Granny was dead. She’d made it to ninety-eight, and we’d buried her last week. Mum had been asked by Grandpa, who was a hundred and two, to go through and clear her grandma’s things. We all called her Granny though she was Mum’s granny not ours. What a hoarder she was. Every paper bag she bought anything in since the war was flattened out and saved. There was a box of silver foil she collected for ‘Guide Dogs for the Blind.’ Not a thing was ever threwn away.

She’d had wardrobes and cupboards full of clothes and drawers full of underwear she mustn’t have been able to get into for decades. We’d dealt with the furs, hats, coats, dresses, blouses and skirts the day before. Trousers? Forget it! This was Granny we’re talking about. In her world, other than a certain type of woman she didn’t like even thinking about, only men wore trousers. She’d given a serious talking to to one of my sisters so loaded with euphemisms as to be unintelligible for wearing jeans at her house one Sunday, which when translated into English by Mum we’d laughed about for weeks. There were a number of completely plain smock like garments mum said were maternity wear that Granny had worn when pregnant with my gran, her only child. “Surely she didn’t wear those in public?” I’d asked.

“Once she was big enough to shew she never went out. As I understand it, she retired to live in her bedroom, boudoir and the attached dining room during her confinement, as pregnancy was referred to, and not till your gran was in the safe care of her wet nurse and Granny was ready to resume her life of fashion did Grandpa even lay eyes on her.”

Today it was the turn of the shoes and underwear. A dozen and a half laced whalebone corsets were accompanied by what Mum said was a hand crank for her abigail, lady’s personal maid, to tighten the laces down to an acceptable wasp waist which before Granny’s marriage had been eighteen inches. Mentally dividing that by pi I arrived at a waist just under six inches in diameter. “How did she breathe?” I asked.
“Probably quickly with very shallow breaths and a great deal of difficulty. Which was probably why women of fashion were always fainting in those days,” Mum replied.

There were even more corsets of later design and fifty or so assorted what mum said were girdles, panty girdles and corselettes. Some had suspenders, some did not, but Mum shewed me where they could be fitted when we found the box of separate suspenders. The box contained a load of silver thruppenny bits which I knew Granny used to hold her stockings up when the rubber buttons on her suspenders perished, as they always did. Granny had shewn us all how they worked and said ladies collected them for just that purpose. She’d said they were the perfect size and the new fangled twelve sided bronze thruppenny bits were completely useless for anything.

Some of the more modern corsets looked like granny knickers, which were by the bye noticeable by their absence, some were like a short petticoat, some were like a full body suit with integral brassière, god alone knows how long it took to get into one of those. A lot of them, but not all, had gussets that fastened with metal hooks and eyes like a bra, or even small buttons, presumably so the wearer could relieve herself without undressing – a later in the day version of a pair of pantaloons. I guess given female anatomy the solutions have to be similar. They were all made of some kind of material that was a bit stretchy. Mum said they were popular from the forties to the sixties and some were referred to as control wear. I laught and she said, “To look slimmer, to control the tummy, not for control as in sub and dom, Michael.”

I wasn’t at all taken aback by Mum knowing about that sort of thing, she’d never married, and as far as I could remember had never kept a boyfriend for more than a few months. She’d admitted to all of us she was sexually adventurous and though we knew we all had the same father it had been an on and off relationship she’d maintained with a good looking, intelligent, married, university professor whom she’d selected to father her children just because he was good looking and intelligent. In her own words, “Hector provided me with the family I wanted in return for the kind of sex life his wife denied him. I have never regretted my relationship with him, he’s a decent man. However, I can afford to maintain my family with the degree of affluence I desire without the help of any man’s money. I have no desire to accept money in return for being told what I may and may not do, thank you very much.” There were six of us, the four girls sandwiched in between the boys. I was the eldest.

There were dozens of pairs of pantaloons, literally two pieces which had tie up laces at the knee, no gusset and the only connection between the two halves was at the waist by a draw string. And I’d thought crutchless knickers, which my sisters referred to as butterfly panties because of the way they appeared when laid flat for ironing, were a recent invention! Mum said once a fashionable woman in Granny’s day was dressed, which could take a couple of hours, it was only by wearing a garment of that type that relieving herself was possible. She'd added that of course it made access for other activities possible too, which just went to prove that it was an ill wind indeed that blew no good at all. Mum was a rather unusual parent for one of her generation.

Petticoats, of which Granny had hundreds, were of all lengths, colours, fabrics and types. Everything from waist slips, a bloke gets to know some nomenclature by having sisters, to full shifts from the neck to the floor. Others looked like lightweight, feminine, tightly fitting boiler suits with frills round the wrists, shoulders, knees, ankles or some combination of those. Some were sleeveless, sleeved to the elbow or the wrists. Some were legless stopping on the thighs somewhere, some at the knees or the ankles or somewhere else on the leg. Some were cut high on the leg looking very modern and a couple looked like knickers from the front but like a thong from behind. Like I said, given a problem the solutions tend to have a lot in common, but any bloke going to a strip joint in those days got value for money for sure.

There was a definite trend in the nighties. The oldest were silk and so thin you could read a newspaper through them. Most were accompanied by a matching, equally transparent and flimsy coat with no buttons, just a sash to use as a belt, that Mum called a négligée. The only slightly more functional ones that bordered on dressing gowns were, I was told, peignoirs. You could see how Granny’s figure and bedroom attire had changed over the years. The fabrics became heavier and warmer, and the most recent were flannelette and decidedly bigger. I speculated that did not preclude her sense of bedroom adventure becoming ‘heavier and warmer’ too, because Mum must have got it from somewhere, and for sure it wasn’t from my gran, her mum, but I kept that to myself.

There were a couple of hundred brassières in every style and fashion from the last seventy-odd years, including ones with cups that couldn’t possibly have reached as high as the nipples which I thought were like what my sisters called quarter cup bras, but Mum told me they were referred to as décolleté brassières in their day, and Granny had worn them with some of her evening gowns. For a woman of barely five foot tall my Great Granny had been a big little lady even as a girl and she must have been some girl in her day. There were pointy bras Mum called bullet bras that she said had been made fashionable by Hollywood actresses in the forties and fifties.

A good deal of what we were packing up felt to be as heavy as amour plate and thinking back, today would be regarded as seriously heavy fetish gear. I don’t know what weight of clothing a woman had on when fully dressed in those days, but women must have been as strong as carthorses just to stand up never mind walk.

Button hooks by the hundred, in a huge variety of sizes and designs, abounded in every drawer. Some blouses and skirts had dozens of buttons on, no zips or velcro in those days, imagine a skirt two and a half foot long with a button every quarter inch. But it was the boots that took centre stage in the button department. Some of them had forty or so buttons so tiny you couldn’t have done them up by hand. Mum explained the idea was, since it was undesirable to see the row of buttons they were tiny which meant a hook had to be used to do them up and undo them. She said using a hook that small took skill and shewed me one where I could just about make out the hook on the end it was so small.

How the hell Granny had walked wearing some of those stilettos baffled me. Six inches high terminating in a heel that wasn’t quarter of an inch in diameter. “Granny had them specially made,” Mum said. “She was self conscious about her lack of height.” Dancing slippers by the score, you name it it was there. There was even a single pair of waterproof outdoor boots in a plastic bag with several pairs of boot socks. “For going into the garden to cut flowers for the house,” Mum explained.

In addition there was all the other paraphernalia of a wealthy Edwardian woman of fashion, most of which I had no idea what they were used for. There was so much stuff I wondered if Granny had actually worn all of it. There were hundreds of suspender belts and a bushel box of silk stockings, and a few more modern nylon pairs, but strangely not a single pair of tights. “Granny didn’t approve of tights, she believed they were unhygienic and encouraged cistitis,” Mum replied to my enquiry. There were some other belts with just two straps. Mum explained, ‘They’re sanitary towel belts, the loops on the towel slip over the centre of the W on the end of the straps on this one.’ God alone knew how many decades it was since Granny had need of one of those, but there were more than a dozen of them.

Mum took a sanitary towel belt home to shew the girls and my sisters were in stitches over them. When Mum said that Granny considered using tampons was a form of masturbation I thought the girls were going to wet themselves laughing.

But all that stuff was why mum and I were now in the then Manchester Polytechnic now Manchester Metropolitan University, museum of costume; ladies underwear section, when I would much rather have spent the first sunny day in months almost anywhere else. Purportedly curating the biggest collection of clothing on the planet, they’d been thrilled to receive the whole lot.

Looking back I’m not surprised; Mum hadn’t been too thrilled to realise days afterwards that she had just given them over thirty thousand pounds worth, for most working men at the time that was over five years pay. God alone knows what they’d be worth now. I’m not going on ebay to find out it’d probably kill me. Me? I was marginally interested in the tour we were given around the place, men’s, women’s, children’s clothes it was all there.

The remarkable thing was the overhead section of the M57 Motorway that crossed part of the city ran just outside the windows, it seemed almost close enough to touch. I could experience it with all five senses; I could see it, hear it, smell it, feel its vibrations and taste it. Despite the sealed windows, the exhaust fumes, burnt rubber, diesel, petrol and tarmacadam were almost overwhelming in the hot summer sun. After a while I lost interest in the cod pieces and even in the women’s underwear, surprising really as I was not quite twenty, and focussed on the complete lunatics driving past the windows.

Absolute head bangers with a death wish most of them; some of them looked like they were about to park in the room we were in. The woman shewing us round, seeing what I was staring at, looked through the nearest window and said, “You get used to it.” May be, but I continued to watch the traffic fascinated by the thousands of near death experiences. One car in particular I saw weaving in and out of the artics, eighteen wheelers to some of you, a few seconds later I heard a crash and the traffic ground to a halt. I have no idea if the weaver had been involved.

I knew that Mum hadn’t wanted the girls to help with Granny’s things because it would have been too upsetting for them because they had loved Granny. I suppose I did too, but I’d never got on with her. As we were leaving, I asked, “You’re not planning on putting us through something like this when you pop your clogs are you, Mum?”

Mum laughed and replied, “Do you think they’ll have a department for fetish wear by then, Love?” The trouble with Mum is she’s bloody clever, and I can never tell when she’s joking. Still when the time comes my sisters will be older and they can deal with it. I love Mum and we’re closer than she is with any of my siblings, and I’m not sure I’ll ever be old enough to sort out her things without being gutted. There’s got to be some benefit from having four sisters surely? Yes, they can deal with it.

The over riding thought that ran through my head as I drove away was, “I wonder if other folk watching me drive think I’m a head banger looking for somewhere to die too. Then again, if they’d known I was carrying in all that turn of the century seriously heavy duty bondage gear they may be thinking I was looking to die in a far more exotic manner than being crushed by an artic.”