The package arrives in clear plastic, showing the gleaming cotton jumper inside. It’s a rich, deep green bearing the crest of my son’s primary school, the one he will be attending just a week from now. Even with his uniform in front of me, I find that hard to take in. Instead, I admire how neat it is, and wonder how I’ll ever keep it clean.
My primary school uniform was navy slacks and a blue jumper, over a white shirt sporting a grid of blue checked lines – leading the more waggish of our rivals to nickname us ‘the tea towels’. (Even at the time, we couldn’t fault that one – when you’re got, you’re got). My son’s shirt is block white, and without the elasticated navy tie that was de rigueur during my own schooling. Instead of addressing the vertiginous alarm that my son is now of school age, I wonder why children no longer have to wear ties and decide, vaguely, that it probably all changed after David Cameron.
I wore a uniform every day of my schooling, and hated it. I envied the American high school kids from movies and TV, all adult and cool in their day-glo civvies, their starched collars and leather jackets. I loathed the dowdy uniforms to which I was restricted – a startling misjudgment considering the extent of my wardrobe at the time.
Until I turned 18, pretty much every item of clothing I owned was made of polyester and sported off-brand lettering that spelled out things like ATHLETIC, or GOALS, or a variety of other nebulously clothing-adjacent words. These were often acquired from places which did, admittedly, sell clothes, but primarily traded in brake fluid and solid fuels. The street-smart kids on Saved by the Bell and Sweet Valley High never wore the same outfit twice. Unless I resorted to wearing the ‘good clothes’ I wore to mass every Sunday, I would have worn the one-and-a-half combos I owned approximately every single day, as would most of my friends. This would have resulted in us all having our own unique, if steadily decaying, uniform anyway, with the added drawback of being harder to locate on school trips to famine sites and drainage works.
That it never occurred to any of us that the main benefit of uniforms was to stop our parents having to buy us eight times as many clothes speaks to how sheltered we were from real world concerns at this time. It may also be why we never gave a second thought to ripping our trousers, sniffling all over our shirt sleeves and blowing holes in their elbows so that, by April each year, our uniforms looked like they’d taken a tumble dry through a combine harvester coated in snot.
Perhaps that’s why I have a lump in my throat as he tries it on, and realise that this uniform too, so shiny and clean, will go through the same fate; the scuffles, the sniffles, the stitches and the scrapes. Yes, that’s it. The cleaning.
Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O’Reilly is out now (Little, Brown, £16.99). Buy a copy from guardianbookshop at £14.78
Follow Séamas on Twitter @shockproofbeats
