The Car Park Attendant

Fashions come and go.  These days, young people change their style with the season.  Appearance is all.  Individuality is the name of the game and yet, conversely, conformance is widespread.  It only takes one person to slash their jeans and before long, all teenagers have slashed jeans.

Nonetheless, ten or more years later and it's possible to identify a decade by the clothes being worn in a photograph, in a film or on television.  The fashion of some decades is so distinctive and retrospectively so popular, it finds itself being repeated.  The Twenties, the Fifties and the Sixties spring to mind.  As for the Seventies, well, not yet!

I find that old folk tend to hang onto the popular fashions of their youth and those once involved in teenage cults and sub-cultures fix their image for a lifetime.  Once a Mod, always a Mod!

However, some aspects of fashion have almost disappeared.  Take the once ubiquitous hat for example.  The Flat Cap was usually worn by the manual worker, the Trilby by blue and white collar workers, the Homburg by stylish types and the Bowler by  City gents and bankers.  Perhaps the decay of the once rigid Class System has accelerated their demise.  The almost total disappearance of the man’s smoking pipe is just as striking.

But in my lifetime, a more subtle change has occurred.

It wasn’t until the Seventies that I began to notice a certain type of man had all but vanished, like a particular race falling into extinction.  The mutilated veterans of the First World War were beginning to die out.  Their numbers hobbling about town on one leg or those having to pin their spare sleeve containing no arm to their coat had noticeably diminished.  Collarless white shirts, the high waistband trousers resting on the stomach above broad leather belts had started to disappear with them.  The sound of hob-nailed boots on the pavement was becoming a thing of the past.  The sound of wooden clogs was already history.

By the late Eighties and the Nineties, men who had lived through the Great Depression and men who had fought in the Second World War were also beginning to die out.  Men with hats, men with greased hair and grubby beige macintoshes, men who went out drinking on a Saturday night wearing a suit, shirt and tie were distinctly fewer in number.  False teeth, unfiltered cigarettes and fingers with yellow nicotine stains were fast becoming a thing of the past.  It wasn’t until the actual sighting of such a person that their decline in number became apparent.

One day in 1988 I parked my car in Leeds City centre.  As I got out, a man walked up to me.  In an instant, I realised he was just such a character, an endangered species to be treated with respect and curiosity.

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Portly, war-weathered men

Wear grime beige coats,

With flint grey hair

In grease combed strands,

Under old felt hats.

Nylon collared shirts and

Plain ties with small knots

Hold up sagging jowls,

Yellow tombstone teeth

And wrinkled, under-eye bags.

A bulbous nose upon which,

Purple-red capillaries fan out.

Grey and pockmarked skin,

Dissected into a web of crevices

Define the years of conflict.

Big calloused hands with coarse skin.

Cheap gold Signet rings

Squeeze stubby fat fingers.

Thick corrugated fingernails

Under which black dirt resides.

Those tell-tale yellow patches

Of nicotine-stained fingers.

Bovine smells of worn leather

And tobacco burnt breath.

Signs to define their generation.

Ticket Sir?

As grime, servility ground in.

Do they no longer feel the burden

Of the worn leather pouch

Heavy with dirty coin?

I don’t see these men anymore.

On market stalls, on red double-deckers

Or sipping ale in the smokey blue mist

Of beer splattered public bars.

Are they dead now and all gone?

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