In my mother's shoes

Shoes

After my mother’s death we found a pair of her old shoes in the cellar; soft, chocolate-coloured suede lace-ups stretched wide and comfy as boats, great bumps hollowed out to accommodate her bunions, particularly the enormous one on the left foot where she had once, long ago in my childhood, dropped a sewing machine on her big toe joint. She hadn’t bothered with the doctor and it had presumably broken and healed crooked. Now I come to think about it, this little accident had been pre ’47 and as a war widow she would have been reluctant to incur a medical bill. It was the culmination of damage begun in her orphaned early teens when she squeezed her feet into dainty satin flapper shoes with pointed toes and Louis heels, shoes which resulted in hammer toes squashed into a point against the diagonal big toe.

Perhaps it was the advent of the NHS that resulted in an operation to her toes in an orthopaedic hospital in Liverpool when I was seven. It was too far to visit, and we relied on daily letters to keep in touch. I wrote up my little doings and she drew me a picture of herself in bed with her feet in traction, described her fellow-patients’ foibles and the strictness of the nurses. Half way through the three week absence my Great Aunt Kate who was caring for me and felt nervous about long train journeys decided to spend a chunk of her savings on a taxi all the way from Pwllheli to Liverpool, setting out at dawn in order to arrive for afternoon visiting. Four miles into the expedition (at Fourcrosses) the taxi broke down and took three hours to repair, while my initial excitement faded through impatience into boredom and finally despair. No journey since has ever seemed so long. We did eventually reach Liverpool, in the evening, long after visiting time was over. And as the sister sternly informed us, children were not allowed to visit at any time, let alone when they ought to be tucked up in bed. But my heartbroken wails combined with Auntie Kate’s indignant pleas and the taxi driver’s testimony resulted in rules being broken and we were allowed to see my mother for ten minutes, to bask in her smile and open arms, to be hugged and kissed before setting out on the long trek home.

And in the end it was all for nothing. My mother’s tendency to arthritis flared up although she was only in her twenties and attacked the traumatised joints, leaving her in worse pain than before. I hated going with her to buy shoes. She shunned the sensible, broad lace-ups and would spend hours going from shoe-shop to shoe-shop till she found a pair of smart cuban heeled court shoes she could manage to push her lumpy toes into, a sad, pretty Cinderella lumbered with the Ugly Sisters’ feet.

The arthritis must have been hereditary. When I was twelve, just after my periods began, the scaphoid bones on my feet swelled like golf balls and reddened painfully, making me cry off hockey at school and preventing my enjoying any exercise other than swimming or cycling. A fool of a consultant labelled them “congenital accessory scaphoids”, claiming the inflammation was due to their rubbing against too-tight shoes.
“They can’t be congenital,” my mother objected. “They’ve only just appeared. And she’s always been measured for Start-Rite shoes in the correct widths. She’s never worn anything else, except Clark’s sandals in summer.”
The swollen 'congenital' scaphoids kept me company all through my teens, whatever shoes I wore, until my first pregnancy, when they totally disappeared never to return. They didn’t prevent me, the moment I had some money of my own at sixteen, rocking and rolling in lime-green suede winkle pickers with four inch stiletto heels, though my mother begged me not to with tears in her eyes.
“I wish I’d had a mother to tell me not to wear silly shoes.”
But, like Hans Andersen’s Little Mermaid, whose exchange of her fish tail for a pair of exquisite legs and feet to try and capture her prince demanded the witch’s price of suffering agony with every step she took, I insisted on elevating my five feet one inch on stilettos despite the pain. I remember particularly a pair of black velvet winkle-pickers with stiletto heels and rhinestone buckles. As my bunions swelled and ached my shoes became gradually wider and lower down the years, until I finally gave up silly shoes entirely at age fifty-five. It was only then that I came to connect my stupidity with my horror, as a child, of being shown by a sailor uncle a pair of beautifully embroidered old Chinese slippers extending only three inches beyond the ankle and being told they were made for an adult lady with bound feet. The torture of her grandmother’s foot-binding was graphically described by Jung Chang in The Wild Swans, as well as the great pain of their gradual release to begin growing again after her marriage to a Manchu, who did not follow the binding tradition. Her account of the grandmother’s visit to her married daughter who lived over 300 miles away, a terrible journey by several means of primitive transport, involving many agonising miles on foot, only to be packed off home again by her new son-in-law after a stay of one week, had me in tears.
We Westerners have heard much about the infamous ‘lily walk’, the painful, tottering little steps of young women with bound feet, supposedly much admired by men in Old China. According to American psychologist Claude Steiner, destabilising clothes and footwear are part of a male plot to keep females weak and vulnerable: ‘Balance is a particularly valuable power source for women. Patriarchy discourages women from attaining a strong sense of physical balance. Women’s fashions designed to please men – tight clothes, miniskirts, high heels – interfere with physical stability.’
Yet it was apparently Chinese mothers-in-law who forbade their sons to marry girls with normal feet. And I cannot honestly say that any of the men in my life encouraged me to wear high heels and pointed toes. The opposite, in fact. In my experience men like to be accompanied by women who can stride out comfortably and keep up with their pace. I remember in Lincoln about 20 years ago going out in a group which included some German, French and Italian men. They were laughing at the local Debbies and Sharons because of their old fashioned high heels. I only ever came across one man who wanted me to wear high heels and I only went out with him once. So maybe I am simply not attracted to the kind of man who yearns for a bimbo.