HANG THEM HIGH

Nov 30, 2009 Features / Columnists, Tony Deyal column

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Except for brief periods when I lived and worked in cold and wintry climes, I let it all hang out.  However, before you, dear reader, get your early morning exercise by jumping to conclusions that are salacious or psychological, picturing me perhaps in my wrinkled birthday suit exposing my shortcomings, or subjecting all and sundry to my views regardless of how extreme, let me rid you of your preconceptions, otherwise you will continue through life catching your assumptions.
What I hang out is my washing. I put it all on the line, so to speak. What I expose to the scrutiny of sunshine are my raiments. When the weather changes they become rainments.
Ever since I was small, and long before we had a telephone, among our other external amenities and facilities we had an outside line. As you passed through the village you had the opportunity to see everybody’s lives on the line. No wispy unmentionables in those days. It was a cane-workers’ village and the dirt and ashes were hell to scrub out.
Most workaday garments were utilitarian, casement underwear, flour-bag shirts and sheets, and tough khaki pants that made you walk like John Wayne or as if you had starched your “sliders” or flour bag underpants.
Dress Pants were of two varieties. First was the composite- a dress that my aunt and other village women wore over their pants as homage to their sex and the need to protect the lower regions from the swarm of “sandflies” that gathered like a dark, angry cloud around anyone in a cane field at four in the morning.  Second were the ones worn by my father, uncle and the men of the village. They were of British manufacture – tweed, twill or serge.
They were only for special occasions and they were set off by two-toned shoes, dress shirts of various hues and Wilson hats. When nylon undergarments became the rage, they were the occasional episodes brightening an otherwise humdrum line of clothing.  However, by today’s standards they were substantial and cumbersome- in Guyana some are still referred to as “jukeboxes”.
For a while I went to elementary school in Port-of-Spain.  Even in the midst of life in the relative sophistication of the city, one still had clothes to “sun” and so where lines of cocaine are now predominant, there were clotheslines aplenty.
Next to our school there was a lady who possessed a white Westinghouse refrigerator.  She used the freezer and ice-trays to make milky sweet “ice-blocks” which she sold to us. Between the house and the school was her clothesline from which she hung the family laundry including her husband’s underpants, old fashioned and with buttons heavy enough to give the poor man a hernia.
Next door, in the schoolyard, the game of choice had switched from “Rescue” – an atavistic game beloved of boys with lots of running, hitting, pulling and tugging – to marbles. I discovered that few of the “town” boys loved playing for pain – essentially a version of marbles in which, if you lose, the other boy is allowed to pitch the marble at full force directly on the bones of your knuckles. The boys in my school favoured a marbles variation called “button win” in which we played for buttons.
In those days in which zippers were still novelties, where did you get your buttons?  Aha!  So also thought my friend and partner in crime, Stoddart. I don’t know if I ever knew his first name, but his last name lives in memory and infamy alike. He was mischievous rather than purely wicked. He was always a bob on the landscape running pell-mell and full speed around the school like a Jamaican mini-bus on the Old Hope Road or heading up to Papine.
The first I knew of it was that the headmaster, Mr. Prince Alfred (P.A.) Forde let out a thunderous bellow like an African Bull Elephant sighting a Great White Hunter without a gun and glad for the opportunity to retaliate.
“Stoddart!!  Stoddart!! Come here boy!”  The school shook. The neighbours, as far as the Desperadoes panyard behind us and the market in front of us, jumped in fright. Stoddart duly appeared, head down and pre-emptive tears flowing like rum at an Indian wedding.  It seems that he had cut the buttons from the neighbours’ drawers and other garments.  Not just the neighbor next door but all the others around us.
The beating that Mr. Forde administered with his usual gusto left Stoddart with a swelling that was bigger by far than a mere button.
I thought of Stoddart and company when I saw a Reuters article by Jon Hurdle about Americans fighting for the right to hang out their clothes in public: “Carin Froehlich pegs her laundry to three clotheslines strung between trees outside her 18th-century farmhouse, knowing that her actions annoy local officials who have asked her to stop.
Froehlich is among the growing number of people across America fighting for the right to dry their laundry outside against a rising tide of housing associations who oppose the practice despite its energy-saving green appeal.”
Even though there are no laws against letting it all hang out, Hurdle reports, “A town official called Froehlich to ask her to stop drying clothes in the sun. And she received two anonymous notes from neighbours saying they did not want to see her underwear flapping about.”
Fortunately my next door neighbours in Antigua are made of sterner stuff.  We all look, but after so many years do not really see what’s on the line. However, Froelich and a lot of other Americans, including a “Right To Hang” are facing opposition from many state and local governments. The hangers-on are rightly claiming that putting the laundry outside saves money and is environmentally friendly. The opposition is about aesthetics and not pragmatics.
Needless to say, the battle-lines are now drawn. As Froelich says, “If my husband has a right to have guns in the house, I have a right to hang laundry.”
*Tony Deyal was last seen saying that the amount of clothes his children go through, they might as well call their backyard “Wash-ington” D.C. (Drying Clothes).

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