UNJUST JEANS!

In recent months I have been immersed in memories – writing an autobiography called “The Fall and Rise of Derryn Hinch. How I hit the wall and didn’t bleed”. It will be published later this month.

I mention it not for a free plug but to explain the interesting and, at times poignant, trip down memory lane. How I got from there to here.

And one of the childhood memories was sparked by the trawling through old photo albums. There’s a shot of a jug-eared Hinch, aged about four, on a second-hand tricycle with the toes out of my frayed slippers. It was ever thus.

I remember the day. It was November 6. Minutes after the photo was taken I rode my trike through the remnants of our Guy Fawke’s Night bonfire. I got mired in the middle and, foolishly jumped off into the still-smouldering ashes. That took care of the tattered slippers and several layers of skin on my small feet.

The trek through the photo album memory lane reminded me – as if I needed reminding – that I was a “hand-me-down” kid. Hardly on my Pat Malone in the 1950s in New Zealand.

Researching the book in Kiwiland took me back to those days in Opunake where my grandmother was a clever seamstress. She made me my short pants out of the few good, unshiny, bits left from my grandfather’s worn-out trousers.

I can still remember being mortified – 45 years ago – when, at the age of five, I didn’t have a belt on my trousers. Not even a sewn-in cloth one, which was common. My short, grey serge trousers stayed up because their button-holes were attached to buttons on my shirt.

When I started high school I wore my brother’s hand-me-downs and frayed, cast-off, shirts. When I started work as a cadet reporter at the Taranaki Herald newspaper in New Plymouth, NZ, I wore a jacket and trousers that a friend of my mother gave me because her 23-year-old brother had died of cancer.

This is a long-winded way of getting to an issue that shocked me, even stunned a naïve Hinch, this week.

A female friend left the lunch table to “pop across the road” to a Toorak children’s clothing store to look for a birthday present for her five-year-old niece. Maybe a cute pair of jeans. She was back, almost ashen-faced, in minutes. Found some jeans for the niece alright. They wanted more than $230 for them! The kid would grow out of them in four-five months. Target here we come.

She did bring me a glossy catalogue that looked like it had been nicked from Vogue magazine. Kids in all sorts of expensive gear and not a price on any of it.

And it got me thinking: Have we gone stark raving mad about brands and spoiling our kids?

Parents are spending mini-fortunes on designer sneakers that their young sons’ toes will push the ends out of within six months.

Expensive, back-to-front, name brand baseball caps are de rigueur. There’s a huge con going down here. If you are a walking billboard for a product then surely it should be cheaper and not more expensive.

I am such a pedant about it all (at an adult level) that if I bought a new car I would demand the car salesman unbolt the car yard’s symbol from the boot and take a razor blade to “so and so’s dealership” emblazoned in a transfer on the rear window.

But back to our kids and values and teaching them what frittering money is all about.

This is Easter Sunday. The other day David Jones was advertising a “mega plush bunny with 300 gram Easter egg” for forty bucks. You could also buy your kids a “happy fify with 150g confectionary mix” for thirty bucks. Whatever a “happy fify” is.

This will sound like the gripes of a curmudgeon. But we had fun in cheaper, simpler times.

My first two-wheeler bike was second-hand. The chrome had peeled and the handlebars had been retouched with that silver paint that used to be reserved for making the coal range look respectable. And it was a girl’s bike. But it was mine. And my family could hardly afford it and I genuinely cherished their generosity and self-denial to buy it for me.

Do kids even think of that today? Have we moved so far down the fast-flowing current of the “me, me, gimme, gimme” river that we can never reach a saving over-hanging branch?

Rolling over at Rebel or buying your spoiled brats name brand designer shoes that they will instantly grow out of is not preparing them for the real world.

It is not helping your bank balance or sanity either. And sometimes “No” is not a dirty word.

Children have to be taught values and have to be taught that – as Mick Jagger once sang – “You can’t always get what you want”.

I remember being envious of the toys and baubles that my childhood mates had. They were the local doctor’s kids at the wealthy end of the street. I was envious – but they were still mates.

And even their parents would not have bought a five-year-old a $230 pair of jeans.

April 11, 2004

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2004