A Penny for Your Loafers

Last Wednesday the children finally went back to school. At Birdman Coffee and Books that morning, the atmosphere of celebration was palpable. Not only had the throng of assembled parents survived three months of schoollessness without being charged with infanticide, they’d also managed to fund a quarter-year’s worth of summer camps, babysitting, day-care programs, back-to-school supplies, and replacement uniforms and still had enough left over for a celebratory cappuccino. Lynn was doing a roaring trade. I’m sure that if she’d had mimosas (or possibly screwdrivers) on the menu, business would’ve been even brisker.

Anyway, on the list of things to be done in the weeks leading up to the first day of school, one pair of items stuck out to me: Charles’ feet. Ten years old and a dedicated country kid in every way, our son Charles deplores footwear of any kind and during the summer months only submits to wearing it under extreme duress. Consequently, by the end of July he has feet like a hairless hobbit. His pedal extremities are scarred, battered, bitten, and tough as buffalo hide—blunt instruments not well-adapted for the transition back into footwear that the modern classroom demands. Even if he was less unwilling, the kid is so hard on shoes that it’s a moot point because the shoe has not yet been invented that can contain him. The best we’ve done are Blundstones – the steel capped, elastic-sided work boots preferred by Australian bricklayers and cheap in every Antipodean hardware store. Advertised as indestructible (although they’re not), they stand up fairly well to the punishment Charles doles out, and on the rare occasion when we get back to Australia to visit family we pick up pairs in enough sizes to see him through another year or two.

But since he’s killed his Blunnies and there’s no prospect of a visit to any Australian hardware stores any time soon, I’m wondering how he’d go with a pair of Clarks desert boots. Being a child of the ‘70s, I can’t see the phrase “back to school” without thinking of Clarks. They were the bog standard school shoes when I was a kid. Cheap, tough, and universally available, Clarks were the shoes everyone’s mother bought at the end of summer. I remember the sensation of the foot-measuring device, cool against my (scarred, battered) sole when my mother would take me and my sister to the local shoe shop for new Clarks the week before term began. They were utterly unfashionable, but at least they weren’t homemade. Mum was very handy and legendarily thrifty, and when my brother, sister, and I were small she made almost everything we wore. That lasted until the age of about ten, when I found myself standing in a circle of newly fashion-conscious, jeering schoolboys who had suddenly noticed that I was wearing trousers made out of old curtains. It’s a good thing Mum’s interest in homemade never extended to footwear, or who knows where it might have ended? I can hear it now: “George was a good dog. But now he’s gone there’s no sense in wasting that hide …”

Anyway, to ten-year-old me, the name “Clarks” was pretty much synonymous with “back-to-school.” So I hated them and find it ironic that Clarks have become not only available again, but even fashionable, and that I recently purchased a pair of my own volition. They seem as durable as ever, so I think Charles might find himself with a pair this fall, suggesting that fashion, just like history, is doomed to repeat itself.