Vivienne has always been reluctant to talk about her childhood. In 1994 she told the local newspaper Derbyshire Now! that this was because she ‘feared people would find it boring’. Until she was sixteen, the Swires lived in or near Tintwistle, in Glossopdale, which is cut off from Lancashire and Cheshire by steep hills and a river gorge, and lies in the western lee of the Pennines, the spine of hills which divides the North of England in two. To the west of the Pennines, in Lancashire, the nation’s cotton industry flourished. To the east, in Yorkshire, the woollen industry was established. Exploiting the fast-running water that flowed down the peaks, textile mills and factories were built in the area from the mid-eighteenth century. Immediately after the First World War, the cotton industry had employed nearly 80 per cent of Glossop’s working population. Following severe unemployment during the Depression, when the Hadfield Tintwistle labour exchange recorded a devastating 67 per cent rate of unemployment, the local economy revived once again. The mills which surrounded Tintwistle provided a livelihood for many of Vivienne’s relations, and she was to retain a sentimental but informed appreciation of the qualities of traditional English textiles: starched cottons, worsted pinstripes, fine-gauge knits, satin-smooth gabardines and hairy tweeds. They were to inspire the nostalgic strand of fashion that would become one of her signatures.
At the end of the war, Gordon Swire senior took work at the local Wall’s ice-cream factory. He supplemented the household income with odd jobs, such as collecting holly from the hedgerows to twist into Christmas wreaths which he sold to the neighbours. The whole family enjoyed the make-do-and-mend habit, turning their hands to simple crafts such as dressmaking or utilising domestic ephemera for decoration. Their Christmas tree, for example, was adorned with the perforated silver tops from salt and pepper pots.
Dora, who now worked in the grocery shop, not only made her own ballroom dresses but clothes for all the family, perhaps using remnants bought from the mill where she had worked. Times were good. In the second half of the 1940s the textile trade continued to thrive as the government fostered an export drive to finance war debts. Production was focused on long runs of cheap cotton prints for the African and Far Eastern markets. Workers were secure in their employment, and took patriotic pride in the posters displayed throughout their communities which assured them that ‘Britain’s bread hangs on Lancashire’s thread’.
Vivienne’s parents provided for their family and were loving and kind, but they were not remotely scholarly: Dora took the view that reading was a waste of time. They encouraged physical pastimes instead, such as dancing and rambling. The children kept hamsters and guinea-pigs in the back yard and crafted toys and games out of discarded objects. Describing her childhood, Vivienne was to say: ‘what we didn’t have at home was any literature. I remember my mother once buying some encyclopaedias but they weren’t the right sort where you could look things up.’
What her mother, in particular, did give Vivienne was a forthright bearing, a confidence that invited comment and a sense of style. She chose unusual Christian names for her children, and made a point of dressing them well, buying good-quality clothes at C&A in Manchester or making them herself. Childhood friends recall Dora as ‘houseproud’, something Vivienne would never be, and caring about her appearance, a trait she retained into her seventies and which Vivienne did inherit. A school classmate, Bob Noton, remembered Vivienne as ‘meticulous about her clothes and well-turned-out as a schoolgirl. That’s what a lot of people found attractive about her.’
By the standards of the time, the Swires were relatively liberal parents. The three children were often left unsupervised, since both Dora and Gordon worked by day, and in the evening they were frequently left with a babysitter while their parents went ballroom dancing (a hobby they pursued into old age) at the Tintwistle and Hollingworth school halls, Glossop’s Victoria Hall and in Ashton-under-Lyne, six miles away. They relied on their eldest daughter to take responsibility for her siblings from an early age. Vivienne has described her parents as being ‘in love all their life and devoted to each other’. Perhaps she felt that this love excluded her. A former employee of Vivienne’s says: ‘Her mother and father were so close. He was star-struck by her right to the end of his life. Dora always came first. She was the star of the family.’
Vivienne was required to walk her brother and sister to the Hollingworth village school each morning and to St Mary’s Anglican church on Sundays. Although her parents were not zealous members of the local church – they would assure her that they would attend the evening service, but rarely did – Vivienne was captivated by religion. On learning, aged four, about the crucifixion, she remembers being so horrified that she vowed to challenge oppression: ‘I felt I had to become a freedom fighter to stop this sort of thing going on. I really did want to do something to change this horrible world.’
Making defiant stands became an early characteristic of this confident and independent girl. On her first day at nursery school in Hollingworth, she saw a queue outside the girls’ lavatory. Reasoning that there was no point in waiting, she used the boys’ instead. She claims that this was her ‘first confrontation with tyranny’, and it earned her a slap from the teacher. By the time she was five she was questioning the teacher’s example, preferring ‘to do my “r”s round and round like a snail because it looked prettier’, rather than copying exactly from the blackboard. Even though she was slapped again, she refused to conform. She had already developed an independent view of mores and manners: ‘I have an inbuilt perversity, a kind of inbuilt clock which always reacts against anything orthodox,’ she said thirty years later.
At the age of eight Vivienne progressed to the Tintwistle church school, where her mother had been educated, and joined a class of variously-aged pupils of both sexes. Her parents took only a distant interest in their children’s academic development, neither harbouring grand ambitions for them nor, according to Gordon junior, discussing what they wanted to do when they grew up. ‘We never showed our parents our school reports,’ Gordon remembers, though Vivienne’s consistently acknowledged her ‘creativity’: ‘It wasn’t that they didn’t care, they just assumed we were bright and let us get on with it.’
Despite her comparatively uncultured background, Vivienne remembers finding stimulating companionship in books, which nourished her imagination and led her beyond the restricted world of her family. One can imagine her escaping the confines of the small bedroom she shared with Olga and Gordon, spending winter evenings huddled in front of the hearth, or sneaking into her parents’ room and, propped up against the door under the scratchy tulle layers of her mother’s dance dresses, losing herself in the pages of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five stories, the brothers Grimm’s fairy tales and Walter Scott’s ‘Lochinvar’. These first writers were soon followed, according to Vivienne, by Dickens, Buchan, Chaucer and Keats. On summer mornings she scrambled over the wall behind the cottage, passed through a disused quarry and climbed up to the high meadow to read: ‘I remember sitting in this meadow in the sun with the dew still on the grass, and I could smell May blossom, and even at that early age I remember saying to myself how lucky I was.’
Vivienne’s childhood was secure and happy. She enjoyed exploring the lyrically beautiful nearby peaks and dales. Finding hideaways in the wooded terrain of the Snake Pass and Devil’s Elbow towards Cut-Throat Bridge, she would read adventure stories or tuck into a picnic of treats from her aunt’s greengrocers, washed down with home-made dandelion and burdock lemonade. It was during these solitary, free-roaming days in this gauzy, rain-softened terrain that she developed what she has called her ‘country heart’; her subsequent nostalgia for the English rural idyll and her knowledge of its flora and fauna. Two decades later, money being short, she used her knowledge of edible plants to feed her family; as a designer she would refer back to country pastimes – fell-walking, riding, fishing, shooting – to create clothes that, even though they were worn by the hurried city-dweller, conjured up the unhurried, idealised Arcadia of her childhood.
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