...a few new captions
A handful of captioned images taken from vintage sewing pattern covers and catalogue pages.
The Evacuee
The story of an evacuee
that begins in the autumn of 1940... 10 year old Billy says a tearful
goodbye to his mother before boarding the bus to who knows where. All
the other kids are just as nervous as Billy, even more so when they
arrive at the small church hall in a remote town somewhere well away
from the city. They stand in line waiting to be picked and some of
their potential hosts inspect them as if inspecting livestock,
picking the healthiest and cleanest looking ones first. Poor Billy
was always one of the last to be picked for football games and he's
one of the last today. A stern looking middle aged lady arrives late
and is 'furious' that all the 'decent' children have been claimed.
“Is this all you've got left?” she snaps at the billeting officer
as she sneers at the three remaining children. The lady reluctantly
picks the tatty looking red haired girl next to Billy, before
entering into a heated debate about whether or not she should take
Billy too. “You did put your name down for two children Mrs
Postlethwaite.” the billeting officer reminds her. In the meantime,
the smallest child is taken in by a family who've agreed to take four
instead of three evacuees. The billeting officer pleads with Mrs
Postlethwaite but the lady refuses to budge.
“I said I could house
two girls at the most and you've only got one!” Mrs Postlethwaite
retorted. “I don't like boys, I don't trust boys, and I have no
intention of housing one... especially a scratty little street urchin like
that!” she says as a well manicured nail points directly at Billy.
Halfway House
Lawrence has recently
been taken out of foster care due to him turning 16 years of age, and
has been residing in a residential housing scheme for the last five
months. It's a kind of 'halfway house' which helps youngsters make
the transition between foster care and living by their own means. The
halfway house provides a stable and secure living environment and
helps its residents to find work or a suitable college course and
assists in finding permanent accommodation outside of the welfare
system. Lawrence's current halfway house is called Elm Tree House and
is more geared towards residents with mental health and disability
issues, but it was the only one in the area which had an available
place so that's where Lawrence ended up. It's not a bad place by any
means and like most of these types of residential housing schemes,
the aim is to get their residents to eventually move out and learn to
live an independent life.
House Rules
Aunt Katinka was always
a staunch advocate of petticoating and claimed that it was
commonplace in ‘the old country’. It’s not at all common here
in Blighty, apart from at Aunt Katinka’s house. My mother used to
send me to stay with her a few of times a year as a child and
spent every moment having to abide by her unusual house rules.
From the moment I
arrived I'd be buttoned into a dress and if I showed even the
slightest hint of objection, she'd swap my knickers for a nappy which
wouldn't be changed until bed time. She didn't make me wear girls
clothes every day. Some days I wore my own clothes but always over my
knickers, or if I’d been disobedient, over a nappy. To begin with I
suffered terrible nappy rash but I soon learned to shut up and put up
as I'd rather spend my days wearing a pair of knickers than a nappy.
My mother knew exactly
what went on but insisted that petticoating was harsh yet
harmless. At least my mother didn't petticoat me at home, nor did
she ever threaten me with it. However if I ever played up or got in trouble, my mother would threaten to send me to stay with Aunt
Katinka when school broke up. “She'll happily have you every school
holiday and half term if need be!” I recall my mother saying. The
visits to Aunt Katinka's stopped when I left school and so did the
petticoating... thank god!
Now I’m an adult and
I'll be staying with Aunt Katinka again for a few weeks, but only
until I sort myself somewhere permanent to live. The last thing I
expected was for her to pick up where we left off all those years
ago!
My First 'Mixed' Girl's School
Having grown up in
Ashford, where one school on the far side of town had adopted the
policy of 'educational petticoating' several years ago, I knew that
some schools were less desirable than others, especially for boys.
Educational Petticoating schools (or 'mixed' girl's schools) are
becoming increasingly popular these days, with seemingly every large
town or city having at least one, so when my mother booted up Google
Maps to show my sister and I the location of a our new house and our
new school in the new town we'd be moving to, I asked “It's not one
of those schools where the boys wear the same uniform as the girls is
it?”
“Nooo.” my mother
replied. “The boys and girls have separate uniforms.”
“Phew!” I replied.
“Told you!” I cockily said to my sister who, only a few days
previously had claimed that our new school is a 'mixed' girl's
school. I was 95% certain that she was only trying to wind me up
because she knows how much I'd hate it.
“Told me what?”
Julia smugly asked.
“That it's not a
mixed girl's school.” I retorted.
“Actually Matthew, it
is a mixed girl's school.” my mother stated.
“What?!” I blurted
as she clicked on the school and followed a short cut to its website.
“But you just said...” I stammered as she clicked through to the
uniforms page and...
PA for a Day
WTF is going on? You
may ask... Well... my mother works for herself and for no other
reason than trying to impress one of her clients, she claimed that
she had a Personal Assistant to help manage her diary, run errands,
keep her topped up with coffee and so on. It was one of those
innocent white lies until this particular client wanted a face to
face meeting to discuss a new contract, and the client insisted that
Mum's PA also attended the meeting. The fact that her PA didn't exist
was a big problem, and it was my idea that Mum simply gets someone to
pretend to be her PA. The last thing I expected was that it would be
me!
Should Our Menial Males Man Up?
The image above has
been published in Good Housekeeping, Woman & Home, Marie Claire,
OK!, Woman's Weekly, Cosmopolitan and many other periodicals, and
it's been causing quite a stir! It's part of the pressure group
Extreme Equality's latest campaign and a retort to the pro-separatist
stance on what has been dubbed the genderquake. The
pressure group's founder and former starlet Charlotte Chapel has
repeatedly claimed that the pro-separatist movement are 'relics
from the stone age' and 'a
bunch of sad little misogynists who need to wake up'.
Chapel claims that the latest Extreme Equality campaign highlights
the positives and negatives of the genderquake in a simple and
succinct manner. “It's designed to promote the debate as
much as it's designed to change opinion.”
she states. “It's really no big deal when a guy is told
to wear a specific uniform, paint his face or shave his legs... it
wasn't a problem when the girls had to do it and its not a problem
now... and this poster highlights that.”
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