FASHION BRANDS NAMES

Not quite the Vicarage Tea Party of journalistic legend ...invoked by lazy scribes, always in a pejorative spirit, when occasion demands an image of bourgeois stodginess and propriety. No. This is, in fact, a Salvation Army Tea Party. My mother, if she were here, would be able to tell us who all these people were. The only detail I recall is that the second lady from the left (doesn't her neighbour look like Margaret Rutherford?) was Mrs Shepherd's mother. Mrs Shepherd, a neighbour of ours, was an old lady when I was a boy. If this was her mother we must be going back well before the war. The girl on the right, in her beret, reminds me of the illustrations in the children's books we had, often handed down from a generation previously. Old ladies still looked like this when I was young, subfusc from bonneted head to black-booted foot, broad convexities and stupendous busts contained within fur-trimmed coats of ample cut, worn summer and winter.
I don't know where this was taken, but the buildings look tantalisingly familiar. It's not those "Cottage Homes" in Overndale Road, opposite the bottom of Croomes Hill, Downend, is it? When I was a teenager it was a reformatory for teenage girl delinquents and I remember the embarrassing experience of having to walk past a party of about twenty who were out on some sort of conducted walk. The Army had a citadel in Staple Hill and, like the Dissenting chapels, was a strong influence in the life of the district. At the age of 16 I quite fancied some of the younger and more comely women Salvationists, in their well-cut uniforms and comic hats.
To modern eyes this looks like slow stuff. Bring your own food by the look of the brown paper bags and parcels of greaseproof paper. One certainly wouldn't take any liberties or crack a smutty joke or anything. Massed white teacups up at the far end. Out of the question to bring a bottle, of course. Dear things. I suppose they enjoyed themselves in their way. It all seems so ...so innocent ...so totally without malevolence.

A collage as part of a 3rd year project entitled 'Animals in Fashion'. Belonging to the first half of the project, 'The uses of Animals'. Specifically dealing with the fur trade.

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