Word: monica
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Dates: during 1950-1950
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London Without Railings. I Leap Over the Wall, a sort of deb's diary of Monica's coming out, is a bubbly, effervescent report that is certain to become a lending-library smash. With a smile she recalls the habit she wore for 28 years. It began next the skin with "a nice, thick, long-sleeved 'shift' of rough, scratchy serge . . . Stays, shoulder-strapped and severely boned, concealed one's outline; over them, two long serge petticoats were lashed securely round one's waist. Last came the ample habit-coat of heavy cloth, topped...
Worse shocks were to come. Her sister, with whom she had expected to stay for a few days, was living with a "friend . . . who . . . flatly refused to let me spend a night beneath their roof." Monica hurried to sanctuary with an aunt in Sussex, then on to visit her uncle, Stanley Baldwin. But not even an ex-Prime Minister could preserve her from the sight of American soldiers pinching British womanhood, or -most "sinister portent" of all-"the spectacle of London without her railings. It was almost like seeing Queen Victoria without her clothes ... The parks . .. the sacrosanct squares . . . flung...
...Without Fleas. Monica's old friends did their best to wise her up. One of them said she was like "a piano, half of whose keys had gone dumb for want of use." The friend added: "What would really do you good would be six months on a battleship...
Failing that, Monica went looking for a job on shore-a procedure that was educational enough. For a while, she grubbed around in vegetable gardens as a worker in the Land Army. Later she struggled as a matron in a camp for conscripted girl munitions workers, then as an army canteen hostess. But her job as hostess seemed to consist chiefly of peeling potatoes and being attacked by hordes of fleas. Once she found herself in a cellar with a self-styled photographer who offered her a job developing dirty pictures. Finally she tried herself out as an assistant librarian...
...Monica had learned to handle a drink and even "flung my bonnet over the windmill and accepted a cigarette." Except that she had trouble balancing herself on high heels, the nun had become as much a woman of the world as she cared to be. At present, still as devout as when she first entered the convent, she is living in the country...