2026 Fashion On The Ration Challenge

thriftmonster

I am loving Maggie Joy in the current diaries I'm reading

itsthelittlethings

We had an evacuation at work on Friday. It was all very scary and my friends Helen and Alva were crying. Alva wears heels and I only got her to stop crying by saying she wouldn’t be able to see where she was going and they would find her with her legs sticking out like the witch from the Wizard of Oz. She is Spanish so it took me a while to explain. Lucky I could remember the word “película”. Helen had to go early after that. She said she just wanted to see her husband. He is a tradesman so has an exemption. The rest of us got back to it.

There is a craft sale in the next village today. I have dug through my suitcase of wool and pulled a few things out. I need some more money for food next week and also because my sister’s mother-in-law had a beautiful chiffon top that she only wanted 4d for. I could always spin her out till Friday when I get paid but I’d rather not. If anyone has any petroleum which I doubt or a bike and good saddlebags perhaps head on over and I may see you there.

I paid the tailor some of what I owe and she gave me some more stuff. Now I owe her 6 shillings! We agreed I would pay her every Friday what I could afford until the end of the year. I made her promise not to give me more stuff and she laughed. She said “if you had any coupons I might be tempted”. Mrs Reeves was arriving just as I left. All her clothes looked new. Pretty sure she isn’t behind on coupons.

itsthelittlethings

Is anyone listening to Worker’s Playtime? Little Alfred has TB and his mother can’t afford the treatment. Me and my landlady are quite gripped. Her friend who is in the Labour Party got us into it.

Nelliegrace

Trying to think what to regift to my older sister for her birthday. Perhaps an apron as she looks after young children while their parents both work. I found several, bought but never worn when I turned out the airing cupboard.

I bought an interesting book from the National Trust second hand bookshop yesterday, to support a good cause. I think I borrowed it from the library some time ago, and it is available free on the Open Library.

“Singled Out tells the story of a generation of women, brought up in the unquestioning belief that marriage was their birthright, who discovered after the 1914-18 war that there were, quite simply, not enough men to go round. In the 1920s they were known as the ‘Surplus Women’.

This book is a rich, moving and ultimately affirmative account of the spinsters forgotten by history but remembered by many of us as our teachers and our maiden aunts. Grief and war forced these women to rebuild their lives, and to stop depending on men for their income, identity and happiness. Drawing on a wealth of sources including unpublished autobiographies, individual interviews, problem pages and lonely hearts columns, it explores their economic, emotional …survival.”

PipneyJane

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81959305#Comment_81959305

Link, please! I love a good story.

Although rare in the 1980’s, I nursed several TB patients. TB used to be endemic. My most memorable TB patient was a lady with TB Meningitis. She’d had no pleural symptoms - probably carried TB for decades - and it was only when they did a lumbar puncture that they discovered she was a carrier. (I’m a nurse by trade; an accountant by profession. )

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81959529#Comment_81959529

Thanks for bringing “Surplus Women” to our attention @Nelliegrace . I have always thought that this is why Miss Marple never married. Those poor women. Over a million young men dead and many disfigured for life. My favourite WW1 veteran was a young man of 90-odd, who’d lost his leg after a spell on the Western Front, but was confused and disoriented due to an infection and kept trying to get out of bed, forgetting that he didn’t have his leg. At other times, he thought he was in the rehabilitation hospital, after he was evacuated back to Australia, and asked us when his mum was going to visit. (I wish I could remember his name.)

• Pip

Nelliegrace

We were still nursing WW1 Veterans when I did my training in the 70s @PipneyJane. One frail gentleman became very distressed in the night. He had been put in a corner bed space on the Nightingale Ward of the Victorian hospital and the claustrophobia brought back the horrors of being buried alive in the trenches.

itsthelittlethings

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81959796#Comment_81959796

I am wrong! Not sure Workers Playtime had a drama aspect. More details here.

https://www.bbc.com/historyofthebbc/research/bbc-at-war/homefront-programming-2

MrsCD

Miss Marple mentions her 'beau' who didn't come home from the war in one of the TV programmes. She never wanted anyone else... 😞 .... although I don't think it's in the original books. 🙄

Laura_Elsewhere

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81960302#Comment_81960302

It isn't in the books- I taught a course on Classic Crime Fiction for a decade or so, and the change in students' preception of Miss Marple in particular over that time was bizarre! :)

There have been many screen versions- Margaret Rutherfurd is splendid and a rollicking jolly adventure but pretty much entirely unrelated to the books! Christie herself apparently enjoyed them though, and so do I :)
Hickson was the Marple- surprisingly, those tv versions depart quite considerably from the books in many ways, but it's generally unnoticeable because they stay true to the characters, the plots and the 'feel' of the books, so moving them from the 1920s or 30s to the 1950s, for example, is not a problem.
Then comes the ITV ones…. sigh… they divide into two groups: the later ones with Julia Mackenzie are actually not bad. They vary wildly from the books, but the character is reasonably recognisable as Miss Marple, even if she is turning up in books she never was in… some motives are altered- one murderer changes from simply being jealous and possessive to having a violent and traumatic past involving termination of a pregnancy from her brother, with connivance of unloving parents- the level of detail gone into is horrible. Christie never veered away from how awful people can be ('Crooked House' for one), but she didn't dwell on details salaciously and lustfully.

But the earlier ITV ones, the Geraldine McEwan ones- I cannot understand how the Agatha Christie Estate gave permission for those, and I do wonder if they have regretted it. The plots are hauled around wildly, the murderer in at least two is a different person for a different motive (?!?!), and worst of all is the character of Miss Marple…
Marple's character is overtly gentle and polite, but covertly steely and persistent. It's that combination of the dear sweet innocent little old lady with the mind like a steel trap and well aware of the motives that drive people.
McEwan's Marple is horrible, plain and simple. She is nasty, unpleasant. She snipes about people, is snide and snobbish, puts people down and sneers (goodness, how many of those terms begin sn-…!). For reasons inexplicable, the re-writers chose to throw in not only an invented beau, but a steamy same-sex past referred to more than once, and leering salacious prurient comments.

I just don't understand why they changed it all so much- I watched most of them, but why would you take an established character, change her fundamentally from decent to sleazily indecent, and change the bloomin' murderer and motive?!?

There, that's better.

Could someone just give me a hand down off my soapbox, thanks? ;)

Laura_Elsewhere

'Surplus Women' is a brilliant book which I think I've mentioned before- if I haven't, I should have done!

@PipneyJane you're right to feel sorry for those two million- because of the way trench warfare still retained elements of cavalry warfare, the officers led… specifically the junior officers led charges over the top, and so were disproportionately killed. It wasn't simply that a huge tranche of men were killed, it was specifically that the ones killed were disproportionately the junior officers who should ahve come home and married all those lower- and middle-middle-class young women, whose upbringing and education was solely to be a middle-class wife and mother… a little conversational French, poetry recitation, enough botany to know some flowers, enough music to play and sing a little… damn-all use if you suddenly have to earn your own living.
Those wealthier had families they could simply live with, or could have allowances from the family funds.
Those poorer had always had to work, and were brought up to be capable, competent and able to manage budgets, housework, look after infants, etc.

but those ones in the middle… oh dear. Innocents abroad… novels of the 1920s and 30s so frequently feature distressed young women who lost all their little capital when they started a teashop or dress-shop with a friend who let them down and all the money was lost… that's because as well as not having any useful skills, these girls had no experience of the world, no ability to judge a business idea… they were a class and genertion who were deliberately kept innocent, to "keep the bloom" on their girlhood as long as possible, as an Edwardian ideal… but oh, what a disastrous background for their later lives…

We are the ones who benefit from them. Most of them couldn't do much, but they could learn nursing or teaching- and they did. A vast number of women, unmarried, without homes or family of their own, able and willing to live on the job, able and willing to work extra long hours, able and willing to earn lower pay…

… and from them we get our NHS and our state education system.

Without those two million surplus women, in their desperate straits, we would never have had all those schoolteachers and nurses who worked hard long hours, and lived on the job, lived for the job, and allowed the NHS and our schools to be built up into the national systems they became.

We owe those women…

(Blimey, two soapboxes in a row?! I had better go and do the washing-up to bring myself back down to earth!!)