Come with me back in time, girls and boys, to the heady heyday of the mini-skirt and of the vain and misguided adult attempts to prevent schoolgirls from wearing mini-skirts with the hemlines somewhere up around the clitoris area.
The time: Uncle Dive's Schooldays.
The place: "C" corridor of an English co-ed grammar school.
Dramatis personæ:
Mrs. Gardner (Deputy Headmistress; combining Medusa's gaze with a propensity to explode with the awesome fury of Mount St.Helens several times a day);
A cold, stone flag floor;
A six inch ruler;
Any number of pretty young girls in regulation school dresses customised to be as short as humanly possible;
A smirking Dive and his unsavoury clique.
Brief aside: Just as the pitiless fiend Mrs. Gardner is used as a personal rottweiller by reclusive Old Slump, the wily headmaster (think Emperor Palpatine but without the looks or charm), Young Dive is in turn Mrs. Gardner's pet … I look like her son (who has run away to India) so she dotes on me, which allows me some considerable latitude for "unconventional" behaviour, a gift which I don't hesitate to abuse in a most disgraceful manner.
Thanks to her intervention I am excused uniform (at least when I reach the upper sixth form and Præfect-hood), allowed to play rock guitar with my disreputable chums in the school hall (to the apoplectic rage of our viciously splenetic Head of Music who won't allow guitars on the school grounds as "they are trash and have nothing to do with music"); allowed to publish a cynical, profane and frankly disturbing monthly satirical riposte to the official school magazine - the creation of myself and one Bavis … think Small Glass Planet with sick cartoons - and she turns a blind eye to my using the keys to the art department office to have copious sex with überbabe Judith Flaxman, prettiest girl in the lower sixth.
Anyhoo; back to the plot:
Mrs. Gardner stalks the school (again, think of that mechanical robot Jedi thingie in the last and crappiest Star Wars movie, put a wig on it and there you have Mrs. G), slapping a ruler against her palm and woe betide any girl who doesn't heed the warning cry of "Cavé!"
This woman rules by inducing sheer, pants-wetting terror, and any hapless girl not sharp enough to yank down her hem is brought smartly to heel by the barking of her surname and forced to kneel on the stone floor while the gorgon slaps her ruler against the poor girl's leg to ensure the hem of her dress is no more than the regulation six inches above her knees.
Ah, the glorious days of corporal punishment; any girl found transgressing the rule is hauled off double quick to the Deputy Head's office for a stern sermon followed by a good old-fashioned spanking (or for repeat offenders a splendidly noisy and stinging caning), emerging flushed and tearful and rubbing her bottom only to be forced to endure the long walk down a corridor mysteriously filled with a lot more smirking boys than it is at any other time.
And you wonder how I turned out like I did …
Those were indeed the days. Lounging in the common room, surrounded by bevies of pretty teenage girls with their dresses hitched up to flash their knickers at the world.
Sigh …
The demise of the mini-skirt is (with the possible and grudging exception of the Great War) the most truly tragic event of the twentieth century, something that scars us still today and that leaves grown men - myself included - crying themselves to sleep in hopeless despair.
Stop this madness. Bring back the mini-skirt as compulsory wear for all girls and weemen (except lard-arses; that's just gross … If you can't keep away from the fridge, stay indoors so we don't have to look at you).
This has been an appeal on behalf of world sanity.
17 comments:
I'll ignore that the lard-ass remark since that's just mean, although by saying that, I have just acknowledged it.
Anyway, our public school still has a dress code with the hem line guide being the length of a dollar fill from the center of the knee. I don't believe it is evenly enforced. Note--in the States, a public school is a school that is open and free to the public, which I believe is not the case in the UK.
um, substitute the word "bill" for the word "fill"
It's the other way around with schools over here, Robyn; public schools are fee-paying, state schools are free.
And you've got great legs so next time you come to visit let's see more of them (OW!) … hee hee.
HA! I am lucky that I was just young enough to escape this rule, but my older sister had to endure it. She was the queen of anti-establishment back in the day...as were most.
Mrs. Gardiner sounds like the stuff nightmares are made of!
After seeing that picture on your post...I had to go and watch Nancy Sinatra's "These Boots are Made for Walkin' just to get the full effect!
Mrs. Gardner was a terrifying, child-eating sadist until her son ran away; after which she would invite me over to listen to avant-garde music (our shared passion) and eat cake.
One day during study period she burst into the room to find me sitting at the teacher's desk with an acoustic guitar, regaling my classmates with bawdy songs.
She motioned me to keep playing and applauded at the end, before leaving without shouting at anyone.
She was great!
The photo is one of several hilarious knitting patterns I found in mum's attic and posted a while back.
Bring back the dolly bird!
let's do the time warp again
you cheeky monkey! xoxox
We should push to pass laws that make mini skirt wearing compulsory for females aged 20 to, say, 45...or thereabouts.
Even in the winter.
15 balls of Bri-Nylon. What a hoot !
How about half that number. That would suffice.
A shilling for the pattern? My, how things have changed.
When Twiggy was a guest at the Melbourne Cup, way back then, she arrived wearing a mini skirt. It was our first exposure to this marvellous invention.
The ladies of the establishment went into fits of apoplexy and the press had a field day.
As I said, "what a hoot!"
Whoops !
Change that to Jean Shrimpton, - "The Shrimp".
Here's the link;
http://www.milesago.com/Features/shrimpton.htm
Well worth a read.
Savannah! Cheeky? Moi?
Istvanski: I'll vote for that law any day.
Monsieur B: What a marvellous piece! Especially the bit about the "crowd of scowling middle-aged Melbourne matrons". Excellent. Hee hee.
I bet you would have enjoyed going to my high school - a Catholic girl school where the girls tended to be on the wild side and preferred shorter skirts than what's prescribed by the nuns.
Hey - fancy that. I'm back online, but only for a few minutes. It's now 810pm and I need to go back to the new place soon. Shortlived cyber joy. :-(
I saw some minis at a recent sixties party. Trouble is, being so unused to it, the poor girls walked along pulling their hems down all the time so there was no elegance.
I used to wear them, with knee-high boots. I was about 9 though thinking i was 19 like my cousin. I missed it all really, though our skirts were short later at school. Never had any tyrants like Mrs. Gardner though thank God. Only dodgy teachers who asked you to dance at the school ball. Ew.
Your lard arse line is unforgivable, i'm with Robyn.
Actually just remembered we used to turn the waistband over again and again to make it shorter and when the more strict teachers came along, we'd let them down again. The result was the desired mini skirt length but a rather fat waistline. Any other girls recall that?
YOU were a Teacher's Pet?
This post reminds me of my husband's French teacher - his Sixth Form College Wet Dream. She had a habit of wearing tiger-striped panties under a too-light colored skirt. She'd stand at the blackboard, writing energetically enough to make her bum jiggle a little...Simon thought he was going to blow right there. Maybe THIS is the reason he married a teacher...
Dive dear, you should visit us one summer - the miniskirt has been back in here for a number of years. Think of what you have been missing out on!
I had one of those crotcheted dresses that my grandmother made herself. The holes in it were so big that I had to wear a flesh coloured body stocking underneath. (Bear in mind that my grandmother was 60 when I was born, thus 75 when I was 15 - and she was one of the blue-rinse set). Hee, hee.
As for you, teacher's pet - so was M.B BTW and me too, but I was the headmaster's pet (in primary school).
I went to a Catholic girl's academy. The six inch rule was randomly enforced.
I used to roll up the waist band of my skirts every single day in the girl's restroom with about forty other girls. The key was...you had to remember to slide the waist band back down before Sister Adeletrude saw it....
I couldn't get away with a mini skirt these days. I have somewhere along the line developed this unsightly stuff called cellulite....
Joy: I very much doubt they'd have let me attend a Catholic girls' school, no matter how much I begged them.
Lynn: Dodgy teachers … Ew! And I remember that waistband trick. Whatever happened to the days when women actually wanted to show off their legs? Sigh …
Kate: that kind of thing is fine so long as you don't make him dress like a schoolboy (hee hee).
And yes, I was a teacher's pet and hated it; the harrowing tale is buried in my archives.
Mme: Yikes! I remember those flesh coloured body-stockings under crocheted dresses. I also remember old Philip Crack's daughter used to go around naked under hers, but that's a very dodgy story for when I want to do some jail time.
Maria: there was really a Sister Adeletrude? Wow! Her parents must have named her in the full knowledge that she'd grow up to wear black and spank girls' bottoms.
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