Serena Draper

Sunshine Girl

As any resident of the United Kingdom can tell you, our summer varies.

Sometimes it lasts from March 21st to March 28th, and sometimes it arrives on August 5th and lasts until August 7th. In between anything from snow on high ground in June or floods over low ground in July can happen.

At first—that is, when you’re about nine years old—it’s exciting. Later on it's not so exciting. It’s always popular, of course, with the manufacturers of umbrellas, mackintoshes and fur boots, but they’re just in it for the money.

Up to the time of going to press with this issue we’d had a whole week of summer this year. It happened during the second week in June and out came the sunshine girls, including SERENA DRAPAR of Brighton.

It was a little breezy on the beach but it was lovely and sunny too, and you couldn't have wished for anything more delightful to adorn the scene than Serena.

Unless you were fanatical about zebras. Zebra-lovers are an odd lot. They go out and lasso them, take them home and keep them in the garden and spend ecstatic hours looking at them.

Imagine them preferring looking at zebras to looking at Serena.

No wonder the psychiatrists don’t know which way to turn.

Serena works in an office and emerges sunnily at the end of each day, and that happens even when it's pelting hailstones. A zebra would just look mournful.

Span No 180 - August 1969