After a hard day at the office MARGARET CICEK likes to put her feet up. So, does Alfie Corkwright, he works in an iron foundry and he comes home absolutely beat-up by all those red-hot sparks.
Margaret comes home whacked out by the terrific tempo of electric typewriters.
It’s the same the whole world over.
Evenings are for putting your feet up, especially if you commute and the journey is a fight for survival.
No, please don't make me laugh, said SUSAN HOWARD, I get all giggly and it won't go away.
I'm learning Esperanto, you see, and you need to be terribly serious about it and concentrate like a girl sticking on her false eyelashes for her most important date.
And then my dad comes along and says something comical and I giggle all over my books and the pages blow apart. He says I ought to get a job as assistant to a TV funny man, he says I’d be just right for that.
I hope you don't mind girls who giggle a lot, do you? Oh, thank you. You're a very sweet photographer. Oh, no, don't start making funny faces or I'll get all hysterical.
I’m sorry, I just thought you were, I didn't realise your face was always like that.
This is a wild nature story
Well then, dead in the middle of the jungle was an Edwardian town house of three storeys. All around it was concrete. It was about half-a-mile from Chelsea and you couldn't see the rest of London for all the bricks. In the charming bedsit on the top floor was an exotic orchid., blooming away despite the jungle.
You could have swiped us semi-conscious with a gardenia window-box when we met the orchid. She was SALLY PETERS. She had never been in a jungle before, she had come from a quiet country town to work as a secretary in London. The hoots of the taxis were like the roars of lions, but Sally was blooming all the same. Well, she had coped with whistling wolves for years, so roaring lions were no problem.
"I could eat them for breakfast," she said.
The first lion-eating orchid of all time.
For a premium you’ll think is quite ridiculous (said the insurance man) you can be covered for any kind of personal accident. Every day people fall off ladders, cartwheel down fire escapes, walk into walls—
Yes, yes, that's all very well said HELEN DU BOIS but how ridiculous is quite ridiculous? I have quite a job to keep up with the cost of living as it is. Being a shorthand-typist does not exactly cover me for tripping off to Davos in the winter and Cannes in the summer, and I can't even buy all the clothes I'd like. So how I can afford more insurance, however ridiculous the premium is, I really don't know.
Oh, my dear young lady, I can assure you it would scarcely raise a rattle in your purse. And what you must consider is not whether you can afford it but whether you can’t—
I've already considered that. What I’m considering now is how often I fall off ladders, tumble down fire escapes and walk into walls. Actually, it was very intriguing the other day. The most heavenly man suddenly appeared as I left the boutique and I was so invigorated by his obviously magnetic vitality that I walked straight into him. We parted the best of friends and he sent round a bunch of flowers. I don’t need to be insured against that. Goodbye, Mr. Pinecrust.
If you often have wistful dreams about someone tender, affectionate and absolutely ravishing who would make you blissfully happy without having to go off to a desert island, you're probably on an all-male expedition to the icy wastes of Greenland.
One girl you'll almost certainly dream about as soon as you see these pics of her is PENNY LEIGH.
She's ever so ravishing.
She likes riding, swimming and motorbikes. She can ride a motorbike like fun. Want to go pillion with her?
If so, hang on blissfully or you'll fall off.
In a Scottish fashion house SUSAN ASHFORD puts in a hard, creative day's work every day, and you can't stop her vibrantly attacking all kinds of other jobs at week-ends, either.
Makes us feel fragile, she does. The energy of the girl. And she's only twenty-one.
She keeps her car in her garage at home, and she doesn't only like to keep the car gleaming with polish, she likes to keep the garage spotless too. It's incredible. All those lovely week-ends just made for fun and Susan happy with a broom.
Wearing just the bare essentials, as it were, she goes into action. If we had a bloke come round to do a spot of polishing or cleaning for us, he'd be wearing egg-stained dungarees and turn the place upside-down in minutes. Not Susan. With smooth, curvy efficiency, and looking like a shipwrecked sailor's dream of home, she cleans up the garage in no time at all. Talk about how to make a humdrum job look like a floor show at Dick's Nitery.
Lovely.
Most of you know that adaptability and housewifery go hand-in-hand. Take the case of MAUREEN BEECH, for instance. Maureen not only runs a home, she is also a fashion model and the holder of the title " Miss Brighton and Hove Albion 1965.” Besides adaptability, how's that for getting around?
The best secretaries today all seem to be raving beauties, and if they'd been part of the scene in Dickens' time he'd have dispensed with Little Nell and filled his books with heroines who had far more vibrations, and who were full of the joys of life.
One of the joys of life today is secretary JOY HARRIES.
Here she is on the seat at the bottom of her garden in Hertfordshire.
We know you'd all like one like Joy at the bottom of your gardens, but supposing suddenly you did have? You'd only go all non-compos mentis and quivery and inarticulate. What the one cool man in a hundred would do would be to bow slightly, extend a hand and say, "Ah, my dear Miss Harries, shall we take tea on the lawn or shall I show you the conservatory?"
Joy would like that. She can take tea or leave it, but she adores conservatories and hot plants.
Oui !
Girl with the engaging smile and a natural flair for looking lovely in white lingerie is LIZ McEWEN.
Liz spent a holiday in France this year. She went with some girlfriends. Naturally, they all wanted to test their French. Liz saw the most ravishing gendarme, lean, long, shatteringly Gallic and absolutely dishy. “When the traffic stops,” she said, “I’ll pop over to him and ask him the way to the Eiffel Tower.” “But we're not going to the Eiffel Tower,” said Shirley,” we went there yesterday.” You can't do anything with a girl as unimaginative as Shirley, so Liz just gave her a look and popped over to ask her dishy gendarme the way to the Eiffel Tower. As soon as the gendarme saw her coming he blew his whistle and all the traffic went into reverse. He bowed when Liz arrived and Liz, in her best French, which is not at all bad, popped the question apropos the location of the Eiffel Tower.
She returned to her friends dreamy-eyed and in an ecstatic tizzy, as they say in all the modern novels. “Well?” said Shirley. “He said it was twenty minutes after eleven,” said Liz tenderly. “Some answer,” said a girl called Daffodil, “he couldn't have understood your French.”
“His name is Maurice,” said Liz,” and when he comes to England he's going to bring me one of those big bunches of onions.”
It was just one of those days. JOANNA CARLTON went out shopping and came back with the wrong change. It could happen to anybody, and it certainly happened to Joanna, a Nottingham housewife.
“Yes, I know,” said Mr. Carlton, “but it happened last Christmas as well. Back to the blackboard for you, dear wife, and we'll start with practical mathematics and end with trigonometry, and though it'll hurt me more than it’ll hurt you we’ll both feel all the better for it.” “I don’t think it will make me feel better at all,” said Joanna. “Can't I just go out to knitting classes?"
“Back to the blackboard,” said hubby and back to the blackboard it was, and Joanna started with how many beans make five and what happens when you buy seven oranges and give a quarter of them to that nice bus conductor on the way home.
Then she went on to practical mathematics and wished fervently she'd stayed with the five beans and seven oranges, because she was never very good at any kind of mathematics and likes just being a happy housewife and a good cook and a great help to her husband when he's having trouble mending a fuse.
“What,” said hubby, “is the distance between A and C?”
“Five and a half oranges,” said Joanna.
Never mind, it was a gallant try and she felt all the better for it, even if he didn’t.
It’s a bit of a problem when you want to change your dress in the back of a car, for there’s always the possibility that some knickerbockered bird watcher may be looking or so thought HELEN BAXTER.
And when you have changed, isn’t it just absolutely ridiculous to find your dress caught up in the car door and that tweedy-headed B.W. twittering at you over the hedge
"I don’t usually appear out-of-doors like an absent-minded professor," said ANNE SCOTT.
"What brand of absent-mindedness did you have in mind?"
"Oh, you know." A bit of a giggle here. “The ones who leave for work minus their trousers. I didn’t leave home minus my dress, I assure you. It’s the weather."
"What weather?"
"All this gorgeous hot stuff. I didn’t think there was any left."
"Oh, come now, Miss Scott, weather has always been a matter of the four seasons."
"Do you have to talk like some diddly-fiddly old dodderer from the Ministry? I’m only trying very simply to explain why I look like this."
"No explanation necessary. Miss Scott. It’s all a very natural development process singularly special to lovely young ladies, and there’s no one it pleases more than an old dodderer from the Ministry."
“There’s no need to make all that much of it. It just happened to get a lot hotter than I expected, so I thought I’d do some cooling off."
"Pardon us while we go jump in the lake. It’s the only way to get our temperature down.”
Having fought her way home from the office, AMANDA CASE thought she'd take a bath instead of a shower, then sit down refreshed to chicken and asparagus pie.
She ran the bath and was quite unready for what happened next.
She fell in.
She wasn't at all undressed for it.
Just a few buttons undone. Then what?
“I was wet all over," said Amanda, and so was everything else.”
A work of art more often than not is something they put on a pedestal or hang on a wall and is frequently called a museum piece. There’s the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo and MAGGIE McCULLY, only don’t try hanging Maggie on a wall, even at a Bond Street gallery, or you’ll find yourself in a six-foot frame and with a bump on your head that’ll fit a half-pint skid-lid.
Of course, if you’re a lover of art and subject to fragilistic trembling’s in the presence of the Mona Lisa or the Venus de Milo, you won’t be without palpitations in the presence of Maggie, either. As the epitome of all that is inspiring about the modern girl,
Maggie is even better than a work of art.
She lives and breathes and loves a sleigh ride.
The day was fine, PATRICIA McGREGOR was looking beautiful, and everything seemed set fair for a walk in the park.
But first, of course, Pat had to make sure that her seams were straight and her nails were polished.
Not to mention her shoes. A fashion model like Pat just couldn’t be seen in public without a shoeshine.
A final check on those seams—a last suspender adjustment, and we’re all set.
Apart from—no, not just the hat, Pat. What about the skirt? Well, you might get away with it if you keep your coat buttoned up, but suppose you get asked into tea somewhere?
“Hallo! Hallo-Sally? Sally, did I leave my skirt at your place yesterday? I did? Well, good heavens, what did I come home in, then? I did? Gosh, no wonder I thought it was draughty on my bike!”
