Party Frock is the next of my childhood books to be read from the culling pile. First published in 1946, my version was printed in 1965 by the Collins ‘Seagull Library’, which means I was about ten when I read it. Illustrations are by Anna Zinkeisen.

“Quintessentially English” is the phrase that sprang to mind as I re-read it. The inspiration for the book was Noel Streatfeild’s niece receiving a party frock as a present from America during WWII, and not having an occasion on which to wear it. (This put me in mind of Helene Hanff, who after the war sent food packages to England, as recounted in her memoir 84 Charing Cross Road.)
The story opens in late December 1944. Hong Kong-raised Selina has been living in an English village with her aunt and uncle and six cousins for five years and five months as a consequence of her parents being interned by the Japanese (and that’s as far as that storyline develops until the joyful telegram after VJ Day).
Next we are introduced to a chaotic cast of characters: Doctor Andrews (the uncle who runs his surgery from the house); Mrs Andrews (Aunt Anne) who seems to have limitless patience which gets sorely tested; John, the eldest boy, a boarder at Marlborough and home for the holidays; Sally, who is about a year younger than Selina but in the same year at school because poor Selina is apparently not that bright (well that’s how it read between the lines). Sally (12 and small for her age) aspires to be a ballerina, and the professional ballet school conveniently situated in the next village, run by a Madame Ramosova, gets to have a role in the story-line (with a happy ending). Sally is a twin with Christopher, who is in to skating (but he hasn’t got any) and mucking about with pretend swords and things. Phoebe is nine, fancies herself a poet and is growing out of her clothes. Then come the young ones: Augustus (five?) and Benjamin (four). Benjamin is given to lordly phrases which usually start with, “My dear,” as in, “My Dear, that is not dirt, that’s brown from the sun,” (actually, I also remember protesting this as a young child, but without the preface).
Miss Lipscombe is a retired matron now working as the stiffly-principled surgery nurse, and Mrs Miggs, an evacuee from East London, is the (supposedly) daily help who only turns up if she is in the mood, then races through her work humming Rule Britannia, and informs the children she is partial to a bit of a “knees up, Mother Brown.”
Selina receives a parcel from America containing a party frock and shoes, much to the envy of all, particularly Sally and Christopher who have written to an uncle with thinly-veiled hints they would like skates and silk stockings. But in true all-for-one style, the children gather in the school-room (which used to be called the nursery until John was humiliated by the taunts of schoolfriends), and, via a committee chaired by John, devise a plan for Selina to wear her special outfit – they will stage a village pageant, and each has to write a scene.
Where to stage it? At the local abbey of course, a private home ever since Henry VIII kicked the monks out, but about to be sold because Colonel and Mrs Day can longer manage fifty bedrooms and such-like with the remaining staff; being the former butler, Mr Partridge, and the former house-keeper, Mrs Mawser, both of whom are extremely uncomfortable with their unconventional employers insisting they all muck in together, sharing meals at the kitchen table, for example. These two had been in service at the house since they were twelve and Colonel Day’s grandfather “the old gentleman” was in charge. (By the way, the outgoing monks cast a curse on the abbey.)
A side character is Mr Bins, the postman, who delivers the parcel in the first place, and gets into an argument with Miss Lipscombe about the amount of duty to be paid. I must say, three pounds, eighteen shillings and fourpence did seem rather a lot in my opinion, but he tells her, “I’ve no time argufying with you,” and Doctor Andrews has to intervene to “save bloodshed”. This is extraordinary, because all the family are at breakfast, and no one should leave the table until the last person has finished, which is usually Augustus, who has a huge appetite and refuses to be hurried. There is an awful lot of eating going on all the way through the novel, even though rationing is frequently mentioned. Breakfast is always at least two courses, beginning with a cereal called Force, and then going on to something cooked. Then everyone must be home promptly for lunch, followed by tea, then the two young boys are bathed and put to bed (by Selina and Sally usually), and then the rest of the family have supper. Lots of bread and buns are referred to, so apparently no shortage of flour and yeast 🙂
The children behave in ways that would be unrecognisable to many modern parents: polite, obedient, and with fabulous table-manners, they have regular daily chores such as clearing the table, washing up, making beds – and are willing to swap if it means they can get on to their mutual projects faster. They have innovative ideas taking each other’s strengths and weaknesses into consideration, are responsible for putting those plans into action, and organising the resources needed, even where this demands negotiation with adults in the village (except for Selina – who the other children remark has an inferiority complex – and then load her up with being the one to approach Miss Lipscombe). They do occasionally spat and show self-interest, as in Phoebe to an impatient Sally over the supper table: “Speak to me once more like that and I shall take another half-hour“. In fact, rather highly-strung Phoebe also commits an unforgiveable sin when she cries at the dinner table. Her father, while acknowledging the value in an occasional cry, advises her that others should never be subjected to such displays and sends her to room.
Another side character is Mr Laws, the local garden-loving Vicar who is getting a bit dotty but still giving sermons. The tonic the doctor gave him has no effect on his faculties as he gave it to the freezias – a sad failure: all length and no flowers. He has a role in the pageant as the Abbot, but he has to have a minder to ensure he doesn’t wander off with the buttercups and miss his cue.
The script-writing and performance planning is toddling along in that backyard presentation way we probably all subjected our parents to, until Squadron Leader Day enters on page 80, after VE Day, which is skimmed over. He is the Day’s nephew, awaiting discharge and convalescing at the abbey after having spent months in hospital from crashing his aeroplane. His nerves, understandably, are a bit shot, but ever since he was a boy he has dreamed of staging a big production on the amphitheatre-shaped lawn of the abbey, and this is his last chance before it will be sold.
It’s a bit sad that by his somewhat manic schemes he manages to take over the entire production, relegating Selina to stage-manager in the process, but it all ends well after another two hundred pages. Staged on 20th September 1945, the pageant takes the audience through seven hundred years of change in English history, even including a stop at the Siege of Mafeking! Hundreds of the villagers are roped into taking parts, and others are roped into making costumes from re-used and re-dyed material, including Mrs Day’s 1930s evening dresses. Hundreds more from surrounding villages attend the performance. The nearby American army base provides the band (the Canadians have already gone home), and the closing scene features army jeeps being driven on to the lawn stage.
Everybody gets what they want in the end and the curse on the abbey is lifted when it is narrowly saved from being burnt to the ground just before the performance (this includes an interesting description of how to pump water out of buckets). By the way, the Americans buy the abbey as a “hostel for the youth of America, to keep alive for ever the bonds of friendship forged in these last years”, and install Colonel and Mrs Day to act as host and hostess. Probably just as well as their jeeps would have churned up whatever was left after the lawn had been trampled by horses, making it very unattractive to any other buyer.
It’s all a bit bonkers really (to coin an English phrase), and rather sadly, indicative of the influences under which Australian children laboured in the 1960s when we were still so tied to the “mother country”. In school, particularly primary, we were taught so much English history, and not one scrap of Aboriginal history. Some of us are still struggling to catch up.
Your post inspired me to read this classic child book
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Oh gosh! What did you think of it?
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I like to imagine how it was in a time where children were brought up to the old values of right and wrong and to master their emotions in challenging situations. Then, as a Dane, there is so much literature from England and the USA that I would love to get to know.
Another thing is that everything from WWII has my interest as my parents were young at that time.
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I am a WWI and WWII buff also. When I was young, everyone had family members who had served in the Australian forces, or had been Japanese POW.
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Wow, imagine the many stories from these people
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Mostly they didn’t speak about it. But I did have a relative who was captured in Greece and sent to a Stalag in Thorn, Poland. He contributed a chapter to a book about his experiences, but I don’t have a copy.
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It always seems to be challenging to speak about horrible periods of a person’s life. I love to read personal stories from survivors as you can learn something about coping, and the ones who write or talk get a kind of therapy from the horror
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If somebody made a list of crucial English/ American literature for adults and children, I would appreciate it. Nowadays, I read the original language and not translated
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In culling my children’s books, I have kept back all the “classics” I own – but when I will have the time to read them again is the question.
What is crucial reading, I guess, falls within the social attitudes of the time.
I have just finished an Australian book set in the outback at the beginning of the 20th century and the attitude towards our indigenous is outrageous today. I think the book belongs in a museum 🙂
I will blog about it when I get a chance.
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ps, We’ve been watching the crime thriller ‘The Killing’ (Forbrydelsen). I might be speaking Danish at the end of it. They certainly know how to drag the story out!
Tak.
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I never watch the TV series, but I know the Danish ones are famous abroad. You spelled it perfect
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Lovely read! Such sweet kids….definitely rare these days.
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I agree! Thanks for commenting – and for your follow. I haven’t written much lately but hope to do a post shortly.
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I love bonkers books and illustrated books as a visual learner they keep my interest, I didn’t get tested for dyslexia until i went to University and a lecturer noticed a pattern in my essays that was holding my marks down and he asked me if I was dyslexic and was surprised when I said I didn’t know. I arranged a test with the Universities help and boy was it great to actually get some help with structure, coloured cards to read through, grammerly programs, books to read. I almost immediately went from C grades to A. At school I think I slipped through and got the A grades because my Mum was so strict on reading and writing reviews for her and Dad to read to ensure we understood the books and spelling practice and although I took longer to learn my spellings than my brothers we were made to stick with it until we could do it. Plus I steered away from the heavy essay based humanities subjects and concentrated on all three science subjects, maths, statistics, music and the arts.
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That’s a fascinating insight – I would never have guessed. I have always been a good reader – I think I could before I started school, and therefore good spelling and grammar simply flowed from that. Plus we didn’t have a television so no distractions there. But now I am older I am finding I’m skip-reading certain words or transposing the order of the letters. I hope THAT is simply distraction and not a signal of something more sinister.
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I absolutely love old children’s books, and this one sounds so fascinating! I used to read my mom’s and grandma’s books that were threaded through with WWI and WWII references.
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The one I am reading at the moment is set in the Australian outback and includes attitudes to our indigenous people that are shocking today. I’m not sure how I’ll review it. It does serve its purpose though, to understand the discriminatory attitudes that were taken for granted.
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Oh, I have experienced similar things in children’s books. At least one of the Doctor Dolittle books, for instance, is quite racist. Then some of the Bobbsey Twins, etc had anti-Asian storylines around the time of WWII. Gene Stratton Porter is an American writer who had a lot of racist stuff in her otherwise wonderful books. It’s so horrifying to think of children reading these negative and dangerous attitudes.
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What a wonderful story!!! So very English & right up my street. I & my kids were brought up like those & we all had our jobs. Mine was cleaning the brass door handles. Amazing really when later I polished our bronze winches every day as we sailed the oceans to Australia. After we left Panama the humidity made it difficult but it all resumed when we moored in Wollongong. Many thanks Gwen for a marvellous blog🙂🙂
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I thought it would appeal to you JoJo J
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An enjoyable review, Gwen! Things were a bit different back then.
As children, we were not taught Native American history over here, a similar problem.
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A missed opportunity for us all, but lucky we have the mentality to educate ourselves now
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The illustrations are fantastic. Love that one of the woman on her hands and knees scrubbing the floor and she has that big smile on her face. And how about the description of the thin and tall woman who looked her best when she’s sitting on a horse. That book could not survive a bra-burning protest, that’s for sure.
Good to hear from you, Gwen. We miss your great views on the world.
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A few of my younger female friends would have this on the banned reading list for sure!
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“Quintessentially English” indeed :o) – thanks for your entertaining summary of this book. Noel Streatfield is new to me – interesting that she omits her first name, Mary. The English are unique, but I’ve never understood their “stiff upper lip” thing and felt for poor Phoebe and her dinner table cry. Wouldn’t you know the Americans bought the abbey – very funny…
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In many other ways Phoebe was quite advanced for a nine-year-old. I think she was entitled to have the odd meltdown :-), particularly when the Squadron Leader called her poetry dribble or something similar and cut it from the pageant. And I just remembered, her father gave her a talking-to in his surgery over the crying incident, but he comforted her in the end. Character-building, I think it’s called.
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Yes, well, I don’t know, not the kind of reading to encourage a feminist future life, nor one for a fairer less class-ridden society. Oh dear, fancy sharing meals with the former butler, how gracious. I guess you can read them in an ironic way. I managed to miss these books, especially ‘Ballet Shoes’ and so did my daughter, until we, too, saw the film ‘You’ve Got Mail’. A film now, post the #metoo movement, that is really, really creepy and just ghastly. Some films like some books don’t stand the test of time do they? I am surprised Noel Streatfeild is still in print, even over here in jolly old Blighty.
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Hopefully at the time I read it as inspiration to overcome these expectations. Although I do remember wishing we could afford ballet, or any dance, lessons, which many of these young girls aspire to – never recognising my Rubinesque body was never going to squeeze into a tutu 🙂
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My nieces both had ballet lessons all the way through to mid teens. I am not sure that they were particularly useful in the end. Neither are/were the preferred body shape for ballet and the consequential sniping from the others girls and the overall hierarchy of the dancing school had more of a negative than positive affect. It has been a pity as one of them is a natural, gifted dancer and very musical, but now, sadly, doesn’t perform at all.
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That’s an interesting perspective I hadn’t thought of. And little girls can be so cruel to each other. It’s one of the tragedies that some females are drawn to bringing each other down, rather than combining against the other forces which are set to conspire against us. “Pulling the ladder up after them” was one phrase I heard in reference to women who had climbed the corporate ladder and wanted the younger women to have to struggle as hard as they had to get there.
Which is all way off topic – nothing new for me there – but, if I had done ballet, maybe my posture would be a whole lot better!
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There’s this pretty ordinary film called you’ve got mail with Meg Ryan in it. She’s a knowledgeable book seller who mentions Noel Streatfeild’s ‘shoes’ books. I’d have liked to know about them when I was growing up. I would then have passed them on to my granddaughters when they were of an age. Love those illustrations, very forties and fifties.
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I only remember one scene where Meg Ryan was sitting on the bed with a laptop. Can’t remember any other blessed thing about that movie. I feel Streatfeild’s books were of their time 🙂
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An amazingly thorough review, Gwen, with a profound final paragraph, and fine illustrations. I am enjoying this series.
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Many thanks Derrick. Also my first using the Block Editor. On my iPad, the images don’t display correctly, and they obscure the text. I have the same “problem” reading yours on the iPad, that’s why I wait till I have the laptop on. Guess I’ll have to dig into why . . .
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I guess so, Gwen
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