Tuesday 20 July 2010

The Annual for the hippest young girls

Everyone loves making innuedos out of words from The Past - the innocent time that we can sully with our brain diseases of filth and misdeed so happy times here in My House whenever I find an Annual for girls from sometime long ago. Like the 50s. This was before all the youngsters were posting themselves naked on Facebook in a totally ironic way and before they were having children just so they could fit them in their Hello Kitty lunchboxes. (I promise I definitely didn't pick this out because I thought it would be full of classic 1950s racism. Nothing in the title hinted at that)


Oh these girls knew nothing of the 'Ways of the World', which is why these girls are smiling, rather than running, when 'Over the Ridge appeared four panting grey faces'. In fact one of the girls (I can say that, rather than 'women' because that was fine in The Past) seems to be offering the men to a game of croquet even the creepy man, shuffled away at the back, peering at their ever so bare legs.















How do these girls know how to act, though? How do they know that when a hoarde of men come ambling over a hill that they are not to run but that they should offer them for a bout of a quaint English sport? Well fear not dear reader, your ignornace is to be addressed here! All female humans in the 1950s were sent to Canada for 'Girls-in-Training' Camp.
In order to know these girls better we are given hitherto unseen access to the girls most private of thoughts on how they have learnt how to be a girl. However, as this is the 1950s we will observe protocol and not actually read any of these letters as their thoughts will be nonsense. Instead, we will look and make our own, male, minds up. These girls are content. Girls like sitting by a lake, it makes them believe they are the Lady of the Lake ready to give Arthur his Excalibur - this is every girl's fantasy. We can see the sitting down girl is even doing the raised hand action as she tries to perfect her Lady of the Lake thing. She is not allowed a sword as the weight would drag her under the water and this would be a very different annual.


These girls were gone an awful long time training to be proper girls - what did they do in their spare time? Get your mind out of the gutter and stop harbouring the fantasies seen in smutty films with pillow fights etc, this is no place for that. No, these girls would retire to their room and nothing untoward or saucy would happen. We notice in the innocently titled, 'Escapades with Audrey' that 'the prettiest girl [Audrey] had ever seen or imagined...slipped into the room'. These girls are now going to do each others hair and talk about dolls. There is no reason for you to be thinking otherwise. These pretty girls being imagined slipping into each others room is perfectly acceptable behaviour in the 1950s before Barbara Windsor and her smutty entourage got their way with our morals. The decadent Cockney.



Everyone knows that when these girls were off enjoying each others company whilst away from home, in their camp rooms, they were really just wanting one thing - to be near their daddy. This is highlighted with suitable subtlety in the piece entitled, 'The Daring of Daddy'. Really I think all we need here is to read the first paragraph, as I don't wish to spoil any of the story for you:
'It really was astonishing of Daddy, indeed, Patsy was not quite sure that she approved until she reached school on the Monday afterwards and found the girls loud in his praise.' Well what comes after can only be very daring by daddy, very daring indeed.