[Vwoolf] Virginia wasn't the only one

[Stuart N. Clarke]

‘On an allowance of fifty pounds it was difficult, even for the skilful, and I had no skill, to be well dressed of an evening. A home dress, made by Jane Bride, could be had for a pound or two; but a party dress, made by Mrs Young, cost fifteen guineas. The home dress therefore might be, as on one night that comes back to mind, made cheaply but eccentrically, of a green fabric, bought at Story’s, the furniture shop. It was not velvet; nor plush; something betwixt and between; and for chairs, presumably, not dresses. Down I came one winter’s evening about 1900 in my green dress; apprehensive, yet, for a new dress excites even the unskilled, elated. All the lights were turned up in the drawing room; and by the blazing fire George sat, in dinner jacket and black tie, cuddling the dachshund, Schuster, on his knee. He at once fixed on me that extraordinarily observant scrutiny with which he always inspected our clothes. He looked me up and down for a moment as if I were a horse brought into the show ring. Then the sullen look came into his eyes; the look which expressed not simply aesthetic disapproval; but something that went deeper. It was the look of moral, of social, disapproval, as if he scented some kind of insurrection, of defiance of his accepted standards. I knew myself condemned from more points of view than I could then analyse. As I stood there I was conscious of fear; of shame; of something like anguish—a feeling, like so many, out of all proportion to its surface cause. He said at last: “Go and tear it up.” He spoke in a curiously tart, rasping, peevish voice; the voice of the enraged male; the voice which expressed his serious displeasure at this infringement of a code that meant more to him than he could admit.’
(“Moments of Being”, 2nd edn, Hogarth Press, 1985, pp. 150-1)

‘The pianist seated herself at the piano. The cellist adjusted his stool.  Silence fell on the audience.
“She’s wearing brocade, my dear.” 
Sister Monica Joan’s articulation was faultless, and ... the acoustics at All Saints are superb. Her stage whisper, which at its best could penetrate a railway station at rush hour, reached every corner of the church.
“We used to do that in the 1890s; cut down some old curtains, and make a second best dress out of them. I wonder whose curtains she got hold of?”
The pianist glared ...’
(Jennifer Worth, “Call the Midwife: A True Story of the East End in the 1950s” (London: Phoenix, 2008), p. 308)


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