The (Vogue pattern) white hooded dress

Oh how I’d bet Shakespeare would have appreciated the irony that most of the people who now trail round his home town are seventeen year olds whose last thought is taking a scholarly interest in the sixteenth century. Seventeen: just the age he left Stratford-on-Avon, just the age when life is at its most alluring, magnetic, irresistible. I expect he couldn’t get away quick enough, was more than eager to abandon its little streets, probably hardly kissed his mother goodbye before heading off for the Great Drama which was, of course, awaiting him with a touch more promise than it does for most of us.

That summer, being seventeen and girls, we had spent the months from January to May before the Stratford-on-Avon upper sixth form trip thinking about what we would wear. We’d been there the summer before, and knew the town would be full, not just of bored sixth form boys, but also, incredibly, fairly bored young actors there as extras, spear carriers, messengers etc. So this time we wanted to make an impact. You might well think we should have been taking a more detailed interest in the plays we were studying, King Lear and Twelfth Night. And, yes, we did quite like doing the texts. But Stratford connected less with work than with how we should present ourselves. How should we look?

By April it was clearly going to be a summer of long hair, centre parted, and short skirts. But we sensed a hidden tension between the Marianne Faithful/Jane Asher romantic look and an undertow of Mod chic and discipline also on the streets. Yes, there were subtle fashion aesthetic problems here, tangling up with the unspoken arguments of the zeitgest: as a result our lunchtime trips to survey what was in Lewis Separates were thoughtful and judgmental. So much nearly right but not quite. Often the only way to have exactly what you wanted was to make it. All of us were reasonably adept with a Singer and a couple of yards of fabric.

‘I’ve seen a pattern I like,’ said Maureen, one lunchtime when we were sitting in our form room because it was raining and we couldn’t go out for our customary roam around the shops. Instead we, Jo, Yvonne, Pat and me, sat there with our hair combed down over our faces searching with nail scissors for split ends; split ends, while not quite as destructive as curls, were another hideous threat to the longed-for perfection of straight, shiny hair, and had to be methodically singled out and cut off. With the focus and precision of a group of wild primates we groomed away.

‘Yeah?’ said Jo, ‘What’s it like then?’

‘It’s a Vogue pattern.’

This silenced us. We all stuck cautiously to Simplicity or Butterwick as we had been trained to do way back in the distant days of being thirteen and doing needlework before O level Physics had claimed more of our timetable. Sister Claire Rosario had Vogue patterns right off limits. Too Expensive. Too Fashionable. Too Ambitious. Too Worldly.

‘Yes?’

‘It’s long sleeved and it fastens at the side. And. And it’s got a hood. A kind of loose hood. And braid round the edges.’

A hood? Then no-one wore hoods. Well, Carthusians possibly. It was not like now when teenagers in hoods flock around our world with as much rarity value as grandads in blouson jackets. No. Oh no. Hoods then still evoked a kind of early eighteenth century Lady Up To No Good On Her Way To An Assignation kind of glamour. You’d need confidence to think of wearing something like that. But Maureen was confident: her dad was the chairman of the school governors, and they lived in a big red brick Edwardian villa in a leafy street near the school.

The next lunchtime which was nice enough to tempt us out we went to Owen Owen to offer our opinions on the pattern, though it was clear that Maureen’s mind was made up. Hauling open the mighty weight of the Vogue catalogue she said that her mum would help her with the difficult bits. She was lucky the book was free; it was usually in the musing, scented clutches of some Finchley Dowager clawing through the cocktail wear section.

‘There,’ she said, with as much triumph as if she had designed it herself. ‘Look. Isn’t it great?’

We looked. The drawing, for, of course, it was a lightly brushed illustration, nothing as honest as a photo, made the dress look as if it were loosely attached to a gazelle in sunglasses, one hand on a hip, the other dangling a striped Copacabana style beach bag. Feet criss-crossed with strips of no doubt nubuck leather, a slight smile hinting at travel, yachts, a flat in New York and a house in Massachusetts. Beauty, it said. Money, it said. Sophistication, it said. The ultimate value. Sophistication.

‘I thought I’d do it exactly like the drawing, in white, with black braid round all the edges,’ said Maureen. And in that second I had the first stirrings of doubt. Maureen was five foot high, not slim, round faced. Freckled. Her hair was long, admittedly, but very wavy and flat on top. Until a few months before it had been in tight plaits for twelve years. Maybe that was why it was such a funny shape. But I said, along with the others, ‘It’ll look lovely.’

You had to lie to your friends at such moments. And anyway I might have been wrong.

At last the three days in Stratford lay at our feet. I had a blue and green silky high waisted dress bought in C& A’s the year before which was still OK, and a navy crochet top and hipster skirt which would do for travelling. By then, in fact, Stratford wasn’t bothering me that much. I had acquired a boyfriend; and Shakespeare was in the background for the time being. But still it was exciting to be going somewhere with my friends. No parents. No nuns. Just one liberal English teacher who trusted us to behave.

The summer before we had blamelessly spent most of our time rowing up and down the Avon. As often as we dared to be so forward we would navigate a wobbly course along past the balcony of the theatre. The bolder among us would wave at the actors hanging over the rail enjoying their cigarette breaks. Memorably one or two actually waved back. But only one or two. It is only now that I can see how comic we must have looked: oars splaying at spectacularly life-threatening wrong angles, our careful, indeed backcombed and lacquered, hairstyles, neat little outfits noone in their right mind would wear for rowing hours at a time. Later, after each performance, we had clustered at the stage door and bleated gently at anyone who went past for autographs, though I guess most of the cast escaped out another door or stayed in the bar until too late for us. This year we planned to do all these things again. David Warner, Maureen’s favourite actor, was in a play. We had learned the actors hung out in the Dirty Duck pub. And we were almost old enough to get away with going there ourselves.

We planned to go there the first night. The play began at seven thirty and we thought we’d have a drink at six as a way of kicking things off. Even getting ready was exciting, packed together in the one huge room in the b. and b. where we were staying. In the centre of the room was Frances McCleod, from the other teaching group, generally acknowledged to be the prettiest girl in the school. Well, she was the blondest and it wasn’t bleach. Fanny stood there, in her gingham bra and knickers (so cool) and showed us all how it was much easier to run eye pencil around your eyes if you fingertipped on a teeny weeny smear of cold cream first. Then she looped up her long, silver-blonde Western Isles hair into a black velvet ribbon. Pulled on a broderie anglaise blouse, a tiny skirt. She yawned.

‘What I really hate,’ she said, ‘is those old men who come up to you in the street and try to talk to you. As if you’d be interested in them.’

We listened. Frances was wise. She had a beautiful boyfriend called Oliver. We hadn’t actually seen him but any boy then called Oliver had to be beautiful. You knew that. Once, she had chucked him over the phone and he had cried. Cried!

There was no point trying to compete with Fanny. I put on my blue-green dress and buckled my sandals. A ritualistic scroll of mascara, and I was ready, ready enough to resume worrying about whether we’d be challenged in the Dirty Duck and thrown out and made to look like under age idiots, with no boys with us to dilute the embarrassment by joking and jeering.

The door opened and Maureen came in from the bathroom where she had been getting ready. We all knew this was because she was so proud of the dress she wanted us to see it on her with the maximum effect. She already had the hood up and a black bag casually slung over one shoulder. And even though she was wearing big black sunglasses we could see her face had that look every woman recognises with a sharp ache: please, please tell me it’s worked and I look nice.

‘Wow,’ we all said. ‘You look fabulous. It’s fantastic.’

And then we ambled the mile or so up to the Dirty Duck. It was a ravishingly lovely English summer evening, drenched with the scent of lime blossom, and the old brick walls glowed with a honey sheen, and growing up seemed as graceful and sweet as the leaves on the trees. And this year we were so much older than last year, so much more grown up, so much more possessed of panache and social ease. Yes, we walked towards the Dirty Duck with as much breeziness and lightness as if we were a group of starlets ourselves, and everyone in there was lucky to be getting so much as a glimpse of us.

Fanny led the way. She could easily pass for eighteen, and she had the hauteur to face down any barman. And anyway we were only going to ask for lemonade shandies. The place seemed full of handsome men in white shirts and hip jeans. Heads down, we followed Fanny. A dozen sets of male eyes followed her too I noticed as I trailed in her glorious wake. She ordered five shandies and smiled gently. Like dawn coming over the horizon. The transfixed barman didn’t demur, just reached for the glasses. Success. We’d done it. We’d arrived.

The others were sitting down half way along a far wall when we made our way back with the drinks and packets of crisps tucked under our arms.A muted but dark silence met us. Yvonne was looking stricken, the look she used to have whenever she was told off by a teacher lower down the school. When she said thanks her stutter, last heard in year four, had come back. Maureen still had her sunglasses on. She said nothing. We sat down. Jo redid and undid the buckle on her jacket. It was beige and white check, and had come from C & A, but Jo had the knack of looking French and expensive in anything. I still don’t know how some girls can do that. Born with it. A talent.

A tear slid slowly from underneath Maureen’s sunglasses, leaving a gleamy slug trail down her cheek. Then she pushed her hood back as if it were hurting her head.

‘They laughed at me when I came in.’

‘No. Who?’ we said.

‘Them. They were all laughing. And one of them shouted Oh look - it’s Friar Tuck.’

She nodded her head towards the door, towards the group of men in white shirts; a general blur of interesting jaw lines and brown skin, the presence of real, grown up men. Actors. And I think David Warner was at the back. Two of them turned around and looked over at us, turned back and said something to the others and, yes, they laughed. Rather loudly. Maybe they were just laughing at how young we were and how awkward we looked. Or maybe Maureen was right.

‘Of course they’re not laughing at you,’ we all said. ‘Don’t be so silly.’

That night she wouldn’t come with us to ask for autographs after the play, and when we got back the hooded dress was a heap on the floor at the end of her bed. Maureen was asleep, or pretending to be. The play had been Twelfth Night.. And then, and ever since, I have hated Maria and Toby Belch for what they did to Malvolio. Why shouldn’t yellow cross gartering be O.K? What’s wrong with making an effort? With trying? Why can’t people realise?