Shopping for Downton Dresses

A friend is going to a Downton Abbey party in a few weeks, and the two of us went prowling the vintage clothing stores of Lambertville and New Hope on Wednesday looking for the perfect dress.

Now that Downton has moved into the twenties, this meant a flapper-era evening dress, sleeveless, lightly beaded, perhaps, and for my friend's purposes, black, for she is a chic New York girl. At Mill Crest Vintage on Bridge Street in Lambertville we poked around the twenties rack for awhile without success until the salesperson asked what we were looking for. When we told her she disappeared into the back and emerged with two twenties-era evening dresses, black, beaded, with the soft hand and elegant drape of beautifully worked silk.

"Perfect," my friend said. "How much are they?"

"This one is eighteen," the salesperson said. And just as I was thinking, Damn, I could afford that, not that I could squeeze myself into it, she added, "Hundred."

Ah. Eighteen hundred.

"This one is twenty-seven," she said, holding up the other beaded beauty, one of those numbers with vertical slits every three inches all around the beaded skirt, so that when you do the Charleston in it, people can see flashes of your rolled garters, but when you stand still, it hangs down and respectably covers your knees. Twenty seven. Hundred.

"It's all hand beaded, of course," the salesperson said. I visualized a sweatshop full of little French peasant girls, ruining their eyes beading dresses they could never afford to wear. "And then with the Downton Abbey craze there's a huge demand. What were you thinking of spending?"

"Four hundred," my friend said miserably. I could see that the slinky one without the slits had seized her imagination.

"You could try Love Saves the Day over in New Hope." I had no idea they had vintage clothes there. I thought, from the window displays, that it was an emporium of kitsch and Elvis memorabilia. But when we got there I saw that they carried a respectable collection of vintage garments.

Alas, as far as Downton Abbey stuff went it was pretty much the same story as at Mill Crest, except that the exquisite silk frock that was hanging from the ceiling, the one with the matching black peau-de-soie jacket, wasn't for sale at any price. It was part of the owner's personal collection. No one ever wore it. No one was allowed even to touch it without cotton gloves. Who knew such treasures existed less than a mile from my house?

My friend found a cute black dress that wouldn't quite pass as a twenties garment, being too nipped in at the waist. She bought that one, at a reasonable price, figuring it would come in handy on some other occasion. We went back to the house, still dreaming of the long slinky dress with the beads.

I used to collect old clothes, before I realized I was unfit to take care of them. They need protection from dampness, from acid tissue paper, from moths, from all the things that damage delicate fabric. Caring for fragile old things requires single-minded dedication, and like most writers of fiction I am of many minds. Today I may behave like a meticulous museum curator, but tomorrow I might be a careless hippie, and the day after that a minimalist with no place in her life for extraneous objects like old clothes.

Nevertheless I still have a few pieces, as the knowing ones of fashion call garments these days. Two or three of my pieces are actual twenties garments. As we walked toward the house I suddenly remembered the royal blue silk lace dress I picked up at the flea market, years before Downton Abbey was a gleam in Julian Fellowes' eye. I paid fifteen dollars for it. I think it had been a bridesmaid's dress. Long sleeves snapped into the armscye with tiny little snaps, to be removed for evening wear. Some cunning dressmaker did this in 1925 or so. It has a blue silk underslip.

I found the dress crumpled in a ball in the corner of a drawer in my bedroom. It might work. It needs to be hung in a steamy bathroom to remove the wrinkles, but there's nothing like the heft and slink of real silk lace. You don't see that stuff any more. My word, what if it's worth a thousand dollars? I would hate that. I would have to be responsible for taking care of it.

© 2014 Kate Gallison

Serials, Continued

The serial, with its attendant cliff-hanger ending, is as old as Sheherazade. You will recall the story of the sultan's bride, who told him a tale with a cliffhanger every night to keep him from chopping her head off in the morning. In the nineteenth century, and well up into the twentieth, magazines published serial fiction, paying the writers by the column inch (in case you ever wondered why the works of Dickens were so long).

When I was little, serial dramas were acted out on the radio, not only the housewives' soap operas but comic-book style stories for kids, Little Orphan Annie, Sky King, Tennessee Jed, or Jack Armstrong (the All-American Boy). The episodes were fifteen minutes long. Can you imagine? Nowadays it takes fifteen minutes for a TV show to get through the commercials. We would sit transfixed in the big chair in front of the radio, spoiling our supper with handfuls of cookies, waiting to see whether Sky King had rescued Penny and Clipper.

Serials featuring plucky damsels in distress, such as the Perils of Pauline, pulled in many an eager moviegoer in the silent era. Later movie serials appealed to boys. The grim-jawed heroes often served in the armed forces, sometimes flying airplanes, struggling with the customary mad fiend bent on world domination, if not Hitler then Doctor Destruction. Each episode ended with the hero going over the cliff in a car, or falling out of his airplane, or being crushed in a mine explosion. The following episode would begin, "after Captain Bruce Bammer was rescued from the mine, he…"

So the technique is there to be used. Make your audience root for the hero. Involve them deeply in his life. Then do something terrible to him at the end of every episode.

Modern audiences like their serial dramas in bigger chunks than fifteen minutes; an hour or an hour and a half works well on television. And they will wait all summer for the next season of, say, Downton Abbey. But how does this translate into print media? How long should a serial episode be? How many episodes make a story? These questions are still up in the air. Some writers are capable of spinning off an infinite number of episodes of, for example, a sci-fi thriller, and others want to wind it up while the readers are still young. It seems to depend on what the traffic will bear.

How much closure do you need at the end of an episode? That's another question. Some folks are unhappy that the episodes end with cliff-hangers, and to them I say, go read a short story. It's a different form.

It may be that reader input will come to direct the way some of the serial stories will go. There are folks who are horrified by this idea. I'm not one of them. I'll consider suggestions from my friends, so why not from strangers on social media? This is the twenty-first century, after all. How many of us are solitary geniuses cranking out inviolable works of brilliance? As I always say, we'll see how it goes.

Oh, right. I almost forgot to put in a plug for BUCKER DUDLEY.

Kate Gallison

Great Books on War

All the discussion of “Downton Abbey” and WWI reminded me of some war books I have — ”enjoyed,” is the wrong word. Read with interest. Here are a few of them:

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
I was in my teens when I read this. WWII had been over for several years and none of my family had taken part in it, because of age or disabilities. My only knowledge of war was from the newspapers and newsreels and Lowell Thomas’s radio accounts. This book had a tremendous impact on me. It was weeks before I could get it out of my mind.

Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell
The Civil War was just two words to me. I was a Northerner, a native of Pennsylvania. I had no relatives from the South and the only Southerner I had ever known was my Second Grade teacher, who was from Baltimore. This book was a revelation to me. And the thing that fascinated me most was not the war itself, but its aftermath, and the long-term effect it had on the losers — Scarlett and Ashley.

The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
I remember this one mainly for its shock value. My mother wouldn’t let me read it when it came out. The first book she had ever denied me. (I think I was ten or twelve at the time) so, of course, I found it in the library and was duly shocked — mainly by the f-word. Seeing it in print for the first time was an earth-shaking event!

The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk
What a fantastic yarn. Wouk is a master writer who whisks you along like a brisk wind. I knew that from reading Marjorie Morning Star, which I loved. Captain Queeg is an iconic character I will never forget. (And not just because Bogart played him.) And Wouk’s rendition of sailors trapped at sea under the rule of a psychopath is unforgettable.

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
O’Brien had a new way of looking at war — through the personal effects of the soldiers. This original angle brought fresh insight to an old subject. I read this book in a book club. During our discussion, one of the members confessed he had served in the Army in VietNam and his job had been to collect the bodies from the field and bring them back for burial. Among his duties was to empty the dead soldier's pockets and make sure what he found there was sent to the man's parents or his wife. He described how an unknown body was gradually transformed into an individual as he examined his wallet, the pictures inside, his letters from family or sweetheart, his talismans — such as a rabbit’s foot or a religious medal. By the time he had finished, he always felt grief for the loss of this total stranger.

The Moon is Down by John Steinbeck
This book is not well known in America, but it was a bestseller in Europe during and after WWII — especially among people who were active in the resistance. Somehow, Steinbeck, a native New Englander who lived most of his life in California, was able to get inside the minds of people living under Nazi occupation in a small, unnamed town in Scandinavia. He imagined the situation so well that thousands of Scandinavians and Europeans bought the book from underground booksellers, sometimes risking their lives to do so. This is an example of creative imagination at its height.

Now That April’s Here, by ______________?
I loved this book and have not been able to find it. It was written in the ‘40s, I believe, but I don’t know the author. It was about two British war refugees who were sent to stay with an American family during WWII for their safety. It described how they were changed by this experience and their difficulties readapting to life in Britain when they returned. If anyone can locate this book for me, I would be very grateful.

Robin Hathaway

Tales from the Great War

Attention, Downton fans: You will recall from the ghost story I told about my grandmother's midnight visitation in the tower room of Fritwell that my grandfather served in France during World War I as an officer in the Canadian army. While Granny and her sisters and my five-year-old mother were frolicking on the grounds of Fritwell Manor, Grandaddy was in the trenches, battling the Hun.

The unpleasantness of trench warfare is well known. My understanding is that it was much worse than what they show on Downton Abbey. In the beginning when the troops went over the top of the trenches to attack the enemy the British forces still kept to the old model of marching in perfectly disciplined formation. Effective against the French at Waterloo, maybe, but against German machine guns not so much. The 'three on a match' superstition arose in the trenches; by the time the third soldier got his cigarette lit the German snipers had a bead on him.

Most folks who have spent any time on a battlefield are reluctant to talk about it afterwards. Nevertheless Granddaddy told a story to my mother, who told it to me.

My grandfather and a fellow officer, a close friend, were occupying a trench together. It was springtime. The friend was moved to climb out and roam the countryside, which was somehow possible just then. He found a rosebush, or a number of them, all in bloom. He cut the roses and brought them back to the trench with him. It was a moment of beauty, a rare thing in that time and place.

Suddenly a shell came screaming into the trench and my grandfather's friend was killed. There he lay surrounded by roses. It was an image that my grandfather carried in his memory to the end of his life.

Were they in Picardy? I don't know. It would take me a month to research it. Anyway here's the famous song of that era.

Kate Gallison

If you Like Downton Abbey, You'll Love Rupert Brooke

I was a fan of Rupert Brooke. What impressionable young girl wouldn't be? So beautiful, so gifted, so doomed. He wrote deathless poetry and then was killed in The Great War. In the old family cottage at The Ledge — a wide place in the St. Croix River near St. Stephen, New Brunswick, Canada, where once there was a seaport and now there are cottages — one of the books was a volume of Rupert Brooke's poetry. Possibly a first edition. It had a blue cloth cover and used to belong to my great-aunt Kathleen, after whom I was named.

When I was fourteen I used to lie around on the moldy-smelling day bed at the cottage at The Ledge when the tide was out reading Rupert Brooke, listening to recorded Strauss waltzes, and wrecking my teeth with MacIntosh's Taffy. What bliss.

After I was grown my mother and I were visiting one of my other great aunts, the one who was then in possession of the cottage and all that it contained. I came across the book on a low shelf, covered with dust, unread, unloved. "Oh, look," I said to my mother. "Rupert Brooke's book of poetry."

"Take it. Steal it," my mother said. It was the only thing she ever advised me to steal. I had a friend once whose mother used to take her to the supermarket, where they would both slip expensive cuts of meat into their pockets and underwear, but my mother was not that sort of person.

So I took it. When I got it home a dead moth fell out of the back cover, a miller, one of those big things. Someone must have squooshed it there on purpose. But the book was still full of deathless poetry. Here's one of my favorites:

V. The Soldier

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

Kate Gallison