When I was very young my favourite character was a man who stood outside his house, wearing two hats and eating privet leaves.
It wasn’t a case of ‘like calling to like’ which is just as well, perhaps, but I do rather admire the non-conformist approach to life. I yearn to stun my fellow man with my audacity but alas, for me, it just doesn’t work.
Take clothes. To hazard a swift generalization I would say that there are three ways of being well dressed. Some let Courrèges or Chanel do their worrying for them. I did once meet a girl who let me hold her Hartnell evening dress while she wriggled out of her Dior, but that is the closest I have come to Haute Couture.
Then there are those matt, smoky blondes who glide about in hand-made shoes, cashmere sweaters and utterly unclumpy tweeds. Taking the cue from my friends, I try on meltingly soft coats and skirts but no matter how hard I glide I still look big and militantly respectable. However, it is the third group who really intrigue me. These are the beanpoles with character. The girls who look ravishing in boleros made from milk bottle tops. My best friend’s like that – dashing, willowy and a mother of four. ‘Of course you must show off your legs,’ she says as I stand there gazing gloomily down at my pouffe-shaped knees. So I hitch everything up and sprawl lasciviously all over her inflatable chairs and leather sofas and feel marvellous. But then I go home to my quiet little village.
It’s a funny thing, but whenever dashing girl-friends come to stay with me everyone is enchanted to see them wandering about in mini-caftans or swinging art nouveau bell bottoms over the sides of their sports cars. But the moment I wander outside in my genuine Hawaiian muu-muu or my real Venetian gondolier’s hat people start nudging each other and wiping their eyes. (Perhaps wearing them together is where I go wrong?) Right now I want to master current trends with my own individual interpretation of same, and still look sexy.
The other day, as I rattled through my coat hangers, I realized that something immediate would have to be done about my wardrobe. There were plenty of sad old dresses suitable for housework. There were even two or three floor-length gowns awaiting further sporadic outbursts of high life. But for the great assorted limbo in between the outlook was threadbare.
‘Right,’ I thought. ‘Where’s my cheque book? It’s time for chains and leather fringing.’
Oh, I was a gift to the rag trade that morning. The first assistant I approached said: ‘Well these wrap-around housedresses might suit you, madam, but my coffee’s poured out so would you mind waiting?’
‘What about this?’ I said, pointing to the sort of swinging number we mums all subconsciously yearn for. ‘Could I try it on meantime?’
‘Well please yourself, dear,’ she said. ‘But it’s hardly you, is it?’
This sort of thing happens to me all the time. I have even been known to track down a responsible-looking assistant and say: ‘I place myself entirely in your hands.’
In old movies this approach never fails. With cool but friendly professionalism, the sales-lady changes our heroine from tweedy clumper into sequin-studded houri in half-an-hour.
In my case, they either squeeze into the changing-room and tell me the story of their lives (which I quite enjoy as long as the oxygen supply lasts), or else they lead me firmly to the bleak end of the rack. And I don’t really see myself turning up at parties in vee-necked brown crêpe with a dickie front. My idea of a party is where the ladies, wearing the latest glittering gear, flit about being witty and faintly wanton, while the husbands perk up and cast sparky looks here and there. Several of my married friends keep their parties fizzing this way without the least sign of an orgy developing.
So I comb the local boutiques for something short and shiny to wear – with peep-through portholes even – although these are pretty thin on the ground in village High Streets.
Eventually, I find or make myself a dress with so many cut-out portholes that a large, aging, mid-European professor looms out of the pulsating party gloom and says with characteristic sledge-hammer logic: ‘Yes, I vill sleep with you. Meed me oudside in ten minids,’ or else I am confronted by a tiny, hopping-mad wife screaming: ‘Put my husband down at once.’
Eventually, I suppose, my search for non-conformity will turn me into a sort of elderly eccentric. Swathed in milk bottle tops and little purple remnants I should just about be coming into my own by the time I am past caring. I may even be nibbling privet leaves by then.