Roundabout

Maidens in Uniform

By KATHARINE WHITEHORN By the coat rail a tense battle was in progress. A mother, in a nondescript floral, was firmly ordering a large size, belted, navy-blue school coat; her daughter, overwhelmed to the knuckles, was close to tears.

'But I can't wear it like this!' she wailed. 'It's far too big!'

'We'll turn the sleeves up and you'll grow into it,' said her mother. She turned for support to the saleswoman. 'They don't think about the price, do they?'

The saleswoman smiled indulgently. 'All they want is tight bodices and frilly petticoats!' she said, taking the coat to be wrapped.

A voice boomed behind me.

`Miss—Mrs.—ah—Whitelaw, is it? Forgive me —I never remember names, except head- mistresses.' Looking rather like a headmistress herself, the Head of the department started to show me round.

The first thing I saw was a big book of clothes lists. Some, along with '1 dirty linen bag, 2 Liberty bodices, cotton,' listed '1 Bible, revised version.' Many of the older boarding schools required half a dozen pairs of footwear and only three pairs of knicker linings : no training in dainty femininity there.

Most of the stock of uniforms seemed more suitable to the Armed Forces, or possibly the Elderly Bereaved, than to young girls; but the Head was all in favour of them. 'They don't show the dirt,' she said. (Only chalk and scurf show up really well on navy blue.) 'If you have a light colour, the shade may vary,' she ex- plained. Only clothes reduced to their dingiest common denominator come up the same every time, apparently, and cheaper stuff made from reclaimed wool—old army socks and things— show traces of its former self under all but the heaviest dyes. 'And you can get a far tougher garment much cheaper if the manufacturers produce a standard garment from year to year,' she said. Which sounded very convincing, until one remembered that She's editor had succeeded in paying, for a uniform bought piecemeal, exactly half as much as an approved school outfit would have cost—with no difference in the wearing quality at all.

All the uniforms were deeply lacking in sex appeal, but that, one gathered, was a great point in their favour. The maiden in uniform, it is hoped, will not attract the boys; and she can hide the embarrassments of adolescence in an undemanding shapelessness. Sometimes, of course, the second hope is better fulfilled than the first : one girl from a South London day school went to school on Friday and had a baby on the Saturday, and not even her own parents knew she was pregnant (the school in question has since given up tunics in favour of skirts).

In spite of the alleged impossibility of getting brighter uniforms, there were in fact two other kinds to be seen (both in that shop and in others I visited later). There were the sheer flights of a headmistress's fancy (and a headmistress's fancy leaves a mere teenager's standing at the post)— elfin little dancing tunics, dashing hussars' cloaks in scarlet, Arabian djibbahs from the wilder shores of serge. And there actually were a few enlightened ones—the Guy Laroche styles of school dressing--that looked young. St. Pat11.3 Junior School, for instance (the uniform chosen, significantly, by a committee of parents), has blue-and-white dogtooth checked pinafore dresses and showerproof tweed coats in a rich, attractive blue. And Skinners' Company's School, whose headmistress believes that girls will never look after clothes they detest, is trying striped blouses, red cardigans and red sailcloth skirts.

But with these exceptions, few of the girls' uniforms looked in the least like real clothes. Boys' uniforms, on the other hand, mostly do look like men's clothes—though maybe this is only because men's clothes look so like uniforms. Downstairs, in the boys' department, the tailor's dummy of the Perfect Schoolboy was wearing a grey suit that an adult might have chosen.

'He's the only one who ever looks really neat,' said a salesman. 'Boys aren't interested, are they?'

One mother agreed with him anyway. 'It's just a bit of parental respectability, I'm afraid,' she said, pointing to the grey Sunday best they had just bought. 'I'm tired,' she whispered with passion, 'of taking him to the oculist in jeans.'

She didn't see why boys shouldn't wear jerseys, indoors at school : 'Why make them wear jackets that wear out at the elbows? Someone pointed out that jerseys have no pockets. 'Pockets!' she retorted. 'All that `happens with pockets is that they get gummed up with sweet papers and have lobe cut out with scissors.' Boys and girls, it seems, have uniforms for quite different reasons. For girls, the main point is to let mothers off the impossible task of keeping up with the Joneses' little girl, who wears a new dress every day. But with boys, all the kudos goes to the campaign-scarred, ink-stained veteran: none to the new bug in his sissy clean blazer. For them, uniforms are mainly a school's attempt to impose some faint order on to an amorphous crawling mass of raw schoolboy : uniformed dayboys, too, are more easily spotted and policed by prefects. Only boys and girls at the more entrenched boarding schools share the burden of Tradition : the dottier and more archaic the uniform, the greater the presumptive gulf between its wearers and the town louts who dress like human beings.

But even free schools go in for uniform if they can; and indeed for any form of equality in education, it does seem vital—at least for girls. But need they be so dismal? Granted there

are snags in prettier uniforms: only a handf of headmistresses (and, of course, Lad Lewisham, Whom God Preserve) seem even consider the possibility of surmounting the There's the price. But uniforms are expensiv anyway; and parents who often spend more tha a term's fees on a girl's outfit are not going condemn her to a dozen years of dreariness jU for the sake of a pound or two. Practicality If gym tunics are practical, so are boiler suit jeans, overalls—and nobody suggests those (aft how can a uniform claim to be practical th requires a tie?). Moral discipline? It would better discipline to get a girl to care for cloth she likes than to get her up like a scarecrow I clothes no girl of taste could fail to detest.

'But they do look so nice when you see the all together in their navy tunics!' the girl department Head insisted.

They. Neither she nor anyone else I spoke said she.