Bond Street Story by Norman Collins

published 1959







Wherever you looked, she was there. Superb. Serene. Indisputable. The steeply arched eye-brows. The long curve of the cheek. The deep indecipherable eyes. The wide gentle mouth. The face smiled imperturbably on the public from all sides. From boxes of face powder. From the shiny pages of expensive magazines. From Mayfair pageant programmes. From the walls of Underground platforms.

That face, and the figure that went with it, represented everything that the race was always reaching out for. It was elegance. It was poise. It was correctness. But there was more to it than that. There was also an indefinable spiritual quality to it. A placidity. Even if it were a new strapless evening-gown that she was displaying, or a Longchamps ensemble with a hat as flat and wide as a Chinese umbrella, there was still the same ethereal, faintly surprised air of a discreetly fashionable Madonna.





But even a face and a figure must have some kind of private life. And it was the private life that wasn’t so good as the public one. Not nearly so good.


commentary: A couple of people recommended this one to me – I think it was the usual suspects, Lucy Fisher and Sarra Manning. I loved Collins’s London Belongs to Me (several entries a while back), and this one was mentioned again around the time of the clothes panics blogposts – this time Victoria Harris is up:

Can I recommend Bond Street Story by Norman Collins, which I've recently read. Poor Irene, who's only 17 and quite self-conscious, starts her day with no outfit for the staff social and ends up with 3. A scarf/sash thing and handbag she bought to jazz up her old black dress, a posh frock which a colleague saves from stock and marks down for her because of a lipstick mark - and which she can't really afford but knows she just has to have because it's gorgeous and a real bargain, and a dress she gets home that night to find her mother making for her.


And then Alexandra Kim mentioned it on Twitter too – she’d read it because of Victoria’s reco I think.

So I finally read it, and honestly I could do two weeks’ worth of entries from it: the book is full of wonderful clothes considerations. But that is not to underplay that it is an extremely good proper novel, highly entertaining and completely engrossing.

The centre of the story is Rammell’s department store in Bond St London it is, perhaps, something on the lines of Fenwick’s: it considers itself very upmarket, and there is this blissful comparison:

Nobody ever came into the shop at nine o’clock when the doors opened. That wouldn’t have been Bond Street behaviour. More the way Marks and Spencer customers go on.

Collins picks out a set of characters from the shop to follow – from the owners down to a shop assistant, and magnificently moves among and between them. (He seems to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of how such a store would operate, despite the fact that he worked all his life in quite other areas – TV, films and writing.) All of them are treated seriously and realistically, although the book is very funny, and very good on everyone’s different foibles and fantasies.

The different sections in the book would give you a clue:

Reluctance of a Female Apprentice
Love and the Shopwalker
Private Affairs of a Leading Model
Case of the Missing Budgies
Bond Street in Retrospect

ALL of the characters are fascinating, and beautifully done, their stories winding in and out of each other (they are not confined to their sections, as the headings might imply). And there are excellent minor moments in the book – the man who walks with a ‘polar-bearlike saunter’. The secretary who is ‘A dark intense kind of girl, who seemed to have been born for the delivery of bad news….[she] made him feel as though he were taking part in a verse drama, and had just heard that Troy had fallen. This morning… she sounded as though she was on her way to bury Polynices.’

The lady in the extract above is Marcia, the ‘leading model’ of the book section list above. She is single, and after a spectacular career is concerned about getting older and would like to pin down a happy (and prosperous) future. The book follows her as she tries out a number of men, auditioning them perhaps for a role. She thinks she might have to live in the country so investigates a new look:

The last thing that she had ordered was a rough, practically sandpaper tweed with a divided skirt. She was having trouble to find a pair of shoes heavy enough to go with it.

She is torn about one man – rich, but really….

There was something so frankly vulgar, so bank-holidayish about him that Marcia shivered. And he had such a positive way of eating potato crisps. He munched them noisily like a schoolboy, perpetually thrusting out his great red hand for more.

I loved her trip to the ballet at Covent Garden: she thinks the dancers could learn a thing or two about movement from a top model like herself, and

if you just sat there, not concentrating on anything, an agreeably anaesthetic sensation came over you. It was like taking a long hot bath without the nuisance of having to dry yourself afterwards. The only difficulty lay in being absolutely sure that you could keep awake.

She gives a lot of attention to her clothes:

Marcia decided on her beige dress. The beige dress. And her moonstones. It promised to be a pretty pale colourless kind of evening. And Marcia decided to fit in perfectly.

And there is a lot of talk of mink, and blue mink, which was new to me, and then trouble over a mink wrap that Marcia borrows (perfectly legitimately) from the shop but returns rather late…

The clothes opportunities are neverending. There will be more entries, and more comment on the book.

The hat-and-tweed ensemble – Longchamps indicates the paris racecourse, so this would be ideal – is from Kristine’s photostream.

Dior strapless gown, 1958, same source.

Beige dress also. And mink wrap.