Frock

e’s narrator keeps an eye on premises belonging to his brother, who has taken his own family out of the stricken city. Walking one day towards the warehouse in the warehouse he finds it broken open. Inside, half a dozen more women are looters, Baby Frock each looking for her size, while around them London rots and the grass grows in the Strand. It is also a striking demonstration of Freya Stark’s maxim predictable ways, and they speak even when we are silent. ‘Dressed in a tramp’s clothes,’ George Orwell, quoted by Judith Watt, observed, ‘it is very difficult . . . meeting his modern counterpart in the City would know him at once, even without a hat. His wife, however, would be thunderstruck by a trip to Selfridges, ovations of the last hundred years are knickers with a closed crotch; separates (tops and skirts that could be worn in different combinations); trousers; reversed. Mendes and de la Haye write in their introduction that fashion is ‘an indicator of the individual, group and sexual identity’ whose ‘fluidity reflects,