Club Foyer>Chillout Room>Depositions
I was very fortunate earlier on to work in the West End of London and to have a job where I was not office-bound.
Over a period of two years or so around the area I fairly regularly encountered three women who used to wear SBR macks - and another over the much longer period of more than 15 years.
All of them wore SBR macks regularly for their journey to work. One of them explained to me what an ordeal it was, commuting wearing one of those macks. “I used to get a lift part of the way," she said, "but now I have to come the whole way on the train and I really suffer in this mack. It's hot and uncomfortable coming in in the mornings, but going home in the evenings it is absolutely sweltering”.
The long term girl was not particularly submissive from what I could see. She often wore her mack open or loosely round her shoulders. But it was clear she had an enormous selection of macks, all of them SBR.
One foul morning she turned up in full foul-weather gear - a cape in SBR, the hood up, and shiny wellingtons for her feet and legs. In the evening the cape and boots had disappeared and she was wearing an SBR mackintosh. Did she keep that at work? Or - I wondered - had she been wearing it beneath her cape in the morning...
One of the other women was extremely well groomed. She had two macs, one a white surface-proofed affair which she wore in fine weather, and a black SBR one for the rain.
The third one was much more strictly controlled in her dress than the other two. Quite often she wore a matching bonnet-type rain hat and rubber boots with her mackintosh. And the mackintosh was always carefully and fully done up. She used to meet her husband most days for lunch in Selfridges' self-service restaurant. It could be very warm in there but she never so much as undid a button of her mackintosh outfit. In the summer she sometimes wore an SBR jacket and skirt set and I wondered what it was like to wear a mackintosh skirt all day.
There were a number of other people I saw in macs from time to time. The most surprising occurred one evening during a period when it had been very warm but cloudy and dry so mackintoshes were not at the forefront of my mind. I had just squeezed on board a rush-hour tube at Oxford Circus when, standing there, I was struck by the aroma of a mackintosh. Eventually I spotted the source some distance away through the crowd. It was a very heavy-looking SBR mackintosh with a rather matt finish and it was being worn by a girl with an uncomfortably red- and hot-looking face. No sooner had I noticed her than she left the train in a hurry - looking a bit as though she had missed her stop. Very frustrating! I still believe her mac may have been the sort they make out of sheet rubber, not the more usual rubber-proofed fabric kind.
Tony
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