Free Old Sins by Penny Vincenzi

happily for Julian, fashion was being reborn. Not just clothes, not foolish frivolity, nor even a burgeoning industry, it was a serious matter, one worthy of sober consideration and artistic merit. The Royal College of Art had opened its school of fashion design in 1948 with Madge Garland, an ex-editor of
Vogue
, as its professor. People talked about fashion and the design of clothes as something seriously important. Moreover, it was big business. The effect of M. Dior’s New Look had been staggering. Not only was it revolutionary in look, but in attitude. In three dizzy hours in the February of 1947 it spelt the end of economy as a virtue and of fashion as a sin; after six years of skimpy skirts and square shoulders, here were clothes that caressed the body, clung to the waist and swirled around the ankles in glorious extravagance. Women didn’t just like it, or even want it, they yearned for it, they demanded it, they had to have it. The rich flocked to Paris; the ready-to-wear houses copied it within days and it sold and sold and sold.
    It was considered unpatriotic, which only lent it more glamour; questions were not quite asked in the House, but Sir Stafford Cripps called a meeting of the major British designers to try to persuade them to keep the short skirt popular, and another of fashion editors to tell them to instruct women to ignore the long; and Mrs Bessie Braddock, the stout and aggressively unfashionable Labour MP, took women to task forcaring so passionately about something so frivolous. Princess Margaret promptly negated any impression Mrs Braddock might have made by appearing constantly in the New Look. It all added up to a defiant, almost reckless approach to anything to do with clothes and looks; and made it an excellent time to be involved in cosmetics.
    The Morell empire began life as a cough mixture. It was a perfectly ordinary cough mixture (called unimaginatively, if graphically, Morell’s Cough Linctus), in three flavours: lemon, cherry, and blackcurrant, but it had two important selling points. The first was that it tasted extraordinarily good, and children therefore loved it; the second was that it worked. Given to tired children in the night by tireder parents, it had them asleep again in ten minutes, their coughing silenced, their throats soothed. The reason for both factors was in the formulation, for which the parents and the children had to thank an old man working in the back room of a
pharmacie
in a small town near Deauville, but this was long before a Trades Description Act could prevent anybody from saying anything very much, and Julian had an ingenious and laterally thinking mind. Thus the linctus bore the legend ‘specially formulated for night-time coughs’.
    There was no question of there being any money for advertising, and the labels stuck on the bottles by the hands of the bored housewives of West Ealing, where Morell Pharmaceuticals had its headquarters in an ex-WRVS canteen, were simply printed in white on red, with no embellishments of any kind except a border of medicine spoons twisted together, which was to become the Morell company logo. Nevertheless, the simple message was successfully and powerfully conveyed.
    Julian sold the product into the chemists’ shops himself, driving huge distances in his Wolseley saloon, its big boot and passenger seats crammed with samples. The pharmacists, used to being fobbed off by crass young salesmen, were charmed by the intelligent, courteous man who could discuss formulae with them and who would always meet orders, even if it meant him personally driving hundreds of miles overnight to do so; originally reluctant to stock the medicine, those who did so invariably came back for more, and because of the conversationsthey had had with Julian about formulae, would recommend it to distracted mothers and worried grandmothers and anxious nannies with rather more confidence than usual.
    The worried mothers, having experienced its considerable