Attitudes experienced when eating out minus a male escort.
On 28th March 1930, Vera Britten wrote a piece in the
Manchester Guardian telling of her bizarre experiences when trying
to buy a cup of tea of coffee in a public place, such as a restaurant or
café, unaccompanied by a man, after a certain hour. She found it was
not possible. The rules were made, presumably, with the thought
that no woman without an escort after dark could be on legitimate
business, such as wanting a cup of tea, but was obviously there solely
to tempt men to prostitution. My own mother, in the thirties, before
the divorce from her first husband was finalized, was courted by my
father for many months without him being allowed to stay with her
after 10 o’clock at night. There was a creepy fellow apparently called
the Queen’s Proctor, who, had he caught them at 10.01pm together,
would have assumed they were having a sexual orgy. The inference
being that sex could, or would, only take place after dark and after
10 o’clock. That was fifty years ago and since then some progress has
been made, indeed the permissive society has been born. But there
is still a long way to go it seems in changing the rules as to where
unattended females are allowed, or dare, to tread.
A very old friend, Maggie, a painter from the North of Scotland
and I decided, after a sad gap of several years, that we should meet
somewhere for a weekend. York was agreed upon as a halfway
house. We stayed at a lovely bed-and-breakfast farmhouse, just
outside the city, but had to buy lunch and dinner elsewhere. On
Saturday night Maggie suggested that we went somewhere special
for dinner. We were recommended to go to a nearby hotel which
had French food and was apparently very popular. So, we booked a
table. We both dressed up in our best and I think we looked very
respectable. The hotel car park was full of Mercedes, large Rovers,
and sports cars. Despite high unemployment in the North, the old
saying about ‘where there is muck there is brass’ seemed apt in that
area, if nowhere else. We walked into the restaurant to find flowers
on every table, gleaming silver cutlery, lighted candles (of course)
and linen napkins. The head waiter came up to us with a large smile.
“Have you booked?” he asked. We told him we had. “A table for
four?” he said. No, not a table for four, we said, for two. He looked
puzzled. “For two?” he echoed our words. His smile vanished and a
distinctly disapproving look came into his face. I suspect that the
following kind of thoughts ran through his mind. (a) That he could
say that there were no tables free so we would have to go
elsewhere, or (b) that there would be a two or three hour wait until
we would be served. But since we could see this was not to be so, he
reluctantly showed us a table in the farthest corner of the room, as
out of sight as possible.
Maggie, a married woman, had not really understood when I,
newly single, told her briefly of the feeling of extreme vulnerability I
had, as one of a minority group – like being single when convention
and society mainly caters for doubles. Although we were a couple in
this restaurant, we were both women. In a world where it is the
norm for men to take women out to restaurants on a Saturday night,
we were the odd couple, as it were. But although the waiter, when
he finally materialized to take our order, did so with more than a
touch of disdain, he could not spoil our enjoyment. Eventually the
food arrived and it was delicious, we had interesting and lively
conversation (not about men) and a good bottle of wine. Having a
candlelit dinner with a woman friend is thoroughly to be
recommended, with none of the complications of sexual domination
or sexual attraction, or both. I do hope, as the sexes become more
equal, women will be able to have lunch or dinner either by
themselves or with another woman in an expensive restaurant
without the feeling that they are unwanted outcasts intruding in an
out-of-bounds no-go area. And, although we were allowed in the
restaurant where I think it was unlikely anyone dining thought we
were prostitutes, the attitude of the hotel staff had not, I thought,
changed radically since Vera Britten’s day.
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