Night-Blooming Annuals

The first buds of spring were all ready to burst into bloom last week in London's ballrooms, nightclubs and charity bazaars. In the fashionable Berkeley Hotel, the horticulturists who had nursed them to maturity were gathered in solemn session. The mothers of this year's crop of debutantes were ostensibly meeting to make arrangements for a forthcoming fashion show, but their deeper purpose was to prepare a new spring catalogue of this season's night-blooming annuals.

Unlike her sister in New York, who drinks her Martinis extra dry and has learned to be bored at the Stork long before her debut, London's deb bursts forth on the social scene relatively unaware. Her dancing has been largely confined to boarding-school socials, her standard tipple tomato juice laced with Worcestershire sauce. Her debut is genuine and to meet it she must first get on a "list."

Secure in an ancient tradition of aristocracy, London society is far less fearful of contamination than its counterpart in other great cities, so virtually every girl whose father can afford it gets on one or another of the lists that make the master catalogues. One list is made up of those presented at court. The high-born get there automatically, but even the family of a young lady of no social contacts can easily find an impoverished noblewoman to sponsor its daughter for a fee. Another list is compiled from social notes in the Times, open to anyone who can afford a small dinner for, say, ten or twelve.

Once listed officially as a deb, the new blossom has only to sit back and wait for the invitations to pour in. During a mad period of flowering that lasts for three months, her mornings are spent in beauty sleep, her afternoons and evenings at a never-ending round of teas, dinners and balls, her nights at nightclubs. A shrewd father can cut the upkeep for the season down to as low as -L-1,000, but many a deb runs up the tabs to well over -L-10,000.

Meanwhile, there is the ever-present problem of finding nutrient soil in which the deb can flourish. The steady, promising young man of 30--mother's invariable choice for a son-in-law--seldom has time for the social round, so the deb for the most part must frolic with a younger, less stable type, whose main qualifications are strong legs for dancing and a talent for witty sophistication. Since such gay blades are not always reliable, the mothers at the Berkeley were busy last week grading them according to a private code. Those who rated NST (not safe in taxis), FI (financially insecure), HD (heavy drinker) and AW (awful bore) were generally scratched.

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