Clothes-Pegs is the first of the light romances that Noel Streatfeild wrote under her pseudonym ‘Susan Scarlett’.  Even though she apparently despised these books, considering herself a writer of literary novels, she just couldn’t help writing well.  The characters are wonderful  -  svelte young women with gold stars in bitchiness, crabby old ladies, complicated, difficult children  -  she does these so well.

    Promoted from humble seamstress to glamorous model in a top London fashion store, Annabel is transported to a world of cocktails, luxurious cars, Elizabethan mansions  -  and back-biting jealousy.  Miss Streatfeild, who did her own stint as a mannequin, presents a convincing behind-the-scenes picture of exhaustion, boredom and enforced camaraderie, sustained by glasses of port and bromo-seltzers.  And of course there’s the love story.  Annabel comes from a happy, down-to-earth and hard-working family, brought up by the eminently wise Ethel to know right from wrong.  But in this dazzling new world will the upbringing hold? Can her romance with a Lord really be doomed?