The lengths we went to for our shorts . . .

BACK in the late Thirties, the Women’s Amateur Athletic Association (WAAA) issued a rulebook. One rule was that shorts of competitors should be 6 in above the knees. I remember the older club members saying it was antediluvian, and at 13, I had to look up the word in the dictionary. However, we never complied. I wonder what the then WAAA would say about the competitors’ shorts of today? The next brush with skirt lengths was in the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS). If I remember correctly, the ordered length was 12 in from the ground, and every so often, officers and NCOs came around the barrack rooms with a ruler. We would be ordered to stand on our beds, and they would proceed as per orders. However, before they arrived, most of us would put on our tunics, and wear our skirts to the ordered length. After they had left, most of us would hoist up our skirts back to the modern look. We were never reprimanded for it. The powers that be must have known most of us broke the rules. Irene McLeish, St Osyth, Essex.

UP: In 1964, I transferred from a northern police force to a police force on the South Coast. In the first instance I went to that force’s HQ to be issued with all my new force’s equipment and was accommodated there overnight. The following day I travelled by train to my new police station. As I got closer to the police station, I saw three men approaching me — one I recognised immediately, as he did me. We were both flabbergasted. We had served together on the same RAF Station in Germany, in 1955/56, and had been billeted in the same barrack block. Now we were serving together again. Albert Edward Short,

Blackpool, Lancs.