Caroline had the distinction of having had her photograph featured in Rural Living, a fact she carefully concealed from her flatmates. Not that this was difficult: Dee’s reading was more or less confined to the vegetarian and alternative therapies press - Anti-oxidant News, for example, or The Healthy Table; Jenny read political biographies, and little else; and Jo, as far as anybody could ascertain, read nothing at all. So there was little chance that any of them would have spotted her in the magazine, immediately after the property advertisements and just before the editorial on rural policy.
The publication of full-page photographs of attractive young women of a certain class was one of the great traditions of British journalism, better established than the rival - and vulgar - tradition of plastering naked women across page three of the Sun. The Rural Living girls could not have been more different from their less-clad counterparts in the Sun, separated by social and cultural chasms so wide as to suggest that each group belonged to a fundamentally different species.
Rural Living girls were photographed in a rural setting, although from time to time one might be featured in a cloister or some other suitable architectural spot. Generally they wore clothes that were not entirely dissimilar to their mothers’. Indeed, in the case of those girls of very ancient breeding, where long bloodlines had not been synonymous with commercial success and where genteel penury was the order of the day, the clothes they wore were in fact their mothers’, having been passed on with relief when it was discovered that fashions had come full circle and the outfits were once again à la mode.