SUPER PRAMS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 3 August 1938, Page 8

SUPER PRAMS

LATEST PARISIAN FASHION. All the moderately well-off French women are now using super prams. The old-fashioned type are being sold for next to nothing to women of the poorer classes, who have found a new use for them. In the street markets it is quite a common sight to see tired-looking women of all ages loading Up the old type of discarded prams with cabbages, other vegetables, and groceries, and wheeling their “shopping baskets” home, instead of being weighed down with the burden of parcels and stringkits. These . super vehicles are streamlined, have shock absorbers, pneumatic tyres, a spare wheel at the rear, sliding roof, and the front rolls down for fine weather outings and slides up to keep the rain out on wet days, which is one up on the usual rainproof sheeting—no guarantee that rain will not trickle down on to the blankets. There are also glass windows that open (curtains, too, you seel). It is possible: that armoured glass may be used for these windows in the future. This is an expensive glass, which has been invented in comparatively recent years. It does not cut or injure, because it will not break, and if it is hammered it only turns to powder. It cannot be cut with a diamond like ordinary glass and the required shapes and sizes have to be cut during the manufacturing process. These prams, designed on the satae principles as the latest motor car Chassis, are to be seen in Paris, and even the smallest towns of France. In quaint Dieppe, proud mothers wheel them over the cobbled streets, where the shock absorbers are certainly needed. Some of the models open up at the back exactly as motor cars, so that mothers may put their shopping parcels in this “luggage” receptacle. In every country, except France, the fathers seem to have a pram-complex. In fact, it is such a rare sight to see a man wheeling a pram in England that women almost feel it their duty to bow in respect when they see the one father in a thousand who does it. In France, however, especially in Paris, the fathers proudly saunter forth often unaccompanied by their wives, on Sundays and holidays, wheeling prams as proudly as though they were taking their new streamlined motor cars for a run. And they seem to enjoy the outings as much as the infants themselves.