FIRST WORLD WAR PERMIT BOOK TO ENTER RESTRICTED AREAS
Marion Carter (relation)
By John Snow
This permit book was for a relation of mine, Marion Carter (nee Reeds) who was born in 1885 and died in 1936.
As the entries in the permit show, when she applied for this permit she was living at number 42 South Road which in those days was a General Stores.
Pinned in the back of the permit Book is a newspaper cutting which contains a laymans "Tongue-in-cheek" idea of what many of the general Public thought of the Document, although of course these documents were a necessity during the upheaval of the wartime and the sensitive security surrounding the harbour at Newhaven.
The contents of the newspaper cutting have been retyped so that it is possible to read the contents, however the last couple of sentences were not available and have to be left to your imagination.
IN A PROHIBITED AREA
If you do not reside in a prohibited area, such as Dover and many others, and have no occasion to go in and out of one, you escape from the domination of the "Little Red Book." Deem yourself lucky if such be your situation, for you are escaping a tyranny that can become very oppressive.
This "Little Red Book" ("Permit Book" is the official name of it) takes charge of you like one of those genii in Eastern tales whose influence was sometimes beneficient - and sometimes not. One flourish of it and the most tightly closed official doors fly open for you. Without its magical influence they are unyielding. No amount of prayers, protestations, threats, pleas, blandishments or objurgations will get you through them. Even the wiles of Eve fail where the "Little Red Book" proves all powerful.
It is Eve herself who regards the book most unapprovingly. Between its covers one is "tabbed off" with a meticulous regard for truth, as an unsympathetic policeman sees it, that often proves embarrassing. Recorded in detail there are all the little personal secrets which woman especially regards as her own private property and objects to having declared from the housetops.
Where you were born, your nationality, whence you come and what your business is; whether you are a lord or whether you are a labourer:- and so on.
The front page contains a usually very un-flattering portrait of yourself, supplemented by a "personal description" which, being in most cases the work of an unsympathetic policeman, is yet more uncomplimentary still.
His idea of the shape of your nose, the colour of your eyes, and other details of your physiognomy may differ widely from your own conception of these things; but down they go into the book.
Should you be afflicted with a wooden leg, ?????????????????