The following extract comes from my late grandmother's, 'Let's Make a Day of it' - an unpublished, poignant account of her life as a fifteen year old in the First World War.
The account is told in the form of a conversation she has with her (future) granddaughter. But she never did have a granddaughter. Instead I - her grandson - found this war-time biography early this year in her attic, along with lots of other gems she'd written.
When reading the account please bear in mind the 'flappers' my grandmother refers to are the earliest variety, which pre-date the 1920s. I haven't found any other accounts of this youth culture apart from a brief reference in an old dictionary and a good account in Brewer's, Phrase and Fable. Go on the internet and you'll soon find tiny accounts of these teenagers as a contemporary to the full-on adult flappers circa 1920s. But as the following account clearly shows, they date back to at least 1917. And their child-like social manners are very different from the party animals of the 1920s.

My grandmother had one novel published in 1931 and later, after her death, one of her poems was covered by the pop-singer Roger Whittacker. Here's the extract then with its early rumblings of the teeny bopper -

Never heard of a flapper? No - I don't suppose you have - I haven't heard the word myself for years - and now I come to think of it, I don't suppose you've ever been one, either. What do you call yourself these days when you're no longer a child but haven't yet come of age?..."Teenager?" What a name! It might mean anything between a little boy of twelve and a married woman of twenty.
A flapper was something - something much more special...Well, I don't think it actually meant anything - it was just a word we had. Your Uncle Ted used to say it was borrowed from a term used in wild-fowl shooting, where it meant a little duck that's just learning to fly: but I think really it was because of the way we did our hair. Nowadays we all wear it in the same style from the cradle to the grave, and you never know where you are - but then, of course, everybody wore it long, and there were very definite conventions about how you should arrange it, according to your age, though you could vary the details to suit your face. As a child you wore it hanging loose, or tied up with a coloured ribbon: and when you got too big for that - you know - you did it in a long plait hanging down your back, and tied with a big, wide bow at the end - black moire for day time, and in the evening, or for very special occassions, double satin, two inches wide, to match your frock.
If it was long enough, this pigtail, as we used to call it, flapped about whenever you turned your head, and I think that was probably the origin of the word. There was great competition to see who could grow the longest and thickest - I know one girl in the Guides who could sit on hers, but that was exceptional. On the whole, you were doing very well if it reached your waist - mine nearly did, but never quite - and so long as it was long enough for the bow to lie between your shoulder blades, which was about the average, it looked alright. Anything shorter than that evoked remarks about hog-manes and flue brushes, and was a Tragedy.
You kept it like that for three or four years - till you left school, anyway, and, if you left early, for some time after: then, when you were round about eighteen or so, you did it up - pinned it close to the head in a bun or sausage curls - and after that you ceased to be a flapper and were looked upon as a grown-up young lady.

It was fun being a flapper - even in the war time - so long as you kept your feet on the ground and didn't try to fly too high. You could still enjoy many of the indulgences and privileges of childhood, but you were no longer subject to all its discipline and restrictions; and you had much of the freedom of a grown-up as well, without any of an adult's responsibilities

...Smoking? - that was rather a moot point - it depended a lot on one's parents. Mine didn't object if I took an occasional cigarette when it was offered to me, but I never bought any for myself till I was twenty-one. It was much the same with make-up, and high heels. But I wasn't thinking so much of minor details like that: the whole set-up was different - the way we looked at things, our relations with other people. For one thing, we never dreamed of aping our elders in over-sophisticated clothes and elaborate make-up, as some girls do now - we were far too cock-sure of ourselves as we were! And there was none of this sham-romantic nonsense about "dates", and "going steady", either: Until you put your hair up, at any rate, friends were just friends, irrespective of age or sex, and if one of them took you out - usually it was on the carrier of his motor-bike, and the faster and noisier it was the better - nobody, least of all yourself, would imagine he was falling in love with you or start hinting things. You could accept a present, too, without feeling under an obligation or wondering if there were any strings attached. Once you put your hair up you were expected to be more "choosy", and a girl didn't encourage a man to pay her attention unless she was really interested, but so long as you were only a flapper it was all right. And because you could only be one once, and for such a short time, everyone went out of their way to make the most of it and give you a real good time while it lasted...
Oh, yes - we flirted a bit sometimes - but it was all part of the game and nobody took it seriously. Or if one of us did "fall for someone in a big way", as you so elegantly put it, she took jolly good care not to let him know! That would have ruined everything, and scared him off for ever. And of course there was always some girl who wanted to eat her cake and have it - that type will always be with us. But the rest of us took a dim view of that sort of thing - because it spoiled things for everybody - and we had our own ways of dealing with it when we thought it was going too far. There was one girl in our road who went down Lover's Lane one night and came back without her pigtail - sheared right off. There was a fine-to-do about that, I can tell you - letters to the papers, and what-do-the-police-think-they're-doing, and all the mothers and aunties asking each other who on earth could have done it, and whatever anyone wanted to do a cruel, senseless thing like that for, and what a shock it must have been for the poor girl.
I could have told them who'd done it, and why - and as for the shock, well, I don't know so much about that - she was asking for it for a long time - but it was more like a sentance of Excommunication. You see, it took about eighteen months to grow again, and by then it was time for her to put it up anyhow - so she could never pose as a flapper any more.

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