The artwork was a construct of wire and tubes.

His wife had decorated it all up with hollyhocks and poison ivy, and it looked real festal and bowery.

By the mid-nineteenth century tartan had become a mythic material encompassing ideas of nationhood, clanship, and political allegiance seen through increasingly fashionable and spectacular forms.

And then, of course, there was the ever present danger of being denounced to the Milice; its members would invoke the Gestapo, and anything might result from such a thing – deportation, imprisonments, or even ill-treatment at the hands of these thugs.