Archives: Persephone Forum

We have admired and loved so many home-front heroines in Persephone books, women who meet the challenge of war with fortitude and humour, un-conscripted women who find fulfilment in keeping the home-fires burning, digging for victory, making do and mending, and queuing, and managing unfamiliar, often extended households, in which their own children might be joined by those of others, relations or strangers, while husbands and fathers are absent, for months or years, or for ever.  To Bed with Grand Music presents a very different woman in a rather different war.

 

 

In the wonderful Little Boy Lost (PB No. 28) published in 1949, three years after To Bed with Grand Music, Marghanita Laski would create the most convincing anti-hero in Hilary Wainwright. In To Bed with Grand Music she paints an equally convincing, anti-heroine, Deborah Robertson, bad wife, bad mother, whose war work, after a brief stint in a Ministry, is selling fake antiques to gullible customers in Mayfair. The novel was poorly received by (male) critics. Was it published too soon after the war? Were people too concerned with repairing damaged marriages and families, sweeping infidelities under the carpet in an attempt to move on, by putting the clock back? Or was there something unacceptable, unforgivable even, in a promiscuous woman, an atavistic horror of the sexually wayward wife,  at a time when the very notion of Home (capital H) was sacrosanct?

In the opening scene, about to leave for the Middle East, Graham Robertson baldy tells his wife, ‘it’s no good saying I can do without a woman for three or four years.’ He expects no protest, and surprises himself with his own magnanimity when he promises, never to fall in love with anyone else, never to sleep with anybody who could possibly fill her place in any part of his life. At a time when women’s enjoyment of sex was barely discussed, would Deborah, or any wife, have dared to express her own equivalent need for a man? Laski does not state her position on the inequality, but we hear her the challenge.

From the start she invites us to question the marriage. When Graham says that he will be ‘thinking how bloody attractive you are’, Deborah immediately assumes that he is concerned that she might be unfaithful. There is an ‘ugly edge to her voice’ when she asks, ‘what about you?’  Is there a history there? The farewell is not the conventional tender wartime parting. It is almost all to do with sex, and not much with love.

Married just before the war, a week after her twenty-first birthday, when the novel opens she and Graham have a two-year old son. Timmy, we guess, was an unplanned baby:  ‘… you’re glad we had him aren’t you?’, asks Graham, whose need for reassurance suggests that Deborah might not be the most doting of mothers. This is reinforced later by her housekeeper. ‘I don’t think Mrs Robertson is what I might call the mother type,’ she tells Deborah’s mother. Mrs Chalmer’s opinion is somewhat coloured by the fact that she wants full charge of Timmy, but Deborah’s mother concurs and does not discourage her daughter from seeking work, and more, in London, although she does not spell this out, even to herself. She recognises her daughter’s limitations as a mother. Mrs Betts is a perceptive woman but not a warm one. The relationship is not good, but she knows her daughter well, aware, for example, that her youthful wish to study at the Slade had little to do with a passion for art and everything to do with a passion for climbing the social ladder.  The not unhappy widow of man who may have been more sexually demanding that she would have liked, she suspects too that her daughter may have inherited some of Mr Betts’s ‘tendencies’.

If Deborah reminds us a little of Lena Wiltshire in Saplings by Noël Streatfeild (PB No. 16), a passionate wife, but a reluctant mother, the two women differ in one very important way: ‘Lena never even pretended the children came first.’ Her husband Alex came first, and other than as attractive accessories she expected little from her children. In the Robertson household, and in her own estimation, Deborah comes first, and she demands a great deal of her son. Selfishly interrupting his games with other children so that he might rush to greet her, she basks in Timmy’s admiration, purrs when he offers her his favourite toys, is most pleased when the little boy woos her. Having made plans to leave for London in the coming new year (we guess it must be 1942) she puts no noticeable effort into etching his features on her memory, but brazenly poses for him in church at Christmas, so that he should remember ‘his mother’s lovely face in her little fur bonnet, the blue painted ceiling, the choristers’ voices, the deeply pervading sadness of Christmas in wartime.’

Rejecting the possibility of a job in Winchester, local and not uninteresting but with none of the potential excitement of London, she has had little difficulty in convincing herself that her reason for doing so is because she really wants ‘to stay at home with Timmy’.

 

 

When London beckons, Deborah uses Timmy to justify behaviour which she knows to be wrong. Following her own selfish desires on the specious grounds that her absence will be good for him, she argues that she owes it to her child ‘to make him strong enough to face all the knocks of life rather than to protect him against them.’ Having lined up all her arguments she is able to escape from the increasingly tedious round of village life, convinced that she is showing strength and courage in leaving her little son, ‘a painful conclusion, but all sacrifice is painful or it wouldn’t be worth anything. The important thing is to see things straight and then face up to the sacrifices involved.’ For all her faults, Lena Wiltshire was honest about her relationship with her children.  Like Hilary Wainwright, Deborah lies both about herself and, worse still, to herself. Later, but not much, an attractive GI has little difficulty in persuading her that she should sleep with him ‘for Timmy’s sake’.

It is not so much Deborah’s behaviour that Laski disapproves of as the bad faith. Long internal dialogues between Deborah and what she thinks of as her conscience, or even on occasion God, never fail to reach the conclusion that she wants. She is selfish and self-indulgent, with a professed belief in Providence which permits her to do exactly as wishes. ‘Opportunities made their moral demands’, whether it be the offer of a job or a flat, or the opportunity to be generously wined, dined and danced in glamourous surroundings, to be showered with expensive and hard to get luxuries. Opportunities that did not appeal could slide by unnoticed, it was immoral to disregard opportunities that did.’ Appealing opportunities abounded in the early forties.

The war was bringing about change in many areas, not least in the position of women. Brought into the workforce in large numbers, many for the first time enjoyed an income of their own, however small. Forced to be independent, they began to enjoy their new status. Marriage was no longer the rock solid bastion it had been previously. In the year before the war fewer than 10,000 petitions for divorce were filed, less that half of those by husbands. By 1945, of 25, 000 petitions more than half were filed by husbands of which over 10,000 were on the grounds of adultery (from Millions Like Us by Virginia Nicholson). In her psychology evening class at Morley College in South London, Amber Blanco White, better known to Persephone readers, as Amber Reeves, daughter of Maud and author of A Lady and Her Husband (PB No. 116),  keenly advocated sex before marriage – good for mental health – advised her students not to tell their husbands if they had a lover, and even went so far as to act out some more unorthodox positions in the interest of variety and fun.(Millions Like Us ).

There was nothing particularly unusual about Deborah’s wartime activities. What was sad about her encounters was that there was little love and less and less fun. Variety, however, was not lacking. American GIs, Frenchmen, Brazilians, Norwegians and plenty of English soldiers, and civil servants with wives safely tucked away in the home counties, no shortage of ‘opportunities’ for those eager to seize them.

 

 

London was full of single men and women who had in Elizabeth Bowen’s words ‘come loose from their moorings’ (The Heat of the Day). The war had rewritten the rules of ‘social engagement’. Laski describes them with a cool almost anthropological eye. ‘Once the fundamental fact that all the relationships within the circle were extra-marital ones, the social life they entailed was as conventionally ordinary as the social life of ordinary married couples.’ Ordinary, maybe, but with added appurtenances ‘of almost as great importance as caste masks; it was essential that a woman should have a slim gold lighter and a jewel-encrusted gold powder-compact; that she should have smuggled perfumes and lipsticks and other fards from countries that did not take the conception of war as austerely as England.’ Laski does not pull her punches.

Believing herself to be starved of love, Deborah has slipped easily into the circle, drawn in as much by the glamour and the goods as by the sex. Two of her wiser and kinder lovers – for they are not all bad, and some are considerably nicer than her – caution her about the dangers. Joe, a gentle and generous American officer, warns her of a future passing from man to man. Pierre, a handsome and sophisticated Frenchman, who reluctantly and on her insistence, gives her lessons on being a ‘good mistress’, dares to suggest that once ‘qualified’ she may find it difficult to go back to  being a good wife. Even her more sophisticated friend, Madeleine, her first guide on the slippery slope of infidelity, urges her to go home before it’s too late, ‘surely you want to go back and live with your husband when the war’s over and you’ve got a baby to keep you company while you wait for him.’ Deborah assumes that Madeleine is afraid of competition. She lies, why wouldn’t Madeleine?

 

 

We are a long way from the drab England of shortages and rationing, grubby evacuees and lonely meals on trays, a long way too from husbands and children. In To Bed with Grand Music Laski shows us a different war, where women are not bonding in sewing parties or soup kitchens or factories or even over cups of tea. A lack of reliable female friends (the pretty ones prefer men, the plain ones are boring) is part of Deborah’s problem. Madeleine is good-hearted, but her marriage is history, she has more money than Deborah, and she makes no secret to anyone, and importantly not to herself, of how she has chosen to live.  Deborah’s chats with other women take place mainly in the lady’s cloakrooms of glitzy nightclubs and focus on the lack of silk stockings and nail varnish, not the lack of eggs or oranges. Food at the Ritz, or the Savoy or the Berkeley Buttery was plentiful. The black-out and air-raids over London, which drained the energy of so many, can be turned to advantage. No gallant man would allow a woman to walk home through dark streets, and ‘Chivalry now demanded that a woman should not be left alone in a top floor flat [Deborah has, conveniently, found herself just such a flat] while the bombs flew past, so, as the alerts were more or less continuous, Deborah was seldom alone at night.’ Laski coolly, and damningly, adopts Deborah’s voice.

Deborah has had a ‘good war’. She is far from eager to pick up the pieces of her previous life; the roles of wife and mother do not appeal. Little wonder that ‘there was an air of disintegration’ in her life after VE day. There is no redemption. But Laski exacts no further retribution. One party is over, but she will find another.

High Wages opens in 1912. The daughters of urban working class families could look forward only to domestic service or factory work, in Lancashire the cotton-mills. Those of impoverished middle class families might find a position looking after other people’s children, or their elderly relations, or, failing that, they might try to find employment in the expanding retail sector, which at that time provided board and lodging – an extra that was far from generous and rarely optional. Jane Carter, the seventeen-year-old orphan child of a journalist, with already two and half years’ experience, finds herself applying for a new position in a draper’s shop, the best in the Lancashire mill town of Tidsley.

 

 

On the day she delivered the manuscript to her publisher, Whipple wrote in her diary, ‘What possessed me to write about a girl in a shop? I know nothing about it.’ She may never have stood behind a counter, but the polished counters and shelves, and the multitude of glass drawers would have been familiar to any middle-class woman of her generation, and of mine. The last draper’s shop in our local town was still open in the 1970s for pins and needles and buttons, material and braids – beautifully described in Jane Brocket’s introduction. There were a few exceedingly dreary ready-mades in the window, but that was not their ‘forte’: one felt that their heart wasn’t in it.

The Miss Starlings were of the old school, like Mr Chadwick of Chadwick’s of Tidsley, where Jane is taken on at five shillings a week, plus (meagre) commission, and all-found: a none-too-clean shared room, where ‘the floor covering was a cold glassy oilcloth of a presumptive white’ and the merest of meals supplied by the penny-pinching Mrs Chadwick. ‘Shop assistants did not expect a great deal in nineteen-hundred-and-twelve,’ Whipple observes wryly. She shows such sympathy for the young working woman, speaks so convincingly in Jane’s voice and sees so clearly through her eyes, that it is hard to take seriously her claim to ‘know nothing’. At the very least she must have been an observant shopper, and appreciative of good service, to write so convincingly on the ‘art of retail’. I was reminded of Evangeline in The Homemaker (PB No. 7).

 

 

Jane, like Evangeline, proves to be a gifted and attentive saleswoman. Her feel for the stock, her eye for fashion and patient empathy with Chadwick’s customers far exceed those of Mr Chadwick himself, self-important, smug, set in his ways and socially insecure. ‘Slightly aggrieved’ on noticing that she spoke better than he did, he is pleased to make an impression on her, and having done so ‘looked for an opportunity to make another’. Making a display of his professional skills, running a length of sateen between finger and thumb, ‘he shot a glance to the side to see if Jane was watching his methods with intelligent interest. She was.’ In two words Whipple pricks the bubble of pomposity, and awards the first round to Jane. If there is a hint of sexual attraction in Mr Chadwick’s startled response to the movement of his new assistant’s eyelashes – ‘he hoped she wasn’t going to turn out to be one of those pretty girls. They were a nuisance. Flighty’ – it is brushed away. The Chadwicks are not likeable but neither are they sinister, rather figures of fun, to be mocked more than damned, and Whipple is brilliant at sticking in the pins (most appropriately in this case). Dressed for church (they chose St James’s ‘because it was good for business’) the couple do not cut quite the figures they intend, ‘Mr Chadwick in his morning-coat, his two scallops of hair showing like the wings of a bird that had got imprisoned under his bowler hat; Mrs Chadwick in a toque like a humble relation of Mrs Greenwood’s’, Mrs Greenwood being a much fawned-upon customer.

Dorothy Whipple selects a sharper nib for Mrs Chadwick than for her husband. In less than half a page she gives us a portrait equal to some of her best: ‘… a gold watch pinned by a lover’s knot over where her bosom should have been but was not … she sat in the upstairs sitting-room, her hands crossed on her hard front, looking out on the market-place and giving now and then a loud contemplative suck of the teeth. Mrs Chadwick was rather mean. Not excessively so; but just mean enough to add interest to her days.’  So concise, but sufficient to leave no doubt as to Beryl Chadwick’s petty unpleasantness. Dorothy Whipple trusts her reader to join the dots. There is an intimacy in her writing, so that one feels at times less a reader than a friend with whom she shares amusing details, almost whispering in our ear, confident that we will appreciate them as she does.

The humour is never laboured. Nor does she hector, but leaves us to deduce her message. In her Afterword to They Knew Mr Knight (PB No. 19) Terence Handley Macmath writes that ‘her characters seek happiness and wholeness in the same sense that the Greeks spoke of “salvation”… Her novels, although not overtly religious for the most part, are about wrongs being righted, people changing, sin being redeemed.’ Happiness is not the fulfilment of dreams, but rather the accommodation of dreams to reality. It comes at a price, most often, paradoxically as a result either of catastrophic financial loss or painful personal sacrifice. Terence Handley Macmath notes the grim wit and the biblical reference in the title of They Knew Mr Knight. High Wages resonates with similar irony and New Testament undertones: high wages can be the reward for hard work, but we must not forget St Paul’s warning to the Romans: ‘the wages of sin is death’.

High Wages, They Knew Mr Knight and The Priory all in their different ways deal with money and work and all are strongly feminist novels.  Money is not of itself bad, but greed is. Money earned by hard work is good, money falsely obtained is evil, inherited wealth is debilitating. Major Marwood lacks energy and vision for the priory and the estate. Thomas Blake is caught in the slipstream of Mr Knight’s fraudulent dealings, Mr Briggs, husband of Jane’s customer, friend and later business backer, barely escapes being dragged down by his tax-cheating partner, Mr Greenwood. In all three novels working middle-class women (far from the norm in the 1920s and ’30s) stand as moral beacons in a world where men have failed. Carrie, the barmaid, makes a man of Thomas Blake’s ne’er-do-well brother, and generously helps out the rest of the family. Nurse Pye brings order to the priory; Miss Vanne, single mother and successful hairdresser, introduces the Major’s elder daughter to the world of work so that when the family is faced with poverty, she has the strength to learn dairying and cheese-making; the Major’s sister, Victoria the Artist, leaves the ease of the priory for a room above a pub and knuckles down to make a living from her dreadful paintings.

Work is redemptive, and transformative, but to attain to the ‘wholeness’ that Terence Handley Macmath writes about, requires tenacity. Sensing the ‘gratification of the business woman’ from the first, Jane is bitten, but it takes her seven years to progress from shop assistant to owning her own dress-shop, from tentatively advising on new trimmings and suggesting dress patterns, to signing the lease on her own premises and establishing her own contacts with London wholesalers, a world of men with wandering eyes and hands which she navigates with cool composure.

 

 

Help in Jane’s venture has come not from her erstwhile employer, but from one his customers, and not his most esteemed customer, Mrs Greenwood, the ‘autocrat of Tidsley’, wife of the richest and, as we will later discover, most corrupt, mill owner. Jane’s backer is Mrs Briggs, a woman who has been raised, unhappily, out of her class – as is often the case with DW’s heroines – following her husband up a shaky social ladder into a house which is too big for her, and losing her role as housewife and mother on the way, as cooking and caring are taken over by servants. Mrs Briggs will find her own salvation in Tidsley’s new shop, which will bring not just a role, and a purpose, but, eventually, and unexpectedly, a handsome dividend. ‘I feel different,’ she tells Jane, ‘I feel I don’t mind so much what people think of me not being a lady and that.’ The previously dependent, shy and retiring wife will save the household from penury and imbue her broken husband with some of her own lately acquired strength.

Dorothy Whipple is particularly good at women, pleasant and unpleasant. Mrs Briggs is a sweet and generous woman. Mrs Greenwood the local grande dame, self-appointed protector of the town’s class structure, is forceful and bullying. The description of her is unsparing, ‘her maroon coat and skirt, her violets, her complexion, somewhat empurpled by the cold’ all matched. ‘“Rich and proud,” thought Jane, “and everything about her stiff and firm. Even the violets pinned tight. She wouldn’t let even a violet nod.’” This most esteemed customer is demanding and time-consuming and casually contemptuous. Whipple damns her equally casually, ‘Weeks later, Mrs Greenwood came into the shop to pay her bill.’ The italics are mine, the ‘dog whistle’ (to use today’s slang) is the author’s. To Mrs Greenwood’s dismay she has not been able to instill any of her (albeit unattractive and often ill-directed) energy into her daughter, a pampered girl, bored and talentless, with few friends and, in stark contrast with Jane, lazy and wholly lacking in staying power.

An article appeared in a 1937 issue of the Cornhill Magazine, quoted in the Dorothy Whipple entry in the ODNB, which captured the essence of her novels: it commented that in all of them ‘her characters struggle sturdily towards individual salvation’. The writer might have added that this only applied to some of her characters, those born with some aptitude for the struggle. Sylvia Greenwood is not one of them. Her looks and her mother’s tireless endeavours will secure an eligible husband, well-connected and with prospects (an earlier unsuitable suitor – a gloriously funny young curate, one of Whipple’s brilliant cameo parts – having been seen off) but not a fulfilling marriage, nor, it would seem, much fulfillment of any sort.

Even Lily, the Chadwicks’ lowly maid, and later Jane’s ‘live-in’ servant, with a drunken husband, makes good by dint of hard work, and a bit of luck: it’s wartime, Bob has enlisted, and while he drives lorries, she does well on her ‘separation allowance’. For some, indeed, the war had a silver lining. Mr Chadwick supplies linen to the VAD hospital, and ‘does well out of mourning’ though it falls to kindly Jane ‘to go to the afflicted homes, and fit the mourning clothes on indifferent bodies’ – how brilliant is that ‘indifferent’. Mrs Greenwood is in her element as Commandant of the VAD hospital, and even manages to bully an injured Belgian out of committing suicide – not all bad. Mrs Chadwick, by scrimping on the girls’ rations, ‘kept herself and Mr Chadwick plump and comfortable all through the war. She did her bit.’ Jane, feeling that she must ‘do something’ as the war ‘dragged on and on, all the exhilarating hatred and fine fury gone out of it; nothing now but a grim struggle between worn men’, makes tea for the returning soldiers, who include Noel Yarde, Sylvia’s husband to be, ‘one of those men, far more numerous than women can believe, who, if the flat truth must be told, enjoyed the War.’ We seem to hear Dorothy Whipple speaking very much from the heart here.

 

 

Jane’s admirer, an autodidact librarian, with a love of poetry and of the sound of his own voice declaiming it, returns from the war damaged physically and altered mentally. Wilfred, who had wanted so much to share literature and knowledge with Jane,  had introduced her to H.G. Wells’ Ann Veronica (the novel of the New Woman, sexually liberated, based on his affair with Amber Reeves, author of A Lady and Her Husband PB No 116), and much else besides. By the time Jane is running her own business she not only has a grasp of French, she is familiar with the stories of Maupassant – quite an advance for a girl who left school at fourteen – which we must assume is thanks to Wilfred’s example and encouragement.

It is hard to avoid spoilers at this point. Suffice to say that although Jane’s sturdy struggle towards ‘individual salvation’ will succeed, it will be just that, individual. For a while, perhaps too long, she identifies with Ann Veronica, the New Woman. Her business career qualifies her as a New Woman; sexual freedom is an add on. But Jane is Dorothy Whipple’s creation and she must find happiness not in following her heart, because breaking up a marriage and leaving a child fatherless cannot be the road to salvation, but in becoming reconciled to a more modest and importantly moral path.