Business as Usual Read online

  Business As Usual

  Also published by Handheld Press

  Handheld Classics

  1What Might Have Been. The Story of a Social War, by Ernest Bramah

  2The Runagates Club, by John Buchan

  3Desire, by Una L Silberrad

  4Vocations, by Gerald O’Donovan

  5Kingdoms of Elfin, by Sylvia Townsend Warner

  6Save Me The Waltz, by Zelda Fitzgerald

   7What Not. A Prophetic Comedy, by Rose Macaulay

  8Blitz Writing. Night Shift & It Was Different At The Time, by Inez Holden

  9Adrift in the Middle Kingdom, by J Slauerhoff, translated by David McKay

  10The Caravaners, by Elizabeth von Arnim

  11The Exile Waiting, by Vonda N McIntyre

  12Women’s Weird. Strange Stories by Women, 1890–1940, edited by Melissa Edmundson

  13Of Cats and Elfins. Short Tales and Fantasies, by Sylvia Townsend Warner

  Handheld MODERN

  1After the Death of Ellen Keldberg, by Eddie Thomas Petersen, translated by Toby Bainton

  2So Lucky, by Nicola Griffith

  Handheld Research

  1The Akeing Heart: Letters between Sylvia Townsend Warner, Valentine Ackland and Elizabeth Wade White, by Peter Haring Judd

  2The Conscientious Objector’s Wife: Letters between Frank and Lucy Sunderland, 1916–1919, edited by Kate Macdonald

  Business As Usual

  by Jane Oliver and Ann Stafford

  illustrated by Ann Stafford

  introduction by Kate Macdonald

  

  First published in 1933 by Collins.

  This edition published in 2020 by Handheld Press.

  72 Warminster Road, Bath BA2 6RU, United Kingdom.

  www.handheldpress.co.uk

  Copyright of the novel © the Estates of Jane Oliver and Ann Stafford 1933

  Copyright of the Introduction and Notes © Kate Macdonald 2020

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

  ISBN 978-1-912766-18-5 Print

  ISBN 978-1-912766-19-2 ePub

  ISBN 978-1-912766-20-8 MOBI

  Series design by Nadja Guggi.

  Contents

  Introduction by Kate Macdonald

  Works published

  Business As Usual

  Part I – Autumn

  Part II – Winter

  Part III – Spring

  Notes on the novel by Kate Macdonald

  Kate Macdonald is a publisher and a literary historian. She has published her research in a number of books, chapters and articles on twentieth-century publishing history and the book business. Her most recent book is Rose Macaulay, Gender and Modernity (ed. Routledge 2018).

  Introduction

  by Kate Macdonald

  Business As Usual was published at the beginning of the authors’ careers as two of the most prolific professional women writers of the mid-twentieth century.1 ‘Jane Oliver’ was the pen-name of Helen Christina Easson Rees, née Evans (1903–1970), and ‘Ann Stafford’ was Anne Isabel Stafford Pedler (1900–1966). They met while working at the Times Book Club in London. Anne ran the export department where Helen worked: ‘I was first delighted by the gaiety of her line drawings as she doodled on her blotting-pad while dictating business letters’.2 After Helen published her first novel in 1932 they began to collaborate as authors, and developed parallel writing careers, writing light contemporary comedies together under their pen-names, and romantic fiction as ‘Joan Blair’, and publishing many solo works. They reached their peak in the 1950s, when Helen was lauded by the Sunday Times as ‘one of the best living writers of historical fiction’,3 and Ann was praised by F Tennyson Jesse for her novel Bess.4 Their careers lasted until their deaths in 1966 and 1970, during which time they published at least 97 novels.

  This formidable output is testament to their quality as authors, and the professionalism that enabled them to make the best use of their skills to suit the reading needs of a receptive market. The particularly rich publishing climate of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s made it possible for them to make their living as authors, publishing novels, broadcast fiction and children’s fiction for nearly thirty years. Their work was regularly performed and read aloud on BBC broadcasts in the late 1930s, and they published short fiction (Helen’s writing career began when she had a story accepted), and undoubtedly serialised their novels during the ‘Silver Age’ of the story magazines.

  Jane Oliver

  Helen Evans and her younger sister Mary had grown up in Newcastleton in Roxburghshire, daughters of a country doctor. Helen went to school in St Andrews in Fife, and then to a finishing school in Lausanne in 1922–23. She then went to Bedford Training College while Mary went to Oxford. Their parents were unusual for the period in investing so determinedly in their daughters’ education. In the post-First World War world they may have wanted them to be equipped for a highly uncertain world, in which women were striking out in careers and social norms.

  After Bedford, Helen taught as a physical education instructor at a school in Loughborough in the late 1920s. Later, she moved to London, and she, Mary and a Canadian cousin also called Helen shared rooms together as paying guests in a house in Cadogan Square. On the dustjacket of her first solo novel, Tomorrow’s Woods (1932) Helen described herself as ‘turning her hand to half a dozen trades, she has since been gymnast, masseuse, and school teacher, a writer of penny dreadfuls, a literary secretary, and worked from nine to six in a big London bookshop.’ She had been the ‘literary secretary’ for Clemence Dane, one of the most well-known British playwrights in the 1920s and 1930s. The ‘big London bookshop’ was the Times Book Club.

  Helen gave up teaching to concentrate on becoming a writer, and her partnership with Anne Pedler followed. By 1936 they had published six novels together, and six further novels separately.

  Helen and Anne were photographed by Howard Coster in 1936, in a portrait now held by the National Portrait Gallery. Helen is seated on a cushion in front of the fireplace, while Anne leans over the arm of her chair to look at their manuscript on the floor. It’s a portrait of collaborative working, and Helen’s intent gaze is the focus, rather than the apparently blank notebook in front of them. Helen was photographed several times by Coster that year, suggesting that she was the more famous face of the writing partnership.

  She learned to fly ‘on a battered Moth’, obtaining her Royal Aero Club Aviator’s certificate in April 1937. In 1936 she wrote to a fellow pilot and writer who had ‘caught so exactly the terror and loveliness of flight’, John Llewelyn Rees (he also used the spelling Rhys). They fell in love and lived together, marrying in 1939. He, like Helen, was a pilot, and also an RAF officer. He was killed in August 1940 on active service in a training accident. After his death Helen became convinced that she remained in communication with him, and transcripts survive of their ‘automatic writing’ conversations. Spiritualism and contacts with the dead became a feature of some of her post-war fiction, particularly Morning for Mr Prothero (1950).

  As well as her steady work as an author, Helen was a Christian, a noted volunteer, local activist and campaigner against the export of New Forest ponies and for the Red Cross. She remained close to her mother and sister into the 1950s, and to her secretary Bet Lukens, to whom she left her home in her will. In 1962 she had had the house rebuilt in brick containing a time capsule, an event filmed by Southern TV. She continued to publish her books, and David Murdoc
h notes that from the 1950s she wrote children’s novels in parallel with adult fiction, using her meticulous research to write stories set in the same historical period, but for different readerships.

  Helen and Anne founded the John Llewelyn Rhys prize from Helen’s royalties in memory of her husband, as a prize for young Commonwealth authors. She and Anne administered it for some years, then handed it to the National Book League in the 1960s. Helen remained on its selection panel, only giving up her work for the prize a few weeks before her death. Half of her obituary in The Times was devoted to the prize and her husband’s last book, England is My Village, which had been posthumously awarded the Hawthornden Prize in 1942. On Helen’s literary career, The Times reported that ‘she was best known for her historical fiction, which was widely popular. Her work was thoroughly researched and nicely balanced, so that the scholarship never bore heavily on the narrative. She had a great gift for catching the vigour and variety of a period, and this was particularly marked in the novels with a background in Scottish history.’5 She had published 31 books under her own pen-name, and had co-written a further 39 with Anne.

  Ann Stafford

  Little is known about Anne Pedlar’s early life. Her obituary notes that she had an MA and a PhD, though it is not known when she was awarded these degrees, or from which university. She had been married but had left her husband around the time that she and Helen met. Her son John Pedler was born in 1928, and was sent to the USA during the war, returning in 1943. He later worked for the Foreign Office and became an author, dying in 2018. Like Helen, Anne drove ambulances in London during the Second World War, but she made her career as a novelist, publishing 25 books under the name of Ann Stafford, and a further 39 co-written with Helen. She was active in the British Red Cross from 1939, rising to the rank of Divisional Deputy President.6 After the war both Anne and Helen lived in Hampshire, variously living next door to each other and sharing a house in North Gorley, Fordingbridge. In Anne’s last illness Helen cared for her until her death.

  Business As Usual

  From the biographical outlines above it seems clear that Business As Usual was based on Helen and Anne’s working lives and personal experience. Helen’s sister Mary, an Oxford graduate like Hilary, was told many times that she needed experience to get a job, but she was never offered the experience. Like Hilary she too played hockey, and like Hilary’s predecessor had to leave her job due to appendicitis. Helen and Anne recreate with relish the working lives of single women in 1930s London, and the struggle to find work that was interesting, amenable and paid enough to live on. Everyman’s is clearly intended to be a version of Selfridges on London’s Oxford Street. Anne, in particular, would have contributed the detail of the daily routine in a busy library, and Helen gave verve to their heroine Hilary’s life outside the shop: the episode of driving in a very dubious car to Devon for hiking at Easter, and then coming back to London at dawn with the milk carts, feels typical of what we know of Helen’s adventurous character.

  Business As Usual was reprinted within a month of publication, and was praised by Mr Selfridge himself.7 Its title was a common catch-phrase in the period: ‘business as usual’ is listed nearly 2000 times for 1933 alone in the Guardian’s digital archive.8 The novel is remarkable for its blending of the particular 1930s mixture of the booming department store and the venerable institution of the lending library. The Times Book Club was one of the ‘major British circulating libraries’ of the first half of the twentieth century.9 In 1932 Q D Leavis observed that ‘the Times Book Club and Mudie’s serve the upper middle-class and Boots’ the lower middle-class, while the newsagent represents the bookshop for most people’.10

  The conflation in this period between a bookshop and a library is confusing to the modern reader, since present-day bookshops are not libraries, and modern libraries almost never sell their stock except when they need to clear their shelves of unread tomes. The important and now obsolete factor was that borrowing from a circulating library was generally not free: one subscribed to a library to gain access to its collection. Thus the social stratification of class that was enforced by personal income affected the kind of library one used, and the amount of subscription, and the quality of books, one could afford. Hilary Fane’s humane reorganisation of the Everyman’s Library desks is a neat indictment of this system. No longer will her poorer library subscribers have to queue in humiliation at the Fiction C desk, which dispensed only the oldest and shabbiest books. Instead all subscribers will be able to change their books at the desk for their surname’s initial, in an egalitarian fashion.

  The early twentieth-century library was an important book-buying customer for publishers, since libraries were used very widely. Their customers expected to be able to borrow the most recent novels, and so libraries needed to buy large numbers of multiple copies of new and standard titles, and to replace them at regular intervals as the books deteriorated in condition. Libraries could also order books to sell to their customers.

  On the other side of the rather transparent line that divided the twentieth-century bookshop from the library, both small and large bookshops developed their own brand of lending or circulating libraries. Many 1930s smaller bookshops carried lending libraries in a back room, as they had done since the Victorian period. Then, the increasing levels of adult literacy had encouraged corner shops and tobacconists to invest in cheap editions that would give a steady return of a halfpenny or a twopenny fee each time a book was borrowed. Gordon Comstock’s contempt for the cheap library stock in his bookshop in George Orwell’s Keep The Aspidistra Flying (1936) conveys a particularly sour view of what reading should and could mean to people with little money and (in his view) no taste.

  This was one end of the continuum of public access to reading material. At the other end were the cosmopolitan institutions represented by the central London branches of the Times Book Club and its competitors: Mudie’s Select Circulating Library, the Harrods Library, the library of W H Smith or even Boot’s Lending Library. These were highly respectable and often venerable institutions: Mudie’s was centuries older than the Times Book Club, and both would have shared the Times Book Club clientele, which were: ‘Clubs, Libraries and individual customers who place standing orders with us for regular supplies of the latest books […] many of our clients find it convenient to purchase their books through us because they are stationed in remote places where they cannot obtain local supplies’.11

  But Hilary Fane is not working in the Times Book Club. She finds work in Everyman’s Stores, a well-known and highly reputable department store on London’s Oxford Street. It has a main entrance, with ‘large, buttoned men’ who guard the door (21), and it has lifts, a staff canteen, a nurse, a Book Floor with a Book Department and a Library, Millinery, Haberdashery, a packing department off-site, an Inexpensive Gown Department, a Baby Linen Department and its own delivery vans and catalogues. Most importantly, it has its own big clock on the main street entrance, which clinches Everyman’s identification as Selfridges. Selfridges liked the identification enough to include Business As Usual in its selection of Signed Copies available from its Book Department during Christmas 1933.12

  Selfridges ought to have liked Business As Usual very much, since the novel exudes loyalty to the firm, and a sense of family. Everyman’s is a British institution, and its component parts offer excellent commercial services to the public. Its standards and regulations are as good as the law of the country. Its community of workers can be moved around and deployed as needed, like an army or a well-trained domestic staff. Instead of a Family to obey  – this is not a Great House, but a business – there is the Board of Directors, among whom was once Hilary’s Uncle Tom (this casually mentioned fact should alert the reader to the Cinderella theme in the plot). To serve at Everyman’s carries distinction, since its standards are so high, and its attitude to its customers is impressively respectful. One wants to shop there, which is what a successful advertising campaign should achieve. The S
elfridges Book Department of its day would have been pleased to be stocking a book that resonated so strongly with its own values.

  The Everyman’s staff members do their best to offer good customer service, but as in all good novels of organisation and shop-floor politics, there are nuances. There is efficiency and competence, and the results can be impressive: Hilary recognises that Miss Lamb is a professional typist, with skills beyond anything she could hope to achieve herself. There is also sloppiness, inadequacy, pig-headedness and bumbling uselessness, but the novel’s generosity usually finds reasons for these flaws, inviting the reader to understand and forgive, and perhaps treat shop assistants more generously in future. The authors skilfully avoid recreating the institutional atmosphere of a boarding school, despite the plaintive efforts of Sister Smith, because the young women who swarm in and out of Everyman’s staff door have homes to go to, pennies to save for the gas fire, stockings to wash and friends to see. The male staff are also given rounded portraits, particularly the friendship of Mr Salt and Mr Millett. Hilary dissects their relative social positions effortlessly, so natural is it for her to place people, and to do it according to school and university. She is generous about Mr Millett’s aspirational hopes, because he will clearly go far, but she can never not see his origins as a grocer’s errand boy.

  Standing head and shoulders above all the men of Everyman’s is Michael Grant, head of Everyman’s publicity and a shining epitome of masculine excellence against whom none of Hilary’s male colleagues can ever compete. He is variously described by Hilary as a magnate (42), god-like (72) and a Minor Prophet (74), careful deprecations when writing to her family that do not mask her feelings. We see that he is calm, measured, with a perfectly balanced view of how to deal with all transgressions. He is sensible, has a sense of humour, is judicious, knows when to leave well alone, and knows when he has found a colleague of good sense and efficiency. He is perfectly cast as the desirable parti in what is effectively a workplace romance (Helen and Anne would write Mills & Boon romances successfully for nearly thirty years). But there is far more to Business As Usual than romance, largely due to how the story is told.