Business as Usual Read online

Dear Michael,

  How noble of you not to mind about that Cabinet Minister. I am so relieved, and even looking forward to Saturday at Aunt Bertha’s. Of course you may come and cook sausages over my gas ring another night to make up. What about Thursday?

  Even if you feel that you just can’t bear to come on Saturday, and think of some brilliant excuse at the last minute, I’ll still expect you on Thursday evening, at the flat.

  Decorations unnecessary.

  Yours ever,

  Hilary

  2A Christchurch Street

  Chelsea

  April 7th, 1932

  Michael Dear,

  It’s been such an incredible evening that I can’t bring myself to go to bed and end it. Because to-morrow, of course, you’ll be just an important official of Everyman’s and I’ll be an unimportant one. So I want to write to you while the last few hours are still real.

  I’m glad about this evening: glad that you’ve seen my flat and like it: I’m glad you like me: I’m glad and amazed and proud that you want to marry me. Only, you must look in my personal cupboard first. Not that there’s much of a skeleton in it – just one of those muddles. But you ought to have an inventory.

  I should have pulled myself together to give it three hours ago, when you first began to talk about me, on the Embankment. But I was so surprised and it was so easy just to listen that I didn’t protest. I just walked and turned, and walked and turned with you beside that parapet, and didn’t say a word. As you know. But now, listen. I was engaged until two months ago, and it wasn’t a success. I exasperated a nice, clever man into being unkind to me, and then broke off the engagement. Which was grossly unfair and feminine. I didn’t even know that I was being exasperating and obstinate – that’s what’s so frightening.

  It all happened because I insisted on spending the year before we could be married earning my living in London. I refused to give in and come home when I was told, or when things went badly here. That was after the library investigations that you organised. What a mercy you did, by the way. If I’d still been a label-writer it couldn’t have happened. At least, not happily. You might have made a marvellous King Cophetua, but I’d never be a queenly beggar­maid. I’m too Scots: always folding my hands and knowing my place.

  I don’t mean that because things went wrong last time that they’d be bound to go wrong again. I think this is different, but will you understand if I ask you to wait a while? Not for a year: I don’t think I could bear it. But leave things as they are for six months. We won’t be engaged: we’ll see each other as usual. It’ll be odd, but it’ll be good to know that you’re in the same town, the same building; to come back every morning to a chance of meeting you. And then, whatever we find at the end of the six months; whether it’s been a whim and died, or a real relationship that’s going to survive, you’ve made me very happy for one evening by telling me.

  Yours – faithfully,

  Hilary

  Private. Not to be filed.

  EVERYMAN’S STORES

  For use in inter-departmental correspondence only

  From Michael Grant

  To Hilary Fane

  October 7th, 1932

  Subject

  Your letter of April 7th

  Memo

  With reference to the proposal made six months ago; this seems now due for further consideration.

  In the event of your reaching a favourable decision, do you authorise me to obtain the necessary paraphernalia?

  M G G

  Private. Not to be filed.

  EVERYMAN’S STORES

  For use in inter-departmental correspondence only

  From Hilary Fane

  To Michael Grant

  October 7th, 1932

  Subject

  Your memo of this morning’s date.

  Memo

  I do.

  H F

  Notes on the novel

  by Kate Macdonald

  1 Unless indicated otherwise, the personal information about Helen Rees and Anne Pedler was kindly supplied by David Murdoch, Helen’s nephew.

  2 Jane Oliver, ’Ann Stafford’, The Times, 29 September 1966. 14.

  3 Advert for Collins, The Times, 27 October 1955, 13.

  4 Advert for Hodder & Stoughton, The Times, 17 July 1951, 6.

  5 ‘Jane Oliver Historical Novelist’, The Times, 18 May 1970, 12.

  6 Oliver ‘Ann Stafford’, 1966.

  7 Advert for Collins, The Observer, 12 February 1933, 6.

  8 See Newspapers.com to search the archive of the Manchester Guardian.

  9 Nicola Wilson, ‘British publishers and colonial editions’, in The Book World, Selling and Distributing British Literature 1900-1940, Nicola Wilson (ed.) (Brill, 2016), 15–30, 28.

  10 Q D Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (Chatto and Windus, 1932), 14.

  11 Wilson 2016, 28.

  12 Callisthenes, ‘A Signed Copy’, The Times, 5 December 1933, 12.

  13 ‘Business As Usual’, The Guardian, 11 April 1933, 12.

  14 FRCS: Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons

  15 Government House: Basil is from a family in the diplomatic service.

  16 hysterotomy: an incision in the uterus. It’s possible that the authors meant ‘hysterectomy’.

  17 miniatory: menacing, aggressive.

  18 GFS: Girls’ Friendly Society, a charitable organisation designed to care for girls and young women by offering moral precepts and practical help and facilities for work and leisure.

  19 flags: flagstones, a larger, squarer and better quality stone for street paving than cobbles.

  20 distemper: a short-lived undercoat paint used for a cheap decorative treatment.

  21 get off the rails: the trolley-buses ran on rails and were powered by electricity through cables above the roadway, rather like a modern tram system. If a cart wheel got stuck in the rails, there would be an inconvenient hold-up.

  22 chars, or dailies: women who worked as a daily cleaner with some light cooking in more affluent households.

  23 a Pit: a ticket for the theatre, in the area between the stalls and the stage, and one of the cheapest seats in the house.

  24 Home Chat: a weekly magazine for working women and girls, with recipes, home hints, puzzles, an advice column and serial stories.

  25 Lyons: a famous chain of tea-shops.

  26 Dining Rooms: licensed inexpensive restaurants for a working clientele, with a set menu.

  27 County Council: Mr Millett went to a state school, possibly on a County Council scholarship, rather than the fee-paying schools that Hilary and Basil would have attended.

  28 Night School: adult evening classes in subjects designed to help working men, and women, who had not been able to go to college to advance in their careers.

  29 that count: Mr Millett wears clothes emulating those of the typical Cambridge undergraduate.

  30 Trinity: Mr Salt attended Trinity College Cambridge, but dresses as a typical businessman in the City.

  31 ABC: another chain of tea-shops.

  32 mountains: How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news. Isaiah 52.7.

  33 annunciatory: the Annunciation was the Virgin being given the news that she was to bear the son of God. Mr Simpson must have looked similarly beatific.

  34 Eno’s: Eno’s Fruit Salts, a fizzy tablet to add to water, a long-standing indigestion remedy.

  35 Fiction C: circulating libraries had different levels of book offered to customers depending on their subscription. C would have been the oldest set of stock, which would have been in circulation for some time, and the books would have looked well-read.

  36 corres: correspondence.

  37 par: paragraph.

  38 Anglo-Indian way: excessively concerned about social status, and probably fiercely racist.

  39 japanned: a lacquered finish on wood or other friable surfaces.

  40 wash-stand: a stand containing a china bowl in a recess, and pos
sibly also a space for a jug of hot water. The Colonel’s wife would wash herself here, so it was an intimate space to be screened from public view.

  41 divan: a flat bed with no headboard or footboard, that could be disguised as a sofa in a room used for day as well as night.

  42 area: Georgian and Victorian London houses typically had a paved area outside the basement door or window, which lighted the basement rooms, usually the kitchens.

  43 lacrimae rerum: the tears of things, from Book I of the Aeneid.

  44 hot-bottle: hot-water bottle.

  45 Turn again Whittington: from the legend of Dick Whittington, thrice Mayor of London.

  46 White Knight: an impressive but day-dreaming character, from Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking-Glass.

  47 carbons: carbon-treated paper sheets to ensure that the writing on the page will be copied automatically onto the page below.

  48 Palmerston: the shop uses a code with a key to ensure that customers can’t work out the prices of the books. P = 1, A = 2, L = 3, and so on.

  49 Marie Stopes: author of books about contraception and sexual advice for couples, written from a medical and psychological perspective. She was a notorious name, the founder of the Marie Stopes family planning clinics and also a best-selling author.

  50 beagles and the Cam: Mr Salt evidently used to go out with the beagles, ie run alongside dogs when hunting, and rowed on the Cam while at Cambridge.

  51 leathercraft and string: this suggests that the slightly impoverished readers of Fiction C books went in for leather handicrafts at evening classes and knitted their own shopping bags, which would not have been at all fashionable.

  52 benzine: although considered a dangerous chemical now, benzene, also a fuel, is a solvent, and was used as a rapid cleaning agent to remove stains in some fabrics. It is also flammable, as Hilary found out.

  53 perilously: parquet wood flooring can be lethally slippery if polished with wax too enthusiastically.

  54 Society papers: magazines like the Graphic, Tatler, Horse and Hound, Country Life, with more photographs of Society people at play than text.

  55 Pig won’t get over the Stile: from the folk tale ‘The Old Woman and her Pig’.

  56 Deil take the hindmost: Scots saying, that the devil will take the last in the race, or, every man for himself.

  57 Upper Circle: a more expensive seat at the theatre than a Pit (see above).

  58 larn: learn, from the dialect phrase ‘that’ll larn ye’, ie ‘that’ll teach you’.

  59 pi-dog: Anglo-Indian term for pariah dog, a homeless scavenger.

  60 promiscuous: she doesn’t feel like seeing lots of people.

  61 sedentary beams: wide bottoms that don’t get much exercise. Hiking, rather than simply going for a walk, was becoming very popular in the 1930s.

  62 Christian: from Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress.

  63 Roman Holiday: an event where the spectators take pleasure in watching another’s suffering.

  64 Irish Sweep: The Irish Free State Hospitals Lottery was a fundraising lottery set up in the Republic of Ireland in 1930 to raise money for its hospitals, and sold tickets with the names of horses running in various Irish and British races. Lotteries were at that time illegal in the UK, so it was very popular among British betters. Mixing Day may have been the day when the tickets were separated and mixed into the different drums used to sell the Sweepstake tickets on the streets.

  65 teeth out: aside from dental health not being high in people with poor nutrition, it was routine in the early part of the twentieth century to have one’s teeth removed as a prospective cure for physical problems elsewhere in the body, as well as to remove them before painful abscesses could set in.

  66 tumbler: false teeth were routinely kept in a tumbler of water beside the bed, so the teeth could be taken out discreetly at night and popped back in in the morning.

  67 ex-officio: by virtue of her office.

  68 frogged: frog-kick swimming.

  69 in trouble: Miss Lamb was pregnant, and unmarried, which was a serious social and civic catastrophe: this would lose her her job, and she would have to keep the baby’s existence, or her lack of a husband, secret to get future work.

  70 flitting: the process of moving house.

  71 pantechnicon: a very large removals lorry.

  72 E Orch Soc: variously, the Everyman’s Orchestral Society, the Everyman’s Amateur Operatic Society and the Everyman’s Dramatic Company.

  73 O P corner: stands for ‘opposite prompt corner’, referring to the traditional location for the prompter in a play, seated at stage left. Thus O P is stage right.

  74 contumely: feeling humiliated.