Business as Usual Read online

  The Guardian review from 1933 spotted that the novel’s strength is its social realistic accuracy: ‘There is a type of mind which will always get more fun from prying into the raw materials of history – the documents and the letters – than it will from reading the same materials when the historian has exercised his art upon them.’13 This is an epistolary novel, a mode handled here with variety and a very light touch. The letters are actively enhanced rather than merely illustrated by Ann Stafford’s line drawings, and by the original layout (reproduced in this edition) that simulates telegrams, in-house memoranda and private letters. The single illustration of a certificate of posting a registered packet does all the work of a letter, with satisfying economy. These communications speak through their formats as much as they do in the meaning of their content, and there is much enjoyment in imagining the receipt of these letters, memoranda and telegrams, as well as in how they were first written and sent. Imagining oneself in the minds of the characters as they choose what and how to write to whom, and in what mode, enhances the novel’s liveliness.

  The exposition is enjoyable as well as informative, and Hilary Fane leaps off the page from the beginning with her enthusiasm and her self-assurance. She is certainly not perfect, since she can’t add up, or type efficiently and she is unable to master NEAT PRINTING. We enjoy the process of discovering how much nicer she is to Basil than he is to her: ‘I don’t think one enjoys “I told you so” however beautifully it’s put’ (21). She tells her parents things in slightly different ways than she tells them to Basil, and soon she does not tell him things at all. She offers and gives, and he does not reciprocate. Thankfully her pride will not let matters go on into abjectness. She is a fighter, a dogged and determined young woman who knows her own market value as an employee, and as a fiancée, though she struggles to avoid being demoralised.

  Once Hilary earns enough she chooses to eat and live alone, rather than in the depressing Minerva Hotel, and she sees only family friends or people she knows from home or Oxford. As soon as she can afford a flat rather than a basement room she decorates it herself, and her fairy godmother-aunt furnishes it fortuitously so that the char can be reassured that Hilary is respectable and middle-class. (That one of the first things she does on achieving this level of professional independence is to engage a cleaning lady is also a class indicator.) She does not go to the pub, or the cinema, and she goes to the theatre on her own rather than joining loud parties in a music-hall. Her class is revealed through her style of living, and her tastes clarify what the reader expects of a middle-class heroine of quite good family. Hiking in Devon at Easter with a woman friend could not be more 1930s – Harriet Vane did it on her own in Dorothy L Sayers’ Have His Carcase (1932) – yet the authors are careful to separate Hilary and Mary wandering happily on the moors in their sandshoes from the broad-beamed urban hikers who must follow maps. Driving, even in a dilapidated car, was also the correct mode of travel for Oxford graduates. Cycling was cheaper, but just a little proletarian, as Margery Allingham’s depiction of Benny Konrad in her 1937 novel Dancers in Mourning showed.

  Even when Hilary is feeling happiest with her lot she is alert to the unhappinesses of others. One of the striking aspects of this novel is the care taken to delineate the lives of single working women. Their habitats are not grim, but they’re depressing. The first thing we learn about the Minerva Hotel, Hilary’s first London home, is its list of rules, and the probability that its clients are likely to leave without a day’s notice. Hilary’s search for work is not desperate, because she does eventually find herself a clerk’s post, but her struggles in learning how to negotiate with Employment Bureaux foreshadow Miss Pettigrew’s miseries in Winifred Watson’s Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (1938).

  Hilary’s first impressions of Everyman’s are largely about the women: the officious Sister Smith, the herd of women typists, the ineffectual Miss Hopper, the bristling Miss Sparling. She notices the old women searching through dustbins in the lane outside, and the chars coming home at nine in the morning after making other people’s breakfasts. Miss Dowland counts her time working at Everyman’s by the Mondays, and lives with, and supports, her unemployed woman friend. Miss Lamb, in her mid-twenties, is hoping to marry her Boy, but Miss Watts ‘doesn’t seem to have a Boy, or if she has she’s more reticent about it. Perhaps at thirty-five (or thirty) financial security is the only thing that matters’ (53). When Business As Usual was published Anne was thirty-three and Helen was thirty.

  Hilary knows that she is fortunate – ‘I can always run away’ (67) – since she has a fiancé and parents to go, but it’s important to her to prove to herself that she can support herself for a year in London. In the context of the 1930s economy, she is taking quite a risk, and perhaps this is why Helen and Anne wanted to tackle this subject. Business As Usual reveals much about the desperation of single women looking for work (or being happy to stay on the dole), and it is important for the success of the novel that perseverance, a sense of humour and realism about what she can accept in a job, carry Hilary through. She is lucky to find the opening at Everyman’s, and she is lucky in having a temperament that allows her to work hard at tedious and inimical tasks. She also knows that this job is probably her only chance, and she is not going to abandon it. She is very aware of the struggles of less fortunately safety-netted women. When Hilary finds her basement room, formerly a kitchen, she encounters struggling genteel Anglo-Indian poverty for the first time. The cleaning woman calmly tells her off for spilling milk on the grate that any of the other girls in the house would have been glad to have had. When Hilary encounters a woman in a dire situation, she panics because she doesn’t know what to do, but her first instinct is to help, and she can do this because she knows someone in greater authority with the right resources. Life is not easy for single working women, but those who have allies will thrive.

  Hilary’s allies are fairy godmothers emerging when her need is greatest, whether she realises it or not. Aunt Bertha’s joyful discovery of Hilary behind the Library desk causes a day-long sensation for all her colleagues, some lasting bitterness from her enemies, and herself some excruciating embarrassment. But its purpose in the plot is to place her publicly in her proper social position. As the niece of one of Everyman’s most valued customers she now becomes closely connected with her colleagues’ need to keep the customers happy, and she must behave correctly to colleagues and customers alike. As the niece of Lady Barnley Hilary is now recognised as having the entrée to Michael Grant’s social circle. More important than the effect her fifty-minute public tea-break had on her colleagues is how she handles the aftermath: she apologises to Michael formally but privately, naturally using the correct register for their class level, establishing the beginning of their courtship by correspondence. Hilary’s fairy godmother has waved her wand.

  Once Hilary is released from the daily niggles of servitude by being given a junior management post, she begins to fall in love with retail. The Mail Order Department is a place of wonder and complicated staffing. She survives the Christmas period, when she has to ‘take the pulse of at least a dozen different departments daily … settle disputes, administer sal volatile and good advice’ (180). She marvels at the idiocy of customers, and the brilliance of the Everyman’s filing system. She reorganises the library. She is heart and soul for Everyman’s continuing success, to ensure that business does carry on with its usual assurance of the best for its customers, since ‘Our business is your pleasure’.

  Notes

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

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

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

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

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

  6Oliver ‘Ann Staf
ford’, 1966.

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

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

  9Nicola 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.

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

  11Wilson 2016, 28.

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

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

  Works published

  Jane Oliver (Helen Rees née Evans)

  Those titles published by Macmillan & Co, Friday Press, Chatto, Oliver & Boyd, and Oliver & Boyd are likely to be aimed at the children’s market.

  Tomorrow’s Woods (Collins, 1932)

  Evening of a Martinet (Collins, 1934)

  Barrel Organ Tune (Collins, 1935)

  The Ancient Roads of England (Cassell & Co, 1936)

  Mine is the Kingdom (Collins, 1937)

  Not Peace but a Sword (Collins, 1939)

  Queen of Tears: The Life of Henrietta Maria (Collins, 1940)

  The Hour of the Angel (Collins, 1942)

  In No Strange Land (Collins, 1944)

  Isle of Glory (Collins, 1947)

  What’s History To Us (The Carnegie Dunfermline Trust, 1949)

  Sing, Morning Star (Collins, 1949)

  Morning for Mr Prothero (Hammond & Co, 1950)

  The Lion is Come (Collins, 1951)

  Crown for a Prisoner (Collins, 1953)

  Young Man with a Sword (Macmillan & Co, 1955)

  Sunset at Noon (Collins, 1955)

  The Eaglet and the Angry Dove (Macmillan, 1957)

  The Lion and the Rose (Collins, 1958)

  Bonfire in the Wind (Macmillan, 1958)

  Queen Most Fair (Macmillan & Co, 1959)

  Flame of Fire (Collins, 1961)

  The Young Robert Bruce (Max Parrish, 1962)

  Faraway Princess (Macmillan, 1962)

  Costume through the Centuries (Oliver & Boyd, 1963)

  The Splendid Journey (Friday Press, 1963)

  Watch for the Morning (Macmillan, 1964)

  Alexander the Glorious (Collins, 1965)

  Candleshine No More (Collins, 1967)

  Charlie is my Darling (Chatto, Boyd & Oliver, 1969)

  The Blue Heaven Bends Over All (Collins, 1971)

  Ann Stafford (Anne Pedler)

  Silver Street (Collins, 1935)

  The Game and the Candle (Collins, 1936)

  Pelican without Piety (Collins, 1937)

  Five Proud Riders (Hamish Hamilton, 1937)

  Pony for Sale (Hamish Hamilton, 1939)

  It Couldn’t Happen To Us (Collins, 1939)

  Cuckoo Green (Collins, 1941)

  Army Without Banners (Collins, 1942)

  I Want To Be Happy (Collins, 1944)

  Near Paradise (Collins, 1946)

  Paradise Gate (Collins, 1948)

  Light me a Candle (Hodder & Stoughton, 1949)

  Bess (Hodder & Stoughton, 1951)

  The Great Mrs Pennington (Hodder & Stoughton, 1952)

  The Time It Takes (Hodder & Stoughton, 1954)

  The Seventh Veil (Hodder & Stoughton, 1954)

  Blossoming Rod (Hodder & Stoughton, 1955)

  Seven Days Grace (Hodder & Stoughton, 1957)

  The Custody of Anne (Hodder & Stoughton, 1959)

  Saigon Journey (Campion Press, 1960)

  A Match to Fire the Thames (Hodder & Stoughton, 1961)

  It Began in Bangkok (Hodder & Stoughton, 1961)

  The Age of Consent (Hodder & Stoughton, 1964)

  The Young Bernadette (Max Parrish, 1965)

  Bernadette and Lourdes (Hodder & Stoughton, 1967)

  Jane Oliver and Ann Stafford

  Business As Usual (Collins, 1933)

  Cook Wanted (Collins, 1934)

  Cuckoo in June (Collins, 1935)

  Reluctant Adonis (Collins, 1938)

  Joan Blair (Helen Rees née Evans and Anne Pedler)

  Love on Wheels (Wright & Brown, 1935)

  Green Eyes for Jealousy (Wright & Brown, 1936)

  Two Against the World (Wright & Brown, 1936)

  Sister of Nelson Ward (Mills & Boon, 1937)

  Back of the Moon (Mills & Boon, 1938)

  Love and Sister Lorna (Mills & Boon, 1939)

  Love is Born Free (Mills & Boon, 1939)

  Love is for Ever (Mills & Boon, 1940)

  The Girl in the Golden Gown (Mills & Boon, 1940)

  For Love Forgotten (Mills & Boon, 1941)

  The Glitter and the Gold (Mills & Boon, 1941)

  Let April Linger (Mills & Boon, 1942)

  Love Leads to the Stars (Mills & Boon, 1942)

  The Pillar of the House (Mills & Boon, 1944)

  Look Again, Lovers! (Mills & Boon, 1945)

  The Shadow Beside Her (Popular Fiction, 1946)

  Dreams Can Come True (Mills & Boon, 1946)

  Dare I Believe You? (Mills & Boon, 1948)

  Tomorrow My Darling! (Mills & Boon, 1949)

  Home for a Stranger (Mills & Boon, 1951)

  So True to Love (Mills & Boon, 1952)

  Course of True Love (Mills & Boon, 1954)

  Homecoming Heart (Mills & Boon, 1954)

  April Encounter (Mills & Boon, 1955)

  Never A Stranger (Mills & Boon, 1956)

  Beckon Me Back (Mills & Boon, 1956)

  The Dominie’s Lodging (Mills & Boon, 1957)

  Sensible Marriage (Mills & Boon, 1957)

  The Gay Adventure (Mills & Boon, 1958)

  Lonely No Longer (Mills & Boon, 1959)

  Leap Before you Look (Mills & Boon, 1960)

  Rainbow in December (Mills & Boon, 1960)

  But Goes Deeper (Mills & Boon, 1961)

  Dare You Remember (Mills & Boon, 1962)

  The Way to the Wedding (Mills & Boon, 1963)

  Nurse Harriet Comes Home (Mills & Boon, 1964)

  Note on the text

  The text for this edition was created by non-destructively scanning the 1965 Library Association edition, and recreating the original layout as far as could be managed, given the slightly different page dimensions and font sizes. All the original illustrations were scanned and reinstated, and typographical errors were silently corrected. Most of the extraneous full stops were removed, and some compound nouns like ‘any one’ made into one word.

  Business As Usual

  TO

  THE PEOPLE WHO

  WORK

  FROM NINE TILL SIX

  So far as we are aware, no store called EVERYMAN’s exists, in Oxford Street or elsewhere. But there are many like it.

  The staff of the Book Floor live and move in our imagination only. But the originals are everywhere: they work from nine till six and have their being in the hours which remain.

  J O

  A S

  Part I – Autumn

  

  From the Court Column of the Daily Post, 30th July, 1931.

  ‘Mr Rainford and Miss Fane.

  ‘The engagement is announced between Basil Rainford, FRCS14, eldest son of Colonel and Mrs Rainford, of Government House15, Rawalpindi, India, and Hilary, only daughter of Professor James Fane, MA, LLD, and Mrs Fane, University Close, Edinburgh.’

  ST CHRISTOPHER’S HOSPITAL

  August 31st

  Telephone messages

  For Mr Rainford

  Taken by Porter

  Miss Fane wishing to say that she has decided in favour of flying scotsman leaving waverley stn ten am to-morrow can Mr Rainford come to station if not she will be in all evening packing furiously.

  H Munroe (Porter – W Door)

  To Porter

  Ring up Miss Fane (Univ 309) to say Mr Rainford at present in theatre, regrets he has a hysterotomy16 at eight o’clock to-night. Will do what he can to be at station to-morro
w.

  B R

  Mrs Fane to Lady Barnley

  University Close

  Edinburgh

  August 31st

  My Dear Bertha,

  How good of you to wire congratulations as soon as you heard! And of course I understand how my letter has only just reached you at Pau. It’s always the same on holiday – one’s correspondence so persistently follows one about.

  But it is nice, isn’t it? Have you met Basil? He’s a remarkable young man, with a big career in front of him, James says. James has an immense respect for his brains – I don’t feel that I really know him yet.

  They’re not to be married for a year. I don’t approve of long engagements, but in this case Basil’s work makes one necessary, and Hilary is determined not to spend the time at home doing nothing. Of course we’d love to have her – but you know how things are just now. I never realised before how many of James’s offices were honorary! The child says that she won’t have us scraping to give her an allowance. It’s most unfortunate that the Library here couldn’t keep her on. But one knows that they’re hard hit too. Her present idea is to go to London with money for a month, and look for a temporary job there. I’ve made no objections – I’m sure the change will do her good – but of course I’m privately hoping that we shall have her back again by Christmas. She’s going to the Minerva Hotel, which you always recommend. Mary Finnegan and the Bardsleys used to stay there, you remember. It’s home like, as I told her, and quiet. Mercifully we managed to persuade her against unknown, cheap lodgings.

  James sends his love, and would have added a note, but he is quite overwhelmed by his proofs of the last book on pre-Hellenic Greece at the moment. The study hasn’t been touched by brush or duster for six weeks. You may just be thankful that Tom is a business man and safely out of the house in the mornings!

  With best wishes to you both,

  Your affectionate sister-in-law,

  Margaret Fane

  Telegram