The mistress-and-cook cartoon is typical of a vein of servant jokes that runs right through the twenties and thirties, in which the servant is usually portrayed as amusingly naïve, or, as a variation, obtuse or impertinent. The quaint turn of phrase of the working class is a favourite theme – Visitor: ‘How is Mrs Brown today?’; Maid: ‘Well, 'm, she ebbs and flows.’ Indeed, most jokes hinging on an exchange between middle-and working-class figures focus on mutual incomprehension, with the working-class character serving normally as the butt. Though there is an interesting variant in the country yokel figure, who may also discountenance his middle-class interlocutor, as with the motorist of 1925 seeking directions from an unforthcoming local – the motorist snaps in exasperation, ‘Well, you don't seem to know much.’ To which the riposte is: ‘Maybe not, but I ain't lost.’
Class is an obsession. But there is an obsessive quality to much of the humour. The same themes crop up again and again. Tramps – usually possessed of earthy or innocent wit. (Can tramps have been such a feature of the early twentieth-century landscape?) Burglars – invariably masked and wearing striped sweaters. Surprisingly, they are still around in the 1950 volumes, along with that other hardy perennial, the Silly Little Woman. Gender is as abiding a topic as class; women are uninformed, literal-minded, extravagant and foolish. Men are fanatical about sport (golf, usually), barricade themselves behind the newspaper at breakfast and are no match for flighty or dismissive girls – the disastrous proposal is a favoured subject.
Punch has ever been the telling expression of middle England. Those between-the-wars numbers are peculiarly rewarding – and perplexing – in their evocation of a vanished world and extinguished preoccupations. Fox-hunting. There is a hunting joke in every issue, it seems, often combining that theme with some form of social comment – as in the post-war sportsman of the early twenties, a parvenu who drops his ‘h’s and makes social gaffes. Big-game hunting, too, is a rich topic; environmental concern is so far distant as to be apparently inconceivable. Similarly cars and drivers (especially women drivers) – though here there is a whisper of future unease, with the car (frequently broken down) featuring as the invader of idyllic landscapes.
All this seems startlingly archaic now. By the 1950s I was on the scene, but the Punch climate of that decade is today as alien as those of the earlier ones. By the mid century there are jokes about washing-machines (clueless husbands load them with dirty crockery) and television, but the tone and style are of an unreachable world. They are as disconcerting as the clipped and urgent tones of the radio announcers and newsreel commentators of the day; did people really speak thus, and did we truly hear them without surprise? That teenager on the Golsoncott veranda is indeed someone else.
*
This book has tried to use the furnishings of a house as a mnemonic system. I have always been excited and intrigued by the silent eloquence of the physical world – past events locked into the landscape or lurking in city streets. Every house tells a story. Golsoncott's story spans much of the century; it is personal but also public. Historical change determined how life was lived there; objects can be made to bear witness. In the process, a maverick form of social comment seems to emerge – the house becomes a secret mirror of the times, arbitrary and selective, reflecting shafts of light from unexpected directions. Decoding, interpreting, I have been made to consider the view from the house when I was sixteen, and compare it with the world of today.
Fifty years on, our society is apparently less structured, more open, more tolerant; it provides opportunities. Or is it? Does it? And was that mid century climate quite as unrelenting as it now seems? Looking around – looking back – I begin to wonder. There's not so much to be complaisant about today. This country remains polarized; insolent wealth is still there, so is abysmal poverty. The standard class distinctions are holding up – economic, social, political. We still define ourselves, and others, as we shift from one category to another. But the categories have themselves been redefined, over the years. The consensual politics of the twentieth century's end are a far cry from the appositions of earlier decades. We are all sited on the middle ground now, or at least most of us are. There is still a social spectrum, but the location of a person or a group is more difficult: both can have chameleon quality, or resist assignment. Old wealth is still evident, but the inflated incomes that invite envy or distaste are those of the corporate buccaneers or city traders and the stars of sport and entertainment – the new economic plutocracy.
The brave foundation of the post-war welfare state has been steadily undermined. Education above all provokes a degree of despair – here we are with, still, a flourishing private sector patronized for good reason by many parents who might prefer to do otherwise; the alternative is frequently alarming. Until the state system is so good that middle-class parents cease to opt out of it, it is hard to see how private education will ever waste away. And education is at the heart of change: the essential right.
Considered thus, it can seem as though there have been some superficial adjustments to the social landscape – nothing more. Scratch the surface and the basic structure is still much the same. And yet… When I take the central event of my own life, significantly placed in the middle of the century, I realize that right there is a potent indicator of a much more seismic disturbance. Marriage. Quite simply, the marriage of two people who could never have met in a previous age. In 1957 I married Jack Lively; a girl from the southern gentry, a young man from the northern working class. We met in Oxford, in the clear blue air of higher education, both of us freed from the assumptions and expectations of our backgrounds. At the time, it all seemed a purely private and personal matter; only subsequently can I see what we owed to a stealthy revolution, and be grateful.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Ann and Anthony Thwaite for reading the manuscript and for making valuable comments and suggestions, and to my family for their interest and support.
This book is not a work of scholarship; I feel that to cite all of its many sources would be inappropriate. The British Library has been my mainstay. An abbreviated bibliography follows.
Bibliography
Britnieva, Mary, One Woman's Story (Arthur Baker, London, 1934)
—, A Stranger in Your Midst (Arthur Baker, London, 1936)
Cannadine, David, Class in Britain (Yale University Press, London, 1998)
Carr, Raymond, English Fox Hunting: A History (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1976)
Coats, Alice M., The Quest for Plants: A History of the Horticultural Explorers (Studio Vista, London, 1969)
Gough, Richard, The History of Myddle, ed. David Hey (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1981)
Inglis, Ruth, The Children's War: Evacuation 1939–45 (Collins, London, 1989)
Mabey, Richard, Flora Britannica (Sinclair-Stevenson, London, 1996)
Musgrave, Toby, Gardner, Chris, and Musgrave, Will, The Plant Hunters: Two Hundred Years of Adventure and Discovery Around the World (Ward Lock, London, 1998)
Reckitt, Basil N., The History of Reckitt & Sons Limited (A. Brown & Sons, London, 1951)
Stevenson, John, British Society 1914–45 (Allen Lane, Harmondsworth, 1984)
Yates, Frances A., The Art of Memory (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1966)
Penelope Lively, A House Unlocked
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