Living in Sin

‘When the Bough Breaks’ (1947) stars Patricia Roc and Bill Owen. A strange combination at a cursory glance – especially as they end up married – but it works!  I thought that this was the best new-to-me film that I had seen in a long time. I don’t know if this is because it just caught me in the right mood, or if it is a half-forgotten treasure. It is an all-out weepy and I felt much better for getting into the spirit of the thing.

The storyline can be roughly sketched out as follows. Patricia’s character (Lily) has a baby and immediately discovers that her husband is a bigamist. She tries to bring her baby up alone but she struggles – as you would in those days. A posh lady at the nursery takes a shine to her son and at a particularly low point, Lily allows her to informally adopt him. Fast forward a few years and Lily has a good job in a department store. She goes on holiday to Butlin’s and meets the adoring and persistent Bill (Bill Owen). I was gratified to see that they met in the typical 1940s matchmaking dance, also used to good advantage in ‘Millions Like Us’. All the women form a circle, all the men form a circle facing them, and they do a big opposite directions ring-a-ring-a-roses until the music stops (‘Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush’). A quaint way of meeting new people that I regret the loss of. Also gratifying is the presence of Leslie Dwyer at the holiday camp – he went on to become the grumpy Punch and Judy man in ‘Hi-di-Hi’.

Lily says that she can’t marry Bill but won’t tell him why (Oh the melodrama! I lapped this up!). Eventually, he prises her past out of her, and being a thoroughly good egg he still wants to marry her and at last she becomes chatelaine of his corner shop in Streatham. Settled – but with no babies forthcoming from Bill – she seeks out her son, now eight years old. She gets him back – but it is no good, she and her son are strangers. She hands him back to his adoptive parents.

Perhaps one of the reasons why I identified so much with this film is because I identified with Lily’s struggles with her new born baby. Being alone in the world and refusing to receive any support from her bigamist husband meant that she had to go to work. After a period of standing at a perfume counter all day and pacing up and down with a crying baby all night, she finally collapses. This is rather melodramatic to our eyes perhaps – but to be a working mother was much more unusual and therefore open to interpretation in the late 1940s. Women were expected to give up jobs to returning servicemen and dedicate their existences to delivering the baby boom. Yet even in wartime, mothers of young children were not conscripted into jobs.

I found myself going back to work too soon after the birth of my first child. Financial need dictated this. I had a traumatic caesarean in October and was back at work after Christmas, my daughter going to a day nursery. She was a difficult baby – I called her Lucifer because she screamed all night and slept all day and it seemed that nothing would persuade her to review her hours of business. I have a vivid memory of sitting at the top of the stairs weeping in utter misery because she’d cried all night and I had to be at work in three hours. Yet the nursery staff thought she was a delight – just like in the film. I fantasised about running away…and I sometimes worry that if I did not have support from others then I might have done something regrettable.

What is identified as being suitable melodrama material here is now normal everyday life for most of us. My story is not unusual, there are thousands of others out there with similar experiences. But I wonder, do we choose to live like this or has it been forced upon us? Mothers of babies are now expected to work, both by society and the government.  The cost of living is such that one wage per household is not enough – recent statistics showed that a large proportion of households claiming Housing Benefit do have a member in employment. To have to live on one wage leads to reliance on expensive credit and potentially damages the life chances of the children. Some mothers enjoy working though and are glad to keep an identity other than ‘Mummy’. Some hate and it and resent how it exhausts them and means that they cannot be there when their babies are learning to walk and talk.  Personally I felt a mixture of both. And as I said above, not even Winston Churchill expected young mothers to go to work in Britain’s darkest hour. What a conundrum this is.

But at least we are not in fear of being morally judged when we have been left in the lurch by the fathers of our babies (not to say that people don’t judge – but we are more able to ignore it). For this reason alone, perhaps we have made some progress. It just doesn’t feel like it at times.

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Joyce to the World

My new book, ‘Joyce to the World’ – a collection of short stories inspired by the work of Joyce Grenfell, is now available on Amazon. Here’s the introduction and a taste of the stories:

Cover artwork by Howard Taylor - @aitchteee on Twitter - commissions taken!

Joyce Grenfell died in 1979, just before she was due to become Dame Joyce Grenfell. But she is by no means forgotten, indeed she is thought of fondly by many of us who are too young to have been aware of her during her lifetime. It is interesting to think about the reasons for this, when many of her contemporaries are becoming more obscure as time passes.

The two roles that she is most fondly remembered for are Policewoman Ruby Gates in the St Trinian’s films; and the harassed nursery school teacher as portrayed in her monologues.  Mention Joyce’s name to a lot of people and they will smile and reply “George, don’t do that!” These characters have similarities – at first glance they are failures. Ruby fails to secure marriage with her long-term fiancé Sammy and she is hopeless at controlling the school girls while masquerading as a games mistress. The nursery school teacher loves children but it is not returned in the fashion that she probably envisaged. But, we British love an underdog, especially one that perseveres to the point of insanity. Of course it helps when they have a hilarious turn of phrase too. We adore Joyce as a character that has been lost to progress, to dumbing down and mass boorishness. She represents an England that we feel we have left behind.

But Joyce herself was half American and she was no underdog. The world that she represents to many of us did not exist in the pure form that we sometimes imagine either.

In my blog, The History Usherette, I look at nostalgic films and try to pick out pieces of real history. This history is often not as rose-tinted as we would like it to be. I have applied this thought to this collection of short stories. Each is inspired by a piece of Joyce’s work, they run in chronological order from the 1930s to the 1970s. I hope – and I think that Joyce might approve of this – that this might encourage the reader to appreciate some the progress that we have made in more recent decades. It is fun to look back and think that maybe things were better. But they weren’t. Not always.

Natures Gifts:

The original speaker of ‘Useful and Acceptable Gifts’, first performed by Joyce in revue in the 1930s, is horrified to see herself being parodied on stage.

Many women remained single into middle and old age at this point in time due to the mass slaughter of young men in World War One.  Yet to be married and a mother was still looked upon as a woman’s only natural calling. Those that tried to make themselves useful in other ways were sometimes turned into figures of fun.

The Demi-Angel:

Upper class teenager Julia volunteers to help care for wounded soldiers in 1943, going against her mother’s wishes. She is inspired after watching Joyce in the film ‘The Demi Paradise’.

A rigid class system and narrow constraints for women was to some extent broken down by World War Two. This is a look at how it took death and injury on a mass scale to liberate those trapped at home as well as those in the occupied territories.

Dear Miss Grenfell:

Old soldier Robert writes to Joyce to thank her for cheering him up while she was touring with ENSA.

Like so many household names, it was this wartime work that really helped to shape Joyce into the performer we so loved. It took war to allow talent to shine through, and to introduce people to different forms of culture.

Red Letter Day:

Old bachelor Jim is haunted by Joyce’s song ‘I’m Going to See You Today.’

These 1940s lyrics paint a picture of a nation being reunited again with loved ones. It might refer to short leaves from the fighting, or to the post war homecoming. But the war took a huge toll on British relationships. Divorce rates were hitherto unheard of, and this is only the official picture. Some promised marriages didn’t happen; while some unhappy marriages limped on to save face.

Oh Ruby!:

Billy’s mother discusses his decision to join the police force.

We all love St Trinian’s, although I think it does colour our perception of all-girl schools. Do we let what we see on screen influence our lives too much? Are we losing the capability to make decisions for ourselves?

Forgetting:

New husband Bob struggles to reconcile his views of marriage with a society where women are newly liberated. He tries to take back control, implementing a hare-brained scheme inspired by Joyce’s ‘forgetful woman in church’ monologue.

The laws are in place, but male attitudes are too often trailing behind. Even now, I wonder if we’ll ever get true equality.

Some Ladies Have to Dance Together:

A woman reflects on how she first hated, then loved Joyce’s song ‘Stately as a Galleon.’

Another look at how girls are at the mercy of men’s expectations, often rooted in their own base desires.

Retirement Time:

Joyce’s nursery teacher dedicated her life to her job (although she often thought about a change of career, she could never quite break away). But when she reaches a certain age she is forced to retire with no other life to fill her days.

Extract from ‘Red Letter Day’:

He heard the song performed again about a year later. He had listened to Bob Turner whistle it continually as he pinned photographs of his trio of girlfriends onto the wall above his bunk. And then it had played on the radio while he drunk his first beer on English soil. So, from boarding the train to London on that day he remembered too well, the song had been bumping around in his brain. The rhythm altered itself to fit the dominant noise of the moment, whether it was the sound of the train wheels, or the creaking of the carriage body as it pulled away from a platform. He caught a tube train from Kings Cross to Waterloo. He thought he could hear the tune in the wind as it rushed through the tunnels. She would be waiting for him at Waterloo, under the clock, of course. He had told her every time that they had met that this would be the place where it would all begin for them.

“We’ll put our name down for a prefab, then get the marriage licence. When we’ve had our cup of tea and rock cake in the buffet. First thing’s first.”

This refreshment had become their ritual – at the beginning and end of each wartime liaison; a talisman. If they didn’t have it, then perhaps one of them wouldn’t return for next time. It was silly, they knew. But once the suggestion had been made it was difficult to let the idea go. He had smiled about it as he climbed the stairs up from the tube station onto the main concourse at Waterloo. This would be the last time. Now he was home, it would be all house hunting and picnics by the Serpentine.

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Something Fishy

‘Britannia of Billingsgate’ (1933) was a lot more fun than I thought it was going to be.  I have felt in the past that the earlier films of the 1930s are a bit too naïve and clunky for my taste, but this one proved me wrong.  This is a very knowing look at the early film industry itself, and I think that it is rather ahead of its time.

It features music hall star Violet Loraine as Bessie Bolton; while Bessie’s husband and children are played by the now better known names of Gordon Harker, John Mills and Kay Hammond.  Bessie runs a fried fish shop while her husband Bert works at nearby Billingsgate Market. Her teenage son and daughter are both top-drawer dreamers.  One wants to be a speedway star and the other wants to marry a heartthrob actor.  When an Italian film director is filming a new picture nearby, he accidentally stumbles across Bessie and her fabulous singing voice. Spurred on by Bert and the pound signs popping out of his eyeballs, Bessie reluctantly agrees to make a picture and the family are suddenly elevated to a new position in life.

Bessie’s character would appear to be based wholly on Gracie Fields – the part could have been written for her (and the surname Bolton adds to my suspicions here, what with the Lancashire connection…) In fact, I would say that the film rather pokes fun at a perhaps already hackneyed concept of the ordinary woman turned into an overnight star. Because, for Bessie, this isn’t a case of dreams coming true. She is fair sick of it all very quickly – and the whole situation shows her husband up as a very silly man. He is easily swayed by money and fame but he is unable to handle himself. Bessie’s daughter’s actions are the most telling. With access to money and the right people, she starts stalking her heartthrob. She gets to meet him, finds out where he lives and sneaks into his bedroom one evening to wait for him.  This results in the very memorable scene of Bessie giving her daughter a thoroughly and deservedly smacked bottom. The filmstar heartthrob himself is aloof and disgusted…and very probably gay.

This is a film which looks at its own industry and seems to declare it as a load of old bunkum. Already the trappings of fame that we associate with modern life are being held up to ridicule.  What with all this and the Hammersmith Odeon and telephone booths complete with underground posters, it is certainly worth a look. It is available free to view on the BFI website here - http://player.bfi.org.uk/film/watch-britannia-of-billingsgate-1933/

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The Level Playing Field

I have started a new Twitter account dedicated to the life and sayings of Joyce Grenfell (@callmesossidge). This is partly to give me some inspiration as I write my next book of short stories, all of which will be inspired by Joyce's work.

One quote that I recently posted went as follows:

"Things will never, can never, musn't ever be the same as they were before the war."

Joyce wrote this in a letter to her mother during the early years of World War Two, as part of an observation about the British class system. She was not far off being a member of the aristocracy herself.  Her aunt was Nancy Astor, MP and chatelaine of Cliveden and therefore a mover in the highest of circles. At the time that she wrote the letter, Joyce lived in a cottage on the Cliveden estate and often partook of her aunt’s hospitality.  She had also been a debutante and name-dropped a lot of titled and high rolling people in her letters and diaries.  So, for her to say this, tells me that there was widespread recognition of a need for change among those with the power as well as those experiencing it for the first time as part of the wartime social levelling.

Coincidentally, a couple of weeks after I had posted and mused about this quote of hers, I watched ‘The Guinea Pig’ – a film which tackles the notion at the very root.

This is a Boulting Brothers film, which was released in 1948 and is based on a 1946 play.  It stars a twenty-something Richard Attenborough as a teenage school boy.  He plays an East End lad who is sent on a scholarship to a private boarding school as part of a wider experiment. We follow his uncomfortable transplantation from one environment to another very different one – and we feel very sorry for him as he endures the snobbery, feudal customs and loneliness. There is a scene where he tries to run away, then pours his heart out to a sympathetic master.  This is deeply heart-wrenching and it is testament (not that one is needed) to Attenborough’s talent.

With the stoicism that you would expect of a 1940s EastEnder, the lad sticks it out and eventually begins to make those who doubted the scheme to see the point of it. A conversation between one of the old fashioned masters and the boy’s father tells us all that we need to know. That this film is about the need for the classes to mix and understand each other. We had so recently triumphed over a common enemy…wasn’t it now time to give ourselves a common goal – to do the best by our children. To not shut them away in compartments.

Attenborough by @aitchteee

I enjoy slipping back into what was a very idealistic period of our history. I also relish finding out what the Boultings made of it all. They took this one more seriously than many other of the subjects that they tackled. Unfortunately, our society remains as class-ridden as ever....shame on us.

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A Foreign Country

‘A French Mistress’ is a Boulting film dating from 1960.  It is not one of their better known ones, yet it is full of familiarity. Cecil Parker, James Robertson Justice, Irene Handl and Thorley Walters fill the screen with their usual personas. The scene is a private boys’ school – and on the subject of familiar names and faces Michael Crawford is listed as being one of the pupils. I have to say that I didn’t actually notice him while I was watching.

Thorley Walters when he was little more than a school boy, thanks to Richard Hope-Hawkins from my Facebook page In Search of Thorley Walters

In some respects, this is a fun film with a fair bit to recommend it – not least Irene as the stressed school cook.  But it is also desperately old fashioned and, in my view, this overrides any sense of nostalgia.  The French Mistress of the title is a 20-something Mademoiselle who takes up the vacant position of French teacher at the school.  The previous incumbents of the post have all been sent galloping back home due to Irene’s cooking, and Mlle Lafarge is consequently the only applicant for a job that has become notorious. This causes all kinds of hoo-ha at the bastion of chauvenism that is the 1950s/60s boys school.  There are only four female characters in total, and I thought that these served to illustrate the four ages of woman as seen by the patriarchy at this time.

1)   Totty. (Agnes Laurent as Mlle Lafarge) The French mistress is 22 years old, is good to look at and responds positively to romantic overtures.

2)   Matron. (Edith Sharpe as just Matron. She doesn’t even get the dignity of a name) The school matron is caring, efficient and good in a domestic crisis. She no longer regards her looks as important and concedes that she is not as good as category 1) anymore.

3)   Widow. (Irene Handl as Sgt Hodges) The cook is a widow who needs to work but finds the whole thing a bit too much at ‘her time of life’.

4)   Bitter old hag. (Athene Seyler as Miss Peake) She has never married and is dependent on her brother.  This makes her interfering and small minded.

Four good reasons to be glad you weren’t around in 1960.

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Mooning About

If you are ever in need of a cinematic example of how the British have a tendency to not take themselves seriously, then ‘Man in the Moon’ is for you. This 1960 film stars Kenneth More and Michael Hordern, among several others whose faces may be more familiar than their names. The landscape too is one that you will recognise, much of it being filmed in the Buckinghamshire villages around Pinewood.  It is gently humorous - all in all very comforting stuff.  Well, to us British, at any rate.  I suspect a native of any other country would be bemused and bewildered by the whole thing.

The premise is that Britain needs an astronaut to enable us to win the space race.  The men from the ministry are on the look-out for a suitable victim to launch up to the moon. Kenneth More turns out to be their perfect man. He has been earning a living selling his body to medical research because he is seemingly incapable of developing a disease. They (and we) first discover him at the common cold research establishment, being all bouncy and chipper while all those around him wallow in mucus-induced misery. He boasts that he survived everything that the School of Tropical Medicine threw at him.  He is lured to the space centre, where he barely notices being thrust into extremes of temperature and G-force.

More’s character is the epitome of the British hero, as viewed from the first half of the 20^th Century.  He all but stands with legs wide apart, pipe sticking out from his jutting chin and his thumbs in his tailored tweed suit. This in itself is probably a bit of gentle mockery of how we used to be.  But then of course it all goes wrong.  When they finally launch him off to the moon, he ends up landing within a short distance from the Australian launch pad.  More goes back to the cold research establishment, where the scientists continue to be generally baffled.  The British, this film yells out, are clever but rubbish at a lot of stuff.

Of course, we know that the main two contenders in the space race were the USA and the USSR.  Two countries that take themselves and their space very seriously indeed.  I suspect that if this film had been made and released in either of those countries, there would have been an enquiry. Let’s face it, if a Russian had so much as even thought up a storyline that mocked their comrades in this way, Siberia would have beckoned. Would there have been demonstrations outside the cinemas of small town America?  Maybe.  But not only did we make the film, we sat and chuckled at it over our Kia-Oras and bars of fruit and nut.

I’m glad. Who wants space hardware when you can have Kenneth More being thrown off an ejector seat at full tilt.  Marvellous.

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Rock On 1940s Style

In terms of its storyline, ‘Interrupted Journey’ (1949) is possibly the worst film I have ever seen. I can’t bring myself to describe it to you, it’s so laborious. It starts off right enough, but towards the end, it really does go to pot.  The film stars Valerie Hobson and Richard Todd.  Valerie is stunningly beautiful throughout, but I’m afraid that this doesn’t rescue the utter shambles.

The one bright moment is an appearance by Dora Bryan. She never puts in a bad performance and I always like to see her. She plays a waitress in the Paddington Station buffet, where she flogs Richard and his mistress a coffee and a rock cake each. This was the end of Dora’s delightfully distracted cameo, and so there was no more to do than to fall into a rock cake reverie. I began to wonder why the rock cake is so ubiquitous in 1940s culture. Were there a plate of them on offer in Joyce Carey’s ‘Brief Encounter’ buffet? I feel sure there must have been.  They certainly appear in my favourite book ‘One Fine Day’ by Mollie Panter-Downes (1947).  Here they are referred to as “rock keeks” by the snooty bakery assistant – and this is how I always pronounce them to myself after reading that (using Joyce Carey’s 1940s voice).

I followed up my viewing of ‘Interrupted Journey’ with a baking session – having found a rock keek recipe in my old 1950s Good Housekeeping cookbook. The recipe was simple:

7 oz Self Raising Flour

3 oz Butter or Marg

3oz Sugar

3oz Dried Mixed Fruit

Small egg

Drop of milk

Sprinkle of nutmeg/mixed spice

Just mix it all up, stick a few splats on a flat baking tray and shove them in a hot oven for 15 minutes.

Bit too much milk, should be a bit rockier shaped, but you get the idea

The verdict was a good one.  My notoriously picky children, who drive me to distraction with their weird food attitudes (I’ve got one that doesn’t like custard and ice cream, for pity’s sake), shovelled them down like there was no tomorrow. I was able to take one to work for my morning snack for a few days after they were baked. They were so easy to make and they were plain but filling. So I suppose that the answer to the question of why the rock cake was a rationing era stalwart is as follows:

·        Quick and easy to do, no matter how long you’ve been awake fire-watching and queueing for dried eggs you won’t go wrong.

·        Low on ingredients – nothing fancy.  These things are mostly flour and you can probably get away with dried egg and water in them with enough flavouring

·        They can be shoved in the oven with something else and then last for quite a few days afterwards (I made another batch that was still fine 3 days later)

I will be baking more rock keeks. They are very suitable for our new modern day frugality.

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Now that we've done baking I'd just like to carry on with the domestic goddess in a headscarf and curlers attitude.  I've done a new book all about sewing with those iconic Sylko bobbins. You can buy it now on Amazon.  Some very nice things have been said about it:

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