Class and Joanna Cannan III: They Rang Up the Police

Toby frill

You might think this is one of the limpest titles ever, but for the Cathcarts it's not a simple proceeding. One of a family of spinster sisters goes missing, and they eventually call in the law. "After all, I know the Chief Constable."

Before this happens, we peer into the inside workings of one of the most toxic families ever put on the page. Three "girls" and their helpless mother barely see outsiders, and constantly call each other "darling". The youngest, Nancy (38), is addressed as "baby". They have nothing whatever to do (large staff of servants), and don't think this odd. Nancy passes the time sewing. Sheila (red-headed and plain) plays the piano or just sits about. Delia runs the show, and also has some equestrian skills and is part of the local horsy world. Resemblance to the Borden family purely coincidental?

It's Delia who goes missing. Guy Northeast of the Yard is called in, and the middle of the book sags as he goes about his investigation. Meanwhile the ladies reveal a lot about the mores of the time (the 30s).

Someone says, mysteriously: "Well off you may be, but you’re only biscuits when all’s said and done.” I wondered if "biscuits" was contemporary slang, but it turns out the Cathcart family made its money selling digestives.

"I don’t believe there is such a thing as an artistic temperament. It’s not temperament, darling; it’s temper.”

The Cathcarts relate: "We decided that we’d keep calm till eleven” – before calling for help about Delia's absence.

It's the author who despises meals such as this: Besides the tea there was a white loaf, half a pound of margarine, a slice of Canadian cheddar, some beetroot swimming in vinegar, a pot of strong tea, a jug of thin milk, a basin of lump sugar, a cold boiled onion, and seven fancy cakes on the table.  
                
“We never leave any of our personal belongings in the bathroom,” said Mrs. Cathcart. “It’s so suburban.”

The rude servant is "a short young man with oily hair that smelled of violets".

"Rather suburban tidiness" is referred to.

"The Cathcarts were biscuits, but they’ve been out of it for some time," but "three generations and back to the plow?”


The characters come out with some pop psychology to diagnose the sisters, and in the frame of the book, turn out to be right.

"Can’t get ’usbands yourselves, so you don’t want no one else to. That’s what ’tis." An uppity servant says this directly to Delia, shortly before she vanishes.
                
"Sex repression," opines another character.

When Sheila meets Northeast, she doesn't answer his questions immediately because "she had been wondering if he were married, if his wife understood him, if he realized that a pretty face isn’t everything."
                
Delia is dismissed as a "repressed spinster, who had practically given up hope of any sex life — an easy prey for any man."

"She may have bottled things up all her life and cracked suddenly.”
"If a silly woman chose to give way to her nerves."
"You know what old maids are, especially at the time when they gives up ’ope."

As for the mysteriously absent Mr Willoughby, "I’ve heard of lots of men with kinks, who just left home for no real reason at all."

One theory is that Delia has run away with Mr Willoughby, who disappeared at the same time. This means Guy has to interview Mrs Willoughby, an irritatingly self-conscious Bohemian who winces at the word "sketching".

I’m too intelligent to worry about something that isn’t. Time isn’t. It only exists for the benefit of the insane majority.

Well, I hung about here thinking how sordid it all was.
              
“A fruit shop?” “A stall in the market place. I hate smug shops.”

Solicitors are so sordid and everything’s so simple and nothing’s ugly if you just bare your soul.

He was a "typical member of the lower middle class, quite cancerous with respectability".
                
Eventually, she exits: Of course, it’s been horribly sordid, but it’ll make us more sensitive to beauty, so in a way, you see, it’s been good for our souls. I feel terribly hurt — ugliness does hurt me terribly — and I’m going to rush off now to be healed by flowers and trees and birds.               


Clothes are stressed throughout – pay attention.
               
Delia keeps her hair in order with a hairnet. The cretonnes in the Cathcart's drawing room are "sweet-pea colouring" – mauve, pink and blue. Nancy wears floral fabric.

Mrs Willoughby "wore an orange smock over a black satin skirt, black satin shoes with rubbed toes, and no stockings".

A platinum blonde waitress stepped through a curtain of bamboo and beads.
                
A peripheral character recalls her own outfit: Scarlet and white checked skirt, scarlet jacket, no hat and white shoes. (Probably marks her as not quite quite.)
                
Another wore: mauve jumper, mauve halo hat, and gray flannel coat and skirt. (A "coat and skirt" was what we'd call a "suit", but for some reason this word was taboo for women.)
                
At the inquest, Gerda Willoughby is "dressed dramatically in black and orange".   

Nancy complains to her diary that Delia has accused her of wearing a dress with a "Toby frill" – as worn by Mr Punch's dog. "Whenever I make friends with anybody, she says they are boring or common," she adds.

It's maybe not so great as a mystery, but the snobbery and wit keep one reading. He hoped this wasn’t going to be the sort of case you read about in novels, where the detective knows that the victim couldn’t have been in the music room at the time stated, because so great a musician would never have played Puccini.

More here, and links to the rest.               
               

Class and Barbara Pym's An Unsuitable Attachment

This novel was rejected by Barbara Pym's publisher, in the early 60s. Perhaps it didn't seem in tune with the times. Pym took it back and reworked parts of it, and it was eventually published after her death, when she'd regained her popularity. However, it seems unfinished. She revealed that she originally made John "much worse", but in her world that might mean that he wore a corduroy suit, or dropped more H's. The romance between John and Ianthe is understated, but what she gives us goes straight to the heart.

John is a former film extra who goes to work in Ianthe's library, where they are overseen by the waspish Mervyn. Ianthe, a spinster in her late 30s, attracts interest from some unlikely men. Mervyn is probably gay, but covets her inherited furniture. Rupert Stonebird thinks Ianthe would look so perfect in his house. 

Ianthe inherits some money, and buys a cute little house in a London suburb that has definitely not gentrified - yet. As a clergyman's niece, she is welcome by the local vicar and his wife, Sophia, and cat, Faustina.

Sophia thinks Rupert will do for her jilted sister, who is "modern" in an early 60s fashion, wearing a "beehive" hairdo and sometimes a hat like a yellow tulle soufflé.

Everyone agrees that John is an "unsuitable" partner for Ianthe, and the words suitable/unsuitable pepper the text.

There is a local vet and his sister who act as a Greek chorus. And women tend to wear tweeds.

Lady Selvedge and Mrs Grandison set off to open a bazaar, stopping only to consume a "lunch of Welsh rarebit and trifle at a café run by gentlewomen. Class is frequently expressed through food:              
‘We have come to this,’ her mother used to say, ‘eating frozen vegetables like Americans.’
                
In about ten years from the date of the novel, feminism happened and girls pretended that marriage and pairing off were about to disappear from the face of the earth. But this idiocy has not happened yet.

Penelope had now reached the age when one starts looking for a husband rather more systematically than one does at nineteen or even at twenty-one.

Matchmaking Sophia probes "to find out without actually asking whether he had a mother, wife, fiancée, or ‘friend’ in the background".
               
Everyone values Ianthe for her apparent class. Sophia's mother notes her "feather-trimmed hat which had just the right touch of slightly dowdy elegance".
                
Ianthe goes looking for her retired former colleague Miss Grimes, and finds her living in one room in a house of multiple occupation with many bellpushes by the front door, and a hall laid with "frayed chocolate brown linoleum".
                
It's Daisy, the vet's sister, who notes the bromides people wheel out when anyone's ill. "Perhaps others didn’t feel they could give in to it as I did.’ ‘No, they felt it their duty to struggle on,’ said Daisy, half to herself.

The gang go on holiday to Italy, and Sophia takes the opportunity to tell Ianthe that there are alternatives to marriage: good works, being a pillar of the Christian community. But, cries Ianthe, "Mustn’t all these things be a second best? Oh, not to God – I know what you’re going to say."
               
‘Well, some books are destined never to be read,’ said Mervyn. ‘It’s the natural order of things.’ Like the women who are destined never to marry, thought Ianthe, remembering Sophia’s words to her in the gardens at Ravello. There had been something almost cruel in the way she had spoken.               

When Ianthe goes so far as to announce her engagement in the times, Sophia wails: ‘I wanted her to stay as she was, almost as if I’d created her.’
                
There are other details that nail this book to a time and a place (and publishers never like that unless the time is 1550): Ianthe wears a "white orlon cardigan" over her summer dress and the tourists are delighted to discover "osso buco" and spaghetti, not to mention Tuscan red wine.

Authors are often sold as exemplars of "subtle humour" that presumably has to be mined for. This humour, as well as being unfunny, is usually "mild" or "gentle". Pym's humour really is subtle, and neither mild nor gentle. It's no coincidence that, as so often, anthropologists form a background. Their papers of "jural processes among the Ngumi" don't promise to tell us anything much.

"Meeting people in everyday life in north-west London isn’t quite the same as studying a primitive community in Africa", protests Rupert. But by the end of the book he's joking that his next book is going to be called The Wiles of Nice Women in a Civilised Society. And what is this book if not...?

Sophia is revealed as a manipulative woman who has never loved anybody apart from her horrible cat, with whom she is obsessed. (I see Faustina as a Persian with a cross expression.) However, the whole book seems a little unfinished. Sophia's marriage, the lives of the well-meaning vets, are glossed over, hinted at. Another writer (especially one writing today) would make a meal of them, and underline the significant points. Pym just glances at them. Perhaps that's her cleverness.

More here, and links to the rest.
                

Happy Christmas and a Merry 2025!

"Ordinary folk" talk about “making memories”. You do all the hoopla and games so that your children can “make memories”. They also call photographs and videos “memories”.

Lower middle-class Jen Teale makes all her decorations every year out of brown paper and string. She  sticks stuff onto ping pong balls with a glue gun.

Morning guys. Yesterday we were wrapping your Christmas decorations created at the “Paint your own handmade porcelain Christmas decorations” workshop at the Note Warehouse. (@martinharmanart)

People's Trust for Endangered Species @PTES: Handmade plastic-free decorations for your Christmas tree! Shop now! 

Caro Stow Crat has never heard of glue guns: she gathers greenery, conifer branches and red berries in the family’s private woods and sprays them liberally with gold paint.

Samantha Upward avoids Costa – at this time of the year they play "Christmas music" about bells and frost, sung by Nat King Cole imitators.

Journalists take the opportunity to write about their own damaging drinking habits, as if asking for approval or permission.

A vicar has taken on the tradition of telling children Santa doesn't exist and leaving them all sobbing.

But @ferrispictures wins game, set and match: OMG, it's here far too early. I loathe Christmas for its disgusting commercialism. All greed and unfairness.

The sending of valentines has quite gone out of fashion, except amongst persons of the lower class. (@GirlsOwn quoting the1880s)

@MarcCorbishley asks: Is trifle essential at Christmas? (Not among the best upper sets, Marc.)

Enjoy! And Chag Sameach.

More here, and links to the rest.