Making Plans for Nigel: More Autobiography

All things bright and beautiful

Back we go down memory lane...

Dramatis Personae: 
Our parents, who got married soon after the war and had two children: Emma and me (Lucy). We moved into a big (inconvenient, cold) house in the country (Linchmere) while my father struggled as a barrister. They counted the pennies.

But they had plans for us. We were going to become well-behaved, compliant children. They proceeded on the “children live with nanny on a separate floor” principle. They didn’t want to live WITH us. P’s family were high establishment, but Mum’s family had lived in a series of insanitary cottages and done a moonlight flit when the rent came due. I can’t imagine her really caring about having perfect little upper middle class children. But she seemed to mind the most.

The dining room, with huge mahogany table, was just inside the front door – it was actually the back door, leading straight into a gents’ loo. When we all ate in there, P used to tell us fascinating facts from the New Scientist, or tell funny stories from the war. Barman: “Can’t make up your mind? How about a nice Harpic and custard, sir?” Then P earned a lot of money from a case and his career took off. They could make the layout changes they’d been dreaming of. The kitchen became the dining room, the previous dining room became his office. And Nanny left.

But once in the old dining room I was eating a boiled egg and the yolk ran down the outside of the shell. I couldn’t eat it, but P insisted. Mum joined in and it became a screaming row between them. “She’s MY CHILD!” After that my eggs were hard-boiled. (Principle: Children must eat what’s put before them. And eat up everything on their plate. It doesn't just induce obedience, it avoids wasting money.)

Also “Don’t saw, cut!” when trying to cut up cold mutton that Emma said was like boiled lino. When I had to cut my birthday cake Mum would put her large hands over mine and cut it for me – hurting my hands in the process. (In the 60s we got serrated steak knives. Surely the only way is to saw?)

We had a lovely dining room now and a new blond wood table, even a breakfast bar by the window. But no more science facts, no more funny stories. Instead, constant yelling about table manners. "Lean over your plate and the food won't go down your front!" Well, nobody told me. P to M: “Show them how you do it.” She licked her lips instead of using a napkin. She was already drunk – at lunch time. Did he think she spent all day teaching us table manners? (She had “help” – why was she still “tired”?)

As I’ve said, they had a plan for when the servants left – we would be the servants. But they never told us what to do, or showed us how. P would just shout “Jump up! Jump up! Help your mother!” Every day. She didn’t want help, she wanted to go into the kitchen and drink. Again, did he think she was managing us when he wasn’t there?

I realised at the time that they were trying to live as if they had servants when they only had a cleaning lady. I realised at the time that children’s teeth weren’t strong enough to chew boiled mutton – or hands strong enough to cut it. (And it was the dentist, not they, who told me: "If you brush your teeth you won't get fillings.")

I was quite small, about 7, when they decided I would empty the bins as my “chore”. They cornered me next to the Welsh dresser and presented me with the wicker wastepaper basket from the sitting room and told me to empty it. Shouting. I did and said nothing. Eventually I put out a foot and pushed it over. They ran round in circles screaming “The sky is falling, the sky is falling!” I exaggerate, but not very much.

The basket was almost my height. I’d have had to pick it up with my arms round it. Put it down, open the kitchen door (or did we still have a bead curtain?). Put it down, open the back door. Put it down, take the lid off the dustbin. Pick it up, empty it into the dustbin. Impossible. And I didn’t know that you emptied bins into the dustbin. I didn’t think about it.

Reading their minds, they thought this was "disobedience". P had commanded the “men” in the war. Why didn't I follow orders, like a squaddie? He told me once that I was “perverse”. Me: “I don’t know what perverse MEANS!” Actually I’d worked it out from the context. Bin-emptying was never mentioned again.

One day as usual I knocked something over at lunch – a glass of water. “Go into the kitchen and get a cloth to mop it up.” I came back with the floor cloth. Yell, yell, yell. Scream, scream, scream. I’d never noticed what kind of cloth you mopped up a spill with, or where I could find one.

They turned a back room into a playroom for us and all our toys were put there. If we wandered into the living room it was: “You’ve got a playroom now. This is OUR playroom.” 

There was some special chocolate in a blue and gold wrapper. We all had a square, and the remainder was put in the “sweet cupboard”. We were given one sweet after lunch, to train us not to have a “sweet tooth”. Of course I took the rest and ate it all. I screwed up the paper and stuffed into the corner of the downstairs loo. “Did you take the chocolate in the gold paper?” “No.” To me, that paper was blue. I honestly thought they were talking about a different piece of chocolate.

Screaming rows from downstairs after we’d gone to bed. Now they had a child that LIED! The atmosphere went on for three days. Eventually my older sister asked me in a calm voice, “Did you take the chocolate that was in the cupboard?” Me: “Yes.” They probably gave me a telling off. Did they ask me why I’d “lied”?

We were given money boxes – one in the shape of a postbox, one like a real cashbox. If we wanted something we couldn’t afford (like a plastic umbrella printed with ballet dancers), we were told to “save up” till we had enough. We never did any such thing. Children must learn the value of money! But we didn't.

We spent all our pocket money – pennies – on cheap sweets. Until recently I ate whole Aeros for dinner. I now have diabetes. “Proper food” was part of the programme. “You don’t need to add sugar, it’s sweet enough, it’s got sugar in it!” One day nobody stopped me when I added sugar to cereal. I ended up with an inedible bowlful of sugar. I’ve written about the meals elsewhere. 

Was the Ministry of Food still giving out pamphlets about child nutrition: carbohydrates, green vegetables, protein? Rationing was in force until I was three. Mum told me much later that as a child (often fostered) she was always hungry because it was the fashion to avoid “over-feeding” children. If you asked for a snack, you got an apple.

When I was about seven, we visited a friend or relative who, we were told, lived in a flat with a glass roof. I was disappointed to find that it was a half-glass roof like a conservatory. She had provided a buffet lunch. P said to me “cut us some pieces of cheese”. There were some table knives but I couldn’t see a cheese knife. I was afraid of getting it wrong. I said “With what – shall I cut it?” Ton of bricks. Ridiculous! There are a whole heap of knives! 

“Ha ha, with what shall I cut it, dear Liza, dear Liza?” They teased me about that for years, too. “And she was sitting there opposite a whole heap of knives!” But they never asked me to do things like that at home, and didn't know whether I could or not. Were they trying to pretend that we were all much more grown-up than we were?  

When I went away to boarding school aged 10, Mum wrote and said she was getting me a travelling clock for my birthday, with a cartoon of a clock buying a train ticket. I wanted a Barbie. She wrote to Emma that “Lucy wants a grown-up figure doll!” More cartoons. Great scorn. The clock arrived, it was a beautiful thing and I used it for years. But what possessed her? When I came home for the holidays I was laying the table, giving myself a dessert fork and butter knife as usual. Oh no, she said, you eat with a proper knife and fork now. (She meant “adult-sized”.) That Christmas they gave me an attaché case – a miniature suitcase. I never got dolls or toys as presents again. 

Does this belong here? We were encouraged to throw food wrappers and apple cores from a moving car. Later, friends were very shocked by this. It was as if the world didn’t exist, or didn’t matter. Emma said she used to look out of the car windows and ask herself: “Where’s MY place in all this?”

They tried gracious living on a too-small budget. Couldn’t afford to heat the house, which was too big anyway, so it was always freezing in the winter. Why didn’t we heat one room (apart from the kitchen), put the telly in it, and all live there? We were always being hived off into separate rooms. They were still trying to follow the “nursery wing” model. And Nanny had gone, so they were faced with us as we were, and they had to look after us.

We ate off Georgian silver but they were stingy about butter, sugar, jam, chutney. "That’s enough sugar, butter etc. You don’t need any more." We only got lemonade/orangeade at birthday parties, when other children got it at every meal. Why didn’t we sell the silver and buy lots of butter? Of course they had to pretend that it was trashy to eat butter or put sugar in your tea or be warm enough! They spent their money on drink and school fees, rather than labour-saving devices. 

And there was never any briefing. No “When you’re 12 you’ll be expected to wash and iron your own clothes”. Instead they yelled at me when I didn’t. “You’re so selfish, expecting Mrs Thayer to wash your clothes!” I didn’t know she did. If I left water all over the bathroom floor, I thought it just evaporated. Like the contents of the wastepaper basket. I worked out when I was about 16 that they’d expected the schools to tell us anything we needed to know. To do the parenting.

A therapist friend pointed out: “The middle classes want their children to miss out childhood altogether.” What shocks me now is the way they treated us as the adults we would be, rather than the children we were then. They became more rational when the younger two came along. Things changed in the 60s. Other members of the New Poor gladly moved with the times, bought freezers and batch cooked. They ate in the kitchen. They drank coffee out of mugs, not bone china cups and saucers that clattered in your shaking hands. They redid their kitchens in shades of pale blue. Our family caught up slowly. Freezers, dishwashers and casseroles changed all our lives, and helped sweep away those finicky table manners that were such a wonderful excuse for prolonged screaming rows. What could they yell about now?

Postscript: At the time, these incidents came out of a clear blue sky. This is my attempt to work out what was going through their minds. And explain that nobody taught me about cause and effect.

More here about a privileged upbringing, and links to the rest.

ADHD? Neurosis? Or...

Someone just posted on Twitter, describing his "ADHD girlfriend". He's taken the post down, so I'll summarise.

She is hurt by a hasty, brief text. Is convinced the relationship is over. This is, according to the poster, "Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria". She seems to "overreact", but that's just her. "Her nervous system has no middle setting." And she feels guilty about "forgetting, cancelling, saying the wrong thing".

Are all deviations from the norm now "ADHD"? In the 70s we'd have called such a person "insecure" or "neurotic" or "oversensitive" or "easily hurt". We'd have said they had "low self-esteem". If this was you, you were supposed to fix yourself. "Grow a thicker skin." "Get therapy."

"Neurosis is an outmoded term for a broad category of mental health issues characterized by chronic emotional distress, anxiety or depression," says Google AI. In the 70s we accused each other of being neurotic all day long. I'm so glad it's outmoded. (See the diagram above: it's an easy guide to what society requires of you.)

The individuals were always talked about in isolation. I wonder why the woman described feels so guilty? When people feel hurt it's usually because others are hurting them, or have hurt them. Never mind the current terminology, be excellent to each other, dudes. 

Social Cues and Expectations

If you've read the fragments of autobiography I've posted here, you'll have worked out that I'm autistic. There's a lot of helpful talk on Twitter among other autists (loathing of fluorescent lights, removal of labels from clothes). But there's also much discussion among the neurotypical – and they know nothing! There's a weird trend for claiming that autists are really GOOD at things they struggle with, or are supposed to struggle with, such as "reading the room" and "being empathetic". Don't trust them.

They've been talking a lot about social "cues" (we're bad at spotting them), without apparently knowing what a "cue" is. 

If I, as Puck, say to the Fairy: How now, spirit, whither wander you?
She has to say: Thorough bush, thorough briar... 

My line is her cue. But there's no point giving someone a cue if they haven't learned the speech.

The neurotypicals (NTs) often claim that social behaviour is so nuanced that it can't be put into words. They hate being told there are social conventions or rules. This is what I tell them in reply:

I've sometimes found that what I didn't do was quite concrete, and it was perfectly possible for someone to tell me what I should have done. 

Me: I never heard again from that nice man I was talking to at the party. 
Friend: You do it all as you say goodbye. (I.e. arrange to meet again, swap phone numbers.)

Another story. I'd been in a job three months and was having the interview to see whether they wanted me to stay.

Employer: Your work is fine, we want you to stay but there's just one thing. You don't say "Good morning" when you arrive and "Good night" when you leave.

I did so from then on, wherever I worked. I hadn't known it was a thing. I was about 28.

In another job, a colleague told me off for never saying good morning and good night to the receptionist. I later heard that he thought I was the nicest person in the building. 

But you should have seen what I did when they told me to make eye contact... No, not like that.

Remember - the subject that interests most people is themselves. (@DirkBruere had no trouble typing that sentence.)

@thedulab Cardinal social rule is to never make someone feel like an idiot. Perpetually have to assume that everyone is deathly afraid of being perceived in this way. Preempt the interaction by letting them know that stupid questions don't exist. Briefly jest about how they're already in a better position compared to when you were in their shoes. Slip in an anecdote about something embarrassing that happened to you with a level of unreactive casualness that indirectly signals to their brain that it's safe to relax. Chuckle in response to any semblance of an amusing remark. (There, that wasn't so difficult, was it?)

When the delivery man leaves a parcel on my doorstep:

Thanks!
You're welcome!

It's a ritual. It's a script. It is very easy to describe in words – I just did.

And have you heard parents trying to browbeat their children into saying "Please, thank you and 'May I'"? They have no trouble putting these social conventions into words.

As I type on June 4, 2026, Morning Live is giving a script for getting a better mobile phone deal. "Is that the best you can do?" "I'm looking at other offers, I'll have to think about it." They suggest writing the script down on a notebook next to the phone. They're having no trouble telling viewers what to do in this situation. Write a script, and even read it out! Not subtle, nuanced or indescribable in the slightest!

Underrated life skill: Learn to introduce yourself well. Look people in the eye, speak clearly, say something you’re excited about, and give a specific reason you’re glad to meet them. The first 10 seconds set the tone for everything after. Such a simple way to stand out. (@blakeaburge)

One problem I had was that I took literally the platitudes that are handed out to every child:

Be yourself.
Be sincere.
Live in the moment.
Never think about what others are thinking about you (sometimes they add "Because they aren't.")
Never think about what impression you're making.
Don't copy other people. Be original.
Always tell the truth. 
Be fair.
Treat everybody the same.
Never think that people don't like you.
They tease you because they like you. 
Don't wait to be invited.

Try living by those precepts! It's hard. In fact it's impossible. And everyone around you is doing the opposite. I assumed they meant 100%, 24/7. They meant "about 5%". I was amazed to find people thought about me when I wasn't there. (Try turning the mantras on their heads.)

More social conventions:

Toast must be dark.
Tea must be weak.
Steak must be almost raw.
Lawns must be mown.
Luggage must be smart.
Women must cook.
Everyone must drive.

There, that wasn't hard, was it?

The NTs know we have "literal, logical" minds. But their minds are not literal: they don't really know what those words mean. And now they are wringing their hands over us, assuming our behaviour is deliberate and that we could just not do it. Listen to us - don't listen to them.

Autism is a personality type – it's also a culture. There's an "autistic awareness" day for other people to become "aware" of us. But we don't have a day of our own. Where's our flag? Where's our parade!?


More autobiography here.

Décor Crimes Again

Flock wallpaper. Once common in Indian restaurants in the 60s and 70s, via Georgian design based on Indian textiles. Probably coming back – in fact it is now extremely upmarket.

Covers for anything that doesn’t need a cover: matchboxes, tissue boxes, toilet rolls, telephones. (Tissue box covers were made of furnishing fabric with passementerie edging to match your bedroom. Phones and toilet rolls were camouflaged by crinoline ladies.)

In bathrooms, themes are out, eclectic is in. If you want to sell your house, put away personal items and cleaning products. Get rid of shells, and soap in the shape of fish. Nobody will buy a house with a medicine cabinet in the bathroom – replace it with a mirror. Have hooks for your towels, not a bar or towel rail. Stick to one bathmat – and hang it up. (Getpocket.com)

White-painted, vaguely 18th century furniture, especially the wardrobe/night table combo that goes over the head of a double bed. Likewise the stick-on white “regency” fire surround framing nothing but a faux marble slab.

Themes: Interior decorators (and customers) use themes rather than reconstructions of past styles (about which they know nothing). If not themes they’re concepts as in “contemporary living concept”. Amanda Lamb gives a room “the Scottish retreat feel”. She also gives a room “New England style”, which seems to mean pale blue paint and wallpaper of weathered planks. The house has dark 70s doors with bumpy glass that now look all wrong.

Age it up: In the 50s, it was naff to make your genuine cottage look more “ye olde” than it really was. Painted horseshoes nailed to the door, a porch made of trellis with a climbing rose trained over it, coach lamps with electric bulbs, brass candlesticks on the mantelpiece. Wrought-iron house sign with a figure of a person ploughing with a team of shire horses.

In the 70s, Upwards bought country cottages and opened up the fireplaces, restored the old bread ovens and bragged about retaining the copper (copper basin with a fire under it for washing clothes). They lit huge logs and filled the room with smoke.

Modernise a 30s house: Remove the pebbledash (and the decorative pebbledash/brick contrast), paint the exterior white, replace the window frames, stick on a porch in the wrong style and tarmac over the front garden. Rip out interior panelling. Replace Crittall windows. (Are those features "dated" – rip'em out – or "original" and worth preserving?)



Thebackstore.com explains popular home décor themes.

Traditional: white tongue-and-groove, a pot full of wooden spoons, an enamel coffee pot. Inspired by 18th century French and English, colours from country flowers. Oil paintings and matching furniture sets.

Mid-century modern: neutral colours plus olive and orange. (Add sculptures of Siamese cats.)

Industrial: Minimalist, exposed brick, copper, rusty steel. Reused stools, workbenches, filing cabinets, hanging lights – anything metal. (Old school furniture fits in here.)

Bohemian: Hippie and Moroccan, embroidery, different patterns, macramé, cushions, house plants. (Hasn’t changed much since the days of Oscar Wilde – try adding pampas grass in a Ming vase and gold-tooled hardbacks for a fin de siècle look.)

Coastal/cottage: Navy, white, off-white. Shells, pebbles, jute mats, rope, stripes, driftwood. (Bunting! Lifebelts! Deck-chair canvas! Paintings of sailing boats!)

Zen/Asian: Minimal, colourful accents: red, purple, gold. Main palette is “natural”. Potted bamboo, indoor water feature. (Add paper lanterns, low tables and sliding room dividers – and a sliding door to your Zen garden.)

Contemporary: Very minimal, no frills, no ruffles, no embellishments. Light colours. White sofa, a few bright cushions. (No art, no sculpture, no character.)

Vintage/Shabby chic: “distressed” furniture, pastel colours, recycled fabric. (Fraying quilts, seersucker tablecloths, faded chintz loose covers.)

Rustic/country: recycled wood, leather, plaid, darker colours. (Copper pans fit in here.)

Here’s another: fresh-traditional with a Florida twist (Looks more late 19th century Aesthetic movement to me, lots of blue and white ginger jars.)

More here, and links to the rest.

Class and Moray Dalton: There's Death in the Cup

Moray Dalton (Katherine Renoir) wrote several mystery-thrillers that deserve more fans. They are very revealing about attitudes of the time. Other books include acrobats and failing private zoos, but this one is firmly placed in a stuffy little seaside town. The Armour family are beyond the pale of society. Though they have a big house and servants, the other middle class residents do not mix with them. The patriarch's second wife ran off with a French teacher, you see.

“What’s their social status?”
“Oh, middle class, I suppose. The father was a retired manufacturer from the Midlands. But they weren’t visited."
"One does not want to be censorious and Pharisaical, but they weren’t the sort of people we’re used to."

Mark Armour, our hero, is under a cloud for forging a cheque at school. He joined up and had a good war, but when peace broke out couldn't find a job. So he parlayed his startling good looks into a career as a gigolo. We get just a glimpse of this life in the first chapter.

He is forced to return home, where his bossy older sister Bertha inherited all the money. His half-siblings need looking after. George is clearly autistic, sympathetically portrayed, and is happy cutting pictures out of magazines. Winnie is "man mad". She was never very stable and is now about 40. As we've seen from other novels of the same vintage, there was a general idea that if a woman didn't get married she would start to go barmy by the age of about 30.

"One of the sisters is odd. Peculiar in her dress and so forth."
“There’s a taint of insanity then?”

As well as sewing finery out of old clothes, Winnie stalks the local doctor, sitting and crying on the kerb outside his house.

Yes, this is an other stiflingly inturned family, where everyone is forced to dance to Bertha's tune. If she dies, the inheritance is split between Winnie, Mark, George and Claire - the other child of the absconding French wife.

Mark has somehow met and fallen in love with Lucy, only child of what could be another repressive family unit. "I suppose you’ve seen to it that she met any eligibles that happen to be about?” asks her uncle, one of the subsidiary detectives. Oh no, woofles her father, coming up with some feeble excuse. "Lucy is a home bird" – the same phrase used by Joanna Cannan about the pathetic Nancy in They Rang Up the Police.

More about class: a servant going to give "evidence" to the police "was rather too smartly dressed in a bright blue coat lavishly trimmed with cheap fur, opening over a blue silk frock and ropes of pearls." And someone puts on "her high, affected company voice".
     
Though we barely leave the snobbish little resort, and nothing very dramatic happens (there isn't even a dispute about the will), it is a gripping read. Dalton is a good writer:

It was pitch dark in the drive and silent but for the crunching of the loose gravel under their feet and the steady drip drip of the rain on the laurels.
                
The car roared through the darkness. The hedgerows streamed by, every twig and blade of grass flashing out in the white glare of the headlights for a fraction of time to sink back again into the peaceful obscurity of the November night when they had passed.

I guessed the killer, mainly because they are the last person standing.

More Golden Age snobbery here, and links to the rest.
                


                

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. (Servants in GAD mysteries tend to talk like Yoda.)

"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.