More Class in Angus Wilson

Calceolarias

All from the short-story collection A Bit Off the Map.

"The polished yet wilting rubber plant which loomed above them had now the familiarity of the aspidistra – once, after all, also a modish exotic…

The unselfconscious dowdiness of the members of The Crowd… [not for them the] uniformity of elaborate male hair styles and female horsehair tails, of jeans and fishermen’s sweaters… But the clothes of The Crowd – the tired suits, the stained flannels and grubby corduroys; the jumpers and skirts, the pathetically dim brooches and ear-rings – were no conscious protests, only the ends of inherited and accepted taste, the necessities of penurious earnings… The Crowd were already taking off the numerous scarves and gloves which both sexes wore at all times of the year… In between was an insurmountable barrier of sports coats and duffle coats, woollen scarves and raincoats… The girls of The Crowd had naked faces and dirty hair… His eyes swept the hideous nakedness of the young women’s faces.

[These pseudo-intellectual young people of just post war have been long forgotten. They probably morphed into Beatniks. Wearing no makeup was very radical for the time. Rubber plants were a sign of modernity. The joke in this story is that these young people are not socialists but followers of Ayn Rand.]

Their protégé: “had been taken back to far grander places in his time – rooms with concealed cocktail cabinets and fitted-in bars.”

Here’s another milieu: "A small Edwardian house. The lawn was planted with standard roses. The half-timbered upper storey was a bold black and white, in the porch hung a wrought iron lantern… [It betrays the] rich Guildford business background that Sheila had tried so hard but had failed to shed…. Carola would admire the simplicity of Sheila’s table-setting, though she wondered strangely at the lack of doilies, of little mats and of colourfully arranged salads and fruit that she copied so carefully from women’s magazines. Sheila must praise Carola’s new blue dress, and wish that she could speak about the dreadful little doggy brooch."


A mother-in-law speaks: ‘There are standards – gracious living, you know – that are surely worth something. It seems terrible to throw it all away unless you’re very sure you’ve got something to put in its place.’  [I think this translates as: "We’re always in danger of sliding down the class system and if that happened it would be a disaster." Or else: "We must go on living as if we had servants even if we have to do all the work ourselves." This way of life was gradually phased out during the 50s and 60s, perhaps because it was unsustainable.]

Professional gardeners like: ‘Double begonias and calceolarias, they couldn’t have more ghastly taste.’

An embarrassing grandmother (a fashionable dressmaker made good) has: “saxe-blue spangles in the ornament that crowned her almost saxe-blue neatly waved hair”. [The middle classes never tinted their grey hair blue, mauve or pink. Saxe blue is grey-blue.] She eats a “canapé of prawns in aspic” and sits on a “striped period Regency couch”.

Her grandson Maurice drives off to visit his uncle’s deserted girlfriend, who lives in a downmarket house of multiple occupation: “a dirty mid-Victorian house with its peeling stucco and straggles of grimy Virginia creeper”. [What would it go for now?]

He is greeted by one of the lodgers: “She drew him into a little ill-lit hall and bent her long neck – yellow and grubby.” [Middle-class writers were always accusing girls of having dirty necks – but it was probably hard to keep clean when you had to share a bathroom.]

Sylvia’s room is barely furnished: “The walls were cream-distempered and dirty; someone had started to cover one of them with a cheap ‘modernistic’ wallpaper.” [Thirty years on, Cubism has been reduced to interior decoration.]

She quickly recovers: Her figure is emphasized by “her tight white sweater, and her hips seemed almost tyre-like beneath her tighter black skirt.”

A teacher who rather regrets she has become too “good” for her background adds one refined touch – beech leaves in a vase – and chews “very carefully with her front teeth”. She shudders at “the vulgarity, the terrible, clashing bright colours of the drawing-room at ‘The Laurels’”.

More here. And more nonconformists here.

Class in Angus Wilson

Hand-woven djibbah

In Such Darling Dodos, Angus Wilson writes about groups of people who are imprisoned together by money. Adult children get a small allowance. Even after the war (when most people had jobs), it’s acceptable for young women to live at home without studying or working. The idea is that they will meet a suitable young man and get married, but their parents have no spare money for the strenuous social life that would enable this. Things changed in the 60s. A bit.

The rock garden… looked so bare and pathetic in winter, but he anticipated with pleasure the masses of aubretia, crimson, lavender, blue, that would blaze there in May. (Only purple aubretia is permitted, and Upwards insist that it is “aubreta”.)

Here's the room that goes with this garden: “the Medici prints, the little silver bowls, the mauve net curtains, the shot-silk covers, the beaten copperware, the Chinese lanterns and Honesty in pewter mugs – it was all so pathetically genteel and arty.”

A spinster wears: “lucky charm bracelets and semi-precious necklaces”. Jingling or clanking jewellery was warned against by etiquette authorities.

“Dresses on Priscilla would always seem like hand-woven djibbahs.” A djibbah was what we’d call a kaftan (though the word was also used for a child’s overall). They became a uniform for progressive women like Priscilla who in the late 19th century refused on principle to wear corsets. They also became short-hand for a certain kind of woman: intellectual and fey. She might be a social reformer or a spiritualist.

Tony, an elderly conservative Catholic, visits his Oxford cousins: He entered that awful sitting-room with its Heal’s furniture, its depressingly sensible typewriter and long low bookcases… Hard little, bright-covered books full of facts, a dangerous array of so-called scientific knowledge that tried to treat man as a machine. Long, low bookcases were a marker for university lecturers. Penguin (orange) and Pelican (turquoise) paperbacks were full of the “illusory paradise of refrigerators for all”.

Priscilla has written to Tony to say that her husband is ill. Now she regrets it. The sort of wretched, hysterical outburst that one hopes so much will never happen, but which always does at these hateful, morbid times. According to her code, all expression of human emotion is hysterical or morbid.

Kitty visits her relative’s employers: “Kitty came downstairs to meet them, her fox fur and eye-veil resumed for the occasion.” The net eye-veil was part of her hat.

Margaret’s “dainty” room features: “Venetian glass swans and crocheted silk table mats”.

In another story, landlady Greta is out with her elderly boyfriend. He had told her so often that physical caresses in public were ‘just not done’… She no longer said ‘serviette’… She never went out now without gloves… but she also no longer blew into them when she took them off. She was jealous sometimes… but he told her not to be so suburban. Blowing into your tight leather gloves was a class marker: But did anybody really?

Here's poor Jacky Bast from Howard's End in the early 1900s: Her appearance was awesome. She seemed all strings and bell-pulls – ribbons, chains, bead necklaces that clinked and caught and a boa of azure feathers hung round her neck, with the ends uneven. Her throat was bare, wound with a double row of pearls, her arms were bare to the elbows, and might again be detected at the shoulder, through cheap lace. Her hat, which was flowery, resembled those punnets, covered with flannel, which we sowed with mustard and cress in our childhood, and which germinated here yes, and there no. She wore it on the back of her head. (She also "sees to" her hat by blowing on it.)