1930s – Memoranda

What I’ve Been Reading: Non-fiction about Mid-20th Century England

'London's Lost Department Stores' by Tessa Boase

London’s Lost Department Stores: A Vanished World of Dazzle and Dreams by Tessa Boase was a short, engrossing history of the grand and not-quite-so-grand department stores of London. In the early 1900s, there were more than a hundred of these stores, offering an extraordinary range of specialised services and products. Galeries Lafayette was renowned for its Parisian fashions and realistic wax mannequins with real human hair arranged in chic tableaux in the windows; Kennards in Croydon had a rooftop zoo and miniature steam railway; Gamages “sold alligators, Scouts’ kits, magic tricks and motor accessories”; Army and Navy Stores had a 1000-page catalogue from which its members could “order anything from dinner gongs, to laxatives, to ear trumpets, trusses and hair restorer.”

This book contains lots of fascinating photos, maps and anecdotes, as well as a discussion of how the stores reflected societal changes – for example, when shop assistants rebelled against being forced to “live in” (that is, pay rent to the shop owners to live in cramped dormitories above the store where they worked) and went on strike for better working conditions. Many of the department stores closed down in the 1960s and 1970s, followed by further decline with the rise of shopping malls, online retail and, of course, the COVID pandemic. I worked as a teenager in the old Grace Bros store on Sydney’s Broadway (now closed down, gutted and turned into a Westfield Shopping Centre), when the cashiers still used a pneumatic tube system to transport cylinders of cash from the service counters to the cashiers department and we would be regularly herded into the decaying ballroom for staff motivational speeches, so this was a fun, nostalgic read for me.

'1950s Childhood' by Janet Shepherd and John Shepherd

1950s Childhood by Janet Shepherd and John Shepherd also covers a lot for such a short book. There are chapters on post-war family life, changes to the school system following the 1944 Butler Education Act, how child welfare was improved by the introduction of the NHS, and what children ate after rationing ended. I especially enjoyed the photos – children playing in the street with no worries about traffic, entertaining themselves with Meccano and Dinky toy trucks, reading Beano, and gazing enthralled at a black-and-white television screen the size of a shoebox.

'School Songs and Gymslips' by Marilyn Yurdan

School Songs and Gymslips: Grammar Schools in the 1950s and 1960s by Marilyn Yurdan was a “light-hearted investigation” prompted by the author’s memories of her education at Holton Park, a girls’ grammar school in Oxfordshire. It includes a foreword by then Home Secretary Theresa May, who attended the school in the 1970s. This was a gentle, nostalgic look at hideous school uniforms, pointless school rules, eccentric teachers and disgusting school dinners, as well as more enjoyable experiences outside school involving pop records, cinema, dancing and fashion.

'Don't Knock the Corners Off' by Caroline Glyn

Don’t Knock the Corners Off by Caroline Glyn is an even more vivid and interesting look at school life in the 1960s, because it was written by a fifteen-year-old girl in 1963. No ordinary schoolgirl, it must be said – this was written as she was preparing for her second exhibition of paintings, her first poem had been published at the age of seven, and oh, she was also the great granddaughter of Elinor Glyn. This is a clearly autobiographical novel, about a free-spirited, artistic girl who doesn’t fit into the rigid English school system. Antonia starts off at a tough state primary school where she’s bullied mercilessly; then she applies to a posh girls’ grammar school where she’s forced to do homework and follow nonsensical rules; then she moves to a slightly more relaxed co-ed grammar school where she drifts along fairly happily until the headmaster realises how clever she is and tries to force her to do some work. She spends a term at the Sorbonne, then ends up at an art school where she finally feels she belongs. The voice is authentic and lively, often funny and very clearly the work of a teenager, full of complaints about how dull and stupid the other students are and how awful the teachers are and how much she hates maths.

Caroline Glyn, as would be expected from this novel, led a far from conventional life. She had published five novels by the time she was 21, lived in a tiny houseboat near Cambridge, studied art in Paris, became a nun, moved to Australia and died alone at the age of 32 while scrubbing the convent floor. Her former boyfriend wrote:

“Caroline was far more than merely ‘unusual’, she was unique … She had a terrific sense of humour and sense of fun, and we laughed all the time. Of course she had deep neuroses which defy all analysis, as she well knew … her flame flickered so momentarily before she went away to the Other Regions in which she so steadfastly believed. God was as real to her as the dacquiri in the photo, and she absolutely believed in angels and archangels, and often talked about them. She was only half here, and she left so soon to go back to where she belonged.”

'The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother and Me' by Sofka Zinovieff

The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother and Me by Sofka Zinovieff was a fascinating family memoir by the granddaughter of Robert Heber-Percy, the Mad Boyfriend of Lord Berners. Lord Berners, who was immortalised in Nancy Mitford’s novels as Lord Merlin, was a composer, writer and painter who threw beautiful parties at Faringdon House, where a flock of dyed pigeons circled over gatherings of famous guests – the Mitfords, Evelyn Waugh, the Lygon family who were portrayed in Brideshead Revisited, Gertrude Stein, H.G Wells, Elsa Schiaparelli, Salvador Dali, the Sitwells, the Betjemans, Diaghilev. Lord Berners and the Mad Boy made an odd couple, as Robert was three decades younger, uneducated, violent, “a hothead who rode naked through the grounds”, but the household situation became even odder when Robert suddenly married his pregnant girlfriend Jennifer Fry and moved her in to Faringdon during the Second World War. Unsurprisingly, the marriage didn’t last and Jennifer and her daughter Victoria moved away, but Victoria’s daughter unexpectedly inherited Faringdon after her grandfather decided she was the only “sensible one” in the family. Although she has now sold the house, she did own it for decades, attempting to restore it after years of neglect and discovering some of the secrets of its famous inhabitants and guests. This book is beautifully written and illustrated, with intriguing anecdotes and photographs, and will appeal to fans of the Mitfords and Brideshead Revisited.

If you’ve enjoyed Memoranda’s Antonia Forest discussions …

If you’ve enjoyed the Antonia Forest discussions at Memoranda, you might also be interested in these posts about twentieth century children’s books.

'The Years of Grace', edited by Noel Streatfeild I was entertained and educated by The Years of Grace (1950), edited by Noel Streatfeild. As the jacket states,

“The Years of Grace is a book for growing-up girls who are too old for children’s books and are just beginning to read adult literature. It is a difficult age – difficult for parents and friends, but more difficult for the girls themselves. What are they going to do when they leave school? How should they dress? What is a good hobby? How can they make the right sort of friends? The problems are endless, and here in The Years of Grace is to be found the wisdom of many of our greatest writers and most distinguished people of our time.”

Noel Streatfeild must have realised that there was a lucrative market for this sort of thing, because she followed this up with Growing Up Gracefully in 1955. This guide to good manners for young people includes chapters on ‘Manners Abroad’, ‘When and When Not To Make A Fuss’ and ‘Don’t Drop That Brick or The Gentle Art of Avoiding Solecisms’ and it is even more amusing than her first etiquette guide.

'Friday's Tunnel' by John Verney

Readers who enjoy children’s adventure books may be interested in discussions about Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome, Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kästner and Friday’s Tunnel by John Verney.

'T.H. White: A Biography' by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Finally, here are some links to blog posts about the biographies of children’s writers T. H. White and Dodie Smith.

What I’ve Been Reading: Non-Fiction

At the end of last year, I resolved to blog more about books I’d enjoyed. Mmm, that’s been going well, hasn’t it? Anyway, I have been reading more this year, but for some reason, I’ve been underwhelmed by a lot of the fiction I’ve read. Fortunately, I’ve had more success with non-fiction books.

'The Disaster Artist' by Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell The most intriguing and entertaining book has definitely been The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside ‘The Room’, The Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made. I have never seen The Room, a cult favourite “revered for its inadequacy and its peerless ability to induce uncontrollable laughter”, although this collection of scenes gives some indication of its er, unique qualities. The Disaster Artist is narrated by Greg Sestero, a handsome young all-American guy who dreams of becoming a Hollywood star. At one of his acting classes, he meets Tommy Wiseau, who speaks largely incomprehensible sentences in a thick Eastern European accent and has a burning desire to be the next James Dean, despite being a very weird-looking middle-aged man with dyed black hair and no discernible acting talent. Tommy latches onto Greg like Tom Ripley attaching himself to Dickie Greenleaf, and the two become unlikely friends, roommates and (eventually) co-stars in a movie that Tommy decides to write, direct, produce and finance himself. The Disaster Artist describes the process of making a movie with no coherent plot, full of dialogue that no real person would ever speak, designed and shot according to Tommy’s bizarre and inept direction.

Interspersed with the film-making melodrama is an account of Greg and Tommy’s strange relationship, as Greg tries to figure out why Tommy is the way he is. Tommy gradually reveals something of his background, although the more we learn, the more confusing his story becomes. Is he suffering from PTSD caused by his experiences when escaping from behind the Iron Curtain? Did the near-fatal car accidents he claimed to have been involved in cause brain damage that has left him unable to remember and recite the simplest lines of dialogue (which he wrote himself)? Is he a deeply repressed and unhappy homosexual? Is he simply a refugee struggling to belong in a foreign land? At times, it seems Greg is being a bit mean, making fun of a man with such obvious problems – but Tommy is more often a bully than a victim, manipulating others to get his way, throwing massive tantrums, humiliating the young actress who plays his on-screen love interest, screaming homophobic abuse at the one crew member who calls out Tommy for his blatant lying. And Tommy, far from objecting to Greg’s account, has welcomed the attention the book and its recent movie adaptation have brought to him. He’s still friends with Greg – in fact, they’ve just made another movie together (in which Tommy plays an eccentric mortician, which seems more appropriate than the all-American hero he tried to portray in The Room). The Disaster Artist is a fascinating psychological study of a very strange man, but it’s also an interesting look at creativity, ambition and the American Dream.

'The Durrells of Corfu' by Michael Haag I also enjoyed The Durrells of Corfu by Michael Haag, about the family who produced two celebrated authors – Lawrence Durrell and his even more famous younger brother, Gerald Durrell. I was especially interested to read about the Durrells’ life before and after Corfu, which turned out to be far less amusing than Gerry implied in his books. Both parents and all the siblings were born in India, where the eldest daughter died of diphtheria, choking to death in her mother’s arms while four-year-old Larry watched. Then, when Gerry was still a toddler, their father died and their mother decided to ship the family ‘home’ to England, which proved to be cold and unwelcoming. Their subsequent escape to Corfu wasn’t a whim, as Gerry depicted in his books, but a desperate attempt by Larry to save his mother, who had fallen into alcoholism and a deep depression.

Fortunately, life improved somewhat in the sun. This book has lots of excerpts from the siblings’ books, letters and journals, as well as fascinating family photos, but the author also sorts out fiction from facts. For example, while Gerry portrayed all his tutors as bachelors, most of these men were actually husbands and fathers – in fact, Theodore’s daughter, Alexia, was Gerry’s best friend and both families hoped they’d get married (they didn’t). Larry himself was married to Nancy Myers, a beautiful English artist, and there are descriptions of visits from their famous bohemian friends, including Henry Miller, which caused local outrage due to naked sea-bathing and other scandalous goings-on. Sadly, war broke out in 1939 and the family’s carefree life was over. Gerry and his mother left for England immediately, but Larry, Nancy and their baby daughter ended up fleeing from the Nazis in an overcrowded boat to Egypt; Margo married a pilot and ended up in an Italian prisoner-of-war camp in Ethiopia, where she “gave birth by Caesarean section, without anaesthetic, to their first son”; and Leslie, having impregnated and abandoned their Greek maid, went on to a life of depravity. This book is a good introduction to the real story of this fascinating, unconventional family of mythmakers.

‘Aunts Up The Cross’ by Robin Dalton

“My great-aunt Juliet was knocked over and killed by a bus when she was eighty-five. The bus was travelling very slowly in the right direction and could hardly have been missed by anyone except Aunt Juliet, who must have been travelling fairly fast in the wrong direction.”

'Aunts Up The Cross' by Robin Dalton So begins this highly entertaining memoir about a rich and eccentric Sydney family in the 1920s and 1930s. The author’s many older relatives tend to die in unusual ways: Aunt Juliet’s husband was killed when he fell through the dining room floor and broke his neck; Uncle Spot fell off a ladder while attempting to change a light bulb; Uncle Luke tumbled backwards off his office chair; Aunt Eva ate too many green apples; Aunt Jan died “from blowing up a balloon”. Even a visiting plumber dies of a heart attack after catching sight of the author’s ravishing mother, who’d “emerged naked from her dressing room en route to take a bath”.

There are also a number of unbalanced servants, pets and permanent house-guests, as well as an interfering grandmother who lives downstairs with batty Aunt Juliet (before Juliet gets run over by the bus) and a doctor father with a gambling habit who manages to shoot his own knee off (by accident, in his consulting rooms, while seeing a patient). The author claims “it was the clash and mingling of the Irish [on her father’s side] and Jewish [on her mother’s side] temperaments which provided this climate of high dramatic comedy. The fact that the doors were open and everybody joined in was pure Australian.”

Aunts Up The Cross was first published in 1965, long after the author had moved to London, and it shows (the author is particularly scathing about Australian architecture and the state of Australian theatre). The edition I read, however, was the 2001 Penguin re-release, which includes dozens of fascinating photographs of the various aunts and uncles and grandparents, the author’s extremely good-looking parents and the author herself as a pretty and indulged only child. There are also photos of the family mansion in Kings Cross, which burned down during the Second World War and is now the site of Fitzroy Gardens and the El Alamein Fountain.

My only criticism would be that this book is so short, a mere two hundred pages. I’d have liked to have learned more about the author herself, who went to a day school with the Governor’s daughter, then a posh country boarding school before working for the U.S. Army office in Sydney during the war and getting engaged multiple times. However the author, now ninety-six, has a new memoir out entitled One Leg Over, apparently about the many men who fell in love with her over her long and eventful life, so I have that to look forward to.

‘Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead’ by Paula Byrne

I really enjoyed Mad World by Paula Byrne, which is an engrossing account of the people who inspired Evelyn Waugh’s novels – specifically, the troubled Lygon family of Madresfield Court, so similar to the Flyte family in Brideshead Revisited.

'Mad World' by Paula Byrne The true story of the Lygons turns out to be even more dramatic and tragic than that of their fictional counterparts. Lord Beauchamp, a very grand earl, didn’t merely choose to live away from England with his lover because he disliked his pious wife – he was forced into permanent exile in 1931 to evade arrest for “committing acts of gross homosexual indecency” with his servants. While aristocratic men of the time often got away with flouting this law, Lord Beauchamp had been flagrant in his disregard for social and legal conventions. This became a problem when it appeared one of his daughters, Lady Mary, might marry Prince George. The King took action and recruited Beauchamp’s brother-in-law, Bendor, the Duke of Westminster, who’d long resented Beauchamp:

“It seemed grotesquely unfair that his brother-in-law should have three sons, a loyal wife, a string of homosexual lovers, a glittering career and great standing in politics, while he himself had got through three wives without producing a single male heir … Bendor set about his task with great relish and ruthless dispatch.”

The Lygon family was torn apart, with most of the children taking their father’s side and refusing to forgive their mother for divorcing him. The girls, previously the most eligible debutantes of their time, were unable to make ‘good’ marriages, due to the scandal. Lady Mary, the most beautiful, eventually married a philandering Russian aristocrat, who left her penniless and battling mental illness, alcoholism and loneliness. The heir, Lord Elmley, married a much older woman and had no children; Hugh, the model for Sebastian Flyte, quickly lost his good looks and his money and spent the remainder of his short life in a drunken stupor, trying to block out the guilt and shame of his own homosexuality; only Lady Dorothy, portrayed as Cordelia Flyte, seemed to live a relatively happy and productive life, although she had her own brief and disastrous marriage.

The author says that she wrote this book because she believed “that Evelyn Waugh had been persistently misrepresented as a snob and a curmudgeonly misanthropist.” However, I finished this book disliking Waugh, as a person, even more than I already did, which I didn’t think was possible. He was a snob. He spent his life attaching himself to a series of rich, aristocratic families, happy to be their court jester if he got to stay in grand country houses for extended periods at their expense, especially if it also provided him with good writing fodder. From his earliest years, he was spiteful and nasty, bullying anyone he regarded as his inferior in either social status or intelligence. He may have possessed wit and humour, but it always had a sharp edge. There is a lot of description of his idiotic drunken escapades with friends, which we are meant to admire:

“…to an outsider, the banter and play that characterised Mad World [that is, life at Madresfield Court with the Lygon siblings] appear frivolous and jejune, but in reality the comedy was a means of survival and a manifestation of love.”

'Brideshead Revisited' by Evelyn Waugh Hmm. Waugh at least had some self-awareness and admitted, when proposing to the woman who would become his second wife, “I am restless and moody and misanthropic and lazy and have no money…” (It reminded me of Mr Mybug in Cold Comfort Farm trying to appear more interesting to Flora by hinting at his dark depths.) Perhaps the poor woman thought he was joking, but she agreed to marry him and then spent years living in the country, perpetually pregnant, looking after their huge brood of children while he caroused around London. Despite his fervent Roman Catholicism, he had no moral qualms about buying the services of prostitutes, including “little Arab girls of fifteen and sixteen, for ten francs each” in Morocco. Even his brief military service during the war was marked by impropriety, when he falsified the official record of his battalion’s withdrawal from Crete in 1941. He told his friend Nancy Mitford that his behaviour would have been even worse if he hadn’t been under the moral influence of the Church. The mind boggles.

Paula Byrne provides an interesting analysis of most of Waugh’s books, including Vile Bodies, A Handful of Dust and the Sword of Honour trilogy, but I found her detailed chapter on Brideshead Revisited the most fascinating. She examines his descriptions of Oxford, homosexuality, Roman Catholicism and aristocratic life, linking the major characters in the novel to their real-life counterparts. I think readers who love Waugh’s writing will find this book rewarding – but don’t expect to feel very fond of Waugh by the end of it.