Tag: Noel Streatfeild

If there’s some logic to the sequencing of the chapters in Growing Up Gracefully, I’ve yet to figure it out. Following Miss Laski’s philosophical discussion of the nature of eccentricity, we jump to Mr Martin Parson on the etiquette of letter-writing. He says a thank you letter should be written whenever you have been entertained, keeping in mind “they have to be sent whether you have enjoyed the hospitality or not”.

He acknowledges it can be difficult to compose other letters, such as letters of congratulation when someone gets engaged, married, receives some important award or has a baby. Especially the baby situation because:

“…what on earth is there to say? You haven’t seen the baby, you are not interested in what it weighs, and anyway, all babies look alike.”

Luckily new parents are too busy with their newborn to care much about what you write.

Mr Denzil Batchelor then explains ‘When and When Not to Make a Fuss’. This is complicated, because as Noel Streatfeild says in her introduction, “Most British people look upon making a fuss in public as the worst possible bad manners.” However, sometimes your conscience will demand you speak up. For example, imagine you are listening to a conversation and someone says something that you know is a lie. If the liar is a known fool and no one is likely to be harmed by the lie, it’s best to keep quiet. But what if the liar is maliciously spreading suspicion and hatred?

“Your conscience should force you to make a fuss whenever you hear an innocent person being traduced in his own absence, or your country attacked by somebody who just enjoys running down his own side – it’s surprising how many asses of that sort there are – or whenever you hear malicious mouths attack the religion you happen to believe in.”

I doubt I’d rush to the defence of my country or my (lack of) religious beliefs, although I’m sure lots of others would. In fact, a great deal of Twitter content seems to consist of this sort of fuss. However, Mr Batchelor does note that any fuss should be made immediately and you must keep your temper.

Apart from conversational outrages, it can also be appropriate to make a fuss over social interactions involving unfairness. For instance, if you’re at a café and the waitress brings you a cracked cup (“the surest collecting-place for the army of germs that beset our good health”), then “politely but firmly insist on being given another” cup. If you’re on a date at a restaurant, check the bill and if you’ve been overcharged, make a fuss! (“If your girl friend thinks it all very embarrassing, get another girl friend.”) And if you buy a “pair of nylons” and they ladder the first time you try to put them on – take them back to the shop and make a fuss!

However, if you’re the victim of an accident (for example, a waiter spills soup on you), you must smile sweetly and accept apologies with good grace. This is easier to do if you’re Australian, rather than British:

“I’m told the last time the Australian cricketers were in England, Lindsay Hassett, their captain, was the victim of just such an accident. The horrified waiter was profuse in his apologies and begged to be allowed to remove the cricketer’s coat and get it dried and pressed. ‘How kind of you,’ said Hassett, ‘but as a matter of fact the soup went over my trousers too.’ And without–well, he was a cricketer, let’s say without batting an eyelid–he removed his trousers also, revealing the most elegant pair of striped silk underpants. And in shirt and pants he sat down, without moving a muscle of his face, and finished his dinner as if nothing had happened.”

Lady Barnett, the author of ‘Presents – Giving and Receiving’ does not comment on Australian gift-giving habits, but does note how beautifully wrapped American parcels are, “as pretty as the gifts they enclose”. (This is absolutely true. Every American gift-giver I know does a superb and creative job of wrapping, with gorgeous paper and ribbons and hand-made labels. Do they teach this skill in American schools?) Lady Barnet feels that giving presents should be fun for both giver and receiver, whether at Christmas or birthdays or weddings, or just “to say ‘Thank you’ or to bring joy to a sick friend”. A present doesn’t need to be expensive, it simply needs to be thoughtful. And, of course, if you receive a gift, you need to write a thoughtful letter of thanks.

Mr Donald Wolfit then discusses ‘Manners in a Place of Entertainment’. He concedes that the British have not always been well-behaved at the theatre, particularly in Georgian and Victorian times:

“The quantity of liquor consumed, both before and during the performance, often led to high words, as a result David Garrick was eventually responsible for excluding the patrons and nobility from having seats on the stage at benefit performances. It is on record that on one occasion when playing King Lear, when he had laid the dead Cordelia on the stage in the final scene, he had to reprove a member of the party who thought having the actress’s body near him was an admirable opportunity to strike up an acquaintance with her, he even attempted to disarrange her corsage.”

Things were just as bad in America, during a performance of Macbeth:

“Macready records in his diary that asafoetida, vegetables, fruit and even the carcase of a dead sheep, were thrown at him from the auditorium.”

While dead sheep are no longer hazards of theatre-going, modern-day patrons light up pipes and cigars, unwrap crinkly chocolates, have coughing fits and (if they are school students forced to watch the classics on stage) engage in nudging and whispering and spit-ball fights. This is very bad manners.

In the final section of Growing Up Gracefully, we will learn all about well-mannered engagements and weddings.

Each chapter of Growing Up Gracefully has a short introduction by Noel Streatfeild and her introduction to ‘Manners Abroad’ contains the following sage advice for those travelling to Australia:

“I remember being surprised when, on my arrival at Menzies Hotel in Melbourne, the lift-boy took my book from under my arm, read the title, and said casually, ‘I’ll have a read of that when you’re through.’ But a very short time spent in Australia showed me his were not bad manners, as I had first supposed, but merely new manners with which I was not familiar. The boy was asserting in a friendly way that he might be a lift-boy, and I a guest in the hotel, but we had tastes in common.”

Miss Streatfeild also experienced some differences between British and American manners:

“One of the freedoms on which Americans most pride themselves, for which, in fact, many of their forebears left the lands of their birth to become Americans, is the right to speak their minds on any and every subject … We may sometimes think more guarded speech would be better manners, but Americans do not feel like that. They believe speaking out is good manners, and keeping your thoughts to yourself hypocrisy. Maybe they are right. But right or wrong, what we consider good manners when abroad remains unchanged, so whatever we may think of foreigners and their countries we must Keep Our Thoughts To Ourselves.”

Miss Virginia Graham then provides lots of useful hints for travelling abroad, which can often be challenging:

“A lot of irritating things will happen to you when you are overseas, and you will feel rather superior and will long to say to somebody that at home we manage these things much better…”

However, you must remember that foreigners don’t like hearing their countries criticised and can often understand English:

“So accept your sausageless continental breakfast with a smile, enquire, more as if you were seeking information than complaining, why it is that when you pull the plug nothing happens, tip with grace, wait quietly for those trains which never come.”

She explains how to manage tipping and taxis, how to clean your clothes and order breakfast in a hotel, how to manage cutlery in France and cheese in Holland and bathrooms in Italy, and how to avoid dropped bricks (“Although you are probably too young to remember much about the last war, it is quite a good thing to know which side the country you are in was on …”).

After that comes Mr Sidney Form’s ‘Guests and Hosts’. In her introduction, Miss Streatfeild takes a moment to rejoice in the evolution of manners since the war:

“A mother, as it might be your own, calling on a friend’s mother in calling-card days, had to leave three cards – one of her own and two of her husband’s. If it happened that the called-on was a widow, she only left two cards, one of her own and one of her husband’s. In any case, however many cards she left, she had to turn down the right-hand corners inwards, to show she had delivered the cards herself and not sent a servant with them. This turning down corners ritual went on even though the people on whom the mother called knew perfectly well there was either no servant, or the one that existed had far better things to do than going round delivering calling-cards…”

However, there are still difficulties to be overcome when hosting parties, says Mr Form. He thinks big parties are easier, because you can hold them outside your home, invite everyone you know, and let the caterers deal with the food, drink and clean-up. Small parties require skill when selecting the guest list (he advises you to find a celebrity and “implore him or her to attend”) and you might need to make it a cocktail or sherry party (if you have a lot of drab guests with nothing much in common, “clearly they won’t be an easy lot to get going at square-dancing”).

There are also challenges when guests stay overnight in your home, beginning with the state of your guest room (“where no member of the family has slept in them they do not know its horrors”). Then when the guests arrive, they will need to be entertained. Some hosts declare, ‘You must take us as you find us’, which is fine as long as the regular household routine is sufficiently organised and amusing. Others set up a strict and stressful activity schedule. Mr Fine believes that “perfect hosts are those who entertain tactfully, but not too much.” He also provides advice for house guests, including how to escape when necessary (fake an illness or arrange for a friend to telephone about an ‘emergency’).

Miss Marghanita Laski then discusses ‘How Eccentric May I Be?’

“By the time you come to read this book, the question is probably settled; you’re either going to accept the world as you find it or else to reject it – perhaps to make a better one and perhaps not. Both rebels and conformers are necessary. Both can be the salt of the earth, and both can be the most intolerable nuisances and bores.”

Rebellion is the natural state of young people, she believes, although she distinguishes between rebellion against the previous generation’s rules and true eccentricity, which is rare:

“A real eccentric is a person so much divorced from the social life around him or her that the opinion of others doesn’t matter at all. He directs his life entirely by his own thoughts and wishes which seldom happen in any way to coincide with the thoughts and wishes of other people. By the lights of the world, he is almost certainly a madman. He may be a mad genius, like Blake, or he may just be mad. It is to the highest degree improbable that this is the kind of eccentric you are.”

In fact, a lot of ‘rebellious’ teenagers are simply copying each other (‘Teddie-boys’ are again used as an example). But if you come into conflict with your parents about say, your religious or political opinions, she advises that you first determine whether you know you are absolutely right in your beliefs. If so, then it’s up to you to decide:

“Will you save your own conscience at the cost of outraging theirs, even if it’s only outraging some purely social value that they believe to be a matter of conscience? Or will you decide to conform outwardly rather than upset them, in which case your own conscience is in no danger at all, and you’re undoubtedly an unusually kind and mature young person?”

Often parents are concerned about your choice of friends, or your clothes, or whether you drink or swear or read certain books, because they worry it will lead you to become an unhappy adult, rejected by society as “immoral or criminal or grossly irresponsible”. Perhaps you are right or perhaps they are. Perhaps they refuse to compromise. Regardless, you have a right to your own views, but also a duty to ensure they are thoughtful views of your own, not copied from those you admire or put on to outrage those you dislike. Miss Laski concludes with her answer to the question of how eccentric you may be:

“As eccentric as you can reasonably manage without permanently damaging yourself or gratuitously hurting other people.”

As for the practicalities of this, perhaps they are dealt with in the next section, which includes a chapter on ‘When and When Not to Make a Fuss’.

In ‘Correct Dress’, Mr James Leasor explains how much “good manners in dress” have changed since the war. Wartime clothes rationing meant most people had to ‘make do and mend’; nighttime bombing raids popularised utilitarian garments such as the siren suit; coal rationing led to theatre-goers and diners wrapping themselves in rugs and blankets to keep warm. Still, some things remain the same:

“What, in today’s world, is correct dress? Though no one now dresses up for every occasion, the rule about dressing is unchanged. You wear as nearly as possible what is being worn by the rest of the party you are with.”

So, it is “atrocious manners” to, say, visit a foreign church wearing shorts, a strapless dress or no hat. It is also bad manners to wear slacks and a jersey to dinner at a friend’s house, unless you know your host will be wearing the same – just as it is bad manners to put on an evening frock if no one else is wearing one. The only time you can dress as “gaudy and grand as you like” is at a wedding. Young men should wear morning suits and grey top hats, while for women, “no hat is too gay or too amusing”.

Mr Leaver also makes the important point that your clothes should suit your personality. If you hate drawing attention to yourself, don’t wear outrageous clothes. In general, “wearing clothes as an attempt to look conspicuous is nearly always a sign of an inferiority complex” and he gives the example of gangs of Teddy boys and girls, who “dress up to try and kid themselves that they are braver than, in fact, they are.” However, he makes an exception for artists, who tend to wear extraordinary outfits – that’s simply how the creative temperament expresses itself. He gives the example of two art students he recently saw at an exhibition:

“He wore an orange pullover over velvet trousers, and he had a beard; she wore tartan trousers, and a short sheepskin coat.”

And they didn’t even realise what a sensation they were causing among onlookers! It all comes down to self-confidence:

“I sometimes think that the superb sang froid of a cat is due to its fur. Of course other animals have fur, but few wear it with such an air as does a cat. It is soft, usually a beautiful colour, and always a divine fit. All cats feel, I think, slightly superior to humans, and this may be based on the certainty that they are always perfectly turned out for every occasion.”

I thought Growing Up Gracefully had already covered polite conversation, but Miss Emily Hahn now contributes a chapter called ‘Conversations’, all about how young people can manage when they’re forced to talk to boring grown-ups. She reminds the young that older people are often not as confident as they seem and can be very sensitive. So don’t, for example, discuss their age or weight: “A remark like ‘I saw a woman yesterday who was even fatter than you’ does not go down well.” Try not to look at your watch or the door when they reminisce about the olden days. If stuck for conversational topics, talk about sport, the weather or the family. And remember, “truth isn’t always the first consideration in social intercourse.”

Miss Caroline Ball then provides advice on ‘Manners at Work’, beginning with how to apply to a job. A good letter of application is vital:

“Some employers judge candidates on their handwriting, style of letter, notepaper and neatness of folding it, quite as much as they do on scholastic achievements … Avoid scented notepaper … If you send a typewritten application, it is a good idea to enclose a specimen of your handwriting. It can take the form of a postscript to the effect: ‘I am adding this so that you may see what my handwriting is like.’ Stamps should be stuck on straight … Special note to girl applicants: don’t leave lipstick on the back of the envelope when you lick the flap!”

Miss Ball then gives detailed advice for the job interview – for example, “don’t even think of lighting a cigarette or producing a powder-puff.” Of course, clothes require careful consideration. Girls should avoid huge earrings and gaudy make-up; boys should resist the urge to wear “loud check sports jackets, flashy pullovers, wild ties and even wilder socks!” Instead, Miss Ball recommends the three Ns: “Nice. Natural. Neat.”

This is followed by hints for starting your first job, such as being pleasant and responsive, turning up on time, not resenting chores such as “carrying round teacups”, and not “sitting with your eyes riveted to the clock from five o’clock onwards”.

Presumably once the young person has been employed for a while, they will be able to afford to travel. Then they should consult the next section, which includes advice on ‘Manners Abroad.’