Life After Betty: Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

With my apologies for not having finished a Betty by the Numbers for this week (we're having a party tonight!), I hope you'll seek out and immensely enjoy this wonderful happy-cupcake of a novel.

-Betty van den Betsy

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, by Winifred Watson

This is a wonderful book!  I just discovered it a year or so ago, and have probably read it four times since.  There’s also a very good, though very different, movie version.  Big caveat: the stinkin’ book carries the 1930s English lit stain of anti-Semitism.  Gosh, I hate that.  But it’s in about two or three sentences, so I excise them mentally and carry on with the otherwise-most delightful Cinderella story ever.

Guinevere Pettigrew is an Araminta at forty-ish, complete with the mouse-colored hair, but without the advantages an RDD provides.  She’s struggling to navigate London in the 1930s, and finding the going difficult for a dowdy spinster who’s not very good at her putative profession of governess-ing.  (She finds children frightening.)  A curate’s daughter, she was reared to strict standards of morality, humility and gentility.  Add to that twenty years of living in other people’s homes, at the mercy of her employers’ moods, children and household rules, and she’s gone from timid to chronically terrified; from modest to apologetically subservient.  Our story opens with Miss Pettigrew in desperate need of a job that will save her from the workhouse.  In search of that job, she finds adventure, friends and happiness.

 

undated photo of residents of an English workhouse.  They seem frequently to have been stuffed with children, which would have made them especially upsetting for Miss Pettigrew

An employement agency sends Miss P. to the home of Miss Delysia LaFosse (née Sarah Grubb), an actress and nightclub singer of surpassing beauty in need of a governess, despite that “Miss.”  Miss LaFosse has a more immediate problem – too many gentlemen friends about to collide – and despite her parsonical upbringing and belief in her own incompetence, Miss P. makes great strides in sorting out the various callers to beneficial effect.  Miss P. quickly realizes that life’s exigencies have made her much more open-minded and affectionate, and less sternly moral, than her parents and culture molded her to be.

Early in the day (sometime between 11:35am and 12:52pm; the chapters are titled according to the minutes they encapsulate), Miss P. decides “she was going to accept now everything that came along,” including a dry sherry.  She is quickly swept into Miss LaFosse’s gay and frivolous life, teetering on the edge of debauchery, and experiencing all sorts of exciting things she’s never known before, including furs, taxis, a nightclub and kindness.  Her quick wit and courage help her new friends out of several fixes, and she wins a beau of her own and a much, much better job than any she’s held before.  Sometime around 4:00am, the novel closes with a delicious and well-earned sense of happy-ever-after-ness.

 

Miss Pettigrew and friends attend a cocktail party that may have been quite like this one shown in the TV show Upstairs, Downstairs

It’s not just the marvelous Cinderella story that makes Miss Pettigrew such fun.  Listening in on Miss P.’s thoughts as she transforms herself from cringing, unloved drudge to brilliant social strategist and fierce guardian of her friends’ best interests is great fun – funny and uplifting.  Early in the book, “Miss Pettigrew cast a sternly disapproving eye about her, but behind her disapproval stirred a strange sensation of excitement.”   Close to the end, she’s thrown her upbringing to the wind:  “If the small voice of conscience did pipe up, Miss Pettigrew turned a wickedly deaf ear. ... She was out to enjoy herself as she had never enjoyed herself before, and all the sermons in the world wouldn’t change her course. ... Now she lived.  She was inside of things.  Now she took part.”

I like the movie less well, but still recommend it.  It makes two significant changes from the book:  first, it feels truer to its time period – the late 30s – by bringing WW II’s imminence into the story.  That helps put the gaiety of the society butterflies and Miss Pettigrew’s very different experience into a more realistic perspective.  The second dramatic change is a lousy one:  rather than show the camaraderie between women that the book emphasizes, the writer imbues one of the nicest secondary characters in the book with a vicious jealousy of Miss Pettigrew, and shows the two as rivals rather than supportive friends.  Pfui.

Brighton:  Miss La Fosse luxuriates in all the most garish parts of that sinful city; other characters visit; our heroine’s beau has clearly been there; our heroine, at 40, has never kissed a man.  “’The culmination of all true romance,’ said Miss Pettigrew sternly, ‘is marriage.  Unless the thought of marriage enters both partners’ heads, you may be sure there will be no permanent happiness.’”

Clothes:  a five-year old coat of a nondescript, ugly brown, not thick enough for a cold, drizzly November day in London; a silk and lace négligé; real silk underclothes; home-made woolen underclothes; black velvet evening dress with jade earrings and necklace; a fur coat; a “magnificent black evening wrap with a white fox collar;” gentlemen in evening dress and more.

Food:  not really a focus, but grapefruit, ham, eggs, toast and marmalade; various cocktails, including Miss P’s own pour of soda water with just a dash of sherry for color (“Why men waste money getting drunk on [whiskey], when they can get a really cheap palatable drink like lemon squash...!”); a nice cup of tea; a delicious dinner with unspecified soup, fish, roast and sweet; a “marvelous concoction” of “cream and fruit and nuts and ice-cream and a wonderful syrup.”

Incidentally, the author’s story is fascinating.  She was a secretary with time on her hands, reading at work, when she remarked to her sister and brother-in-law that she could write a better book than the library’s latest offering.  Her BIL told her to get on with it, and she wrote six novels, in three or four quite different styles, before giving up writing to run a household that included her husband, children and mother-in-law.  “You can’t write if you are never alone,” Ms. Watson explained to an interviewer.  Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is very available at my local library, and I would love to know what others (like you) think of it.

An Innocent Bride--1999

First the title. An Innocent Bride. Ho hum. A total throw-away. Harlequin clearly didn't know what to do with Betty Neels at this point and was trying to signal readers with semaphore flags, neon signs and traffic cones that this book wouldn't have anybody mucking about in Brighton. But it makes our heroine sound a simp...which she is not. No, the book should have been titled The Moss Rose or Aunt Thirza's Legacy or Love and Leukaemia...

Katrina Gibbs, 24 with masses of dark hair, is sprawling across the country road in all her splendid glory. A motorcyclist driving on the wrong side of the road (Horrid American? But I repeat myself...) has knocked her over and smashed her bike.
Enter the great socking Bentley.
Professor Simon Glenville, 'knocking 40' (39), haematologist at St. Aldrick's and rescuer of fair, young maidens happens upon her, plucks her up and carries her back to Rose Cottage where she lives with her aunt Miss Thirza Gibbs--a retired girl's school headmistress and a woman of prickly disposition and rigid principles who never heard a 'Ms.' in her life and would have given it a frigid stare if she had.
Katrina and Simon and Aunt Thirza get off to such a rough start that it's as though they, all three of them, were hapless British bicycles and Fate an ill-mannered American motorcycle.
When Aunt Thirza (an actual Hebrew name meaning pleasantness and delight...instead of ironclad and unchangeable) is referred to a doctor is it really any surprise that her condition needs the leading haematologist in the history of the British realm?
Naturally, she is going to die. And naturally, no one tells her so. Instead of telling the grown woman that she might die of lymphatic leukaemia at any time they tell her she has Anaemia--a universal catch-all disease that will mask the symptoms of her failing health without alarming her in any way. They don't send you to medical school for years on end to tell the naked truth, evidently.
This gives Katrina and Simon an excuse to meet again and for her to weep (again--the American motorcyclist was upsetting) all over his cloth hankies (which she promises to launder and give back).
Simon brings Aunt Thirza, whom he has decided he rather likes, a moss rose for her garden that is already in bud even though it isn't the season to transplant that sort of thing. Dear me. Plants and fatal diseases. If you're thinking of O. Henry's The Last Leaf, well then, so am I. But we don't have to wait until the last blossom withers on the bush for Aunt Thirza to shuffle off her mortal coil. She passes on in idyllic tranquility, possibly thinking that those iron pills were woefully inadequate and intending to pen a stern letter of rebuke to the head of the NHS.
Simon is off on a lecture tour and Katrina finds that during the funeral hubbub she misses his presence most. A head scratcher.
When he does finally find out he hares off to Rose Cottage in time for tears and mucked up lawn hankerchiefs (with attendant and inevitable promises of laundering). He has sensibly brought a meal from (prepare yourself for the best homehelp name ever) Mrs. Peach. He is unable to pin Katrina down on her future plans and as he leaves his parthian shot is to tell her not to marry a fortune hunter.
Fortune hunter. (Snort.) That would require a fortune at the very least, no? Katrina has a few hundred pounds, Rose Cottage, the extensive kitchen garden and...and a fat lot of good it does her. Aunt Thirza, though lovely enough to provide a home for the orphaned 12-year-old (a plane crash carried off the poor parents. Possibly the plane also carried a oily South American gigolo and a run-away Dutch wife needing to be offed for a future Neels novel?), did not exactly launch her wee chick out of the nest with bankable skills.
In a sensible manner, Katrina decides to become a field laborer by day and a respectable lady of leisure by late-afternoon. Aunt Thirza, mindful of proprieties, would have approved. Simon does not.
Coming upon Katrina while dropping Maureen (oh, have I not mentioned that bit of under-rock ooze? Just wait.) at the manor, he grasps one of her work-roughened hands and presents his findings. '...working on a farm, Katrina?...Grubbing potatoes, picking peas and strawberries?' Oh for the love of...What is he, Sherlock Holmes?
And now for Maureen--bright as a penny and twice as cheap. She is a doctor on his medical team--recently joined--and has sights set on Simon. Any actual meddling she does is fairly incidental. A wee spot of water muddying is all. But, in An Innocent Bride, we are privy to the Machinations of Maureen wherein the villainess plots to annex the dear doctor with false displays of keenness, sympathy, helplessness, charity, distress, unreliable cars and an unbelievable cluelessness about the world of public transport. Neither Simon nor Katrina are ever over-vexed by them (though Katrina does think that Maureen is a front-runner for the hand of Fair Simon due to his willingness to shuttle her about) but it is very entertaining to watch her try so hard.
Maureen meets Katrina (always the correct niece of Miss Thirza) running the bottle stall at the village fete. Of course Maureen wins something. 'I always win.' Well, dust off your cosmic irony, kitten. When this hits the fan, Katrina is going to get the most delightful case of schadenfreude ever.
In the mean time, Simon cooks up a plot. He has a little patient with leukaemia (not the same kind as Aunt Thirza) who needs a rest in the country and he also has Katrina desperately in need of agricultural-grade hand cream and a good manicure. As quick as Bob's your uncle he's got little Tracy (with mother Molly) living with Katrina all financed by the lightening fast and flexible bureaucracy of the NHS!
Seriously, she swallows it. Two birds, one stone.
Tracy gives Simon just the reason he needs to keep visiting. (He's always hiding behind cancer victims to do his courting but just go with it.) He does get her alone for a date at Stourhead and a spot of canoodling but this is a rarity.
Instead, the village grapevine pairs Maureen and Simon. 'But he needs a wife like me!' thinks Katrina. Will you look at that. Imagine leaving a dawning realization lying about where just anyone can trip over it...
Little Tracy is deemed 'well enough' to move out. Katrina finds a job as a part-time librarian/seller of home-grown produce. Things settle.
And then Simon tells her that he's in love with her and...shhhhhh, baby, baby, shhhhhhhh...he'd just like to drop in now and then. Shhhhhhh. 'No, don't say anything, just bear it in mind.'
Don't mess things up by thinking she should have set him straight right then and there. There's another 30 pages to go before the contract is fulfilled.
A fire at the manor more firmly roots Katrina's awesomeness and Maureen's deviousness in our imaginations.
A storm occurs in which Katrina is the teensiest bit weenie.
Simon carries her off to his parents' house (He has parents?!) where he introduces her as their future daughter-in-law.
Proposal. (Ahem. The bit about the cart and the horse applies, methinks.)
A rather nice wedding follows wherein she carries a bouquet of moss roses (awww, Aunt Thirza) and Maureen is banished to India.
The End.


Rating: As a whole this book is just somewhere in the middle. The best bits revolved around the horrid Maureen. It's as though La Neels is finally giving us chapter and verse on How Shallow, Awful Girl Nabs Rich Kind Doctor thus filling in the back-story on almost all Engaged RDD plots. Why would a nice well-to-do doctor get himself caught by the Vapid Undead? Refer to the Maureen template and footnotes.
Aunt Thirza's death is handled beautifully. When I die, I'd like to go that way.
The theme is also a winner. Katrina, brought up rigidly by a circumspect spinster, is bound by Aunt Thirza's formality to express her love in a sort of Remains of the Day repressed smolder.
So, I give it a Treacle Tart. It's not brilliant but it does have some unique touches.

Food: eggs, potted shrimps, rack of lamb, rhubarb fool (how can you turn down a rhubarb fool?), almond buscuits, farmhouse cake, orangeade, lemonade, bacon and egg pie, cheese straws, fish cakes, smoked salmon, tiny pancakes with chopped chicken, cold meat and salad, bad sherry, good wine, cucumber and orange salad.

Fashion: Dateless beige coat, jersey dress (!), his cashmere sweater (The Great Neels fails to sell me on the idea of our heroes in sweaters), cream and amber crepe, a positively life-saving rose-patterned frock.

Spinsterhood, Maiden Aunts and Bachelor Girls

Picture me, on my tip toes, treading a very fine line.

Betty Keira and I were both quite young when we married (She was 21...I was a mere 20 years old), so we had very short stints as bacheolor girls...so this doesn't apply directly to either of us. We are more like the cheerful Cockney cleaning ladies with half a dozen kids running around making us grey before our time...she requests to be thought of as the one who has a beehive hairdo and "smokes like a chimney", I am the one who wears "horrible slippers" with nicks cut out for my corns. (Neither of which is true, but now that you have that image stuck in your mind you will think more kindly of us - as the two who come in to do the "rough").

According to an article on Wikipedia(that source of all that is true...ish):

The British Magazine "The Ladies Pocketbook" in 1836 said this about the Origins of Spinsters ... "Our industrious and frugal forefathers made it a maxim, that a young woman should never be married until she had spun herself a set of body, bed, and table linen. From this custom, all unmarried women were called spinsters, a term which they still retain in law."
In both The Taming of the Shrew and Much Ado About Nothing, William Shakespeare referred to a contemporary saying that it was the fate of women who died unmarried to lead apes into hell. By the time of the British Regency, "ape leader" had become a slang term for "old maid". It is often used in that context in Regency romances and other literature set in that period...In Australia, parties are held for young single people to meet and socialize (particularly in the rural areas). These events are known as Bachelor and Spinster Balls or colloquially 'B and S Balls.' Balls in which women ask men to attend are known as Sadie Hawkins dances in the United States...Unpopped popcorn kernels have been dubbed "old maids" in popular slang, since just as unmarried women, spinsters and old maids traditionally who do not have children, they do not "pop."


So, here's my can o' worms:
If you were/are a twenty-something year old (the age of a Neels heroine)-
which would be more appealing to you?

a) marriage to a worthy, staid, and rather boring man (balding, with glasses).
b) a life of spinsterhood.
put another way -
a) Possible security.
b) Settling for nothing less than true love - and willing to go it alone if you don't find it..