Just re-read Ballet Shoes as an adult

[heron98]

Someone answer me this - if they are so poor they can't even afford new clothes, why don't they get rid of the flipping cook and the maid? Why doesn't Garnie get a job instead of staying up all night stressing about money?

I've never read Ballet Shoes but love White Boots. Harriet's father was a bit clueless but a lot of that was Uncle William's fault for sending him crap to sell. And Lalla needed a smacked bottom!

Wages:

1915 weekly rent for a 4 bed house in Northampton 6 shillings a week, about one six of household income for lowest earners
30 shillings or over was about the average wage for a northern working class mining town (again, 1915), for males largely ages between 22-35
In Warrington, 1915, only 3 girls under the age of 14 were earning, of about 300 households surveyed.
In 1915 the poverty line is at about 24 shillings a week

Spoilers for old classic books? I've heard it all now! Not serious I think

Teaching at home in this way, in the absence of money for a governess or other private education, would be quite normal. Going with the ballet theme Margot Fonteyn shared a governess with another family in her early days of schooling.

I remember as children we thought Posy was dreadfully self centred and entitled about her dance training and 'great potential'. Her poor dance teacher and Posy's lack of concern for her. Not too dissimilar to the unpleasant Anna from NS's Ballet Shoes for Anna.

As children we used to think it wasn't all impossible for

Yes, Lalla was quite dreadful and hard to explain why having a shop was seen as not quite the thing.
Love the way the servants in the olden days took it on the chin and went without their wages to help the quality.
Would love to see Garnie's AIBU.

I didn't want to be any of the girls, though I'd have chosen Petrova at a push. Who'd want to be either of the others? Probably not the kinds of girl who were voluntarily reading a 50 year old book!

Re. wages, I think the idea is that acting work is unreliable and sporadic, so the actors get paid well when they've got it because they might be unemployed for months.

Also, just speculation, but I'm not sure in the early days of film whether there mustn't have been some sort of confusion as to how to calculate pay: theatre is easy, as the girls show, you get paid for as long as the run continues. But if you're paying someone for filming without knowing how successful the film will be it's probably hard to work out what they're worth.

I loved Ballet Shoes but A Painted Garden was my favourite. I always loved old films and A Painted Garden had all the usual Noel Streatfeild themes along with the story of the grumpy child of the family being discovered whilst on a family Californian holiday and cast in a film of A Secret Garden. Gemma and Sisters were favourites too but seem to be out of print.

I can't recall Ballet Shoes too well, but don't feel that there's been any spoilers!! Vaugue recollection only - recall White Boots even less.

Despite that the whole 'poor' thing was common enough in books wasn't it? So SO many books that were about a family becoming poor involved them having a housekeeper or at the very least a cook. I think there were even Enid Blyton books too (possibly the Faraway Tree books) that the family had to move because of Becoming Poor but still had a housekeeper. You find it in the Classics too (Pride and Predudice or possibly Sense and Sensibility, the terrible awfulness of the shockingly small house they have to move into that's actually sounds big).

There was definitely different definitions of poor depending on class. The higher the class the more was still had in their poor state, possibly rings true still to day in reality, just it's no a thing anymore to have 'a woman who comes in'.

Harriet's father was a bit clueless but a lot of that was Uncle William's fault for sending him crap to sell.

I can't help but think that a decent shopkeeper would have been trying to find a more reliable supplier than Uncle William. It shouldn't have taken one of the kids to point that out.

Agree Lalla was definitely a spoilt brat. But in her defence, her aunt had brought her up to believe she was Gods gift to ice skating.

For people wanting to explore the 'genteel poverty' aspect, can I suggest reading Agatha Christie's autobiography? It's a slightly later timeframe, although it does overlap. There is a lot of detail about what they could and couldn't afford, and what they couldn't do without!

Tallulah and Housewife, The Painted Garden is my best one too - I know bits by heart ...
"We can go ! We can all go ! A rich aunt's died that I never knew, and left me a thousand pounds !"

Clearly Garnie was ahead of her time. She was just trying to hang onto her enormous house in Chelsea until her great grandchildren could sell it on 2016 for 20 million.

Brilliant.

And yes, she owned the house but GUM owned all the contents.

I was reading about George Mallory's rather unexpected wife, and thinking along the same lines. A lot of posh men in that period were wandering off 'exploring' and basically doing stupid things while their female relatives were meant to sit home and hope for news. Ok, GUM seems to be being more academic, in an amateur geologist/palaeontologist kind of way, but he's basically part of that fad.

With the amounts of money Pauline and the others earn - they had to put part of it into savings, didn't they? Posie recites the law at Pauline when she suggests not putting all of her wages in the bank, because it's obviously been drummed into them, and it's not a house rule made up by Garnie, it's the law of the land.

So I suppose maybe there was recognition that those high wages should be ringfenced so they couldn't just be used to support a family. And people like poor Winifred must have been so fed up with it all. Now she was clearly less 'naice' in background than the Fossils, wasn't she?

Its well worth reading 'The Whicharts' which was a book Noel Streatfield wrote much earlier, and forms a lot of the basis for Ballet Shoes. In that, Rose is the long term mistress (8 years) of a character who buys her the house when she is 17, then dumps her later, but keeps appearing with other young women who he has got pregnant and who leave the babies with her.
Its not as good a book as Ballet Shoes, but you understand the desperation of Rose/Garnie to keep everything to please him if he comes back

Also, Streatfeild's autobiographical 'A Vicarage Family' is a good read and helpful in understanding the kind of 'genteel poverty' in most of her books and particularly Ballet Shoes.

Noel/'Vicky' is every awkward gawky middle-child in the Streatfeild canon - plus has to make do with threadbare clothes and never having as much as her richer friends.

Footle yes, you'd feel sorry for Peaseblossom if she weren't so foul most of the time.

Anyone interested in reading more fiction from women writers from the 20th century should check out Persephone books. They've republished books which were popular in their day but have fallen out of print. Not all by women writers, there's a mix. I've borrowed several from my local library. There are similar themes in some of them about poverty, gentility and social class and what women can and can't do.

I remember really enjoying the Painted Garden when I was a child - the idea of a child who isn't considered the most talented in the family becoming a film actor just seemed wonderful.

Every time I read The Painted Garden I always hoped they'd make a bit more fuss of Jane, or even say 'sorry we all always kept saying you were crap, you did a really good job there'. But no. Just worried about how it might put poor old Rachel's nose out of joint for once. Those parents were rubbish.

Ah, a NS thread

Ah, Sorrel !

Is the Painted Garden the one where one child's talent is "being a good sister"?

Love all her books but yes, they are very of their time! Particular soft spots for Ballet Shoes, The Painted Garden, Curtain Up, White Boots, Tennis Shoes, Thursday's Child and The Circus Is Coming.

I loved the 1975 adaptation and may have to watch it on YouTube today! The more recent BBC one was OK but should have been serialised and more detailed/close to the book. They made Winifred nasty which I hated!

BonusNewt I think that's Apple Bough.

Thanks Sorrel, I think I have combined Painted Garden and Apple Bough in my brain.

In Apple Bough, I don't think it's just 'being a good sister'. There's the bit where Myra's grandfather is trying to get across to her that she doesn't have to be only talented at music. My understanding of that is that her parents are ridiculously focussed on one kind of talent alone - they don't even realise that Wolfgang might be good at music because they don't like the kind of music he's trying to do - and the grandfather is trying to lend some balance.

I think talented and ultimately successful kids being brattish was one of the unusual things about NS's books at the time. Upper-class kids were supposed to achieve massive success without being seen to try, but the talented NS heroines/heroes (although they are usually girls!) have proper drive and ambition.

The genteel poverty stuff might also have been something that wasn't really said.

Peaseblossom is what a later, less posh, more practical Garnie might have done.
What is the line.. something like "Their mother was one of those gentle, spoiling sorts, and they might have turned out loathsome if Peaseblossom, their mother's old school friend, hadn't come along and said "Come along old bean, I'll give you a hand"" (help me out here Footle!)

Translation: Bee either made a good marriage or had family money or both. Peaseblossom (real name what, Joan? Mollie?) had neither. Peaseblossom ends up as mother's help to posher school friend - thank goodness Peaseblossom's family did manage to pay for the education where she met a posh school friend, otherwise she wouldn't have had the connections to stay in her class (although perhaps she might have had more opportunities and more fun doing something else - senior nursing?)

Going out to work or doing other stuff that would be beyond the pale for your class would have meant - even if you decided you didn't mind for yourself - no more contact with any family and friends, no marriage opportunities. You'd have to build your entire network yourself - but the "lower" class people probably wouldn't want to be connected to you, unless they were also estranged from their class in some way. It would have been incredibly isolating.

(BTW I absolutely LOVE NS's explanations of how families have servants without ever using the "s" word for middle/upper class family helpers. Is it Apple Bough with the man and woman who are described as "a fairy, ask them for anything and they make it happen"?)

This thread has made me want to reread all the NS books.

White Boots was always a favourite of mine, because I had a real thing about ice skating, when I was in my early teens - it was about the time when David Curry and then Robin Cousins were doing so well in competitive skating, and I yearned to be able to learn to skate (of course I would have been amazingly talented, and Robin would have taught me himself - and probably fallen for me too).

There does seem to be a theme of there being one 'difficult' child in each family - and the parents/guardians doing a poor job of treating the children equally.

Yes, and I think that's what makes them so appealing, isn't it? The idea that parents do play favourites and if you are feeling deeply irritated with your siblings it could well be because your turn is about to come.