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?

Absolutely. Sadly mine never really did, and dsis is still Golden Child.

I am guessing here but I imagine that the wages of servants were abominably low, relative to what they would be now. The positions would have been "all found" and they would have had unheated rooms and cheap food in these huge houses. And the wages themselves would have been a pitifully small amount of cash on top, almost pocket money.

I think that certain classes had no choice for a long time but to accept positions like this where at least they had a roof over their heads, or the alternative was destitution. After social changes of the early 20C, other opportunities opened up and people wouldn't put up with the same conditions and there was a huge deal about "the servant problem".

I am talking off the top of my head, does anyone know more about this and can expand or refute?

I would be interested in seeing a comparison in real terms between having servant(s) to do things like beat carpets and wash laundry and cook basic meals - in 1920; and the ways we can, mostly, afford not to dirty our hands too much on these tasks by using hoovers, washing machines, ready meals and takeaways. Of course we are using outrageously cheap labour too, we just can't see it because the food is grown and the machines are assembled in foreign countries.

SDTG - YY, but in her books, it's not so much that the parents realise they were wrong, is it? I mean, Garnie does seem to realise things are tough for Petrova. But in lots of the books, I don't think there's the slightest hint the parents knew they were playing favourites, even after the underdog child shines.

And that's what I found appealing. There's the sense your parents might be quite morally flawed, and their judgement of who's the golden child and who isn't, might be quite skewed.

maud - yes, I think probably you're right. It's not precisely what you're looking for, but Margaret Forster's books on her mother's family and the work they did, are quite good on this. I remember her describing the sheer amount of physical work it took to keep a smallish terraced house clean, to do the washing and to make meals, in about the same time these books are set. Just backbreaking.

As others have said - "noble genteel poverty" was a huge strand in the children's lit that I read. it was written in such a way that you were obviously supposed to sympathise with their "struggles" and so I did, I pitied them terribly; it took me quite a while to realise that I was "poorer" than they were in many ways, in terms of the things we put up with. I started imagining what the heroines of those books would say about our "common, poky little house" (a 4-bed semi with no cellar and no servants' quarters); what they would think of us eating at the kitchen table, and our own mother had prepared the food; we never got taxis, and walked quite long distances; of course we had hand-me-downs and only one pair of shoes, etc, which was actually rather middle class carefulness but was really laboured over in these sorts of books as being humiliating disasters. It really turned me off those books when it dawned on me one day how utterly those authors would have despised me and my family.

LadyCallandea Agatha Christie has a lot to say about genteel poverty in this era. There's a character in (I think) The Labours of Hercules who says :

“‘I’ve heard people say so often “I’d rather have flowers on a table than a meal without them.” But how many meals have those people ever missed? They don’t know what it is – nobody knows who hasn’t been through it – to be really hungry. Bread, you know, and a jar of meat paste, and a scrape of margarine. Day after day, and how one longs for a good plate of meat and two vegetables. And the shabbines. Darning one’s clothes and hoping it won’t show. And applying for jobs and always being told you’re too old. And then perhaps getting a job and after all one isn’t strong enough. One faints. And you’re back again.’”

its in other books written by women at the same time. Lots in Dorothy L Sayers.

Wages for actors are still quite high per hour/day/week, even for something relatively undemanding like being in the background of the opening scene of a soap. But then work is intermittent; it's not like you are likely to have another job lined up for the next week and one for the week after that.

Another thing to remember is that is was far easier to get acting work in those days because the competition was less: too many families would have considered acting inappropriate or beneath them. Getting into drama school was also a whole lot easier before it became the ambition of thousands.

Great thread. I find the inter-war period fascinating because it's in some ways so modern and in other ways almost unimaginably different from our era. My parents were born in the 30s. My father's parents were lower-to-middling middle class and had some domestic help. My mother's parents were working class and were the domestic help! (Not to my dad's family - that would have been weird.

My maternal grandfather was a gardener and worked in a succession of private houses. During the Depression after the Wall Street Crash, he was working for a Duke in one of his many country houses. One day the Duke (or more likely the estate manager/steward) announced that times were hard and cutbacks would have to be made all round, so his wages would be reduced by x shillings per week. No discussion, take it or leave it. He and my grandmother (and their two young children) just had to manage somehow.

We think the UK is a snobbish, class-bound society now, but it's nothing to what it was like back then. My family is Scottish, so possibly a bit less class-ridden than their English equivalents, and my mum and her sister benefited greatly from the excellent free Scottish state education they both got beyond minimum leaving age (they were just young enough to be able to get free secondary education after the 1944 Education Act came into force). My mum went into the civil service and her sister became a secretary. This came as a shock to my grandpa's employers, who had assumed his daughters would go into service. Brave new world after the war!

That Agatha Christie quotation is very relevant to genteel poverty. It isn't just that a certain class of woman feels more embarrassed about being poor; it is the fact that being and looking poor is de facto going to debar her from any job which someone of her background (with her CV/accent etc) can realistically hope to get.

Oh, and if you want to see what it was like for an upper class woman who left her class, read Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford. After she eloped in the 1930s to marry her distant cousin, Esmond Romilly (Churchill's nephew or poss. another distant cousin) to follow their Communist ideals they lived in Rotherhithe, then a very poor working class area. Tragedy hit when their baby daughter caught measles during a local epidemic. They had wrongly been advised that she was unlikely to get it because she was still being breastfed. Unfortunately Jessica, who had grown up in the country in exceptionally privileged circumstances, educated at home and not allowed to play with the local poor children, had never had measles herself so had no immunity to pass through her milk. The local health care staff had never come across an adult who had not had all the childhood illnesses so had not thought to ask about that. The baby died.

Oh, and while I remember, fascinating stuff about the Whicharts above. I haven't read that, but it reminded me of the life of E. Nesbit, a generation before Ballet Shoes. It's possible Noel Streafeild as a young woman knew about E. Nesbit's very scandalous family arrangements and other similar cases (talked about avidly, no doubt, but in hushed tones), since she was an actress in her 20s and moved in rather bohemian circles (for a vicar's daughter, anyway).

From Wikipedia: At eighteen, Nesbit met the bank clerk Hubert Bland in 1877. Seven months pregnant, she married Bland on 22 April 1880, though she did not immediately live with him, as Bland initially continued to live with his mother. Their marriage was a stormy one. Early on Nesbit discovered that another woman believed she was Hubert's fiancee and had also borne him a child. A more serious blow came later when she discovered that her good friend, Alice Hoatson, was pregnant with Hubert's child. She had previously agreed to adopt Hoatson's child and allow Hoatson to live with her as their housekeeper. After she discovered the truth, they quarrelled violently and she suggested that Hoatson and the baby should leave; her husband threatened to leave Edith if she disowned the baby and its mother. Hoatson remained with them as a housekeeper and secretary and became pregnant by Bland again 13 years later. Edith again adopted Hoatson's child.

Poor Edith. She was the main breadwinner. I suppose divorce was even more scandalous than accepting this awful emotional blackmail and breach of trust.

Ballet Shoes is set in the 1930s rather than 20s, surely. In Curtain Up/Theatre Shoes, Pauline and Posy are successful but still young, so well under 30, in the 1940s.

I wouldn't call the children upper class, more middle class. Any other fans of the Gemma and Sisters books?

Anyone interested in very early 20thc genteel poverty, or indeed household economics etc in general might be interested in Virginia Nicholson's Among the Bohemians. Which is primarily, as the title suggests, about bohemian lifestyles in the early 20thc, but is actually very good on the economics and social norms that the bohemians were (in some cases, self-deludingly, reliant on family money, in some cases virtually starving in garrets) trying to break out of.

Domestic labour was astonishingly cheap pretty much up until WWI - not having a servant or two (given their cheapness and the lack as yet of labour saving devices for cooking, cleaning, laundry etc, ready meals etc) would be akin to not having access to a fridge today in indicating a level of poverty.

Plus I think we overestimate how few basic domestic skills certain classes of girl would have had, because they would have been expected to be directing servants, rather than needing to know how to launder or cook themselves. And with all meals needing to be cooked from scratch with no Nigella and Jamie-style 10-minute easy pasta options,, no labour-saving devices and few possibilities for refrigeration/freezing etc,
cooking and cleaning for a large family would have needed experience and training. Neither of which nice, useless Garnie has. Clearly she was brought up to 'better things'.

I'm always appalled by bluff old jolly hockey sticks Peaseblossom in The Painted Garden - as someone said, she was clearly the less fortunate or marriageable schoolfriend who comes to help out and never leaves because she has nowhere to go. But the bit that freaks me out is that when she wins the lottery (or saving bonds?) she spends it on funding the family's trip to the US, and shares a cabin with the children on the ship, while their parents are happily off by themselves on the other side of the liner, and submits to being extra hired help for the whiny American aunt the whole time.

gaspode, that's awful.

housewife - I remember liking them. Though, I got one off ebay a while back (with a fantastically 70s cover!) and found it had aged a bit less well than the rest.

It was published in '36 (I looked it up), but at the end, Manoff is in the UK because he's fled (from Czechoslovakia, I think?), and I assume that's setting it somewhere in the 30s.

(Plus, I'd like to think that lovely velvet frock isn't a hideous drop-waited 20s job.)

I first read it as a teenager and thought the same then.

Did anybody read her Gemma series? Similar situation where a family loses income - the father loses his job due to illness - but it's set in the 50s (I think). The mother gets a part-time job in the hospital and the kids have to cut back on their hobbies (dancing classes etc). No servants.

The contrast between the two is fascinating.

Gemma was supposed to be in italics, not strikethrough. Doh.

I read all the Gemma books. I had the ones with the original covers. My favourite was when she was playing Juliet and fell in love with Romeo. At some point in most Streatfeild books, one child gets a swollen head! I need to dig through our bookcases now and go Streatfeild-searching.

Nothing useful to contribute but gosh this is a lovely thread All the Noel streatfeild books just the absolute best. A Painted Garden and Ballet Shoes just the best. And Apple Bough - anyone love that one too?

Btw I remember in one of the Gemma and Sisters books there was talk of Gemma having to go to a Secondary Modern with some shock. But of course it has to be seen in context, as with Garnie not working etc.

And when Gemma wants to act in the panto! I didn't get that when I first read it, though now I know what it means when a successful actor/actress disappears for a while and ends up in panto...

The Gemma books definitely have a different feel to them than NS's others. There was even a mention of Ann developing breasts, along with Gemma's crush on the boy actor. It's a bit like reading modernised Enid Blyton stories where the children have ten pounds pocket money instead of two shillings.

The Gemma books were published in 1968-69. They go on Top of the Pops at one point, don't they?

And Thursday's Child/Far to Go which were a bit Hetty Feather-ish.

they do go on Top of the Pops, because Robin is so good at SWIRLING tunes. I never knew what that meant though.

I think I mostly pictured swirling as pop versions of folk songs with different rhythms and key changes in and stuff.

Yes, a bit like the songs in Bagpuss? I just always though 'swirling' sounded a bit mad though. 'Quick Ann, Robin has SWIRLED Froggy went a'courting, come and sing it for us, with Gemma on the banjo!'