Dame Eleanor Hull

As a follow-up to my post about Sylvia Brown in Ballet Shoes, I thought I’d look at Rose Howard, the equivalent figure in The Whicharts, an earlier and more realistic book. Since I have this book only on Kindle, I don’t have page numbers for the following quotations. I thought we might get more detail about Rose’s life than Sylvia’s, as I remembered Rose being a more central character. However, although the book begins with Rose, it soon relegates her to the background, and she dies halfway through (oh, sorry, spoilers!).

First, Rose does volunteer work during the first World War: “She had lived in a trance since that November day when the Brigadier had left her. Nothing to get up for in the mornings. Nothing to do all day. She couldn’t even feel the babies needed her, she was their guardian, but Nannie was their life. Now with the war she was wanted again. A woman she knew asked her to help at an equipment office. Troops, it seemed, were camped everywhere, and there weren’t enough mattresses—palliasses they called them. Rose agreed at once. She understood sewing-machines, she didn’t mind scraping all the skin off her fingers tearing up ticking. She worked for hours at a stretch.”

When the money left her by the Brigadier shrinks, “Rose looked round for paid work, and instantly thought of munitions. Fabulous stories were abroad as to what women earned in munitions. ‘If others can do it, why not me?’ she thought. She got a job gauging in a fuse factory. The gaugers were not as well paid as the women who worked the lathes, but they sat for their work. As they worked in shifts of twelve hours, Rose knew her earning days would be short if she was expected to stand. She worked from seven in the morning until seven at night for a fortnight. Then reversed, and worked from seven at night till seven in the morning.”

After the war ends, obviously the munitions factory work does, as well. Rose visits the Brigadier’s law firm, where she is advised to turn her house into a boarding house: “In that time they planned to turn most of the house into furnished rooms. To herself assist Cook with the house work, instead of looking for a job outside.”

Years pass with few changes to the daily routine: “A solid round of housework and ordering meals for Rose.”

On a rare holiday, Rose takes her charges to Sussex, where they meet a family of boys holidaying with their mother. The two women “took to each other, and would sit happily sewing and chatting for hours together, until an outburst of cat-calls from the rocks would warn them that their respective families were returning, anxious to be fed.”

When the girls are in their teens, Rose becomes ill. The solicitor, “young Mr Bray” (in his 60s at least), has advice: sell the house. “Perhaps someone would convert it into flats. He suggested putting it in the market at once. Right away Rose could start looking for an inexpensive flat. Cheap to run. No need to take in boarders. Altogether more sensible. All the children old enough to work now. They wouldn’t earn much, but enough to help. Rose must not worry. There was no cause.”

Rose accompanies the younger two girls on a tour of the provinces. Daisy (the Posy-equivalent) reflects that “She liked the afternoons when Rose was well enough, and took them to explore the town, that was most amusing. Then after tea she had a rest. Even that wasn’t a bore, for Rose was reading the most exciting book to her.”

Similarly, “If Rose came with them, it wasn’t so bad, she brought a pack of cards, and they spent the evenings gambling for halfpennies.”

Sewing, childcare, housework, reading aloud, and the gruelling 12-hour shifts in the munitions factory during the war: such is Rose’s work life. I hope the early years as the Brigadier’s mistress were utter, utter blissikins (to quote Nancy Mitford), because the rest of it sounds pretty dreary.

Earlier this month, Moira at Clothes in Books did a marvelous post on Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes and Christmas carolers, in which she asked, “What does Sylvia do all day?”

Commenters took up the question, pointing out that she did the accounts and some light housework, ran a small business (taking in boarders), planned meals with Cook, and that much of what ladies of the 1930s spent their time on was correspondance. One wrote letters not just to friends and relatives, but conducted a lot of business that later was managed via telephone or, now, various online means: ordering food, coal, other household items; making appointments with dentists, doctors, accountants; paying the bills for all these. In the days when the post was delivered two or three times a day, it was perfectly possible to drop a note in the morning post placing an order and have it delivered no later than the next afternoon.

Nonetheless, being what I am, I returned to the text (any excuse to re-read Ballet Shoes, after all), and made a list of the things Sylvia Brown is said to spend her time on. Here it is, with the page numbers of my edition (NY: Random House, 1937):

12, marking new sheets with Nana
13, doing things for Pauline when allowed
34, read to the children before they went to bed
42, teaching the children
46, “She had just sat down to read the paper . . . . planning food for a lot of boarders as well as giving three children lessons is tiring”
48, hemming curtains
66, from 9-11, two hours of lessons for Posy while the “lady doctors” educate the older two
67, at noon either Sylvia or Nana take the children for a walk; Sylvia has lunch with the older two
138, “the hours she spent working out accounts”
159, administrivia related to getting Pauline a license as child actor: filling in a form, finding necessary documents
160, “Sylvia could not eat for fear the representative of the Education Office should look at her with scorn as one trying to make money out of an adopted child.”
187, “the house, and the boarders, and making accounts meet”; lessons again: “By now they really seemed to know just as much as she did, and they felt they were wasting time, and she knew they felt it.”
195-6, sewing dresses for the girls
241, “Sylvia was at her desk working” late at night
242, doing accounts
243, trying to sell the house
244-5, “I’m making an awful thing called an inventory. The house is mine, but what’s in it is Gum’s, and I’ve got to put down every single thing in every room.”
259, sewing camping gear and looking for suitable pillows and blankets
265, Sylvia (or Nana) takes Pauline to rehearsals for a pantomime
271, teaching Posy at home
274, “up to her eyes with work to do with selling the house”
277, Sylvia is also looking for a flat for five that isn’t too far from the Academy

The book is told from the point of view of the children, to whom adults are strange creatures. It’s clear to them what Madame and the other teachers at the Academy do all day, but harder to imagine the life Sylvia has when they aren’t present. As Moira points out, the household includes Cook, Nana, and a maid, Clara, but I imagine there is quite a lot of housework in a house that must have a dining room, drawing-room, and at least six bedrooms, by my count (day nursery, night nursery, Sylvia’s room, at least four rooms for the boarders; and if Cook and Clara live in, that’s two more, though they probably “do” their own rooms). Streatfeild says the house “had large rooms, and about six floors, including the basement” (8). I hope they send the laundry out!

The trouble with housework is that you can spend all day at it and never be very clear where the time went. You stripped the beds and put on clean sheets and then took in a delivery of something because Cook was cooking and Clara was doing the bathroom and Nana was with the children, and then you took the things to the kitchen and Cook asked you . . . and then it was lunch time . . . then you took the children for a walk before tea, and supervised homework, and then you read to them before bed and how did it get to be eight o’clock and those accounts not done yet?