----- Original Message ----- From: "Barbara Dryden" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, November 10, 2004 8:26 AM Subject: Re: [GO] No boats on Bannermere
> Rosamond, degraded? Even Maidlin works as a waitress at one point. > > Tig wrote > >Their mother takes up a trade - and a very menial one (judging by the > >standards of the period when serving in a teashop can be seen as the > >ultimate degradation) and not only doesn't bat an eyelid but finds it fun. > I'm not sure being a waitress was still in the 'common little shopgirl with painted nails' class in the 1950s. Mrs M runs her own business (always far more respectable than being an employee. Indeed I have a GOP annual for 1926 which recommends running a teashop as a genteel occupation) and working in canteens was exactly the sort of warwork middle class women often did. Plus it is stressed that the teashop is really for pin-money (given that Mr M doesn't send any maintenance, and she hasn't worked for several years prior to the book, I always wonder where her income does come from). I know Joey is so horrifed at the idea of Carla working as a waitress that she insists she come to work as a nanny but we never find out Carla's view on this (though since she never appears at Freudesheim, I think we can guess !). The Bannermere books are written around the same time as Mollie Chappell's Sugar and Spice in which running a teashop is perfectly respectable. Indeed my father would have been an exact contemporary of Bill at Oxford and came from an identical background (single parent scholarship boy) and it was there his met my mother, then working as a waitress and also from a fairly conventional middle class background (private school ). Both my grandmothers were terrific old-school snobs but I don't think wither of them objected to my mother's lowly occupation (both of them having had to do some odd things themselves as widows often do) Nicky -- ________________________________________ Girlsown mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] For self-administration and access to archives see http://home.it.net.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/girlsown For FAQs see http://www.club-web.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/girlsown/faq-0.htm
