Before Lunch by Angela Thirkell (and hats again)

Before Lunch by Angela Thirkell

published 1939

 

This was, I believe the last of Thirkell’s books to appear before WW2 broke out: she most certainly carried on writing her light novels, but they became Home Front books. Is it a little darker, does she reflect that war is coming? Perhaps, but it is still a very funny book, with no foreboding that all their lives will soon be turned over. It is full of great lines, excellent conversations and beautifully portrayed social events.

As a good champagne Bolshevik I ought to despise Thirkell, with her elitism, class consciousness and snobbery, but I let her off for entertainment value, although I can’t read too much of her in one go.

There never seems any reason to go over the plot – several families, some young people who might be looking for love, dinner parties, an agricultural show, a lot about cows.  Some of the characters from August Folly feature – there is always crossover in her work, and there are people, mostly glimpsed in the distance, who are from other books.

The key families are the Middletons, the Stoners, and Lord and Lady Bond. Mr Middleton is no villain, but is horribly, recognizably awful. He talks like this:

‘We shall talk as man to man with old Margett, talk racy of the soil, and then to tramp, burning the long miles beneath our feet, over to Worsted, by the ruins of Beliers Abbey, to Skeynes Agnes and so home, talking as we go…The whole soul of England abroad on the hills today.’

His wife and his business partner both put up with him and actually revere him, and this is hard to believe because he is so annoying.

This morning he was dressed in a blue shirt, a kind of shooting jacket in large checks with pockets capacious enough for a poacher, orange tawny plus fours, canvas gaiters and heavy nailed shoes. It is true that no gentleman farmer off or even on the stage ever wore so preposterous an outfit or wore it so unconsciously, but to go about looking like an eccentric gave Mr. Middleton  unalloyed pleasure..

sporting and country gents

 

A surprisingly-modern touch: Lady Bond has a weekend guest who has to have special starch-free bread, and there is great difficulty obtaining it. All very familiar to a gluten-free age.

Lady B is a choice character, I liked this:

Lady Bond in a useful coat and skirt and wearing a useful felt hat was installed on a sofa that had belonged to Pauline Borghese, pouring out tea.

But come  Sunday, and church, and  her hat is a different matter:

Lady Bond's hat was all that Daphne had hoped. A massive erection of brown velvet crowned with the produce of field, flood and grove, it was perched high on its wearer's head with fine disregard of fashion. Lady Bond, whose mother was Scotch, had been brought up in the best tradition of Edinburgh hats, a tradition which dies hard and still dazzles the rash beholder's eye at afternoon concerts in the Usher Hall, and always got her hats from the same shop in Prince's Street. Mrs. Middleton maintained that she had identified on Lady Bond's Coronation year hat a lobster, two hares' claws, a pineapple, a large bunch of parma violets and a fox's mask and though no one believed her, everyone admitted that she had the root of the matter in her.

 

A nice selection of possibles here I thought.

Lady Bond bullies Lord Bond, and there is an excellent section where he waits till she goes away for a few days before inviting some people over for a harmless musical evening:

“But you needn’t mention it to my wife” said Lord Bond anxiously.

"Jolly good idea," CW said. "Make it Wednesday and I'll run down for dinner."

"That's right. We'll be four then," said Lord Bond, feeling like Guy Fawkes.

There is this robust view from the young man above, whose first names are Cedric Wayland:

“schools aren't what they were. In my father's time a boy with a name like that would have been persecuted till he hanged himself or was taken away and sent to an agricultural college, but no one minded it a bit at [prep school] They thought it was pretty foul of my people and I was always called C.W. And of course at Eton nothing matters."

In the end, most of the plotlines work out – one has a melancholy ending, and there is another where modern sensibilities are somewhat put out. (Age gaps, plus someone switching their affections rather easily from one generation to another.)

The book is a classic Thirkell comfort read.

She very much doesn’t describe what any of the young people are wearing: the top picture shows fashions of 1938, though these are very Parisian, and probably hadn’t reached Worsted and Winter Overcotes in the English shires.

Picture from Brycelands of London.