Mrs Brown of Hounslow

On the eve after my nan's remembered birthday I learnt the origin of Mrs Brown. The person whom I assumed was fictional turned out not to be. The fact that she loved to shop was not however. She was always shopping, food shopping. I wish I could remember what she bought, or if she had a basket on her arm and a gas mask, in its carrying case, on the other, but all I recall is that these were morning, not bedtime, stories. The curtains had been opened, daylight was streaming in. Downstairs, Pop would be making the first cup of tea, and I would be sitting next to Nan, pillows propped up behind me, in their bed: Mrs Brown was dressed and going to the shops. Mrs Brown had a list.
In spite of my patchy memories, I've always thought of Mrs Brown with a rose-tinged fondness. I've tried before to write of her, but found I couldn't. She morphed into something else, someone else entirely, a Jane Marple crossed with a woman showing signs of dementia. She was not Nan's Mrs Brown, nor mine as I remembered her.
But Mrs Brown, I discovered that April eve, was not Nan's either she belonged to Hounslow. A by-product of the Phoney War (in that it's how she came to be known in Hounslow and outside it), that strange eight-month period at the start of World War II where Britain was poised for a bombardment which didn't materialise. Government restrictions, however, were imposed. Movement was controlled, freedoms were limited. Theatres, cinemas, and other recreations were shut. Black-out curtains were made and each night secured in place. There was panic, there were queues. There was conscription for war work. Any of it sound familiar? At the time of listening, it echoed modern day, except the enemy we faced was invisible whereas theirs had gone quiet.
This inactivity on the Western Front was known by other names. Winston Churchill referred to it as the Twilight War, the press as the Sitting War, the Germans the Armchair War and the French the Funny War as the stalemate in Western Europe continued. The Home Front was braced but restlessness grew as nothing happened. People complained...of...the BBC: what they considered entertainment the nation did not, and shopping for food: women war workers struggled to buy what they needed. Again, here were echoes from the past to the present day.
And here is where for me it got interesting. For here Mrs Brown entered. Mrs Brown and her volunteer shoppers. She was found (by a BBC Radio Four broadcast) in a newspaper 'Phone up Mrs Brown' and the shopping will be done for you. Ration Books collected, items purchased and delivered. The scheme highlighted perhaps to facilitate something similar in other regions. It was a mere footnote, a briefest of radio mentions, but enough for me to make the connection (or maybe the leap) between Nan's Mrs Brown and Mrs Brown of Hounslow.
There was no description given of Mrs Brown of H. and I have no memory of any my nan gave me of hers, if indeed she ever gave one. Little girls are often quite content with whatever image of an 'old' lady they've conjured up: in my experience she's usually white-haired and wears a cardigan.
I had therefore nothing much to go on other than my wanting it to be. Why else would this Mrs Brown put in an appearance on the day after what would have been Nan's 96^th birthday if it wasn't for this reason? And what's more I hadn't been forewarned; it was a surprise attack. No, not a very sensible approach you might think, but sense did kick in. I attempted further research, though to be honest I didn't really know where to start, but the majority of my searches returned results with Mrs Brown's Boys. And my Mrs Brown is definitely not her!
Next I tried relatives. But neither my mum or my uncle had heard of her – Nan's Mrs Brown or Mrs Brown of H. The Mrs Brown stories weren't told to them when they were small. My nan, according to my mum, didn't speak much (to her) of the war years or of her childhood, but she talked to me of working in a munitions factory and for an elder brother in the cinemas he managed, and of walking home from the theatre under black-out conditions.
The conclusion we've drawn is that the bond between grandparent and grandchild is just different. Mrs Brown was for me, me alone.

Picture credit: Rationing Notice, October 1939 (source: flashbak.com).

Written April 2020.

To Longbourn

With my mind still exploding and giving birth to all kinds of ideas, some fanciful, some intriguing, some ponderous; in short still reeling from the exhortation of Virginia Woolf, and driven to recall Lamb's essays and his child-friendly rendering of Shakespeare's tales, and wishing, too, I owned a copy of Jane Eyre, I instead selected from the shelf a hardback edition of Pride and Prejudice that was given me circa 2003 by my late maternal grandparents. I know it must have been then because this particular edition was printed in collaboration with The Daily Express; you could claim it free if a copy of the paper was purchased. The title and author are in gold lettering and the front cover illustration, which I'm informed is the property of the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh (the title of the portrait and the artist unmentioned), is of a well-to-do, handsome gentleman, who I can only presume is meant to represent Mr Darcy.
I wondered anew at this: why Mr Darcy? why not a woman representing Elizabeth Bennet? Is this a truth being universally acknowledged that a woman writes of man and therefore marriage? Being a more modern edition I think they could have revised that angle, as while it's a very fetching portrait – with fine eyes and an unsmiling but far from haughty expression - it has at times prevented one from following through on the impulse to read. Because isn't it Elizabeth that is the more interesting, the more captivating? Isn't it she at the heart of the story? Isn't it to her character we look to, even if she is at times headstrong and prejudiced towards one person over another? Isn't it her determination we admire? Elizabeth. Eliza. Lizzy.
Why not an illustration resembling Longbourn instead? As surely then questions such as this wouldn't arise. Why not a plain cover? The name Jane Austen, and indeed the very title, requires no other embellishment, not if it only serves to confuse and then distils the messages the text contains.
It seemed Mrs Woolf was still provoking in me all kinds of related and unrelated thoughts.
Not, I admit, all of them sensible, or just. But thoughts I find have such a random nature that often at times it's hard to keep up with them, or explain them, if you attempt it, in a language that others might understand.
Mr Darcy was then the problem: for being Elizabeth's focal point, he has become that too for the readers and of the novel itself. The women readers, I should hasten to add; and so we women have, in a sense, reduced the work of a woman author to a man.
We constantly make these errors in regards to our own sex.
It took a man - the excellent Andrew Davies – to adapt it for the BBC, with a woman's touch of course, but it became then, as it's remembered now, about Mr Darcy and that wet shirt scene, and the female blushes that followed, and still follow. Women are just as good (or just as bad) at reducing everything to sex, and why not, women say, men do.
What impressed upon me more (and I was fourteen, almost fifteen at the time, not far off Lydia's age) was how the characters were portrayed, because it's to them I now refer whenever I read the novel. I hear in my head the shrill tones of Alison Steadman playing Mrs Bennet; and see David Bamber, with his nervous sweat and gestures, as the tiresome Mr Collins.
The later film with Keira Knightly and other big names was, for me, a disappointment, for it did not epitomise anything that I had come to love. Its one saving grace was the superb soundtrack by Dario Marianelli. That was all. The film was probably truer to the maturity of the person playing the parts, and yet somehow it was less believable. I don't know why that should be so, but it was. Perhaps you're always tainted by what you see first? The BBC enhanced, the film diminished.
It's impossible to do any work, a work of fiction or of non-fiction, or an adaptation, any justice in 700 or so words, let alone put or answer all the questions that might have arisen, or parade the notes and thoughts that have run through one's mind like Lydia Bennet at a ball.

Picture credit: West Farms, the T.H. Faile Esq. Estate, David Johnson (source: WikiArt).

Written April 2020, in lock-down.

Two Rooms in Which to Work

The third week of the lock down and all unread books waiting to be read had been read. I turned to the modest bookcase where the read, the kept, the given, the bought were shelved, mostly alphabetically but not all, as really I think biographies of writers should sit next to their published works. It is not by any means an extensive collection: just the three shelves, which at the time of writing had space still; a third of the bottom shelf to be exact.
My eye, on this occasion, strayed to W, to the one Wells and the two Woolfs. What was I in the mood for? Fiction or non-fiction? A history, a holiday, a room? My mind desired exercise and not escape which made A Room of One's Own, first read in April 2019, the natural, the perfect choice. Usually I wouldn't revisit so soon, but in a national emergency where a one bed, one bath flat was now my world it seemed apt.
I set to work, my door locked from within; there would be no interruptions, for even in normal times my rooms are closed to traffic, passing or invited, i.e. guests of any sort, on any business are unwelcome. The two rooms in which I work are my own; mine alone. And so it was in one of these, the sole use sitting room as against the common, that I started at the place where in my view you should always start, even if it is a second or an umpteenth reading: at the beginning.
Outside was all light and colour, quiet broken by sirens. A Good Friday, and there was nothing Good about it, except the profusion of thought that was soon to be released by Virginia Woolf's lecture on 'Women and Fiction'. With a notepad and pencil close to hand, just in case you understand I was taken by the urge to scribble I turned to the first page where Woolf describes how she sat down on the banks of the river to think about the subject matter and what she could say of them, a five and a seven letter word. I, however, cannot read of the banks of a river without thinking about Lewis Carroll's Alice, for there, although she was tired, all her adventures began.
Instead, however, of chasing a white rabbit down a hole and along a corridor, I chased a Woolf, in a grey t-shirt and black yoga pants, to the British Museum and the Elizabethan age, where like her I found myself disgruntled by the absence, on her say-so, of women in the history books. Indeed, anywhere. Where was she? The she that stood behind men. Countless men, of all descriptions. Oh, in Shakespeare, yes, but here I disagreed. For although his women 'do not seem wanting in personality and character', was he not when he was writing these parts thinking of the men who would play them? I do not doubt that Shakespeare knew women, but were they not in his plays merely representative of the sex, based on his deductions of them, from his relations with them as a man? Which is not to say that the man to woman relationship is unimportant, but can it really tell women anything of what it is to be a woman? Speak as a woman to a woman?
I don't know what Woolf would say to that; actually, yes, I do. She would opine that if men hadn't written women into their fiction – and painted them untrue - they would have been as insignificant on the page as they were in life. Instead of which, 'some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips.' Does it matter then if in real life this was not how it was? My response to my own question would be that: men prefer women of the imagination, and so it presents, as it still does now, two problems: one, it feeds men expectations and asks women to fulfil or succeed these, and two, it gives men the notion they have encountered a flesh-and-blood woman, when the fact remains she is a fiction, written by a man, who has professed to understand when he does not, he cannot.
Here, I feel Woolf would disagree, with me this time, for she would in the case of Shakespeare say he was androgynous; that is, he 'used both sides of his mind equally.' I chose not to counter her statement, for she has put more thought (and more research) into this argument than I have, that I have in fact been able to, with no recourse to a physical library as opposed to the virtual, but it occurred to me I know of only two, possibly three (only one contemporary), who could speak, could write as male and female in equal measure.

Picture Credit: Green Room, 1997, Jacek Yerka (source: WikiArt).

Written April 2020.

The Shelf

Much has changed since I was a frolicking Wordsworthian three year old – two years younger than Wordsworth's five – for by the time I was five I couldn't have frolicked so freely naked as five was the age to don a white shirt, a grey skirt, a grey and striped tie and a green cardigan. But before that I enjoyed being naked out of doors. I had no shame, literally. I played naked (with my older next door neighbours) in the front and the back garden; I nakedly splashed in open air public pools; I made new little friends on holiday naked or at least topless, though they might stay dressed. It was just a body and I liked being free of encumbrances. I had my own ideas and cavorting naked, in safe places, was one.
I can't say that it was a more innocent time because I don't know that it was. I can't say that it wasn't frowned upon because I don't know that it wasn't. I can't say that I remember it, because my memories come from pictorial evidence, at which I'm always, I confess, a little shocked, not at them being taken, but at my innocence and comfortableness in all my surroundings. I can't even say that I remember that sensation of comfortableness because I don't and have long felt distinctly ill at ease with the naked body, my own, revealed in all its entirety, and sometimes another's if it's paraded in front of me.
I don't dislike the body. I admire what artists – the sketchers, the painters, the sculptors - see in it and take from it; I admire how poets and writers speak on the subject of flesh, describe form, but I don't admire or desire the flesh itself. The body to me is a tool, a fine piece of machinery, which due to its many parts needs to be looked after. The attractiveness of it is therefore neither here or there. But if I really thought that then I guess I still wouldn't care. I would still be frolicking nude.
So, what changes that relationship? Awareness. Mental development, and way before the physical occurs. When the emotions engage and the comparisons to others begin to be made. When the shadow you were once fascinated by and played with becomes your shadow, just as the mirror image turned out to be you and not somebody behind it.
Such naked abandon was only a stage, a stage pre school, before the serious stuff of life commenced. It came, it went.
Though womanhood has never done much for my sense of self. What I have is mine and I wouldn't alter it, but...there will always be that but. (But then there will always be a but in everything else as well.) Because how you look is important, if not to you, then to who you might meet, and so it's for them you think. Although I can't say I make much effort there either, not now. I have passed beyond, now, that stage. But there was a time when... (a fatal beginning to a sentence if ever there was one). No; why rehash all that? I was never a woman of fashion, and I don't intend in my forties to start. I do not need to prove 'I've still got it!' because I don't think I ever really had it.
Some people are just decorative, some people have brains and beauty. I'm not sure what god provided me with, but the body was at least, if treated well, functional. Though you could argue I haven't put it to good use, not what a god of biblical or possibly even Darwinian times would have intended. I've never felt the inclination to marry or rear a family of my own. And I've not had the natural energy to carve out a career, a career to be proud of and fulfilled by, for myself. It would have been better if I had been purely decorative, for as the world has moved on it has shoved me aside to a shelf where the functions of its objects are unknown.
How does one go forward if that's where one finds myself? I do not know. All I've done is gather dust since I realised my new station. Oh, I've tried, in the past and still on occasion now, to get on, but I've never really felt myself equal to anything or anyone, which is not to say I feel superior but inferior. And of my work persons there's none that I've liked, on reflection. Each had in them a forced quality, which became harder to maintain. Cracks, after a time, are not so easy to disguise. Cracks tell.
I do not have cracks now, only the fine lines of age and wear, and a peculiar nature which shrinks from offers made, much, if not more, as it did before.

Picture credit: Porcelain Figures on a Stone Shelf, 1930, Konstantin Somov.

Written April 2020, in lockdown.