BOOKS
way, was utterly genuine. An antiquated idea now perhaps, wanting to keep up appearances was no laughing matter at the time.
What does date the philosophy is its shocking sexism. There are unapologetic references to ‘the silliest and most flighty girls’, and females on the whole are not destined to be anything other than simpering secretaries, smiling mothers, or ‘a London teashop waitress’. As for men, if you were educated only in the State sector, as I was, then forget the professions.
Whitehall, the law, becoming a surgeon — no matter how much perseverance, intelligence and energy are applied, these are the realms for your betters, who went to Eton, Winchester or Harrow.
In the Teach Yourself series, the Anglican liturgy is still at the root of British cultural and spiritual life — the Happy- Clappy evangelical brigade hadn’t been thought of — and no one would dream of having sex before marriage.
People smoked, and we are told how to budget for that relaxing and manly habit. No one ventured abroad. As for Americans, as they go in for ‘ over- cold food and drinks’ and pretentious fripperies, such as ice cubes, they are best avoided.
These volumes are easy to mock and read now in a spirit of post-modern irony. They come from a time when the National Anthem was still played in cinemas and every grown-up man wore a trilby.
But when I thought harder about them and looked deeper, I detected flickers of fear in the nostalgia — as if the books were asking, even as they were first published, whether the pre-war hierarchical world, of the Twenties and Thirties and cocktails and laughter, could ever really be successfully and lastingly rekindled? Was it already a fantasy?
Teach Yourself Good Manners (1958) suggests, indeed, that a solid and stable structure of civility and formality can no longer be assumed to exist.
WITH conventions and rules breaking down and formality losing ground, chaos loomed — so W. S. Norman deems it important to remind us how to dash off fawning letters to the Queen (‘I remain, with profound veneration, Your Majesty’s most faithful servant’) and to a noble Viscount (‘I remain, My Lord, Your Lordship’s obedient servant’), should it suddenly seem necessary to invite them to dine.
We are told how to seat guests according to rank and precedence (a minefield) — and had you worried yourself silly about where at the table to place the Archbishop of Canterbury when a Royal Duke is also in the room, the problems are now solved.
Though it is tempting to smile at the elaborate seating arrangements for ‘a small dinner party of ten or 12 people’, the placing of menu-card holders and ordering the servants ‘to take charge of the men’s hats and coats’, are we really so very different today?
Who doesn’t panic a little before the honoured guests turn up?
Entertaining at home, being on show, can never be relaxing. In the early years of my marriage, when we entertained lavishly in Oxford, deploying the wedding-present china and glassware that now doesn’t come out of the cupboard from one decade to the next, nerves would get the better of me. I’d spend so long tasting the fine wines beforehand that I’d be seeing double. ‘I didn’t know you were twins,’ I once said to Dame Iris Murdoch, who made u p her own rules and came in wearing carpet slippers.
David Cameron’s famous ‘ kitchen suppers’ in his Cotswolds farmhouse, with organic food served on mismatched plates, are just as structured, after their fashion, as the formal meals of the Fifties.
For dinner is never only about dinner — there is always a message being sent out about our values and aspirations.
Today, there is a contrived casualness, a compulsory nonchalance, which is as painstaking as a Fifties host and hostess ensuring that the asparagus tongs were polished and the hot soup didn’t give everyone hiccoughs.
Do we eat and drink as much as they did when grub and grog were newly off the ration?
W. S. Norman implies whopping, almost Edwardian, appetites, with menu suggestions that include boiled salmon followed by turbot, then chicken, then lamb cutlets, pudding, cheese and, to finish, a ‘savoury’ of mushrooms on toast.
There was to be sherry with the soup, Chablis with the fish, champagne and claret throughout, and decanters of port, ‘ which are passed around in a clockwise direction’, with the dessert. Guests are advised to leave by 10.30pm.
I fully concur, however, with the no-nonsense approach to what nowadays are called dietary requirements. There were few vegetarians in the Fifties and early Sixties and, ‘if they are really so fussy as to believe that a piece of pheasant will prove fatal, they should not have accepted the invitation in the first place’. Hear, hear!