FIR THE POOR MIDDLE CLASS

Evening Star, Issue 22146, 28 September 1935, Page 2

FIR THE POOR MIDDLE CLASS

[Written by Panache for the 1 Evening Star.’] Lately I read a review of a novel about a girl called Norab, who, an actress rather than wanton, ran away from home to live in London and have adventures there. The reviewer quotes in extenuation a description of Norah’s dinner, and finds there a key to the puzzle of why girls leave home. He quotes “Jamb, potatoes, cauliflower; baked apples, custard.” Then he adds with commiseration—“ Doesn’t that place her? Especially the baked apples and custard!” We are left with the inference that it was no wonder Norab ran away to Loudon, and the suggestion that there is a moral here for mothers who would fain keep their daughters in their native provincial towns. If it is pathetic to live in the suburbs, and impossible to live in the provinces, there is no adjective to describe living in the colonies, where manners and meals are backward without being decently primitive. Yet I object to the fulsome pity of this condescending reviewer. No Londoner could possibly bo sorrier for mo than I am for myself that I have never been to Sadler’s Wells nor seen Baranova in the Russian ballet. But no reviewer is to come with gratuitous pity poisoning my middleclass digestion, and suggesting that cauliflower and baked apples are inherently inferior to the caviare and cantaloupe trifled with by Michael ArIcn’s shoddy young men. iEsthetically, the middle-class meal has the advantage over the Mayfair one. A cauliflower is, in its own right, still life, whether it lies in the basket, in its green dewy frills, before John parts with it as reluctantly as a bibliophile with a mediaeval manuscript; or whether it lies in its dish, blanketed with sauce, ready to be devoured. I have not seen a painting of caviare, but I can imagine it, without composition or rhythm, looking as if the pallette knife had slipped. A baked apple is not only still life, but the baking makes it as fluffy as a canary without destroying its literary associations. An apple suggests Eve, Atalanta, William Tell, symbols of femininity, fleetness, and integrity. Cantaloupe can suggest nothing but a melon. When the appetite is jaded French names may help digestion, and the very reviewer who is superior about baked apples and custard will not find his gorge rising when his fruit is stewed and labelled “ compote,” and his egg blown up to a souffle. An hotel menu looks as unselective as a dictionary to those who are not as intimate with head waiters as people are in Mayfair. There is some consolation, though, in the reflection that caviare and cantaloupe, like cauliflowers and custard, are calories under their skins. Carried away by loyalty to the apple and .the cauliflower I have so far neglected to admit the most pitiful fact 'about this meal which explains why the girl Norah left home to seek her fortune in London.' The truth,, shady as it is, cannot be suppressed, though it is horrible to all tender sensibilities. In Norah’s home dinner was eaten in the middle of tho day. . . .

There iS nothing socially more damning. Between the people who invito you to dinner at 7, and those who ask you to 6 o’clock tea stretches an abyss. That this gulf is unbridgeable has been proved by tho scorn heaped by tony novelists on those who compromise in a makeshift meal, called high tea, where there are things called “ shapes ” and sausage rolls. Who are they, those who have legislated that all the charming witty, and attractive people, the people who count in the world, and with whom we are spiritually at home, must dine by candle-light? They are those who have lived in the tropics, or in the East, where it is too hot to eat at midday. They are those who are miles from home in the city all day, and cannot get back to eat until the evening. They are those to whom eating is such an entertainment that it must be spread out over the empty evening hours. And these people, being the moneyed and the articulate, have branded with the shameful stigma those who eat lamb and custard at midday. The influence on the digestion may be negligible, but fchp influence on the soul is disastrous. So strong is the influence of these people who dino by candle-light that they have impressed their standards on those who belong by heredity and on-’ vironment to tho lamb at midday class, and the result is that these people do not get any dinner at all, since they are shamed into calling their major meal lunch, though they cannot call the evening meal anything but tea. The only people who will naturally admit to dinner at midday are infants, invalids, and the aged. Though it is much kinder to the servants (if any) and more considerate to one’s wife (if not) to dine at 1 o’clock, this gain does not offset the disadvantage of being middle-class, of belonging to the Niiburbs, the provinces, or to those ultra-suburbs, those farther provinces, tho colonies. »

Tho difficulty about being enthusiastic over the middle-classes is the difficulty of remaining in one place. Champions either succeed or fail. To succeed is to reach the leisured state in which dinner is at night. To fail is to drop to the state where there is no dinner. And these extremes are tho extremes that interest novelists; for whatever philosophers may find admirable in the golden mean, novelists are definitely off that gold standard. In novels there are only two places to be, at the top or at the bottom. If at the top people live in London and dine late on caviare and cantaloupe. If at the bottom they will please reviewers either by remaining in the slums on fish and chips or by tramping into the country to eat raw apples under hedgerows which shelter lambs of purely pastoral interest. Poets and philanthropists will praise them, while the middle-class, dining by daylight in a thousand far-flung suburbs, will have no support but the nourishment it draws from a, well-balanced diet. Pity tho. poor middle-class!