COOK-GENERAL

Press, Volume LXXV, Issue 22769, 22 July 1939, Page 18

COOK-GENERAL

A Dickens In The Kitchen .;i JMStfaC 1 [Reviewed by MARGARET JEPSON.] . J

and he sprang .at her with a rase. “Who’s this crazy girl? She’s, cause of all this ridiculous panic. Stops# it, for God’s sake, d’you hear me* ;. 1 ! Get rid of her, somebody, before I goraving mad. Dawkes! Don’t stand', there like a fool, man, do something,' And then ring up the sweep and tell-:; him to come over at once and seej? what’s happened to the damned chim- ■ ney,” He disappeared into the house,- v< muttering oaths, and somebody plucked- ) ■ Polly oft the rope and she stopped’ screaming, and bursting into hie*-' , cuping sobs, flung herself to the : ground. . , , . , Nurses now began to slap and shake V their various charges, and Bishop was heard to speak quite sharply to - a . fluttering lady in green, who insisted i i on clinging to his arm as they wan* ; dered away with the rest of the crowd;I went bick to the kitchen lugging i Polly with me, and the only figttfe ; left on the scene was Sir Harold'* , black spaniel, who was quietly throw- : ing up curdled erfeme brfltee on to : the drive. Truth to Type ’ \ Like her great-grandfather, Miss | Dickens seems to hit on the qutli- $ ties in her characters which make them most typical. It is undoubtedly true that those characters in Dickens who seem curiosities to us were once to be found waltia| about London in hundreds. Wripi to-day tend to introduce us to nw. individuals. But one or two of the -] better drawn of Miss Dickens* j characters are unerringly typical f'i know that dress-designing employer ,] who borrowed her money to pay; J the grocer, who looked in the larder 1 for signs of extravagance, and Whqj slept with a Pekinese dog in hls;j bed. I can name the man. Yet j I don’t suppose for a moment mw j Miss Dickens ever met him. ' Ana j the same with “Nanny 1 ’ at the Vaughans’. That impossible wpmwn was looking after a small relative:] of mine when I was last in London. , Miss Dickens’s kitchen view pfj middle class Londoners, with their \ satellite retainers and tradespeople?,! the atmosphere of suspicious pat-1 ronage and contentious parasitism, ! is absolutely authentic. / £ J Miss Dickens’s most noticeable! departure from her great-ttan%| father’s manner is in her anl«tj intimacy With the reader. She* * owns no disguise.. Charles Dickens^,| might splash jn the bath of his owtLj tears, but while he did, so he stul l wore his black frock coat and ca£ * ried his stove-pipe hat in his haM^| But compared with his, I feel that | because her record of everyday i. things has lost in patience like the, f age, it has also lost intensity. .Sna.-fr is very youhg, of course,, andfcrtf s and there where one can ’pWMwe ‘ fictions with which she ywaQy enlivened the book, it is 'school-'; girlish, but I can well imagine taatf! - If Miss Dickens applies her powa* . of observation to the rest ol Bbas it comes to her, she win produce » an unusual novel some time before • 1950; always provided, of course, that the publishing world does not : >| encourage her to write herself to & t standstill in the meantime. 'vjg The book show* signs of hasty revision, possibly in the of retouching it, so that, as Comptoß|| Mackenzie remarks in the preface?; r it can hurt nobody’s feelings. The Pekinese dog is by turns Mimi, Mmf, he, and she. On page 47 “Miss ", Faulkener, becomes ‘.‘Mrs’’ FauHt-i,. ener. On page 112 Martin Parrishg suddenly becomes “Miss” Parrish, ; and his flat, of which he was sole|,-. occupier, is referred to as “the.;:. Parrishes’.” On page 263 the hvs-u band of Clare suddenly develops aim the attributes of /the husband of|£ her sister Frances. I could con-$ tinue. But I will not. -Miss Dickensh* will have heard , about it 60 time|||| already, and such things acre of(£ minor relevance to the entertain-Lj ment value of any book.

Naturally, when Monica Dickens, a great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens, produces a book, we look for some of his qualities in her work; and oddly enough, we find them. She is only 23. After being presented at Court, she decided that the social round bored her, and she went to work as a cook general. “One Pair of Hands” is a series of episodes, in which she describes with good humour her infliction of her somewhat amateur knowledge of the job on a variety of persons, even more inept as employers. This gives her that objective, haphazard view of society which was so conspicuous in Dickens; and it gives her a Dickensian theme. Her book, lighthearted as it is, is remarkably good propaganda on behalf of that unhappy creature, the “slavey.” Miss Dickens has her great-grand-father’s robust manner of description, his good nature, humour, and observation. But she has these qualities in fcer own way, and not imitatively. Whereas he bore so tremendously the stamp of his own age, Miss Dickens bears the stamp of this. Her style is colloquial to the point of vulgarity. She does not attempt to be profound; but Dickens, whenever he attempted to be profound, became false, and the probability is that had he lived today the cynicism of the modern world would have been a check on his emotional credulity. It was the fashion in that happy age to hunt out the Tear behind the Smile. Nowadays, like his great-grand-daughter, Dickens would not feel expected to labour what has become too obvious. If a more secure age should return; the beauty of his repentant convicts and misers might be appreciated again. The Pace of the Age Miss Dickens makes one excursion into pathos, and it happens to concern that favourite of her greatgrandfather, an individual in what was then known as a Decline. But Miss Dickens touches on it as briefly and warily as he would have laboured it long and heavily; she will not wait for the death-bed, she rushes on. The changed fashion of the age is conspicuous in the change of pace. Dickens’s narrative ambled; Miss Dickens's tears along. The vocabulary has shrunk sadly, but the style is not the clipped, weary one of the Hemingway school. It never tires; it is fluent, rather, too fluent, and it resembles Dickens’s in an essential quality; everything is a shade overdrawn. Here is Miss Dickens’s account of a chimney on fire, taken from the episode in which she works in a large country house as cook, with the aid of an idibt scullery maid called Polly: I rushed out, and looking upwards saw that the kitchen chimney was indeed on fire and behaving like Vesuvius. Polly had followed me, still yelping, and before I could, stop her, she had seized the rope' that hung down outside the back door, and was tolling away with desperate strength at the huge bell that was only rung for deaths and real emergencies. The effect was dynamic. People ,appeared from everywhere in various conditions of excitement and horror. The old groom came galloping down the back drive on his bow legs just in time to catch Miss Biggs as she fainted stiffly away. My friend with the burnt hand came running up with a gun he had been cleaning, which added to the nurses’ terror, and Sir Harold W—- himself appeared in his braces and camelhair suppers, having evidently been woken from his after-lunch nap. Nobody did anything; we all stood round &hd pointed and screamed. Someone hopefully brought out a fire extinguisher, but no one knew how to work it. The children were enjoying themselves enormously, but the excitement didn’t last long. As it gradually dawned on us that the smoke and sparks were getting less and less, and that the fire, was going out of its own accord, the tension relaxed, and the annoyance which relief often brings, set in. Sir Harold suddenly realised that Polly was still pealing the bell,