Just as evocative of a time and place is the way both women discuss race and class. Ginnie outside a nightclub sees ‘two jews with bleached blondes... Gerald [her husband] remarked that if you haven’t got a jewish nose and a Rolls-Royce there is no point going to London nowadays and I believe he is right’, while Boogie counters ‘there are a great many negroes in the service and it is difficult to get good domestic servants’. This sort of reference is scattered throughout the text, and the revelations of Auschwitz and the development of the Civil Rights movement do nothing to change them.
Ultimately, though, what comes through is the ferocious love of a mother for her daughter. Both write only elliptically of bad times — the death of Ginnie’s first child is simply ‘your troubles’ — and this makes Boogie’s occasional outbursts of maternal yearning all the more moving: ‘Of course no one can, or could, or would, ever take your place with me. That is final.’
Husbands, children, houses, friends, each takes second place to this enduring mother–daughter bond, here displayed, in all its mysteriousness, over two lifetimes.
Judith Flanders’s Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain is published by HarperCollins.
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