"LILIES": the Series and Not

Mrs. John Pinkerton and her four girls in Washington State about 1935. L to R: "Mom," Aliene in front, Lucy, Helen in front, and Vera.

With a bit of trepidation, I ordered the series called “Lilies” from Netflix this week. Trepidation because in the Seventies, when “Lillie,” the series starring Francesca Annis, came out I became totally crazed and thought I WAS Lillie Langtry which caused me to be totally inappropriate. But, after all, I was recovering from divorce in those days. Now I’m a stable old retired lady who writes, so what’s the harm?

I’m surprised to find that “Lilies”, the series, keys right into all the “family album” posts and thinking that I’ve been doing. Not that the family on the Strachan/prairie side has a set of sisters like these, but that my Oregon mother and her sisters (to be explored in the future) are very much like these sisters, the ancestors of that writer. As the actor who plays the “Dadda” of the girls explains, they’re a very Celtic lot: passionate, smart, rebellious. Also, red-headed, earthy, ambitious, sometimes too religious for their own good. These girls walk through the same fire and ice as my mother and aunts. Their father, John Pinkerton -- had he been a bit more eloquent -- could easily have given Dadda's speech about “why don’t you tear a railing off the park outside and impale me through the heart on its ten-foot length? It would hurt me less than taking my beloved eldest daughter from her home, when she’s known nothing else!” And John Pinkerton was quite the anti-papist, though it was hard to be an Orangeman in Douglas County, Oregon. He would dearly have loved to bang a huge drum in a parade led by a son on a white horse -- though he never had a son.

My mother, the eldest, did leave her home, convinced that there must be something better, and married my father who promised her the big city life in Portland. She hadn’t quite reckoned on him being a traveling man who would leave her mostly alone the rest of her life. But he had chosen shrewdly and she was capable of raising children and even earning a living as it became necessary.

The next lily in the Pinkerton family was Vera, who was driving when there was an auto accident and her younger sister Helen went through the windshield, fatally cutting her throat. Perhaps as compensation, she became a nurse and ran the surgery in Great Falls before WWII took her to London and Rheims where she saw all the terror and romance, then came home to marry a Hatfield as the youngest had done right out of high school. The Hatfields, poorly educated but potent cousins of Senator Mark Hatfield, are a story in themselves. Then there was a cousin Pinkerton who married a cousin Hatfield and lived a quieter life, but told me that if I tried to move to Douglas County (which I considered a kind of Eden) she would personally strangle me.

I hope that quick sketch gives you a sense of the universality of the Liverpuddlian lilies whose lives revolve around corsets, the handsome young priest, a steady stream of small animals plus one big horse, a street of brick houses -- all alike -- and a small yard where the outhouse is located. They must make enough money to survive, with a pianola (the Hatfields had one in their parlor) to hock in an emergency, and plenty of neighbors to both interfere and rescue from disease and the talleyman. The Upstairs/Downstairs element is pronounced in the series. Dadda is an amateur veterinarian who treats his wounded animals on the kitchen table alongside his daughter’s candy-making home industry. I vividly recall a Hatfield uncle arriving at a picnic with a skunk in a gunnysack and removing its scent gland right there at the picnic table before the food was cleared -- with the Pinkerton girls sending up screams of outrage.

The creation of the script for Lilies is a bit schematic, as it would be if I wrote it. One story about one girl per episode braided with bits of set-up and resolution from the other characters’ stories, plus one story about Dada trying to find love again and one story about the brother finding and losing love. Eight episodes. Richard Stern told us once that it’s important to let one’s grand story soar, but then to undercut it a bit with irony and this series does that well, skewering the biggest sentimentalities and pinholing the tragedies. The purest and least ironic is the story of the priest and Iris, too tall to be named for a violet, too warm to live without children, too poor to join the Poor Clares. But Iris also gets the weirdest story, about a wounded magician.

The most fun is tiny May with her flexible face, huge eyes, and copper hair. She’s the one who takes the most risks and ends up with the real prize: what used to be called a bastard. As an actress, she scores what must be one of the funniest nude scenes in the genre. Ruby, the round, dimpled and closest-to-blonde one, a Liverpuddlian in real life, will clearly have the biggest adventures later since she is a person of passionate convictions which throw her into the company of snob fascists and a butcher with Communist ideals.

A tiny role, but exquisitely presented, is Dadda’s sweetheart, bird-like in her bright-eyed sanity and a perfect foil for Dadda’s Chaplinesque swaggering excess, though one wonders how well she could survive the household.

Of course much of the charm comes from the period effects, which are almost a hundred years in the past now and increasingly easy to give a shine of romanticism. In reality the shared walls with other households; the tiny courtyard with outhouse, rabbit hutches, and chicken nests; the sealed-up parlor in a house with tiny rooms; the shallow stone sink and worn wooden drainboard would have been much less pleasant than they are on a screen. This series manages a reality that’s convincing without becoming a distraction. Yet it was canceled by the BBC “Controller of Fiction” who appears to be a sort of talleyman. In Britain no one under twelve is allowed to rent it. I’m not sure why they would want to. It’s for folks who know a bit about life.

My mother said that if I wrote about her and her family she’d come back from the grave and strangle me. Something very satisfying about hands-on throttling and, of course, it cuts off the voice. She felt she survived only by keeping up a facade, but the writer of Lilies knows that such facades don’t succeed. It’s truth-telling, love and much laughter that saves us all, Celtic or not, canceled or not. I think I’ll entertain the notion of the Pinkerton Girls as a sort of sequel to “Lilies.” Knowing, of course, that might not be real.

My mother's favorite flower was Agapanthus Africanus, Lily of the Nile. I wonder if I could grow one here in a pot. If not, I'll settle for daylilies.


The Pinkerton girls in Douglas County about 1930. L.to R: Aliene, Vera, and Lucy, my mother, holding the pup.