MURDER MYSTERY AS CULTURAL SYNECDOCHE

There’s reality -- so they say -- somewhere out there where we can’t quite get at it.  Too big for the human mind except in pieces.  We call them “metaphors.”  There are many kinds of metaphors, as English teachers used to know but don’t anymore.  The main one in use for religion, for example, is “synecdoche” which means referring to something by using a part to stand for the whole.  

to Neil Gaiman special people might be angels

When sophisticated people talk about the “masks of God,” meaning that whatever the “theos” might be -- presumed to be very much beyond human comprehension -- it can only be considered by some aspect, usually something humans know, like fathers or martyrs or slippery abstracts like justice or love.  Ultimately, unless you settle for a part of the whole that is “reality,” the possibility of really knowing “God” doesn’t exist.  The best we can do is to find the metaphor that really works for us, which might not be the same for all of us.

Even angels die?

So, late at night when the day’s work (or at least the routine) is done, I sit at my screen and watch mysteries.  Life IS a mystery.  Watching mystery films -- okay, MURDER mystery films because survival is the real puzzle of all mysteries and death is the puzzle of survival that no one can solve -- is pleasantly reassuring because they are always solved.  In fact, they are usually pretty predictable because some writing team sat somewhere and followed a formula.  They know what the end will be, because they mostly start at the conclusion and work back, planting clues.

To vary things, I look for the mysteries from different countries.  They aren’t THAT different -- an innovation like “Rashomon” only comes along rarely -- but the backgrounds and the emphasis is different.

Morse and Lewis

Usually my main preference is BBC so I watch the popular ones from them, with particular fondness for “Morse”, his prequel “Endeavor” and his sequel, “Lewis.”  In a mystery there has to be a core set of partners because their dialogue is what supplies the reflection on what the solution might be.  “Sherlock” is also in this mode.  One person is generally a representative of English knowledge and culture, esp. in the stories set in Oxford, and the other person is the practical one who points out the obvious.  Part of the satisfaction comes from knowing the canonical Shakespeare or whatever, recognizing Morse’s favorite music, catching botanical references (in the “girly” versions, like “Rosemary and Thyme,” or in “Cadfael”).  The more one learns along the way, the less one feels as though it's wasting time, but this applies more in books than in movies.

The Aussie mysteries can be much grittier and more vulgar than anything BBC.  “Jack Irish” is a hunter-gatherer whose baseline is the race track, less a matter of chance than one might think, but he’s a posh lawyer who can cope with the out back.  His buddy is a “black,” meaning Aussie aboriginal.  Jack Irish’s refuge is a pub for old codgers who supply memory.  He doesn’t mind flat-chested women.  The victims are often decomposed and fly-ridden, which implies that there must be someone in real life making money as a bug-wrangler.

“Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries” goes entirely the other way.  Clearly comedy but not at all vulgar, Miss Fisher has a team that includes a resourceful butler (a Brit conceit), a female foundling (ditto), and a contact on the police force (more Brit).  This is almost entirely in the city and requires much attention to costume and antique automobiles.

There are also Irish (bitter and vengeful on the waterfront), Welsh (also tough but more compact), and Scots (barren, with many bodies discovered on the high and windy volcanic rim of Edinburgh).  But the toughest and most resourceful detectives are Norwegian.  (“The Killing,” or “The Eagle.”)  All these still echo the World Wars and the subculture of resistance and spying.  Most of all, the French “Spiral” is cynical, black-and-white.  Their system of justice is Napoleonic, which means guilty until cleared.  The judge is an active participant in the investigation and sometimes puts his thumb on the scales, as do the cops themselves.  The kind of underculture that is African American in American and Brit tales, is more usually “arab” in Paris.  The cops and lawyers might be powerful females, willing to sleep around.

"Gran Hotel"

Lately I’ve been watching the Spanish “Gran Hotel” which means there are sub-titles, though my high school Spanish is coming back in spite of the characteristic rapid-fire talk.  Most scenes are confrontations of one sort or another.  This is another period piece, rather like “Downton Abbey” or “Upstairs, Downstairs” with class restrictions and injustice as one of the main motors of action.  The elegant daughter of the hotel-owning family (always in white) and her strict mother (almost always in black) are the central characters, with the men revolving around them.  I just finished the first year, in which all murderers were revealed -- but not caught!

Two series that I only come back to occasionally are “Alias,” with fast action and many special effects that include the various guises of the iconic American woman played by Jennifer Garner.  She’s Nancy Drew on steroids, always verging on the preposterous.  The other one is “House, MD,” in which Hugh Laurie plays an impossible doctor, a miserable human being who deals out trouble while supposedly trying to help patients. 

The above quote from the real-life Laurie goes to my point about synecdoche, each culture choosing parts of life that fit into their pre-existing assumptions.  In America this would be that Alpha males are brilliant, troubled, and effective.  The below quote comes from the anonymous person who wrote the wiki entry.

“Laurie's parents, who were of Scottish descent, attended St. Columba's Presbyterian church in Oxford.  He notes that "belief in God didn't play a large role in my home, but a certain attitude to life and the living of it did".  He followed this by stating, "pleasure was something that was treated with great suspicion, pleasure was something that... I was going to say it had to be earned but even the earning of it didn't really work. It was something to this day, I mean, I carry that with me. I find pleasure a difficult thing; I don't know what you do with it, I don't know where to put it."  He has stated, "I don't believe in God, but I have this idea that if there were a God, or destiny of some kind looking down on us, that if he saw you taking anything for granted he'd take it away".

So this brings us to the real mystery, the religious issue of suffering.  The physician cannot heal himself and must take drugs.  This then raises all the issues of co-dependence, the people around the doc who try to help him.  This is a synecdoche for our globalizing dilemma.  Surely we are more aware of unnecessary human suffering than we have ever been and obviously the Western world tries to address that with modern science.  

The Weeping Buddha, said to take suffering into himself

Some detectives, like Sherlock, are reflecting on every clue and theory they can locate, and others (Watson is a doctor) are looking at the practicalities.  Some are trying to find the molecular cure for AIDS and others are now addressing the long-standing practice in India of defecating openly on “waste ground.”  What both come back to is human behavior, which hinges on what we think reality is.  Is suffering as inevitable as shit?   If so, how should we manage it?

HOUSE OF ELIOT: A Reflection

This morning I’m groggy because a Blackfeet woman I know who is a little older than me called me on the phone late and talked for an hour and a half. My day begins at 4:30 AM with a stint of writing, includes more sleep (often full of dreams), and then goes on in more normal fashion. This woman insists that she is a full-blood and says you can tell because she has a Blackfeet name, though when asked she gives the English translation of that name and actually goes by the name of her white former husband. This woman is a type who shows up in Louise Erdrich novels: powerful and aggressive by temperament, educated because father and church insisted, and displaced from the reservation early in her working life to a major city where she succeeded very well through white upper-class management patrons. Now her problem is how to cope with a subsidized apartment on the rez, diminishing health, and the hard loss of friends from childhood. Also, she says she called to see what I (“an educated white woman”) thought about the world’s sudden catastrophic financial outlook.

This is not the standard mental picture America has of Blackfeet women on reservations any more than I am the standard small town woman. But we are not at all alike. One of the major differences is her enormous emphasis on appearance, specifically clothes. She says she can tell what she calls “intellectual” white people in high places because of their fine clothes. When asked whether she approves of Obama taking off his suit coat in the Oval Office, she dodges by saying, “Well, he’s black. I don’t talk about black people.” On the other hand, I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of mildly mocking Stephen Toulmin and his wife for dressing in very expensive “putty-colored” raw silk clothes. (They’re white.)

There are two dimensions here: one is that I enjoy flouting dress codes and flew in the face of expensive clothes at seminary by wearing flannel shirts and homemade jeans without pockets, waistband or even a sewn hem. Partly I was teasing my faculty which boasted about wearing blue workshirts with reverse collars while they did social organizing in the Sixties. They were mock-working-class Unitarian-Universalist, of course, considering themselves major scourgers of society. Fritscher, a conservative Catholic at the time, says that in the same place at the same time while doing the same social work he wore short sleeved white shirts with a tie. I suspect that’s about how Obama dressed in his more recent stint of social organizing.

While I was dressing as low as one can go without being in rags, I was privately keeping up with Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar -- high fashion. I’ve always loved it. If I had a lot of money, the first thing I would buy would be expensive shoes (low heeled), then some “putty-colored raw silk” garments, and a lot of hats. My problem is that I’m shaped like a barrel (very unhealthy) -- thus hats and shoes. Beyond that, I really HATE all the maintenance and storage issues. Anyway there is no clothes cleaners within a hundred miles. So much for silk.

Of all the L.M. Montgomery stories of Avonlea, the one I reread the most was “Old Lady Lloyd” about the aged spinster in her ancestral home who wore her mother’s remodeled old-fashioned silk clothes. When I type my grandmother’s journals to share with cousins, much is about my aunt and her renewing their wardrobes by applying new lace collars or changing the buttons, though in the prosperous years they sewed whole outfits from patterns. My cousins and I all grew up in home-sewn clothes and proud of it.

In the summer of 1960 I was costumer for a repertory company, which was a little beyond my competence, but then we were all beyond our competence and there to challenge ourselves. This little town had been a rich resort once and the costume department -- an old ice house -- was a trove of trunks and racks of the most marvelous beaded chiffon dresses, slowly disintegrating, in that strange jazz-era style with no waist and handkerchief hems, meant to wear while doing some outré dance like the Charleston.

My current BBC series is “House of Eliot,” which I had thought would be something existential, maybe a mystery. Instead it is the next step in the thinking of Jean Marsh and Eileen Atkins who devised “Upstairs Downstairs” to explore the dislocations and damage of the end of the Edwardian Era. “House of Eliot” goes on through the Twenties and Thirties with two sisters, one older enough to have helped raise the younger one when their mother died, now orphaned by a dissolute Victorian father and thrown on their own resources. Like Old Lady Lloyd, they remodel a parental clothes stash, this time across gender lines: the silk and cashmere of their father. Their lively convention-challenging outfits (rather like Chanel) intrigue the toffs and there they are: a couture house. The rest takes on the two-level problems of changing times for the sisters, who are eligible for upward mobility into the nobility, and their workers (including beaders) who must make their futures as chances arise.

We seem to be in another of those challenging times of social rule-change. They say the last unemployment crunch this big was 1973. That’s the year I quit teaching and returned to Portland. When I went job-hunting while my resources shrank, I made shirtwaist dresses out of my flowered sheets, using a Halston pattern. I still have them -- can’t quite make myself throw them away.

My Blackfeet acquaintance (she is very choosy about whom she allows to call her a friend) would not have approved. She appreciates that part of the appeal of upscale clothes is their high cost. In fact, her definition of “intellectual” is someone who has a generous income, earned through the careful management of power. Many of her role models are post-WWII, influenced by European news and appreciative of order: Eisenhower people. My idea of an intellectual is Stephen Toulmin, a man of such elevated philosophy that hardly anyone can understand him. He’s a “history of” thinker, a meta-thinker, an analyzer of thinking. Maybe post-modern, I suppose. I reach for that standard but will never get there. I can manage something more on the level of Jean Marsh and am content to do that well.

At 4:30 AM I was not a clear enough thinker to compose this blog. When I rolled back into my flannel, ultrafleece, down-equivalent, and electric nest with Crackers on my arm, I dreamt I was at an important dinner party at a table with Michelle Obama who was wearing a purple lace gown. I had come in a wash dress. I excused myself, went home a few blocks away and changed into a dress I’d made myself long ago: a black shantung v-necked garment with flaring trousers that I always wore with a jacket. In the dream it was persimmon velveteen with jet beading, which I made for the dedication of the heroic-sized Bill Linderman statue at what was then called the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City. (It's on Persimmon Hill.)

The message, I guess, is that we must adapt, but that we should value the past. But maybe it’s something about life being a rodeo.

CRANSTON: A Reflection More Than a Review

Instead of spending the last days of this overwhelming election cycle listening to obsessive speculation about the unknowable last curlicues and mysteries, I think I will indulge in a five-hour marathon about Cranford, the little mid-19th century town in England that Mrs. Gaskell explored in many stories. Mrs. Gaskell, having been the daughter of a Unitarian minister and the wife of another, knew many stories. She does not betray confidences, but uses her knowledge of human contretemps to present invented ones. Her stories are gentler than the authors to whom she is often compared: Bronte (Charlotte was a friend.), Austen (a bit more aristocratic), and Dickens (more fond of melodrama) but she gives us the same sense of life going on through the tales of family, town, and a shifting economy.

On this continent she is quite close to Montgomery’s Avonlea stories (Montgomery was married to a Presbyterian minister) or even the stories by Ivan Doig loosely based where I live now: Valier/Dupuyer/Choteau -- what Doig calls the “Two” country, in reference to the Two Medicine River. These Doig linked stories center on the McCaskill family, which like the Doig family immigrated from Scotland to the East Slope of the Rockies. This country has “two” stories: those of the white immigrants and those of the native inhabitants, but Doig only takes on one. This left space for my own “Twelve Blackfeet Stories,” linked stories over twelve generations.

“Cranford” has been scanned and can be read online through Google. I just read the author’s preface which is very charming and informative, an entry point. Then I went to Ivan Doig’s website (www.ivandoig.com), which hasn’t been updated for a while, and was startled to see his “note to my readers” begin, “No one is likely to confuse my writing style with that of Charlotte Bronte, but when that impassioned parson’s daughter lifted her pen from “Jane Eyre” and bequeathed us the most intriguing of plot summaries -- ‘Reader, I married him’...”

In the preface to Mrs. Gaskell’s “Cranford,” she says that every century comes down to some single issue and that a story of generations that succeeds will be focused on this crucial issue. She suggests that the 16th century, a time when people were burned at the stake and driven into the American wilderness, the issue is “will.” How much willpower can a human being have, and what are the consequences of either too much or too little? In the 18th century she suggests the issue is ideas and intelligence, the energy needed to create a new society, particularly in the Americas. And in the 19th century, she says, the worry is over sentiment, that is, what can be done to right moral wrongs that cause suffering to the innocent? This is the era of reform: slavery, animal abuse, women’s suffrage, child labor, and other evils brought on by factories, urbanization and gin.

Maybe we’re still in the 19th century: we still haven’t really resolved those issues, except that gin has been replaced by cocaine. But the 20th century was dominated by the quite real possibility of total planetary annihilation and consciousness of world issues like environmental catastrophe. Cranford could at least still take for granted the idea of the family and still remember the forms of status and courtesy that kept small town people in their places, but never excluded.

So much in these stories is a matter of antique charm and nostalgia -- the period language and furnishings -- but consider the little dog that wears a dress just like that of her mistress -- at least that woman doesn’t keep the dog in her purse. When it comes to the practical nuttiness of the cow that got into a lime pit where all her fur was burned off, to be replaced by a gray flannel set of long-johns with a convenient flap for milking, we’re definitely in Green Gables territory. What challenges to a costumer!

Serious issues lurk beneath. What about Miss Mattie’s brother who had to leave when he put on his sister’s dress and, quite insane, dressed a pillow in infant’s clothes and comforted it in plain sight of the scandalized village. (I loved the suit of clothes he wore as a man returned from India!) The determined Miss Pole, who protected her cow, is played by Imelda Staunton, well-known as the lead character in “Vera Drake,” about a real-life convicted abortionist. These very fine actors (including the female ones) are so familiar to BBC fans that each carries an aura. The one that puzzled me the longest was the senior doctor, who was indelible as the arguably worst “Prime Suspect” that Helen Mirren ever faced, because he is totally benign in this role.

Like Austen novels, the preoccupation is how to keep up standards with never enough resources and the dilemmas of economic strategies like marriage, inheritance, shop-keeping, going into service. In England these are still lively issues, esp. to the degree that class hangs on, but can anything be more timely than Miss Mattie -- so sweet and harmless -- discovering that her bank has gone broke? In those days the workhouse was the only charity outside of one’s friends and family, and a grim alternative it was. There is reference to the Highland Clearances that did to some Scots what the Americans did to Indians.

Matters of changing economics -- the coming of the railroad, the immigration of the roving and unsavory Irish (instead of our illegal Hispanic immigrants), entitlement to education, the deep gulf between the richest and the poorest -- play off amusingly against the concerns a clutch of aging women considering their alternatives. Miss Mattie agrees to sell tea because it is “not sticky” and “persons of all classes” must buy it, but she considers green tea to be “scouring of the viscera” and has to be argued into stocking it. She adds peppermint candies for amelioration.

Mrs. Gaskell’s use of “Mrs.” puts some people off of her novels (I highly recommend "North and South") because they believe she will enforce propriety and obedience. Indeed, there is generally a character opposed to change and upholding of the status quo as some expense to herself. But there is always another character -- in this case a second sister -- who sees human beings in distress and wishes them comfort and safety.

Then there is the stand-in for the author herself who, in this instance, is named Mary and requires spectacles. Ah, yes. This is clearly a set of five one-hour episodes I should watch and ponder some more, even though the mirror tells me I don’t have the youth or smooth oval countenance of Mrs. Gaskell’s Mary. Perhaps there are more stories in the Two Country.

THE 1900'S HOUSE: A Review

Chronologically, the “1900’s House” comes before the “Manor House,” but I didn’t order them that way, so I’m just watching however they arrive. This one really WAS about the house itself, because in order to be authentic a modernized house originally built then had to be retrofitted, restored to the original elements.

The central character is this family was definitely the mother, though the father was a lovable Green Beret Royal Marine. The whole family was a bunch of characters, including twins and a young boy, and a teenager who kept her lipstick in spite of it all. (Shampoo became an issue after the first weeks -- one soon understands why hair was greasy, pinned down, and kept under caps.) The mother was quite deeply committed to the whole project since she was a history buff, an advocate of the “natural way,” and a strong feminist. The father was switched to a recruitment center where he could wear his period uniform to make his pitch.

I was entranced by the first episode which was about peeling back the plasterboard to reveal all sorts of ingenuities and dangers in the original row house. In fact, one of the overriding messages of this part of the series was the constant hazards: arsenic in the wallpaper, cyanide in something else, gas lights piped through the house (the piping turned out to be sound and usable after a hundred years!), beetle traps (a dish with a hole to a false bottom that contained sticky syrup to entice and then entrap the beasties -- why aren’t they selling them in cockroach territory?), and a massive (though small of its kind) ancestor of the English Aga that dwelt in a brick fireplace, simmered away hot enough to make the cook’s face red, but never produced hot water until after two tries the cautious heating engineer managed to get the water reservoir close enough to the firebox. Having read reports from the period about exploding overheated water reservoirs, he created a stainless steel replacement for the missing original. There were so many hazards, esp. for children that one in four kids never made it past the age of six. In fact, horrified safety inspectors nearly shut down this whole experiment.

Not least among the original hazards were non-potable piped water (people of the time at least filtered it), carbon monoxide from the coal and gas, and disease: cholera, diphtheria, typhoid, tuberculosis, and a host of others. On the other hand, if one considers them helpful, a host of drugs now strictly controlled -- opium, heroin, morphine, cocaine -- were available on the open market at a “chemist.” I’m sure these were very enticing for women in corsets so tight they squeezed their stomachs practically into their boots. “Fainting couches” for women (there was one still at Meadville/Lombard's only ladies’ room in 1978) might have also been convenient for a “high” afternoon.

This was another reality-by-script sort of story where dynamics that must have been real were heightened by encouraging impassioned monologues via a hidden camera. Most of the story revolved around women’s issues like way too much work juxtaposed against no scope for thinking, creativity, or exploring. There was a servant for a while -- I never did figure out where all that fluff came from and neither did they! The lone maid was the same mix of friend and skivvy as in the Manor House. It was emphasized that economic dynamics were lifting up this house for middle-class occupants into a new era of mini-luxury (MANY knick-knacks) even as the gentry in their Manor House were losing their grip on privilege.

At the end in the Manor House series everyone was reduced to tears by having to leave the horses behind. In the 1900’s House it was the chickens. Mom would eat eggs but it was the chickens’ personalities that made the family love them. I don’t know of any organized settlement where one can keep a rooster, but they got away with it somehow. The chickens were Black Orpington’s, supplied by a specialist in heritage breeds. He said they were very popular because their coloring matched with the pervasive soot of those days so they didn’t look dirty. One brief moment sticks in my mind: when an upset hen flew the coop, the big tough Marine father recaptured the bird, clasped it to his mighty chest -- stroking it as one would pet a cat -- and soothed, “There, there! It’s all right!”

Originally there had been rabbits to raise for eating, but they were immediately nixed by the mother, not only because she was a determined vegetarian (the only one in the family) but because she knew her girls would become so attached that they would fight to take the rabbits along at the end of the project! They were given to a pet store. Outside of that, the family came into the project fairly easily and left it the same way. They were, after all, a military family who had already moved twelve times and had lived in dubious places. The one most pleased to leave at the end was the small boy, who HATED, HATED, HATED the food until a researcher discovered that fish & chips came available about this time, early takeaway food. From then on, he did better. The father’s biggest hurdle was learning to shave with a straight-edged -- called a “cut throat” -- razor, but like many things that are difficult until mastered, at the end he asked to keep his razor.

Even with the bathtub, bathing was a problem, but that was alleviated when they discovered the neighborhood swimming pool which had been a government innovation to improve slum sanitation. Originally there was even a de-lousing room. Part of the rise of the middle class was a privatization of baths, baking, meat roasting, and other daily necessities, but until refrigeration (though ice cabinets helped) shopping was done daily, though by this time often the purveyor came to the door of the family.

The uncomfortable isolation of the family was artificial. In rowhouses of the period there was no doubt much going to and fro, much twitching of lace curtains, much sharing over the back fence. Church would have occupied time and energy while knitting people together. But this family was very good at inventing pastimes for themselves, putting on little shows, writing newspapers, taking piano lessons, inventing new games.

Next up is “Regency House Party.” I’m very fuzzy about what “Regency” is, but I gather it’s the “age of romance” in the early 1800’s. Stay tuned.

THE EDWARDIAN COUNTRY HOUSE: A Review

Oh, “Gosford Park,” I thought when I ordered “Manor House.” This won’t be a tough one like the "Forties House." No war, everyone in that elegant house Manderston, and everyone knowing their place. Ha! Nor was there any more information about drains or heat either, except the maniacal French chef’s obsession about his massive cookstove which had to be hot at all times, consuming whole roomsful of coal and kindling! The man whirled around his kitchen so fast he was almost a blur and no one, NO ONE, helped fast enough or the right way to suit him.

This chef, Monsieur Dubiard, who clearly lived to cook; Miss Morrison, the Lady’s maid and confidant; and Tristan, the groom who ordinarily does about the same work driving a carriage, were about the only people in this idyllic setting who didn’t end up in tears or near to it, including Sir John, the master who sat at the top of the pile! (Real names for these people -- they were not actors.) This is a surprise to the viewer but seems to have been even more of a surprise to the participants who were thinking in terms of a lark, not sixteen hour days of either slave labor or total boredom. In fact, the comments on IMDB.com seem to divide between those who thought the whole thing was scripted and phony, and those who thought the reality was palpable. I vote with the latter.

We so romanticize the Edwardian period, overlooking the hierarchies, double-standards, hardships and injustices of that short and slightly unbuttoned period between the death of Queen Victoria and the beginning of WWI. We are quite unaware that the obsession with food (quite as intense as now) was hardly health-based -- in fact, Sir John and his wife (a physician) became rather concerned over the high fat, low nutrition, and total absence of roughage, which meant constipation. They admired their chef’s ice sculpture swan but not the pig’s head that glared at them so reproachfully from the sideboard that the family returned their plates untouched -- those surviving downstairs had no such scruples and enjoyed nicking bits off it. Even the chef said to it, as he closed the oven door on the head, “See you later.”

Sir John was so reproachful about the pig head with the butler, Mister Edgar, that the seemingly impervious Edgar was nearly weeping. He had so valued his intimate relationship with Sir John -- tenderly shaving him while talking things over, man-to-man. The pig head might have been planted, but his emotion seemed quite real. Poor Edgar took the heat from both sides as the gentry became more restive -- the sister, Miss Anson, became so bored that she sank into depression and had to be shipped off for a “rest cure” -- while the downstairs staff became even more rebellious.

As always and as Edwardian children knew, downstairs was a whole lot more fun, partly because this staff, at least, was young and partly because there was just so much “doing.” The first kitchen maid (think “Ruby”) quit after two days. The second one lasted only slightly longer. The third one was a country girl, who knew the realities enough to not mind picking game birds and scrubbing pots with homemade soap. The trouble was that she was “country” enough to fall madly in love with the “hall boy” who was at the bottom of the ladder in every way except his own mind. The two footmen were quite splendid rosy-cheeked youths, whose worth was determined by their height. Charlie was vigorous and modern enough to take over the endless pot-scrubbing for a day so the servants’ cook could catch up enough to prepare a decent meal for once. But the brainstorms he was so proud of didn’t always work and poor Mister Edgar was torn between admiration and exasperation.

Not enough housemaids had been hired to maintain a mansion with such elegances as a sterling silver handrail on the main staircase, and it was clear that a bit of extra flesh plus an assertive personality could save such a servant. The thin, idealistic one was laid low and wished desperately to go home, which is when a third maid was added.

If the footmen had too much to do, the young man of the house, “Jontie” was not only prevented from doing anything but also prevented from SAYING anything, which nearly drove him round the bend. The younger brother did quite well with his tutor, Mr. Singh, who had hardly any plot line, presumably because he really WAS tutoring. He is normally a teacher. Nevertheless, he was a reminder of the British Raj, a product of this era, and kept alive the connection between the treatment of servants and the treatment of colony natives. He was the silent conscience.

Clearly, these people put up with their lives because the alternative was possibly prostitution for the women and death by exposure and malnutrition for the hallboy, who was probably much younger in actuality. The economic realities of the time pressed their personalities into deformations and compromises that most people in the US no longer need to make. MOST of the time. Except on reservations and in urban ghettos.

Towards the end of the show there is a “fair” on the grounds. (See “The Buccaneers,” another of my favorite Edwardian movies.) It is visited by Socialists, who might have been ordered off in the true times, but were probably invited by the directors who were well aware of how the rebellions and hardships of the servants made them greatly welcome such a movement. The war, as we’ve seen in “Upstairs, Downstairs,” pretty much ended the system.

It wasn’t until I watched the “footnote” video journals (the participants had the chance to slip away and speak privately to the camera) that I learned this production was slashed across like a sword during filming when 9/11 happened. It was a hard jolt. Miss Morrison and her daughter had actually visited the World Trade Center and stood at the top of one of the towers just the previous year. No one escapes the hands of fate, the wars and economic crises and climate changes of the whole globe, and even Edward the Seventh, who gave his name to the age, must have known that.

The participants thought of just stopping what suddenly seemed like trivial pursuits. But then, like true English, they picked up their roles again and finished. What lingers in my mind most vividly is the still shots of the landscape, a beloved breast of land that has survived so much.

"THE FORTIES HOUSE" A Review

At least I've found the perfect cure for whining about the economy and my diabetes diet. I'm watching the "house" series from the BBC and tonight was the 1940's house. I had thought this would be a sort of aesthetic diversion from life in my village, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Nevertheless, it was bracing.

Mostly this was not about the house itself, interesting as it was. Each room had a vividly tiled little heating unit though they never told us what fuel was intended. I think this is the kind that is sometimes set to operate only when money is inserted, like a parking meter. The hot water unit worked on what appeared to be coke, compressed coal dust, which can be rather dangerous in terms of carbon monoxide and hard to re-light. Woodwork was painted in wild colors, mostly mustard, with thick enamel. Even the furniture and objects d’art were period-specific, partly through set decorators (oh, how the Brits love their wartime series!) and partly through history buffs. A panel of historians and other experts on the period acted as a kind of “government” which controlled what happened to the house through the nine weeks of the program.

Many families applied to be the time-travelers portrayed, but the one that was “cast” was a family consisting of a middle-aged man and wife, their divorced daughter and the daughter’s two sons, one about twelve and the other maybe six. The engine that pulled this little train was the father, a devoted WWII buff who was especially enamored of a particular kind of backyard bomb shelter, a sort of culvert erected over a hole sunk four feet into the ground with the excavated dirt piled back over the top.

As it turned out this was one of the first and most severe tests, as it was for the original WWII people. At the most desperate point of near-despair with everyone digging, all of them clearly unsuited for the task, two male neighbors (just as during the real war) came over to lend their backs to the project. Miserable as the little hole could be -- especially when the sounds of air raids were piped in or when their own personal “air raid sirens” forced them to interrupt meals, tasks and sleep -- they grew rather fond of the sort of clubhouse feel. Dad in particular went out to play his saxophone there and to smoke his cigars, for which he invented a little tar-paper blackout safety device that made a roof over the glowing end. “I could’ve made a fortune back then,” he exclaimed, ever the engineer.

Blackout was the next major challenge, harder than it might seem. Some rooms acquired big darkening drapes and other windows were blocked by dark paper or a kind of framed canvas as used for paintings, except that it was painted black. Even so, the family was fined heavily because early in the bomb shelter routine the mother was so intent on getting her children (who were deeply asleep) out to the shelter that she left the kitchen door standing open behind her while the kitchen lights were on. Something I hadn’t realized was that thousands died due to blackout conditions: auto accidents, falls, and other blunders. In fact, only a few blocks from this actual house a young mother hurrying to her crying child fell on the steps in the dark. She died of a broken neck. We don't know how many gleams of light were targets for bombers.

These two boys tried to be brave but now and then the younger one broke down: too much confusion, too little food, too much cold, too few toys and too much to do. The older boy was assigned the task of monitoring their energy use, painting a black line around the bathtub to show how high bathwater could be. (They were only allowed to draw a bath once a week and had no soap after the first few “years.”) He became a master of the warning sign stuck to light switches and got a lot of arithmetic practice from figuring out actual energy usage compared to goal. Often he managed to keep everyone below the goal with some to spare -- is that relevant or what?

Then the Machiavellian “government” began the real hard-core stuff: the father left for his actual job back in the north country. The women went for each other’s throats, as they had warned they would, esp. after the cigarettes were cut off! They could hardly be blamed: the food shortages came down hardest on them because they fed the two boys first. And they did all the cleaning, as well as having to learn to cook. Neither of them had ever baked a cake.

The committee put them through all the wartime stuff -- pretend explosions that broke up belongings (but mercifully not the mascot statue of a fox terrier which participated in everything), cutting off their gas and water, lack of darn near everything. The "granny" who was only fifty or so and normally dyed her hair bright red was the most transformed. For one thing she lost weight -- they didn't say so, but it was obvious. As time went on she ran out of makeup, only got four hours of sleep a night, and then had to quit smoking, which tipped her into rebellion. The government had to relent and let her do "volunteer work" with some local senior citizens at a center where they served lovely cakes, and from then on she got her feet under her. It wasn’t just the calories: she had not understood how rewarding it was to help others even more needy than herself, even if what they really needed was a friendly ear to listen to THEIR wartime sacrifices. The two little boys remarked that before this experience (nine weeks) their granny was a kind of spendthrift free spirit, but now she'd gone "all nanny-like." The daughter went to a workshop where old planes were restored. She had never worked with men before and found it an eye-opener.

What is worse than war? What made this pale imitation of an actual and intense effort so absorbing? What were they fighting FOR, actually? Would it have been so awful if Hitler had won? Well, how about gray, grinding, oppressive, constant deprivation under a dictatorship? And what's worse than that? Belsen. The show pulled no punches. Through an authentic account of the liberation of Belsen concentration camp “broadcast” over the massive wooden-cabinet radio, it was made clear just how bad life -- if you could call it that -- really could get. The family felt their hardships dissolve into rather pleasant memories.

And the “government,” not being stupid, made sure to provide joyful liberation experiences like picnics in grassy and flowered meadows (this well-off family had never experienced a picnic!) and a jitterbug dance evening with a group that wears authentic uniforms and “frocks” while playing the music of the period. The contribution of the Yanks was recognized as being food (notably chocolate, oranges and SPAM), a huge infusion of energy (some of it in the form of sex, for which they had prepared with condoms), silk stockings, cigarettes and music, oh, the MUSIC! How they loved the music!

There was a vintage airshow where the nearly overwhelmed father sat in a Spitfire, his idea of the most ideal machine ever invented. (He was an engineer working at Precision Parts.) His wife and daughter watched with wet eyes, knowing what this meant to “their man.” Maybe the best byproduct was what amounted to the liberation of those two women, a huge jump in confidence in their own abilities and a strong new relationship between them. And the boys? For a long time afterwards they played a board game they had invented with spinners and little markers in which the Doodlebug bombs tried to get through the Spitfires.

And I've shut up about my own limitations for a while.