When I spotted the yellow1 spine with the title Be a Gent, Little Woman, Be a Gent! and the name of Eileen Winncroft below it while browsing through the shelves here at UEA, I knew I had spotted a live one: rare, audacious, and somehow overlooked in the sometimes cultish fervor for novels by British women from the 1930s. That title alone is a bundle of potential psycho-sexual-social interpretations, and I knew I would have to read the book to see just which direction Eileen Winncroft took it.
Now, some readers might stop at the second sentence: “‘Breakfast, poops,’ he murmured in a homosexual Oxford accent.” We’re obviously in comic territory, but not everyone would find the joke funny today. Winncroft might have considered herself a sophisticate — and her narrator Forest is quite open-minded when it comes to heterosexual love — but when it comes to gay men and women, her humour sinks to the level of Benny Hill:
“Do stop stroking each other; you look like a couple of pansies.”
But she only made them worse and they picked dog daisies and stuck them behind each other’s ears and smacked each other’s bottom and called each other darling and behaved in a manner in which young men do in that pretty pub so near the Green Park.
Sean is a poet and would-be writer, while Forest is a mother and bread-winning writer. It’s Forest who worries about being able to buy her daughter new Wellies while Sean spends hours sunning himself in a deck chair, épuisé et fatigué. Be a Gent is, at least at the start, a comedy of role reversals. “Never in her wildest dreams did she think of Sean as a husband… She felt too much of a gent to need a husband then.” The problem at the root of their marriage, in fact, is that Forest sees Sean as an object: “… much as he despised his long, slender body it had at least got him a wife, whereas his inspired brain had not even got him enough to eat.”
That doesn’t stop Forest from turning out newspapers articles for pregenant women on “how much your husband could help in these last few tiring months.” For Forest is in her last few tiring months as the novel opens. And when the household is increased with a healthy baby boy (Robin), the population is quickly rebalanced by a sickly adult man as Sean — at his mother’s expense — is sent away to a sanitorium in Switzerland. Leaving Forest alone to manage affairs.
I use the word affairs with tongue firmly in cheek. Not only does Forest have to pop up to London and make the rounds of Fleet Street in search of freelance writing gigs, she also has to sort out childcare, lodging, food, finances, and transportation. To this extent, Be a Gent is utterly up-to-date. It may, in fact, be the best account of life as a freelancer written before the phrase “gig economy” lit up some sadistic capitalist’s brain. More than a few writers will recognize the editors Forest has to deal with:
“I adore the article you had in the so-and-so yesterday. Now, that is exactly the kind of thing I want. Why don’t you give me that kind of thing instead of this kind of thing.” Picking up her last article for them and curling up their lips at it.
Outside the practical realm, Be a Gent is about a game of musical chairs, with Forest the player and a series of men the chairs — once she’s got rid of Sean through a divorce pulled off like a rabbit from a hat. There is Charles, the unfailingly charming and reliably caddish man about town. Martin, the magnificent doctor who proves to have a different girl for … well, several days of the week. An enormously wealthy Frenchman smitten with Forest — but she with him? Not so much. It all ends like these games do: the music stops and the player plops down on the chair that happens to be within reach. It doesn’t really matter which man Forest ends up with.
Winncroft admits that none of her characters, including Forest, are particularly admirable. “The next story I write will be about quite different people. Really nice normal people.” But since she only knows one at the moment, she invites her readers to send “names and addresses of any others you know so that I can have a few minutes’ talk with them and get a complete picture of them for the story.”
Be a Gent, Little Woman, Be a Gent! is a little needle of a tale about surviving as an independent woman wrapped up in so many layers of fluff I suspect almost no one felt the barb when it came out. Neither Forest nor Winncroft took herself seriously enough to brood over anything. And the prose speeds the reader along in endless strings of conjunctions:
And then Susan got affected…. And that, of course, opened the heavens…. And while all this fun was going on…. And, of course, Forest accepted…. And the pretty girl he loved…. And Forest returned home…. And every week she tried not to see Martin….
It’s not all like this, but I counted strings of sentences starting with “And …” running on for as much as two pages. Winncroft set a high standard for breathlessness in her prose.
To her credit, she was writing something of an ironic self-portrait. Eileen Winncroft was, in fact, a pseudonym of a pseudonym. To the millions of readers of the Daily Express, she was Martha Blount, one of a trio of women’s page columnists — along with Anne Edwards and Eve Perrick — masterminded by Lord Beaverbrook and all taking their names from friends of the poet Alexander Pope. A few years before Be a Gent came out, Martha Blount provided regular updates during and after her pregnancy. In real life, Martha Blount was Mrs. Neil Macloughlin (her second husband) and their son — known to the Daily Express as Simon Blount — Shaun Macloughlin went on to become a writer of radio dramas for the BBC and, more recently, to found the English Through Drama program. And Mrs. Macloughlin was the former Mrs. Franckeiss and, in the beginning, Henrietta Pryke from Sussex. It took a good hour digging through genealogical databases to unravel that thread.
As Eileen Winncroft, she went on to write a second novel, Angels in Ealing (1939), with a very different tone entirely — a story involving a real angel and a real divine power. Then, over a decade later, she collaborated with a German woman, Else Wendel, in writing Hausfrau at War (1957), a memoir of life in Germany during the Second World War.
As Martha Blount, she appears to have had a deal with Hutchinson in 1937 to write a book based on her Daily Express columns to be titled “I am Going to Have a Baby.” The book was announced in Hutchinson’s catalogue with the promise that it would contain “advice on matters which, if overlooked, may be disastrous.” Unfortunately, the book appears never to have been published: not even the British Library has it. Now we know the reason for World War Two. Much later, in the 1960s, Martha Blount finally offered her advice to mothers in a little paperback titled, A Time for Joy (1968). Tandem Paperbacks gave it far less hoopla than “I am Going to Have a Baby,” despite the fact that the former appears to have been largely based on the latter.
1The UEA Library has the second printing, which had a simpler, all-yellow binding. For those of you keeping track.