The Watersplash is one of Patricia Wentworth’s mysteries starring Miss Maud Silver, a former governess, and present-day private detective. How old is she? And what year is this all happening?
I assumed this was an early work, and the “the War” was World War One. Miss Silver’s flat is
“Victorian”, full of curvy occasional tables, with peacock-blue curtains. “Victorian chairs with their spreading laps, their bow legs, their yellow walnut arms, their acanthus-leaf carving. From the walls engravings of some of her favourite pictures gazed down upon the congenial scene – Hope, by G. F. Watts, Sir John Millais’ Black Brunswicker, Landseer’s Stag at Bay.” Here it is explained that she has inherited the furniture. This interior is from the 1880s – how old is Miss Silver?
I checked the date of the novel, and it’s 1951. I had to quickly change the characters’ dresses and hairstyles to the frumpy get-ups of the early 50s. Would Susan wear her fair hair in a “bob”? More likely a flat pudding-basin.
Miss Silver at one point wears an olive cashmere dress (we can imagine a style old-fashioned for the 50s) with a “high, boned collar” and a “lace modesty vest”. High boned collars are from the late 19th century (Anne of Green Gables scandalises her neighbours by wearing a “collarless dress” circa 1900.) And if Miss Silver is wearing such a collar, how does the modesty vest – a piece of lace to fill in your neckline – fit in? Later she’s described as “this dowdy little person in her family album clothes”.
The proprietress of the village shop moans that everything is different now. You can’t get proper furniture polish. “Nothing’s the same as what it used to be, nor won’t be again.” Another older lady complains of “the increasing lack of manners amongst the young”. Plus ça change!
Another middle-aged woman wears clothes 30 years out of date (that makes them from the 1920s – they’d look shapeless and frumpy to the young). She is often found darning her wardrobe tightly in unyielding wool. She also “pokes” her head forward – something we were warned against as children.
A young woman is described: The girl was dressed a little too smartly. Neither the cut nor the material was good enough to produce the effect which had obviously been aimed at... She belonged to the class, so numerous in any large town, who endeavour to satisfy their social ambitions by wearing a cheap copy of the latest mode. She throws herself at one of the few eligible young men – odd, since he has been disinherited.
The mystery involves wills, and the murders take place at the sinister “watersplash”, a ford over a stream that’s unlit at night. Lovers of complex puzzles may be disappointed, but the writing is good, and rises to heights at times. Plus the social observations are pertinent and pungent.
“The coming in of a new fashion of farming or a new breed of cattle, accepted sometimes after long doubt and debate, more often rejected and remembered as somebody’s ‘Folly’.”
“Miss Mildred opined that Susan was headstrong, and they had a very cosy little talk about some other defects in her character.” Another girl is dismissed as “flighty”.
However, I’m not sure you can remove your own fingerprints from a sheet of paper... And Wentworth manages to include the cliché about the “thin veneer of civilisation”: What a superstitious creature man was! Civilized? The veneer was pitifully thin.
A good read, though. I don’t miss afternoon tea, especially when the brew was weak and tepid, and the "butter" margarine.
The Watersplash has been reviewed by Clothes in Books. Fortunately I picked out different costume details.
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