Women in novels of the 30s-50s were praised for having “well-brushed hair”. Was it neat, flat and glossy, lacking “rats’ tails”, or “not set in a rigid perm”? Middle-class women under stress “drag a comb” through their hair.
When two people fancy each other but do not know it, their hands touch accidentally and "a tingle shoots up their arm". When two characters have a conversation, set it in a restaurant or, ideally, a tea shop, so that you can keep interrupting the narrative with references to their eating habits, e.g. "She took a bite of her scone and chewed thoughtfully." (JL)
Struck by how many novels echo the Brideshead theme - someone from humdrum family being entranced by more bohemian family. (@MsLupin)
A character finds him/herself back at a grand house, now decayed and shabby in the dystopian present. He remembers happy days in the gilded past. (Brideshead Revisited, Wind in the Willows).
The decaying grand house whose impoverished inhabitants are all variously eccentric, mad, living in the past or sliding down the class ladder.
The heroine is plain (sometimes she just doesn’t fit the tastes of the time, sometimes she really IS plain, and sometimes gets a bit of a makeover), but the hero (the right kind of man) can see her inner beauty. Because you’d want to appeal to someone who appreciates people for what’s on the inside, wouldn’t you? (PS: Anyone who tells you that life is really like this is a liar.)
Lucy Snowe, Jane Eyre and Lizzy Bennett: the plain or ordinary girl who gets the hero not by being “feminine”, as an older woman would no doubt advise her, but by being straight-talking, blunt, funny and feisty. (She is also “good”, and surrounded by some bad girls for contrast.) Sadly this approach doesn’t work in real life either.
A young, naive, plain, badly dressed girl gets a job with a suave, important middle-aged man. She frequently screws up and gets into embarrassing situations, thanks to her inexperience, honesty, naiveté, genuineness etc. Sometimes there is a corresponding older woman who is chic and sophisticated, and our heroine is always making a fool of herself in front of this female. Of course they get married.
Examples:
Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
Rebecca (Daphne du Maurier)
The Sound of Music
Elizabeth Taylor's The Wedding Group imagines what their married life would be like – hell.
MI6 was based in Broadway Buildings, opposite St James's Park Tube station. Outside a plaque read 'Minimax Fire Extinguisher Company', inside was a warren of back staircases, dingy corridors and pokey rooms. A secret passage ran to the Passport Office in Queen Anne's Gate while a bridge led to the flat of the 'Chief', Sir Dick White, whose office was on the fourth floor at the end of a spidery corridor... The interview took place at the agency's HQ in a Mayfair office building, Leconfield House, which had a large basement and a windowless ground floor. The interior was shabby, the windows were grimy and internal partitioning had left many rooms an awkward shape and ludicrously overcrowded. (DM)
Tube Alloys was the code name of the research and development programme authorised by the United Kingdom, with participation from Canada, to develop nuclear weapons during the Second World War. (Wikipedia) In Christie’s universe, the relevant offices are found behind a door marked MARINE BIOLOGY in what is obviously Foyle’s bookshop.
The boys and girls in their very ‘with-it’ clothes looked untidy and none too clean. The girls were pale and even sickly-looking. (Dodie Smith, It Ends with Revelations) Beatniks and hippies were always being accused of looking “dirty”. Agatha Christie denigrates fashionable young women circa 1960 – thick Sloppy Joe jerseys at dinner, and black stockings – so hot! Angela Carter wrote that Beatniks didn’t wear make-up, so their faces looked “dirty” to a society used to women in foundation and powder.
When asked how she could afford some luxury, a working-class character will say “Scrimped and syved, m’m, scrimped and syved.” (Paul Gallico’s Mrs 'Arris syved up for a Dior dress by cutting out tea and sugar. It would have taken her a couple of thousand years.)
The dreary society for international students aimed at encouraging brotherhood between nations and world peace which is a front for spies, anarchists or infiltrators. They meet in basements and there’s an enthusiastic grey-haired facilitator passing round the sherry. (Agatha Christie, They Came to Baghdad. A lot of them really were fronts.)
More here, and links to the rest.
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