Business As Usual

[from back of 2020 Handheld Press edition]

Business As Usual is a delightful illustrated novel in letters from 1933. It tells the story of Hilary Fane, an Edinburgh girl fresh out of university who is determined to support herself by her own earnings in London for a year, despite the resentment of her surgeon fiancé. After a nervous beginning looking for a job while her savings shrink, she finds work as a typist in the London department store of Everyman's (a very thin disguise for Selfridges). Through luck and an inability to type well she rises rapidly through the ranks to work in the library, where she has to enforce modernising systems on her entrenched and frosty colleagues.

Business As Usual is charming, intelligent, heart-warming, funny, and entertaining. It's also deeply interesting as a record of the history of shopping in the 1930s, and for its clear-eyed descriptions of social conditions, poverty and illegitimacy.

[book photo from Handheld Press edition, 2020] [author photo from National Portrait Gallery, London -- photographer Howard Coster]

Jane Oliver (Helen Rees née Evans) and Ann Stafford (Anne Pedler) met and became friends and collaborators while they were both employed by the Times Book Club. It was a long and fruitful partnership, in life and on the page. The two ended up publishing 40 books together, from Business As Usual in 1933 to Nurse Harriet Comes Home, the last of their Joan Blair Mills & Boons in 1964 and Ann helped Helen establish the John Llewlyn Rhys Prize, in memory of her husband, an author and RAF pilot who died in 1940. The women lived next door to each other, and, eventually, together, in Hampshire and Helen cared for Anne through her final illness.

There's not much I can add to Kate MacDonald's terrific introduction to the 2020 Handheld Press edition of Business As Usual, my source for the biographical information above. I recommend it highly.

The narrator of Business is actually not "fresh out of university", as the Handheld back indicates, though -- she's 27, nearly 28, and had been working as a teacher, and then a librarian -- partly to wait out the year before marriage and partly because her folks were feeling the pinch of her professor-dad's Depression-decreased honoraria. When she's laid off by the library, she decides to try a year in London -- she explains to her fiancé that she's feeling panicked about moving from financial dependence on her parents to dependence on him -- and wants to know she's capable of living independently and supporting herself. He's the opposite of encouraging, and you see where this is headed, especially when Michael Grant, Everyman's handsome, talented, fair-minded "minor prophet" of a Director of Publicity enters the picture.

The story's told in Hillary's letters and telegrams back from London, to her parents and to Basil, the obstetric surgeon fiancé, interspersed with Everyman inter-office memoranda that offer a different lens on her experience as an employee there. The epistolary approach works pretty well, except that so many of Hillary's early letters are wall-to-wall complaints about her uncongenial work environment and struggles, on an entry-level clerk's wages to keep the wolf from the door (and a door, period, between her and the wolf). After several rounds of such venting, you can't help feeling an uncomfortable twinge of sympathy for the snobby, sexist fiancé, Basil, who's on the receiving end of this firehose. It might have worked better to have introduced an old female classmate or cousin to be vented to while Basil got the bravely cheerful letters that, here, go to her folks.

That said, Business is always entertaining and offers a fascinating glimpse into the mechanics of employment in a large department store in the early-30s -- the infrastructure, the pecking order, the rules and rituals -- and the textures of daily life for young working women of the time -- benzining your shoes, distempered walls, and pennies in the machine for gas & electricity in your bed-sitter. And once Hillary gets her foot on the rungs of the ladder to career responsibility and success, the story moves along at a lively pace.

Also great fun is the up-and-coming young executive love-interest who's shown his genius introducing Everyman's Rational Reading Service book subscription program, advertised with a snappy circular that begins "We know your trouble. You never have a minute. Yet you love to read. And you are right. Good reading is as essential as good living. But in the fret and fume of modern life how are you to find time to choose..." etc., etc. So 30s!

H. G. Selfridge himself offered words of praise on Business's 1933 publication and this mystified me a bit. It's clear that Hillary ends up appreciating her time at Everyman's and the scope it (eventually) offers her talents, but, overall, the book presents a rather depressing picture of how average clerical and retail employees eked out a monotonous existence on minimal compensation in rote work endured in a soul-crushing environment. True, they weren't searching through rubbish bins for bottles and crusts like the poor old women Hillary passes on her way to work, but that seems a pretty low bar. When she describes the vulnerability of a young, unmarried clerk who finds herself pregnant, or the situation of her older coworker -- 35, she thinks -- counting the days "this is my seven-hundredth-and-fiftieth Monday" and trying to make do on her small salary for not just herself, but the female friend she lives with who's been out of work for six months "We hope she'll get something -- anything almost -- soon", there's quiet tragedy there, and Mr. H. G. Selfridge, employer, is necessarily implicated.

Jane and Ann's first effort is a charming, yes, but also surprisingly thought-provoking, read.