Good as her Word: Selected Journalism. Lorna Sage

awful. As the book’s hilarious account of the historic police raid modulates into the story of her experiences before she found her vocation and acquired her house, the party atmosphere is rapidly dissipated. In many ways we still seem to be in the nineteenth century, but now the ambience is less English, more Maupassant. Cynthia’s mother died young, in 1943, and her father, whom she and her sister hardly knew (he’d been a hairdresser on the cruise liners) wasn’t well-equipped to cope alone, though he had to, since potential second wives found his girls too difficult, and his own conscious respectability cut him off from the sort of surrounding support his working-class background might have provided. Each sister reacted in her own way – Cynthia ‘ran wild’, used bad language, and displayed a generous curiosity about sex, Melanie became sensible and ‘posh’ (and married a police inspector). As ‘Cinders’ drifted away from home on the south-east coast and into London (failed hairdresser, waitress, unmarried mother) she seems, by her own account, to have lost control of her life with frightening speed. She semi-starved for a season in a slum basement with a derelict who ‘looked like Christie’, though all he did was, harmlessly, to collect other social casualties into a family of sorts. Her men seem to have been either father-substitutes (though penniless and inept – she only managed one ‘sugar daddy’) or sexy spivs like ‘Sam’, who worked in the amusement arcade, and got her pregnant with nightmarish regularity.

      This is a twilight world of female drudgery (waitressing, pregnancies), of more-or-less lost children (for her first son she arranged fostering, her second was adopted), of abortions and sexual fear. Only as she nears her destiny as a Madam does Cynthia seem to be a person at all. Indeed, she never is quite a person; she moves from unperson to personage (via a short and unpleasant spell on the game herself) in a most disconcerting fashion. As a casualty of family life, and an exile from it, she is a self-made expert in the weird, nostalgic fantasies about domesticity that set the tone at Cranmore. Perhaps the point is made most painfully and absurdly when her long-estranged father, lonelier than ever, and now an old man, becomes one of her party-goers, and joins the queue on the stairs. This is, in a way, Cynthia’s moment of triumph, the closing of the magic circle. She provides the home from home, a haven for refugees from the respectable world she couldn’t live in, and becomes herself a motherless Mother Superior. (House rules excluded men under forty – ‘Old men are more appreciative’ – and her ‘girls’ were chosen because they did it for love as well as money.)

      And so we return to the domain of Madam Baloney, the hilarity by now slightly shadowed, the humour blacker. Cynthia has preserved letters from her clients specifying their wants, and a selection of the most picturesque of these forms the funniest part of the book. A methodical diplomat describes in enormous detail how the lady of his dreams (‘aged 38–46 if possible, and preferably English [including Jewish], otherwise European, blonde or brunette’) is to create the precise quality that turns him on: ‘a very strong, natural odour coming through her blouse from under her arms’. After instructions about not washing and so on, he continues.

      My request is really quite a simple one and not really all that demanding, if you consider that less than 100 years ago, when ladies seldom took a bath and scent was too costly for most people to afford, it was considered perfectly normal for ladies to smell of ‘B.O’ …

      And he hints darkly at tortures of the damned on the rush-hour tube of a hot summer’s evening. Others are briefer, and perhaps less sincere:

      Honoured Partygiver.

      Can you supply a nun at your next shindig? Severe face and Irish accent for preference.

      Yours beatificially,

      ‘Decameron George’

      What they all have in common is longing for that lost past, that time before they grew up and became insurance men or vicars or whatever, when women dominated and enveloped them.

      Many can only do it when reminded of Nanny (‘Who’s been a naughty boy then?’). Some hanker after housework as the only really exciting thing, like the retired police superintendent who pursues one of Cynthia’s ‘girls’ back home to Somerset to clean her oven in the nude while ‘Agatha’ whips away. ‘Agatha’, in fact, comes dangerously close to enjoying her work: ‘I thought of all those years washing my husband’s socks and underpants, cooking his meals, waiting on him hand and foot, and it suddenly gave me a lovely feeling, punishing that policeman.’ But this isn’t Cynthia’s line: she never married, after all, and is more disinterested, ‘unswervingly loyal’, indeed, Bailey discovers, ‘to the curious notion that the male is the superior of the species’. When they left her house, they returned to their dog-collared or pinstriped adult disguises, and (you realize, with a dazed feeling) to running the society we live in.

      Paul Bailey, I think, relished his task because he saw in Cranmore’s alternative economy a satire on normalcy, and more specifically on the family as an institution. Cynthia provided a place where ‘earnest obsessionists’ could painlessly (unless they insisted) act out their quirky emendations on the family scenario, and thus unwittingly proclaim (as it turned out) the quiet insanity of English life and manners. The satiric effect is, however, in the end overlaid with a rather different one: a sense that this particular comic subculture is autonomous, endemic, changeless. Cranmore’s world reflects remarkably few of the things that are supposed to have happened to relations between the sexes in the last hundred years. Except of course that they can be written about – something Bailey here does marvellously well. For the rest it’s as though the only testimonies to a century of hectic change are roll-on deodorants, Philip’s hoover, and assorted electronic gadgets, littering a family mansion still really inhabited by our great-grandfathers in short trousers, or, possibly, skirts.

       Orient of the mind

       Profile of Lesley Blanch

      LESLEY BLANCH HAD JUST returned to the south of France from a visit to Turkey. ‘I’m at home anywhere and nowhere,’ she’d said, and I saw why when I climbed through the jungly tunnel of foliage in her steep little garden and stepped through the looking-glass into her Persian parlour, all latticed windows, low divans and overlapping rugs. ‘The Orient of my mind,’ she announced jokily, with nonetheless something of the air of a satisfied magician – a small, ageless, quicksilver woman in a striped cotton jellaba, who reclined leaning on an elbow to answer my questions.

      These were, first, inevitably, about her style of living. She must be a ruthlessly practical dreamer, I realised, to have stamped her desires so clearly on everything surrounding her. So we started with gardens. The romantic green twilight, she said, is achieved by concentrating not on flowers but on leaves – ‘leaves of every kind, mimosa, cypress, fig, jasmine, thickets of bamboo, oranges and lemons and datura … If you sleep under the datura it’s supposed to send you mad for love, but, she added with an air of gallant regret, ‘there’s no one sleeping under mine.’

      She has lived here alone now for 10 years, but it’s not the first house she’s ‘made Turkish’: there was an earlier one up the hill in Roquebrune village which she shared with her husband writer-diplomat Romain Gary 30 years ago. After their divorce she tried Paris but hated its greyness so settled again for the south. ‘I craved the sun. I never feel the need for people, or much else, if it shines on me …’

      Her love of sunshine is not the only reason, however, why she has not returned to England. (She became a French citizen on marrying dashing Gary in 1946.) Animal quarantine regulations of ‘pig-headed rigidity’ (I’m to make sure to put this in my piece) also keep her pets and hence herself out. She loves animals – ‘but for my travels there’d be a menagerie’. Indeed, pictures of animals are everywhere: an Indian painting of a tree-bear, a pathetic Victorian spaniel needing a home, stray naïve paintings, taken in, ‘out of charity’.

      And it seems to be true that her things are her pets, as it were. The room is furnished with fetish-objects; everything has a story, a sentimental footnote, a personal ‘point’ – ‘I prefer things to people, you don’t have to entertain things, they keep you company