Female British mystery writer takes a casual slap at "Socialized Education!"


Josephine Tey's Miss Pym Disposes, published in England in 1946. Pages 114-115.

Our heroine, Miss Lucy Pym is invited to visit a good friend who is running a girl's school, decides to stay over a while, so writes her good family helper, a Mrs. Montmorency, who obliges her by sending whatever she needs along with a letter:

"I as done as you sed an sent the urgent by passel post. Registered. Fred put it into Wigmore Street on is way to work reciet enclosed I as packed the blue and the blouses...etc..."

Miss Pym is left "wondering why she paid education rates [taxes?]

"It wasn't public schools for everyone that was needed, but a good many elementary school classes of not more than a dozen, where the future Mrs. Montmorencys could be adequately taken care of in the matter of the Three Rs."

THEY MADE HIM LITERATE AND LEFT THE REST TO HIM.

"Old McLean, their jobbing gardener at home, had left school when he was twelve, but he could write as good a letter as any University acquaintance of hers; and why?

"Because he came from a small village school with small classes and a good school master.

"And of course because he lived in an age when the Three Rs were more important than Free Milk.

"They made him literate and left the rest to him.

"He lived on white - flour scones and stewed tea and died hale and hearty at the age of ninety - two."

ONE OF THOSE 'OLE TIMEY NIGGER-BROWN AFFAIRS ?? !!

And now for some of that delightfully quaint British use of the English language, circa 1946, as we see it on page 186, where there's a big social whirl in progress at the girls' school:

"Madame Lefevre came floating in wearing a nigger - brown silk affair that was shot with metallic blue in the high - lights; which made her look more than ever like some exotic kind of dragonfly."