Margery Sharp and the Utility Bookcase

“It is the gift of all poets to find the commonplace astonishing, and the astonishing quite natural.”

From ‘The Rescuers’ by Margery Sharp 1908-1990

My parents were married in 1947 and they furnished their first home from the Utility Furniture Catalogue. In the same way as war time food rationing, the Utility scheme provided you with an allowance of ‘units’ - 60 units in the case of a newly wed couple. The units were like vouchers that then entitled you to buy simple furniture. The easy chairs and tallboy my parents bought in 1947 lasted for years. My Mum was sitting in one of the chairs listening to the news of JFK’s assassination when I came back from Brownies in 1963.

With 30 shillings of their wedding present money, Mum and Dad bought what we always called ‘The Utility Bookcase’. It stood in our sitting room under the window, next to an upright radio with a rectangular screen that displayed radio stations with names like Hilversum, Luxembourg and Helvetia. Those names were my first inkling that there was such a place as ‘abroad’. There a photo below of the same radio model. I painted ours pink when I was about 16.

I was an only child until I was seven and these two items of furniture were a huge part of my early education and entertainment. My first memories are tied up with them and I can clearly remember both of them towering over me.

The books on the utility bookcase fascinated me. Once I learned to read when I was about four, I used to catalogue them in different ways - author, title, subject matter etc. Before then I arranged them by size and colour. A lot of the books were published by The Reprint Society and I thought them very elegant with their single colour boards and a gold embossed label on the spine. But it was more that; very early on I realised that every book contains a world. A shelf of books is a gateway to a lifetime of travel in one’s own mind.

All my life I have tried to remember what was on those shelves - some of the books have survived and I still have them, but we moved a lot when I was growing up and my unsentimental mother would chuck anything if she thought it had outlived its usefulness. (That included most of my children’s books when I was at university. I came back one vacation and they’d gone. I am still getting over it.)

One of the titles on the utility shelves that so fascinated me was ‘The Foolish Gentlewoman’ by Margery Sharp. It’s been on my mind because last week my friend Susan gave me this. It is hilarious. Margery Sharp is Barbara Pam on speed.

Margery Sharp was a successful and prolific writer whose career spanned forty years between the 1930s and the 1970s. She is now best remembered for ‘The Rescuers’, first published in 1959 and Disney-fied into a saccharine animation in 1977. An association of mice devoted to helping prisoners, decide to expand their activities to helping one particular prisoner escape. The description in the book of the refined white mouse Miss Bianca is delicious:

‘There were the most fantastic rumours about her: for instance, that she lived in a Porcelain Pagoda; that she fed exclusively on cream cheese from a silver bonbon dish; that she wore a silver chain around her neck, and on Sundays a gold one. She was also said to be extremely beautiful, but affected to the last degree.’

That last sentence is typical Sharp - build up the reader’s expectation then prick their bubble. The prisoner that the mice decide to rescue is a Norwegian poet.

“If he's a poet, why is he in jail?” one of the mice wonders. “Perhaps he writes free verse.”

comes the cutting reply.

Margery Sharp decided to be a writer when she was seven. By the age of nineteen she had found herself a mentor in the shape of Sir Owen Seaman the editor of Punch, and incidentally perhaps the inspiration for Eeyore - A.A. Milne was his one time assistant. After graduating from Bedford College, Sharp became a journalist and over the next thirty years she published 22 novels and hundreds of articles for Punch and various women’s magazines.

The women in her novels are delightful and sometimes bonkers. Poor orphaned Cluny is sent away by her Uncle Arn who is a plumber, because ‘she doesn’t know her place’. After he discovers that she spent half a crown on tea at the Ritz (which doesn’t even get you bloater paste) he decides that becoming a housemaid under a strict housekeeper is the only way to reform her character. Cluny however is irrepressible and she’s in the excellent company of Sharp’s other female creations. In ‘The Nutmeg Tree’ published in 1937 the gleeful heroine Julia is described thus - if she took lovers more freely than most women it was largely because she could not bear to see men sad when it was so easy to make them happy. Note that “most women”.

Margery Sharp still has her fans. Here’s a quote from a Perri Klass article in the NYT in 2018.

It’s one of Sharp’s great talents, creating female characters of toughness and complexity. She gave us profound — and sympathetic — portraits of mothers who feel notably unmoved by motherhood … and realistic stories of women deeply motivated by money, by art, and yes, by sex, even as she created other gentler women in counterpoint, more daunted by convention, but sometimes tougher in the end.

I think there is no one quite like her. The only other woman writer that I can think of with similar wit, sympathy and kindness is Dodie Smith. Sharp also captures the social change she saw through her long life. ‘Britannia Mews’ published in 1946 chronicles the life of one woman, but also the history of one London street and its trajectory from respectable mews to down at heel slum - and finally as the target of Bohemian gentrification.

Margery Sharp died on the 14th March 1991. I’m so glad to have rediscovered her. She’s going to be a friend for life - and in a way she always has been.

I’ve made zabaglione as eaten by Adam Belinski at the Moulin Bleu Soho, where the plot to hide him from the Nazis is hatched. It’s a scene at the beginning of ‘Cluny Brown’.

4 egg yolks, 2 oz caster sugar, 4-6 tablespoons Marsala or other sweet fortified wine.

Mix together and place the bowl over but not touching, simmering water. Whisk until thick and creamy. Serve slightly warm with a biscuit to dunk. Fabulous

.