It’s quite hard to give, in a short review, a full flavour of Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s book about women’s working lives from 1950 onwards; to be frank, I can’t remember the last time I read something so potty – in good ways, and in bad. But for starters, let us begin with Penny Eyles, who in 1950, at the age of 22, found herself working briefly at a place called the De La Warr Laboratories, near Oxford. According to Eyles, whose job was to type letters to the aristos who swore by the treatments it offered, the “laboratory” comprised lots of black boxes, each labelled with the name of the patient to whom it belonged. Inside the boxes were samples of the patient’s blood and hair, various knobs and dials, and a strip of rubber. Every week, a medium called Mrs Boulder would arrive to “treat” the patients by rubbing the, er, rubber strip, at which point the dials would apparently begin to move.
You have to ask: where on earth does Maxtone Graham find them? My sense is that she doesn’t cast her net particularly widely. Admittedly, in Jobs for the Girls, the third in her trilogy about “lost worlds” of the recent past, there are a few non-posh people: one of her interviewees worked at a Tampax factory in Havant; another was employed at a Bradford mill. But the vast majority have names such as Phoebe Fortescue and Bumble Ogilvy-Wedderburn, and the trouble with this is that the Fortescues and Ogilvy-Wedderburns of this world tend to have things a bit easier than the rest of us; De La Warr Laboratories aside, they can afford to be eccentric (and to flit, as Penny did, when they get a better offer, which they always do). However much we may sympathise with some of the struggles they describe in Jobs for the Girls – their daddies were dastardly not to want to educate them properly, and yes, it was a pity their schoolmistresses thought their best course was to “marry into” a grouse moor – when they confess to how bored they felt at Christie’s, or to how disappointing it was that life at BOAC was not at all as it appeared in a book they read at boarding school called Anna the Air Hostess, you feel irritated even as you laugh.
