TASTER: The British Girl's Annual

[feather_ghyll]

I thought I'd mentioned beginning this, but I had it mixed up with the last annual I read, The Big Book of School Stories for Girls. The British Girl's Annual was 'compiled by the editor of Little Folks' and published by Cassell and Company Ltd in 1918.

I've been reading no more than a story a day, and actually less frequently than that, so I'm edging two thirds of the way through. I've just finished my second Violet Methley story, 'Her Wits' End', which is less noteworthy than the first of Methley's stories in the annual, 'A Daughter of the Legion'. I vaguely recall owning a book by her that features a girl who gets to know Napoleon on Elba, and the writer evidently has an attachment to la belle France, as 'Daughter' again features Napoleon and 'Wits' is set during the French Revolution. Methley's attitude towards Napoleon is weird. Well, romanticised. Her heroine is tomboyish but girlish Violette, aged around seventeen but still climbing trees, who impulsively decides to give Napoleon a posy of his favourite flowers. (Violets, of course). He's the benefactor of her school, which is for the orphaned daughters of soldiers. Touched by her gesture, he decides there and then to give her in marriage to one of his officers. Violette is revolted by the idea and deciding that as a woman, Napoleon's dictats mean nothing to her (!?) runs away from the school dressed as a boy, but comes across a plot to kill the Emperor. Horrified, she goes to tell the proper authorities and insists on joining the officer who is in charge of the investigation as an advance party for Napoleon's journey to the wedding that Violette knows will not take place. In the ensuing fracas, her gender is discovered and Violette makes the discovery that this officer is the one whom Napoleon wants her to marry, and it's all right because now that she knows him, she quite likes him! Hurrah!?

That story raised a lot of !?s from me.

That story was followed by the all right 'A Dance in the Never-Never land', an account about a social dance in the Outback, and 'The White and Green Girl' about a rather stupid girl at college - it's set in 1920 - who ends up getting over a GP for an older girl and deciding she wants to be a doctor. Except no patient would want her to be their doctor.

Then the Huns get it in 'In Mid Air' by Captain Charles Gibson and 'Luck!' by Ethel Talbot, which is another vivid mix of wartime and Guiding propoganda in which good things are ripping and bad things put you in a funk. In both stories, patriotic Brits - airmen in the first, schoolgirl Guides in the second - find German spies who are Up To No Good on British soil and foil their evil doings. 'In Mid Air' has the following exchanges to commend it:

Here Thornbury's man burst forth into another explosion. "Explain yourself!" he demanded. "Justify your most extraordinary behaviour."

"Well," said Thornbury, "if you want me to, I will. I'm not such a fool as to swallow a word of your statements. You no more belong the Anti-aircraft lot than I belong to a tribe of South Sea Islanders. And that I know for a fact. You were not signalling to the coastguard station, but to an aeroplane over the sea, and that aeroplane was not a British one. If those two reasons aren't good enough for you, I can give you a third. Though you speak English uncommonly well, I don't like your accent, my friend. It's suggestive of the beer garden; you have a kind of Unter den Linden way of pronouncing your c's. Just now you said 'conduct'--it was very nearly 'gonduct,' and that's good enough for me. If you want a fourth reason, your skill's too hard for a Britisher..."

My favourite bit is 'suggestive of the beer garden'.