and somehow Miss Pettigrew rises to the occasion. Miss LaFosse begs Miss Pettigrew to help her out: Miss Pettigrew is scandalized but intrigued. The address she's given is for a sexy nightclub singer, Miss LaFosse, who's in the throes of Man Troubles: she's juggling two lovers, with a third hopefully waiting in the wings. In this 1938 book, the proper Miss Pettigrew, a 40 year old faded and timid governess who's fallen into desperate poverty, is sent to a new job by her employment agency. So, at what point do you shrug and say well, this is before all that political correctness, so you have to – er, roll with the punches (ooh that doesn't sound right) – er, I mean you have to give them a bit of leeway, er don't you? The past is another country and all that? Well, I didn't leave the party, I finished the book, there were no embarassing scenes, but I don't think me and Winifred Watson will be meeting up again any time soon.ģ.75 stars. "Now Delysia's a little devil and there's times I could flay her alive, and obviously she needs a little physical correction, but I'm the only right man to do it." Oh yes, that came 12 pages after this – here's one of the suitors speaking : "Certainly," said Miss LaFosse, demurely. And, well, I do think when it comes to marriage it's safer to stick with your own nationality." I don't like to jump to conclusions but I think there was a little Jew in him. "Now the first one, he was kind too," said Miss Pettigrew earnestly, "but well, my dear.
I was motoring through this book and thinking it was kind of a British counterpart to Anita Loos' Gentlemen Prefer Blondes – well, actually, it was The Monkees to Anita Loos' Beatles, but still good fun, as The Monkees are, when Miss Pettigrew on page 162 offers some advice to Miss LaFosse, who is trying to choose between two suitors :
What do you do? Stop the party? Denounce your friend? Turn a lovely evening into a memorable horror-show about which people will wince for years? This sweet little cute little naughty little novel from 1938, with its nudity, its cocaine and its multiple sexual partners (all before page 20) unfortunately throws me into the old quandary which goes – what if you're in the middle of a grand evening with some of your best pals and you're as happy as Larry, whoever he was, having a great time, and then one of them out of the blue makes a racist remark?
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