The Children on the Top Floor

[shewhomust]

I buy books faster than I can read them. Mostly I buy from second-hand or charity shops, where, if you see a book you want, you'd better buy it now. As extravagances go, this isn't so bad: the books are rarely expensive, and it gives me a pleasant sense of security, knowing that I am not going to run out of things to read. And once in a while, when I don't know what I want to read next, I dip in at random and pull out a book.

That's how I came to be reading Noel Streatfeild's The Children on the Top Floor. It's a curious book, first published in 1964, but with the plot structure of Ballet Shoes, updated in some ways, and in some ways not. Four unrelated children are brought up in the household od a largely absent single man, by a Nannie figure and others. They fall almost by default into earning their way in performance, which suits some of them better than others. One of the children succeeds so well that she threatens to become quite spoiled, but learns the error of her ways. Then the man who has brought the children together goes missing: at first things go on as normal, but as his absence is prolonged, there are money problems, and at last it seems that the house will have to be sold and the children split up.

Since this is Noel Streatfeild, it's an entertaining story, with some neat descriptions and characterisations. The relationships between the four children are beautifully done, the clear-eyed knowledge of each others characters and the affection which flourishes despite it. But two things in particular strike me as interesting - that it, apart from the extent to which it revisits the earlier - and, let's face it, better - book. One is how the update works. The children, because of who they are (and I'll come to that), are effectively celebrities: their clothes, toys, furniture, all their needs are provided by manufacturers who want to use their endorsement in advertising, or by magazines who want to feature them in articles. When they are old enough, the children become active participants in this, acting in television advertisements, performing to scripts. The television studio is the working environment, as the stage school is in Ballet Shoes. There's a sweet device whereby one of the adults in the household treats the studio as a place where you can always find out what you need to know: when the children have to be named, when they want to buy a poodle, she goes to the canteen and waits until the right person turns up. Then she asks them, and they give good advice.

The domestic set-up seems less credible. Was it really possible in 1964 for a single man to find four babies on his doorstep and simply keep them, without any intervention from social services? Great Uncle Matthew got away with it, but that was in 1936, and he brought his Fossils home from abroad, which is even now a less controlled means of adoption. The household, too, is archaic: Malcolm Master lives in a large London house with Nannie, who had been his Nannie when he was a child, a cook and a valet / chauffeur (a married couple) and - I think - his secretary too.

This is funded from Malcolm Master's highly successful career as a television celebrity. And it's the character of Malcolm Master, the absence at the centre of the household, which is the oddest thing in the book. His background is sketched in with a mixture of sympathy and waspishness. His father died when he was very young, so he grew up between his mother and his Nannie, both of whom adored him; his singing voice earned him a place at a choir school, where the other boys teased him for being sissy, but not too much, because he was very "pleasant-natured". His singing voice develops into a "pleasant baritone" which gives him an entry to television, where he becomes a star for the beauty of his voice, but finds his forte when he starts talking to his audience, and is in permanent demand on games shows and panel discussions. He has a Christmas Eve show, in which he speaks to the nation from a studio set up to look like his drawing room, and, as he adds the last few ornaments to the tree, he he remarks that though he anticipates a pleasant Christmas with friends, his life is incomplete without children: "You cannot guess what this old bachelor would give to wake tomorrow morning to the squeals of delighted children opening their stockings."

It is this that causes not one, but four parents to deposit their babies on his doorstep the next morning, and serve him right! Clearly, the speech was completely insincere: Malcolm Master wants to do what is right, but he is relieved when Nannie takes over responsibility for the children. As they grow up, he rarely visits the nursery. He is not depicted as cynical or unsympathetic - he is too important to the children for this - but self-deceiving, yes. Also, is it possible to read the description of that Christmas Eve broadcast, and not think "camp"? Which encourages me to regard his amiable but disengaged relationship with the children as a sign of a more general emotional repression.

It is possible - it is irresistible - to continue this reading through the end of the book. Malcolm Master collapses with what is probably a heart attack brought on by overwork. He is away in hospital, and then, without returning home in the interim, sent to South Africa to convalesce for six months. Then he feels so much better that he joins some friends on a yacht, sailing to Brazil - and of course the yacht is shipwrecked, and Malcolm Master is missing for long enough for the children to be threatened with boarding school. He returns in the nick of time, and clearly whatever has been happening to him while he has been away, it has not all been unpleasant:

"Malcolm Master looked so different from the Mistermaster who had occasionally come up to the nursery he didn't seem the same person. Before, though he had smiled and was kind, he seemed as though he was sad and had lots to worry about. Now he looked years younger and he was even browner than Claude Cardon and, most striking change of all, he was gay."

Yes, I know, that didn't mean then what it means now - not to the general reader, in any case. But I think it's true, nonetheless.

Comments

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

So Mistermaster is a Master-Mistress? Of someone's passions, but discreetly offstage?

Nine

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

The clue is on the label, you think?

[fjm.livejournal.com]

Yes, I know, that didn't mean then what it means now

Yes, it did.

From Wiki:

One of the many characters invented by 1950s TV comic Ernie Kovacs was a "gay-acting" poet named Percy Dovetonsils. In one of his poems (which were always read to an imaginary off-screen character named "Bruce") he mentions the expression "gay caballero."
By 1963, the word "gay" was known well enough by the straight community to be used by Albert Ellis in his book The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Man-Hunting.

See also : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_and_Sandy

And Streatfield was at least acquainted with Noel Coward.

Re the issue of a single man with adopted children: it may well have been easier. One reason for the child abuse disaster in 1970s children's homes, was a new obsession with "professionalism" which led to many married and unmarried women being removed from senior positions and replaced by "trained" men.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Yes, it did.

Thank you, I didn't know that. In a way, it makes the whole thing even odder - not so much what Streatfeild knew, as what she was prepared to say, in a book for children.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

Remembering my grandmother, and her attitude to gay men, they were sort of thought of as household pets. Every woman wanted a gay male friend to tell her she was beautiful, and they were thought of as a-sexual.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

ps. thanks for the tip off. I don't know this book.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

Bought it, read it.

Impressive! And he is definitely gay in our sense of the word. Although (as far as I know) straight, I think the model for Mister Master may be Val Doonican who had precisely this kind of folksy show.

The gayness of Mister Master is also hinted at I think by the other man who comes along at the end, Claude Cardon. "Claude" is almost the classic "sissy" name--and "sissy" was the term for movie gays.

Other thing to note: that in 1964 the school leaving age was 15 so when the 11 yr olds start planning their future, and worry about the need to earn their own living, it's not a moment too soon. Terrifying.

As an aside: the career book genre thrives exactly in that period, when lower middle class children were leaving school at fifteen and sixteen. When the leaving age rose, the books disappeared.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Bought it, read it.

Now, that's impressive!

And most interesting. Yes, I do see what you mean about Val Doonican (whose fan site (http://www.valdoonican.co.uk/), despite introducing him as "the guy with the girl's name", confirms he is married with daughters).

I thought I was going out on a limb, but you are so convincing that I am tempted to crawl further out. In which case, what we have here is a book for children, published in the gap between the Wolfenden report and the 1967 Act, in which a gay man is depicted sympathetically, with no drama, and with the suggestion that his repression over his sexuality makes him a worse parent, not a better one.

Well, that's a surprise.

Interesting, too, on the era of career books: one of the things I've always liked about Streatfeild is the way her children go for the shiny, aspirational careers, but in a solid and serious way. (Actually, Val Doonican's joke about having taken seventeen years to become an overnight success is entirely consistent with her approach).

[fjm.livejournal.com]

I recently read The Vicarage Child and realised how desperate *she* was to be an orphan with, as she constantly iterates "no one being able to say you did X because of your parents".

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Ah, so that recurs because it's hard-wired, rather than because it's a handy trope.

Oddly enough, I never felt that, despite growing up as the child of teachers among their pupils and colleagues.