As well as bookshops, there are many other places in Britain where a
scattering of second-hand books is to be found, and one of these is in antiques
centres. Sometimes a book-dealer may have a dedicated unit, but otherwise the
book stock is often highly miscellaneous and presumably arrived alongside other
things from auctions or house clearances. Recently I wandered around a local
antiques emporium, spotting about half-a-dozen nooks where a jumble of books
lurked.
In one of these I found a copy of the Punch Almanack for 1941,
published November 1940, with Punch as a playing card king in full colour on
the front cover. It was issued to mark the centenary of the journal. Inside,
there was a Kai Lung story by Ernest Bramah, good to find, and lots of light
wartime humour, such as the colour plate of a guest dressed as Mephistopheles
at a fancy dress ball who confides that he has joined the A.F.S. (Auxiliary Fire
Service), where he would have been in good company with the writers Henry Green and William Sansom, among others. There are other fine colour plates. There was also a highly enjoyable
spoof ‘family curse’ story, ‘The Luck of the Wapentakes’, about an ominous
barometer, drawing on such legends as ‘The Luck of Edenhall’ and haunted house
stories generally.
Also to the fore I found some good-natured satire on modern art.
Surrealism had probably first come to the vague attention of the British public
through the first International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936 and
subsequent happenings. They tended to understand it as a term for all sorts of
modern art and identified it in particular with the work of Paul Nash, Henry
Moore and Ben Nicholson. By 1940, evidently, Punch and its contributors
could make fun of it confident that readers would know what it was.
The satire is actually quite indulgent and affectionate. An artist,
naturally bearded, scruffy and bohemian, is warned off painting near a naval
dockyard even though his work is a jumble of angles, abstract and
non-representational. A mild bespectacled gentleman in a telephone box in full
heraldic regalia rings home to ask his maid to check if he is in bed sleeping
and if so to wake him up.
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An adventurous advertiser has a full page display advising country
cottage owners to add Surrealist sculpture and art and a tubular chair to the
guest bedroom to make their Chelsea friends feel at home, but not to make any
changes to dinner, which will still of course start with the advertiser’s
famous chestnut soup. The advert is interesting for the assumptions made about
its customers. They are of course comfortable, cozy people with a quaint old
cottage in the country: but they are sophisticated and open-minded enough to
have artistic friends and to buy modern art for the guest room. And, of course,
they are discerning enough to know that some things, such as the chestnut soup,
never go out of fashion.
Punch was at its height around this time, the Forties, with over 100,000
readers, but later became a standing joke, not in a good way, for being not
particularly funny and for being often found in dog-eared copies in dentists’
waiting-rooms. Certainly, the humour always tended to be wry rather than
uproarious, and conformist, not absurdist. It stuck with a sort of gentleman’s
club milieu and did not pick up on the new vogues in humour and satire
exemplified by The Goons, Round the Horne, That Was the Week That Was and so
on. Despite several rescue attempts, it faded out around the turn of the
millenium. But on the evidence of this, admittedly special, issue it had once
been somewhat livelier than its later reputation, brisk, bright, broad-minded
and inventive.
And Symington's Chestnut Soup? No longer made, I'm afraid. You'll just have to make your own. Chop and fry an onion and leek until soft and translucent. Add some chopped garlic, a teaspoon of sage and a teaspoon of thyme. (At this point you will be unable to stop singing the chorus of 'Parsley Thyme Rosemary and Sage'). Stir in so the herbs adhere to the onion and leek. Add a packet of pre-cooked chestnuts, continue stirring. Now add a splash of balsamic vinegar and a twist or two of black pepper. Add just enough vegetable stock to cover the contents and burble away for ten minutes or so. Take off the heat and stir in a good splurge of soya cream or oat cream. Voila. A dish fit for a surrealist magus.
(Mark Valentine)