One thing always leads to another on the intertubes and this particular ravel started with my friend David Nice. David is a cultural critic and musicologist who maintains a wonderful blog – I’ll Think of Something Later – where he writes about music and travel and culture and all the life in between.
In response to my last post he posed a simple question, pub quiz style: “‘Gin was mother’s milk to her’. Who said that?”
For an ex English teacher who had “taught” years of Pygmalion that was an easy one. Eliza Doolittle of course.
It comes slap bang in the middle of this delicious scene where Higgins has Eliza on a trial run for the Embassy Ball with the genteel Eynesford-Hills.
His plan to pass her off as a duchess is partially complete. The accent and the appearance are in place but ….
Eliza is under strict orders to stick to two topics of conversation: The weather and everybody’s health. And so she does.
MRS. EYNSFORD HILL. I’m sure I hope it won’t turn cold. There’s so much influenza about. It runs right through our whole family regularly every spring.
LIZA [darkly] My aunt died of influenza: so they said.
MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [clicks her tongue sympathetically]!!!
LIZA [in the same tragic tone] But it’s my belief they done the old woman in.
MRS. HIGGINS [puzzled] Done her in?
LIZA. Y-e-e-e-es, Lord love you! Why should she die of influenza? She come through diphtheria right enough the year before. I saw her with my own eyes. Fairly blue with it, she was. They all thought she was dead; but my father he kept ladling gin down her throat til she came to so sudden that she bit the bowl off the spoon.
MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [startled] Dear me!
LIZA [piling up the indictment] What call would a woman with that strength in her have to die of influenza? What become of her new straw hat that should have come to me? Somebody pinched it; and what I say is, them as pinched it done her in.
MRS. EYNSFORD HILL. What does doing her in mean?
HIGGINS [hastily] Oh, that’s the new small talk. To do a person in means to kill them.
MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [to Eliza, horrified] You surely don’t believe that your aunt was killed?
LIZA. Do I not! Them she lived with would have killed her for a hat-pin, let alone a hat.
MRS. EYNSFORD HILL. But it can’t have been right for your father to pour spirits down her throat like that. It might have killed her.
LIZA. Not her. Gin was mother’s milk to her. Besides, he’d poured so much down his own throat that he knew the good of it.
MRS. EYNSFORD HILL. Do you mean that he drank?
LIZA. Drank! My word! Something chronic.
MRS. EYNSFORD HILL. How dreadful for you!
LIZA. Not a bit. It never did him no harm what I could see. But then he did not keep it up regular. [Cheerfully] On the burst, as you might say, from time to time. And always more agreeable when he had a drop in. When he was out of work, my mother used to give him fourpence and tell him to go out and not come back until he’d drunk himself cheerful and loving-like. There’s lots of women has to make their husbands drunk to make them fit to live with. [Now quite at her ease] You see, it’s like this. If a man has a bit of a conscience, it always takes him when he’s sober; and then it makes him low-spirited. A drop of booze just takes that off and makes him happy. [To Freddy, who is in convulsions of suppressed laughter] Here! what are you sniggering at?
FREDDY. The new small talk. You do it so awfully well.
LIZA. If I was doing it proper, what was you laughing at? [To Higgins] Have I said anything I oughtn’t?
MRS. HIGGINS [interposing] Not at all, Miss Doolittle.
LIZA. Well, that’s a mercy, anyhow. [Expansively] What I always say is–
HIGGINS [rising and looking at his watch] Ahem!
That’s from Shaw’s play. In My Fair Lady it all takes place at the Ascot races:
And David’s question set me off thinking about gin and literature.
Dickens.
Of course there’s gin in Dickens. Lots of gin. It flows through Oliver Twist for example, where characters use gin to help along business transactions, deaden their pain and manipulate others. See the side bar for the insufferable Mr. Bumble for one instance.
Four poems with a gin mention came quickly to mind:
- George Barker describing his mother large as Asia, seismic with laughter, gin in hand blithely ignoring the Blitz. See To My Mother below.
- Charles Causley rhyming aspirin with gin in Timothy Winters:
Old man Winters likes his beer
And his missus ran off with a bombardier.
Grandma sits in the grate with a gin
And Timothy’s dosed with an aspirin.
- Then up the social ladder to John Betjeman’s infatuation with Miss Joan Hunter Dunn in A Subaltern’s Love Song. She beats him at tennis then it’s time for refreshment:
Her father’s euonymus shines as we walk,
And swing past the summer-house, buried in talk,
And cool the verandah that welcomes us in
To the six-o’clock news and a lime-juice and gin.
- And finally T.S.Eliot, Old Possum. Gus the theatre cat is shabby and thin and shakes with the palsy. But plied with gin will tell theatrical yarns:
Then, if someone will give him a toothful of gin,
He will tell how he once played a part in East Lynne.
So that was it for memory.
I did discover this poem by Phillip Levine in my travels though.
It’s a coming of age story about a stolen bottle of gin.
The first time I drank gin
I thought it must be hair tonic.
……………..People paid
for this?
See sidebar left.
But wait! How could I forget those much school anthologized Pool Players at the Golden Shovel?
.
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Know any poems with a gin connection? Please add. Thanks.
Music and travel sounds appealing. Many of us who “benefitted” from post war education then found we were outsiders. So we changed our accent or retreated into despising the class system that continued to look down on us. But each of us is a slave within that hierarchy…but some, like my sister, who didnt benefit from that education still try to “improve” their accent in the company of others they perceive as superior. I never wore a hat like that and I am not sure a helmet with horns would work either.
Sometime in there the BBC stopped sounding like the BBC and everyone started to emulate estuary speech. But it is interesting that taking ‘helocution’ went out of fashion and the next generation make a regional accent a matter of pride and authenticity. (Up to a point of course.) Not to mention your phrase “middle class speech defect” for those poor souls afflicted with it by mishap of birth and family status.
But it’s all still there. Lurking beneath the surface. Primed and ready to ensnare us.
Think of “axe” as in “axe me a question”. ‘Axe’ as pronunciation for ‘ask’ goes back to Anglo-Saxon. But there are many who think that those who pronounce it thus are ill-educated and ignorant.
Every era has its drugs. My mother recounted tales of her mother coming home “rolling drunk” in rages and taking “it” out on my mother and her sister. My Auntie grew up timid, outwardly, inwardly furious. My mother “stood up for them both”. Thus the family characteristics evolved. But meanwhile the “it” continued along with a strong smell of Palma Violets.
And some said the “It” in “Gin and It” was Italian vermouth. But clearly it was pure alcohol fueled family fury.
That’s actually a terrible story and I can see your mother taking it on just like she took on the greengrocer who sold her bad tomatoes. “Little ‘itler”
I knew you’d know it! Though lucky pupils, to be taught GBS – alas, we never were. Your quoting at length reminded me what a lot he and Dickens have in common. And of course the most celebrated gin-swiller is Sairey Gamp in ‘Martin Chuzzlewit’. This is one of my favourite Gamp monologues:
‘If it wasn’t for the nerve a little sip of liquor gives me (I never was able to do more than taste it), I never could go through with what I sometimes has to do. ‘Mrs. Harris,’ I says, at the very last case as ever I acted in, which it was but a young person, ‘Mrs. Harris,’ I says, ‘leave the bottle on the chimley-piece, and don’t ask me to take none, but let me put my lips to it when I am so dispoged, and then I will do what I’m engaged to do, according to the best of my ability.’ ‘Mrs. Gamp,’ she says, in answer, ‘if ever there was a sober creetur to be got at eighteen pence a day for working people, and three and six for gentlefolks — night watching,”‘ said Mrs. Gamp with emphasis, ‘”being a extra charge — you are that inwallable person.’ ‘Mrs. Harris,’ I says to her, ‘don’t name the charge, for if I could afford to lay all my feller creeturs out for nothink, I would gladly do it, sich is the love I bears ’em. But what I always says to them as has the management of matters, Mrs. Harris’ — here she kept her eye on Mr. Pecksniff — ‘be they gents or be they ladies, is, don’t ask me whether I won’t take none, or whether I will, but leave the bottle on the chimley-piece, and let me put my lips to it when I am so dispoged.’
Dickens was the absolute best at skewering hypocrisy and cant. And from Pecksniff to Podsnap he has the best names.
Looks like that in the current gin fad there’s a rash of Dickensian brand names – noticed there’s a David Copperfield and an Oliver Twist gin. Gamp or Micawber gin just doesn’t have the same appeal.
Don’t know how lucky the kids were but Pygmalion was always fun. Great way to focus on issues of accent and class.
“This Drink’s for You”
Numbing
Cleansing
Gin goes down like an antiseptic
Burning away memories of you.
Mindy Gregersen 2011
That’s a grim one! Drinking/ burning away the sorrows with medicinal gin. Hmm. Thanks Gretchen.
Here is one I like.
Gin
There’s a mystery
By the river, in one of the cabins
Shuttered with planks, its lock
Twisted; a bunch of magazines flipped open,
A body. A blanket stuffed with leaves
Or lengths of rope, an empty gin bottle.
Put down your newspaper. Look out
Beyond the bluffs, a coal barge is passing,
Its deck nearly
Level with the water, where it comes back riding
High. You start talking about nothing,
Or that famous party, where you went dressed
As a river. They listen,
The man beside you touching his odd face
In the countertop, the woman stirring tonic
In your glass. Down the bar the talk’s divorce,
The docks, the nets
Filling with branches and sour fish. Listen,
I knew a woman who’d poke a hole in an egg, suck
It clean and fill the shell with gin,
Then walk around all day disgusting people
Until she was so drunk
The globe of gin broke in her hand. She’d stay
Alone at night on the boat, come back
Looking for another egg. That appeals to you, rocking
For hours carving at a hollow stone. Or finding
A trail by accident, walking the bluff’s
Face. You know, your friends complain. They say
You give up only the vaguest news, and give a bakery
As your phone. Even your stories
Have no point, just lots of detail: The room
Was long and bright, small and close, angering Gaston;
They turned away to embrace him; She wore
The color out of season,
She wore hardly anything at all; Nobody died; Saturday.
These disguises of omission. Like forgetting
To say obtuse when you talk about the sun, leaving
Off the buttons as you’re sewing up the coat. So,
People take the little
They know to make a marvelous stew;
Sometimes, it even resembles you. It’s not so much
You cover your tracks, as that they bloom
In such false directions. This way friends who awaken
At night, beside you, awaken alone.
By David S. John
Listen,
I knew a woman who’d poke a hole in an egg, suck
It clean and fill the shell with gin,
Then walk around all day disgusting people
Until she was so drunk
The globe of gin broke in her hand. She’d stay
Alone at night on the boat, come back
Looking for another egg.
Wow! Heady stuff. New one for me. Thank you Dennis.