P.G. Wodehouse, Something New, 1915
My dear, late friend Richard introduced me to many writers and books. One writer was Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, "Plum" to his friends. The prolific Wodehouse published throughout the twentieth century, about ninety novels in total.
Wodehouse wrote novels of the British aristocracy and their servants. The most famous characters were the addle-brained Bertie Wooster and his valet Jeeves. No, dammit, Jeeves was not a butler! Jeeves and Wooster were wonderfully portrayed by Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry in a series I can recommend to you wholeheartedly:
The first book I picked up by Wodehouse was Sunset at Blandings published in 1977. I thought there had been some mistake, surely it was published earlier! I was wrong, Sunset was Wodehouse's last novel, he was in his nineties when he worked on it. Sunset was the final novel of Wodehouse's Blandings Castle series of books. Blandings Castle is the home of Clarence, the ninth Earl of Emsworth, a doddering Earl who cares for little except his flower garden and the Empress of Blandings, his prize pig and winner of the Blue Ribbon in the "Fat Pig" class at the Shropshire Agricultural Show. Clarence's tyrannical sisters are constantly forcing the Earl to behave more like an Earl, demanding he wear a top hat and a stiff collar at such functions as the prize-giving at the village grammar school. Horrors!
Something New as it was titled in the United States, the British title was Something Fresh, is the first of the Blandings books, published in 1915, sixty-two years before Sunset. The book centers on two young people, Ashe Marshon and Joan Valentine, friends laboring in the unforgiving world of writing pulp fiction for a ha'penny a word.
Joan is the real driver of the plot: if Ashe is so miserable an author, he should do something new (or fresh!). No excuses! Joan herself has had dozens of jobs from being a lady's maid to appearing on stage. If Ashe wants excitement, go out and get it!
Meanwhile Lord Emsworth has been forced to visit London, which he hates, and spends time with obnoxious American millionaire J. Preston Peters who shows Emsworth his prize collection of scarabs. Lord Emsworth, as addle-brained as Bertie Wooster himself, accidentally puts one in his pocket before tottering back to Blandings. Peters, convinced Emsworth has stolen his precious scarab offers an award of £1000 (roughly $140,000 today) to whoever retrieves his scarab from Blandings Castle. Ashe and Joan, through separate channels, decide to get the scarab and get that reward! He will pose as Peters's valet and she as his daughter's lady's maid. When they meet on the train and discover they are both seeking the same prize, Joan scoffs at his ability to pull off the pose as a valet. Why, Ashe did not even know the strictly enforced hierarchy of the servants. Ashe did not even know how to enter the steward's room for his dinner:
"Tell me," he said. "Tell me all you know. I feel as though I had escaped a frightful disaster."
"You probably have. I don't suppose there is anything so terrible as a snub from a butler."
"If there is I can't think of it. When I was at Oxford I used to go and stay with a friend of mine who had a butler that looked like a Roman emperor in swallowtails. He terrified me. I used to grovel to the man. Please give me all the pointers you can."
"Well, as Mr. Peters' valet, I suppose you will be rather a big man."
"I shan't feel it."
"However large the house party is, Mr. Peters is sure to be the principal guest; so your standing will be correspondingly magnificent. You come after the butler, the housekeeper, the groom of the chambers, Lord Emsworth's valet, Lady Ann Warblington's lady's maid—"
"Who is she?"
"Lady Ann? Lord Emsworth's sister. She has lived with him since his wife died. What was I saying? Oh, yes! After them come the honorable Frederick Threepwood's valet and myself—and then you."
"I'm not so high up then, after all?"
"Yes, you are. There's a whole crowd who come after you. It all depends on how many other guests there are besides Mr. Peters."
"I suppose I charge in at the head of a drove of housemaids and scullery maids?"
"My dear Mr. Marson, if a housemaid or a scullery maid tried to get into the steward's room and have her meals with us, she would be—"
"Rebuked by the butler?"
"Lynched, I should think. Kitchen maids and scullery maids eat in the kitchen. Chauffeurs, footmen, under-butler, pantry boys, hall boy, odd man and steward's-room footman take their meals in the servants' hall, waited on by the hall boy. The stillroom maids have breakfast and tea in the stillroom, and dinner and supper in the hall. The housemaids and nursery maids have breakfast and tea in the housemaid's sitting-room, and dinner and supper in the hall. The head housemaid ranks next to the head stillroom maid. The laundry maids have a place of their own near the laundry, and the head laundry maid ranks above the head housemaid. The chef has his meals in a room of his own near the kitchen. Is there anything else I can tell you, Mr. Marson?"
Ashe was staring at her with vacant eyes. He shook his head dumbly.
"We stop at Swindon in half an hour," said Joan softly. "Don't you think you would be wise to get out there and go straight back to London, Mr. Marson? Think of all you would avoid!"
Ashe does not get of the train and once they arrive at Blandings, the plot is off and running. Mistaken identities! Imposters! Hilarious mixups! All in a mystery story as complicated as any Agatha Christie novel. It is all great fun. Make Plum and his daughter proud!
Free ebook: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/2042
Free audiobook: https://librivox.org/something-new-by-pg-wodehouse/
Free BBC radio dramatization: https://archive.org/details/something-fresh-bbc-radio
Reading Gutenberg by John Jackson is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
