The Temptation of Mrs Harris

I shall never forget the shock of seeing, for the first time, a grown-up in tears. She was the mother of my nursery-school friend Lottie, and she’d been away from home over the birth of a new baby. When she saw Lottie again, after a separation of perhaps a week, she wept with happiness. It was astonishing to me that a grown-up could cry, and more than astonishing that anyone should cry for joy. The memory came back to me a few weeks ago, as I reread, with my 9-year-old daughter, Paul Gallico’s Flowers for Mrs Harris. For Gallico, most fondly remembered as the author of The Snow Goose, was a master of the bittersweet, of the mysterious kinship between suffering and joy. He knew how to fold together humour and poignant detail in just the right proportions to prevent his prose from curdling into mawkishness and sentimentality.

And, in bringing out Flowers for Mrs Harris towards the close of 1958, he displayed also a canny sense of timing. For Englishmen nervous of change, the past year had been unsettling. It had seen the last debs presented at Buckingham Palace, and the first stretch of motorway opened. Notting Hill had been set ablaze – literally – with race riots. What better moment for Mrs Harris – dauntless, reassuring, lion-hearted – to step on to the scene? ‘This is, if you like, a fairy tale,’ reads the dust-wrapper on the charmingly unassuming English first edition. ‘But of its enchantment, humour and pathos there can be no doubt, and we predict that it will be welcomed this Christmas and loved for many years to come.’ And welcomed it was – so warmly, in fact, that Paul Gallico went on to write three sequels: Mrs Harris Goes to New York, Mrs Harris MP and Mrs Harris in Moscow. Mrs Ada Harris (or ‘Mrs ’Arris’, as she introduces herself: the American edition had the ghastly title Mrs ’Arris Goes to Paris) is a London char. Small and slender, with ‘apple-red cheeks, greying hair and shrewd, almost naughty little eyes’, she ‘does’ for clientele in Chelsea and Belgravia, moving from house to flat to mews, letting herself in with latchkeys on relentless, silent scenes of rumpled beds, dirty dishes, scummy baths. She works for 3 shillings an hour, 10 hours a day, 5 days a week, and half a day on Saturdays. She is widowed and lonely, but self-pity is not a part of her nature, and life has its perks. She has a friend, stout, dependable Mrs Violet Butterfield, with whom she enjoys evenings at the flicks, the pub, the music hall. And she satisfies a craving for beauty and colour by filling her tiny Council flat at 5, Willis Gardens, Battersea, with potted plants, chiefly geraniums. Flowers provide her with ‘an escape from the sombre stone desert’ in which she lives. And so might Mrs Harris have passed the rest of her days, a stranger to the extremes of both delight and disappointment, had she not one morning, tidying a wardrobe for her employer Lady Dant, come upon two evening dresses from the House of Dior. The first is, in her own words, ‘a bit of heaven in cream, ivory, lace and chiffon’, the second ‘an explosion in crimson satin and taffeta, adorned with great red bows and a huge red flower’. She stands before them in awe, which quickly turns to longing. On a damp, foggy London day, there is born within Ada Harris a determination that, if she achieves nothing else in life, she must get herself to Paris, and buy a Dior dress. She can’t rationalize her ambition, and when Mrs Butterfield asks what she will do with the dress once she’s got it, her only reply is, ‘ ’Ave it, just ’ave it.’ And yet the yearning grows. In the morning, when she wakes up, it is ‘to a feeling of sadness and emptiness as though something unpleasant had happened to her, or something was missing which sleep had temporarily obliterated’. At night, her longing persists in distorted dreams. To begin with, fortune seems to smile on Mrs Harris’s ambition. She has a win at the football pools, and feels herself to be on a lucky streak. God, whom she has perceived since Sunday school as a Being combining the characteristics of ‘a nannie, a policeman, a magistrate and Santa Claus’, is on her side. But when she loses half her winnings in an evening at the White City dog-track, she comes to her senses. She is a woman made not for gambling but for hard graft, and she knows that in the end only sweat and self-denial can make her dream come true. So follow long months of toil – she takes up evening employment sewing zips into cheap blouses – and of sacrifice. One by one, Mrs Harris forsakes all life’s small pleasures – cigarettes, gin, tea, buses, the evening paper, the cinema, The Crown – and her savings grow. Finally, she finds herself aboard a BEA Viscount on the morning flight from London to Paris, wearing a shabby brown twill coat and brown cotton gloves, and clutching in her Rexine handbag the substantial wad of cash required for a Dior dress. Hers, at this moment, is ‘the bliss of one who knows that at last she is off upon the adventure at the end of which lies heart’s desire’. But Mrs Harris’s challenges have only just begun. As the taxi drops her on the corner of the Avenue Montaigne, and she mounts the imposing, deserted staircase of the great grey House of Christian Dior, she is oppressed by an atmosphere both unfamiliar and silently hostile. On the first half-landing she finds ‘a single silver slipper in a glass showcase let into the wall’, on the second ‘a similar showcase housing an outsize bottle of Dior perfume’. Otherwise, there ‘were no goods of any kind on display, nor were there crowds of people rushing up and down the stairs as in Marks & Spencer’s or Selfridge’s. Nowhere was there any sign of anything that resembled the shops to which she was accustomed.’ When at last she reaches the top of the stairs, and meets the manageress, Madame Colbert, there is the gradual, chilling realization that, despite her fat roll of hard-earned cash, subtle snobberies may exclude her from a seat at the afternoon’s review of the collection. Mrs Harris’s lip begins to tremble. For a moment, it seems her courage will fail her. But, despite her cool manner, Mme Colbert is a woman of compassion. A seat is secured, the collection is paraded before a select audience, and Mrs Harris sets her heart on No. 89, a black velvet, floor-length gown called ‘Temptation’. Then comes the crushing revelation that she cannot, as planned, take it home with her on the return flight that evening but must spend the best part of a fortnight in Paris while the dress is made for her. All these difficulties, of course, Mrs Harris overcomes. A telegram to Mrs Butterfield ensures that her employers’ homes are cleaned in her absence; moved by her plight, Monsieur Fauvel, the Dior accountant, allows Mrs Harris to lodge with him, enabling her to visit the Avenue Montaigne daily for her fittings. These are wonderfully described. Gallico details with Tailor of Gloucester relish and precision the fabrics, the seamstresses, fitters and cutters, the hive of cubicles, the acres of thick, silencing carpet, and the elegant, luxurious aroma that make up the interior of the House of Dior. And as ‘Temptation’ takes shape, something even more precious and durable is forged. Beneath their elegant façades, Mme Colbert, M. Fauvel and even Dior’s star model, Natasha, are beset with private sadnesses and difficulties. Mrs Harris, with her instinctive, commonsensical, salt-of-the-earth wisdom, is exactly what each of them needs to set their lives straight. By the time she returns to London, they have become her devoted friends, eternally in her debt. I suppose the politically correct might wince at Mrs Harris. ‘Char’ has become an unacceptable word. But there is nothing uncomfortable or condescending in Gallico’s portrayal of his feisty, aspirantly-challenged heroine: quite the opposite. While the bourgeois Dior employees reveal themselves as craven, brittle, prejudiced, she is unfailingly bold, honest, open. In a sort of reverse Pygmalion, Mrs Harris remains entirely true to herself and her background, infecting her social superiors with her doughty working-class wisdom and changing their lives for ever. Her life too, of course, is changed – though not in the way that she has dreamed or expected. ‘Temptation’ proves short-lived. Within less than twenty-four hours of Mrs Harris’s triumphant return to London, her generosity and high spirits, combined, perhaps, with a smidgen of pride, appear to lead to the devastation of her dreams. Then dawns the glorious realization that what she has found in Paris is something far more precious than any garment, and that what she has bought is not so much a dress as an experience of love and beauty and friendship that will sustain her ‘to the end of her days’.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 20 © Maggie Fergusson 2008