May beginnings: "I'm to be Queen of the May,…*

"Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions. The streets of the cities were lined with buildings in bad repair or in no repair at all, bomb-sites piled with stony rubble, houses like giant teeth in which decay had been drilled out, leaving only the cavity.  Some bomb-ripped buildings looked like the ruins of ancient castles until, at a closer view, the wallpapers of various quite normal rooms would be visible, room above room, exposed, as on a stage, with one wall missing; sometimes a lavatory chain would dangle over nothing from a fourth- or fifth-floor ceiling; most of all the staircases survived, like a new art-form, leading up and up to an unspecified destination that made unusual demands on the mind's eye.  All the nice people were poor; at least, that was a general axiom, the best of the rich being poor in spirit.

The Albert Memorial, Kensington Gardens (photo R. Harding)

"There was absolutely no point in feeling depressed about the scene, it would have been like feeling depressed about the Grand Canyon or some event of the earth outside everybody's scope.  People continued to exchange assurances of depressed feelings about the weather or the news, or the Albert Memorial which had not been hit, not even shaken, by any bomb from first to last.
The May of Teck Club stood obliquely opposite the site of the Memorial, in a row of tall houses which had endured, but barely; …. the Club had been three times window-shattered since 1940, but never directly hit.   There the windows of the upper bedrooms overlooked the dip and rise of treetops in Kensington Gardens across the street, with the Albert Memorial to be seen by means of a slight craning and twist of the neck.

Queen Alexandra House, Kensington, built in 1884 (photo Historic England) 

"….All the nice people were poor and few were nicer, as nice people come, than these girls at Kensington…  The first of the Rules of Constitution, drawn up at some remote and innocent Edwardian date, still applied more or less to them:

 The May of Teck Club exists for the Pecuniary Convenience and Social Protection of Ladies of Slender Means below the age of Thirty Years, who are obliged to reside apart from their Families in order to follow an Occupation in London.

 As they realised themselves in varying degrees, few people alive at the time were more delightful, more ingenious, more movingly lovely, and, as it might happen, more savage, than the girls of slender means."

The Girls of Slender Means   Muriel Spark, 1963

Muriel Spark drew on her time at a similar ladies' hostel in 1944 (the Helena Club on the north side of the park) for the May of Teck Club*.  The story unfolds in flashbacks to 1945, from VE Day in May to  VJ Day in August.  Amid wartime rationing and victory celebrations, the girls pursue their individual dreams of careers and marriage:   among them Joanna, the elocution teacher reciting The Wreck of the Deutschland,  Jane, the embryo gossip columnist, Dorothy with her debutante chatter, mad Pauline, and the ever elegant and heartless Selina.
They barter ration coupons, exchange suitors and borrow clothes; a much-prized pre-war Schiaparelli evening dress is a key element in the novel's shattering climax.  Fascinated by their lives is Jane's friend, the anarchist poet Nicholas Farringdon;  "I think he was in love with us all, poor fellow".

Elsa Schiaparelli evening dress, 1938

"They call me cruel hearted, but I care not what they say,

For I'm to be Queen of the May, mother, I'm to be Queen of the May."   Alfred, Lord Tennyson

*The Helena Club was set up by Princess Helena, daughter of Queen Victoria, Queen Alexandra House was established as a ladies' hostel by the wife of Edward VII, and Princess May of Teck involved in many charities, became Queen Mary, consort of George V.

Who was Warrender Chase?

"God knows where I got Warrender Chase from; he was based on no one that I knew.

I know only that the night I started writing Warrender Chase I had been alone at a table in a restaurant near Kensington High Street Underground eating my supper.  I rarely ate out alone, but I must have found myself in funds that day.  I was going about my proper business, eating my supper while listening-in to the conversation at the next table.  One of them said, 'There we were all gathered in the living-room, waiting for him.'

It was all I needed.  That was the start of Warrender Chase, the first chapter.  All the rest sprang from that phrase.

But I invented for my Warrender a war record, a distinguished one, in Burma, and managed to make it really credible even although I filled in the war bit with a very few strokes, knowing, in fact, so little about the war in Burma.  It astonished me later to find how the readers found Warrender's war record so convincing and full when I had said so little -- one real war veteran of Burma wrote to say how realistic he found it -- but since then I've come to learn for myself how little one needs, in the art of writing, to convey the lot, and how a lot of words, on the other hand, can convey so little…..

All these years since, the critics have been asking whether Warrender was in love with his nephew.  How do I know?  Warrender Chase never existed, he is only some hundreds of words, some punctuation, sentences, paragraphs, marks on the page.  If I had conceived Warrender Chase's motives as a psychological study I would have said so.  But I didn't go in for motives, I never have."

Loitering with Intent   Muriel Spark