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.

"The Price of Shrimps" -- and some cautionary tales for adults

This poem by Paul Dehn was tucked in my old student commonplace book:

" All my life long Since I was thirteen,
Loved by St Francis Is what I would have been.

The fish still scatter, The pony shies,
The snake bites And the bird flies.

Yet here is one who is What I would have been
All my life long;  And he is thirteen."
Circus Hand  

It was possibly taken from one of those idealistic children's annuals of the 40s and 50s.  You would never imagine (apart from its neatness of structure), that it came from the man who wrote apocalyptic poems like these in the 1960s:

From Quake, Quake, Quake*, poems by Paul Dehn, illustrations by Edmund Gorey

Journalist and film critic,  Paul Dehn is probably better known as the script writer for films such as Goldfinger, The Spy who came in from the Cold,  and the many Planet of the Apes sequels.

Born in Manchester in 1912, he was writing as a film reviewer in the late 1930s, and then served in Intelligence in World War II.  He was very affected by the Cold War and the nuclear threat of the 1960s, and published his parodies of classic English poems, memorably illustrated by Edmund Gorey, in Quake Quake Quake, A Leaden [not "Golden"] Treasury of English Verse in 1961.

A parody of "Oh western wind", an anonymous love poem from the 16th century

A parody from Tennyson's poem in "The Princess, III."

*(Quake, quake, quake is also a parody of Tennyson -- "Break, break, break)

The Cold War was a very real threat, and influenced writers, artists and film-makers.  I recall seeing Peter Watkins' The War Game in the 1960s. Creating a documentary-style imagined account of Britain, invaded after a nuclear attack from the Communist East, he mixed news clips with searing acted scenes all in black and white. The film was planned to be shown on BBC TV in 1965, but was cancelled as too "horrifying" to broadcast.  It was later shown by the British Film Institute and at other carefully scheduled screenings; it was a chilling experience. (see mnsl.net)

From Paul Dehn's A Soviet Child's Garden of Verses, illustrated by Edmund Gorey

His sister, Olive Dehn (later Markham) was also an anarchist poet and feminist writer.
As a nineteen-year old she was escorted  from Nazi Germany in 1933 for writing a satirical poem about Hitler, and in later life she was again expelled from the Soviet Union for human rights campaigning.
Her stories for children reflect these concerns.  Come In (1946) is a realistic picture of family life in the 1940s, where the housewife has no freedom from domestic chores. Like her brother's poem Circus Hand, her stories (with a twist) feature in children's annuals.  In The Price of Shrimps, eighteenth century satirists Joseph Addison, Richard Steele and Jonathan Swift combine to rescue the heroine (and the secret shrimp recipe) from a life of drudgery with the wicked witch - by inveigling the witch to read Gulliver's Travels.  But there is a consequence for the fishing port of Parkgate on the Dee: the witch conjures up a furious storm in retaliation and all the Dee estuary is silted up.

Olive Dehn's stories featured alongside those of Enid Blyton and Eleanor Farjeon in the 1940s and 50s.  Odhams Annual 1948

For Paul Dehn, see also sports alcohol.com  (Poems © estate of the writer)
For Olive Dehn, see sevenstories.org.uk/blog