How To Be a Deb’s Mum by ‘Petronella Portobello’ #ABookADayInMay No.8

Hayley/Desperate Reader gave me her copy of How To Be A Deb’s Mum (1957) by Petronella Portobello a couple of years ago – she wrote about it on her blog – and rightly thought that it would be up my street. The author name sounds very unlikely and is indeed a pseudonym – albeit for the also unlikely name Lady Flavia Anderson. It’s told in letters from Petronella to an old friend, Pris, and does exactly what the title suggests: it’s all about being a Deb’s mum.

‘Deb’ here is, of course, debutante. And the book feels a little anachronistic since debutante balls were far less a feature of the 1950s than of the generation earlier. Indeed, Petronella harkens back often to her own debutante season in the ’30s – because, though often describing herself as practically decrepit, Petronella is only 38 herself. Though she is also a widow, and we hear very little about the departed husband.

There are some questions about why Petronella is bothering with this old-fashioned tradition – especially since she lives in the highlands of Scotland, and has to travel to London and rent a house to host all the requisite dinner parties of the season. The question comes chiefly from Alice Hardcastle, a friend who really seems to be a nemesis.

“After all,” I go on, “you may ask what it did for us, Alice, but we shouldn’t be sitting in this train talking, if we hadn’t got acquinated twenty years ago in the same racket.”

“Ah! Then you do admit it’s a racket?”

“No I don’t,” I protest. “I have friends in every corner of Britain, and I want Jane to have the same. Go to a cocktail party in Cornwall or take a job in Manchester, and there’s always someone you know to rescue you from being left high and dry.”

I realise too late that I am using just the wrong argument with Alice, because if we were both honest we should admit that neither has gained anything by association with the other, and that each would probably prefer the loneliest corner of the Midlands to making small talk together. But I cannot carry honesty far enough and say, as I am tempted to do, that only by making a large number of acquaintances can one weed out the incompatibles and cultivate the congenial among one’s fellow human beings.

If you’re sensing some Provincial Lady-esque tone from that, then I’m with you. There is a lot in How to be a Deb’s Mum that certainly feels in that world, with the same self-effacement and mild mockery of others, and ultimately good-humoured beneficence.

And, to be honest, a lot of the novel does feel very much older than the 1950s. There are a few stray things that date it to the period – the young women wear lipstick and nail polish without any fear of censure; somebody brings along a man who is a ‘bearded Existentialist from her Chelsea art class’ – but for the most part it does feel unaffected by anything else happening in the world in 1957. The focus is entirely on how to make this Deb season the perfect one for young Jane. I have to say that Jane doesn’t come off the page as fully as her mother, and I’d be hard-pressed to say anything about her character except that she is excited, a little overwhelmed, obliging and occasionally able to be swayed into something unwise by other people her age.

I thought the book was really fun. The only thing that stops it being a classic is that it is rather one-note – a steady walk through everything involved in the Deb season, and the politics of whom to invite to what, which invitations to accept, and how to be appropriately quid pro quo among the hundreds of young women (and their mothers) who are also fighting to give their daughters the best chance in life. ‘Chance’ does seem to mean social success and other opportunities, not solely a husband (and men are given rather a scant look-in in the novel). Though, of course, a good deal of consideration is also given to ensuring Jane dances with the right young men, and dodges the wrong ones. There is some japery about men who are Not Safe In Taxis, which feels rather dated and unpleasant.

The only other plotline is Petronella’s own relationship with family friend Freddy – who steadily goes from being a reliable friend to perhaps something more, and I was certainly more invested in this than in anything that might be going on in Jane’s life.

So, thanks Hayley for sending to me! It is rather a curiosity – a period piece that probably would have felt oddly out of sync with 1957 even in 1957. It is a window on a very small part of society at a time when their traditions were fading away from dominance – and a really fun time to be had reading it.