Home life
A ripping good day
Alice Thomas Ellis
We were caught in a traffic jam last weekend. I had forgotten how boring this could be and was extremely glad that our friend Chip was among those present. The third son, who was driving, tried to allevi- ate the tedium by playing music, which roared out from behind me with the overall effect of a pile-driver. Voices were raised and things were said in the heat of the moment. I learned that I was the most appalling passenger the world had ever known, and the son learned a few things about ungrateful children and vipers' teeth. When we got bored with arguing with each other, the son suggested that Jemma should roll down her window and tell the man alongside, in the car towing the caravan, that we were hard pushed to know which were uglier — his children, his wife or his dog. I advised against this, as there was no chance of making a quick get-away.
At last we reached the country lanes and passed through a village called Deverills, agreeing that this would be the correct sort of name for some characters in a bodice- ripper — Wolf Deverill, the ageing rake with a son, Jasper, who bids fair to be as dissolute as his father; Gloriana Deverill, the eldest daughter with flashing eyes and a seat like a man's as she flings her stallion at the walls and fences in pursuit of the fox; Petal Deverill, the youngest daughter, winsome, with brimming violet eyes and a deep sense of shame as she contemplates the rest of her family.
The delightful thing about all this was that Chip, who moves in a more elevated sphere of literature, had not previously been familiar with the term bodice-ripper, although he was aware of the genre. We had a long debate about the ethics of bodice-ripping — who was allowed to rip, and who got ripped. The rules are subtle but binding. Could a person, for instance, rip his wife's bodice, asked Chip. Only, we responded, if she was estranged from him and had locked herself in the West Wing. Highwaymen and the male Deverills could rip bodices, but Sir Caspar Milquetoast certainly couldn't. Gloriana would get her bodice ripped but retaliate with a horse- whip before succumbing to the next stage. Petal would get her bodice a little bit ripped but be rescued in the nick of time. Housemaids and dairymaids, on the whole, didn't get their bodices ripped because they were jolly, voluptuous, accommodat- ing wenches who didn't need much persua- sion, and unlaced their own bodices with sly, inviting glances.
The next question was — what precisely constituted a bodice? It is the top half of a frock, usually closely fitting, and there aren't many around at the moment. (I do not mean that women are going around half-clad like Page Three girls, but that frocks now tend to be looser and made in one piece.) It is not the same thing as the Chilprufe Liberty Bodice, a strange ribbed (rather than ripped) garment with dangling suspenders which mothers once made their daughters wear.
Having established this, we arrived at our destination. It had been unpleasantly hot in the car while we were stuck in the traffic jams, the sky a bright blue with — as the son remarked — some very poorly executed clouds in it looking like a bad painting. When we got out, all that had changed. The sky was now gun-metal grey and a wind had risen. Seduced by the early promise of the day, our hosts had arranged lunch under the dovecote and we all had to be issued with extra woollies. Lunch itself consisted of pigeon pie, which was very delicious, but there weren't any doves in the dovecote and it seemed a little poig- nant.
We sat on the grass reflecting on our food taboos and why we never ate things we really hate — snakes, rats, lizards, scorpions, etc. — but creatures you could get quite fond of if you knew them well. The children of the house, it seemed, had declined the pie because they had known the pigeons quite well. It all went along with the irrationality of the rules of bodice- ripping. As did the way we stayed stub- bornly shivering under the dovecote, be- cause this was the country in England in summer and that's what it's for. There was a perfectly good Palladian pile we could have been sitting in, but we stuck it out till the last minute, when it began to rain. Then we agreed that it was this very irrationality which has made our island race what it is, and we all drove home again.
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