AND ANOTHER THING
A woman's life-history is written in her handbag grunge
PAUL JOHNSON
An investigation into the contents of women's handbags reveals that some contain as many as 44 items. That does not surprise me. I divide women into two types. The first has a lot of handbags, empties them often, selects the one she plans to use, cleans the insides, and inserts the contents on strict cri- teria of utility and logic, usually no more than half a dozen, which nowadays would include a palmtop or, in America, a gun as well. This kind of woman is formidable, reli- able, handy; not necessarily warm, though. The other type has one, much bigger bag, which she lugs around with her on all occa- sions, except evening parties when she clutches a velvet wisp and has a bereaved look. Such bags — the French term sac is better — contain various archaeological lay- ers, ending in a Pleistocene of grunge: dog- eared bus tickets, half-eaten chocs, tiny, worthless foreign coins, buttons, aspirins, chewing gum, grimy bits of lipstick, a pencil stub (won't write), angrily crumpled bills, sometimes a prize item like a tearstained let- ter, much read and folded, from a lover long, long ago — the whole bound together by a glue of crumbs, powder, hair and sticky sweet-papers. I have known such bags con- tain a quarter-bottle of gin (empty), a dia- mond-studded dog-collar, a child's odd shoe, a pair of pliers, a 20-year-old election mani- festo and a hairless teddy bear. These women will keep you waiting but will hug you tight.
The heaviest bag I ever came across was carried, or wielded, by the late Dora Gaitskell, a fiery Russian lady married to the Labour leader, Hugh. Shortly after I first came to London, in the mid-1950s, I uttered some disobliging words about Gaitskell on the wireless. Next week, a small but muscu- lar lady weaved her way towards me at a party, demanded to know my identity, then swung in the direction of my head a sort of steel-studded Gladstone bag, catching me a glancing blow and making me grateful she had not scored a direct hit. I never heard of Margaret Thatcher actually handbagging anyone, though she sometimes looked as if she might. Her reticule comes into the first category, though what she finds useful and logical would not accord with all tastes — a condensed version of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, for instance. It always contains a notebook, which she will bring out and use if you utter wise words.
Handbags go back a long way tict have sometimes contained grisly items, such as the head of Holofernes, still dripping. I would like to have poked around in Cleopa- tra's to see what it harboured: charms, charms, charms, I daresay, and a handy asp if they failed to work. Queen Elizabeth had a girdle-bag, or pouch, containing miniature editions of Seneca, verses by Petrarch, writ- ing materials, sweets and herbal remedies, which she gave to her privy counsellors to save them from the horrors of Tudor medicine. What did Mary Queen of Scots have in hers? She was an archaeological-lay- ers-of-grunge woman, and among the deposits would have been found homemade poisons, an archive of treasonable letters, and perhaps even a tiny live dog, like the one that crept out from under her petticoats when her head was chopped off.
Literary ladies do not necessarily conform to bluestocking archetypes. In my experi- ence their bags contain an astonishing amount of aids to vanity, bits of underwear or even outerwear discarded in moments of panic, false eyelashes, hopelessly jammed bottles of nail varnish, broken bits of jew- ellery, rusty nail-files, as well as a complete pharmacopoeia. Not, as you might expect, pocket editions of Shakespeare, Roget's Thesaurus, Greek dictionaries etc. Jane Austen's handbag, I imagine, would be worth a book in itself: very large but not at all grungy, and fitted out according to utili- tarian principles (she was a contemporary of Jeremy Bentham) with everything that might be needed by a lady with a passionate inter- est in clothes forced by circumstances to make her own. Thus, she would have India tape, scraps of jute webbing, piping cord, press-studs, needles galore (and needle- threaders in later life), ric-rac, seam-binding, markers and mending wool, thread snips, thimbles, twist-pins, curlifil, bodkins and bump interlining, a darning mushroom, sliv- ers of Hessian and Russian braid, Guterman threads and Offray ribbons, slipping-thread, siksia and small squares of felt. Plenty of bobbins, too, dressmaker's pins, Bolton twill, beeswax, scrim and gimp-braids, with maybe Cassandra's latest letter crowning the whole.
My mother carried sewing things in her bag into her nineties, plus a tiny pair of sharp scissors, lots of buttons and scraps of wool, a needle-case and plenty of black cot- ffm, and a bag of miscellaneous sweets, chiefly dolly-mixtures, not for herself but for unforeseen children, who were attracted to her as if by some mysterious magnet in her person, so that, wherever she went, rosy little fingers were soon trying to unclasp her bag to lay bare its dulcet comfits. Are there old ladies like her around today, I wonder? Perhaps it is against the law.
I like the word 'bag', not just for the joky marvels it contains, but for itself, so multi- farious, so agreeable to slot into speech. Nobody knows where it comes from, Old Norse maybe, but it goes everywhere. It was originally male — an old saying c. 1250 lays down 'Beggars have bagges, burgesses purs- es' — and remained so until the 1930s. Lord Peter Wimsey says, 'I'll run round and change at the club. Can't feed with Freddie Arbuthnot in these bags.' And, 'Just brush my bags down, will you, old man?' Bag is a capacious word as well as a compendious article. In Victorian times the punctilious, like Mr Gladstone, distinguished between bags, which you carried, and baggage, which was carried for you. Thus his admonition to Constantinople: 'Let the Turks now carry away their abuses in the only possible man- ner, namely by carrying away themselves. One and all, bag and baggage, shall, I hope, clear out from the province they have deso- lated and profaned.' Why doesn't someone say that to the Russians over Chechnya?
In the old days, that is to say in the sec- ond half of the 1940s or a little later, there used to be in London a disreputable night- club called the Bag o' Nails. Unlike the Four Hundred you could not take a respectable young lady there, though it was said that Princess Margaret once paid a brief visit; out of lubricious curiosity, I pre- sume. Etymologists say that it is a corrup- tion of 'bacchanals', and that the original London dive was a pub of this name, with a sign of Pan and the Satyrs, near Tyburn Tree. Men no longer call their trousers 'bags', but they call displeasing women 'bags', or 'old bags', much to the fury of the feminists. Yet no woman would be without her bag. There can be very few who have fewer than half a dozen, as they hate to throw any away. And some have hundreds: bag fetishists are even more common than the shoe variety (and some women are both). A bag fetishist I know says, `To col- lect bags is supposed to be a desire to return to the womb, but I don't believe it. I just like bags.' Indeed, it is not collecting bags that tells you about a woman but what she puts into them, an unconscious autobi- ography down to the last layer of grunge.
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