MARGARINE
Pronounced with a very hard 'G'
Yvonne Brock
The other day, as I wrote ' margarine ' on my shopping list, I said 'Maggie Ann' to myself, and wondered why. Soon I had embarked on a Proustian voyage of memory, which took me back to my childhood in the 'thirties and the world of elocution classes.
My parents and I and my two younger sisters lived with my paternal grandmother in a large Victorian house just outside a small provincial market town. My grandmother, who had three grandsons already and did not greatly care for boys, was delighted at my arrival and thoroughly spoilt me — or so it was said. I found the process (which combined small expeditions together and the buying of unbirthday ' presents with the consumption of rather more sweets than were officially sanctioned) highly agreeable.
Photographs of the time show me to have been a moderately pretty child, but otherwise I'm sure I was quite unremarkable. My grandmother, however, was convinced that I was talented, and even before I could read was teaching me little verses which I was encouraged to recite to the many elderly relatives on their frequent visits. Most of the aunts and uncles were deaf in varying degrees, so I learnt early the virtues of speaking up '. My mother has since told me what embarrassment these recitations caused her.
By the age of seven or eight, when I started attending weekly elocution classes, I had not a vestige of stage fright. In fact I was dangerously over-confident in this sphere. I was indeed a morbidly shy child who shrank from strangers at close quarters, but ' performing ' to them was gloriously different. Elocution and dancing classet formed part of the after-school activities of most middle-class children of my generation, and though dancing appealed to me not at all, elocution was a different matter.
These classes were run as a partnership and in fact still are, now known rather grandly as the Riverside Academy of Dancing and Dramatic Art. In my day they were simply called Miss Macdonald's dancing classes and Miss Black's elocution classes, 'and the annual culmination was known as the Dancing Display. This event usually took place in the local public hall, the audience seated on hard chairs as we performed on a creaking improvised stage. As the title of the event indicates, dancing had priority, and we, the elocution pupils, seemed to spend much time waiting jealously in the wings while the Dancemore Girls — lumpy adolescents lightly clad — hurtled across the stage. There was, to be sure, the one halcyon occasion o fa production of Alice in Wonder/and (in which I played the Mad Hatter), but as a rule our appearances were limited to individual recitations of verse and short sketches specially written for children, of which the most singular was 'Maggie Ann.'
For this sketch the curtain rises on an empty stage; enter a schoolgirl in gym tunic and blazer, complete with satchel and hockey stick and obviously in a bad temper. She slouches over to the table which 'is laid for tea, and an inspection of the sandwiches confirms her worst fears. "Maggie Ann again," she exclaims in disgust, "beastly, smelly Maggie Ann." There follows some account of the trials of her day in classroom and on hockey field, at the end of which she slumps down at the table and falls asleep.
The stage is darkened briefly, and when the lights go up there is another occupant of the stage: a fairy dressed in pale yellow and weeping bitteriy. The schoolgirl awakes, starts at the apparition, and inquires what is the matter. She is told. The matter is that no one loves the fairy; so little do they love her that they will not even give her her proper name, which is Margarine (hard G). It was bad enough to be called ' Marjarine,' but now the latest insult is ' Maggie Ann,' Fresh tears, combined with a veiled threat that, like Tinker Bell, she may die if people cannot adopt a more kindly attitude to her.
The schoolgirl feels guilty, at which point the third and final character (played by me) makes what seemed to me at the time a belated entrance. I played an interfering and do-gooding old fairy, dressed in a long print gown and poke bonnet. Oddly enough, seeing that I played the character, I cannot recall the exact name, but it was something like Dame Goodbody or Goodenough. Speedily I console Maggie Ann by pointing out the schoolgirl's concern, and deliver a benign reproof to the latter. And then, ah then — the moment which reconciled me to so small a part — I address the audience direct, and in these words: Maggie Ann, Margarine, ' Margarine ', Marge, Good folk, I put upon you this charge; If little ills you sometimes have to bear, Don't magnify each tiny, wee care. If margarine you're still obliged to eat Try to imagine you're having a treat . . .
and so on.
The lights dim once more, and when they come up the schoolgirl is alone on the stage, still asleep. She wakes and stretches; informs the audience that she has had a strange dream and that she is jolly hungry. She starts eating the sandwiches with evident relish as the curtain falls.
Over a gulf of more than thirty years, I wonder at the purpose of this curious 'piece. The few lines of doggerel I have quoted may not be entirely representative of the whole, but I feel sure that it was devoid of literary merit or dramatic appeal. My father, who steadfastly refused to eat margarine throughout the second world war, ignoring pointed remarks about rationing and fairness, maintained that it was of first world war origin — a government-backed attempt to soften up the public into acceptance of something nasty. But if so, why was it presented, in the middle 'thirties, to an entirely middleclass audience, who would not commonly have eaten margarine — certainly not in sandwiches. I wonder if the faintly snobbish insistence on the correct pronunciation of margarine (hard G) was an attempt to up-grade the product socially?
Viewed as an early commercial, Maggie Ann' seems strangely half-hearted. The ambitious young advertising executive today would hardly suggest that his product was to be regarded as an ill one had to bear, or that an effort of the imagination would be needed to consider it as 'a treat 'if one were ' obliged ' to eat it! Maggie Ann, for me, remains a mystery.
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