Twiggez-Vous?

The schoolgirl stories of Angela Brazil

The idea that teenage girls and boys might forge a language - which by their and its marginal nature would be categorized as slang - that was dictated by their age and pursuits, and that that language might play a central role in dividing them from their parents (the term ‘generation gap’ is currently dated to 1955 – though its use that year in a syndicated US strip cartoon suggests it was already well-known), came with the territory. But the idea that the genders might move on to creating different, if complementary lexes is comparatively recent. There had been an attempt to differentiate the slang talk of American male and female high school students in 1903, but research had moved away to look at college lingo, and that - at least as seen in the various glossaries that were produced - does not seem to have considered the idea of gender divisions.

Sometimes, however, they stated themselves. If, for instance, one looks at such stories as Tom Brown’s Schooldays, set at a British public school or, at the very end of teenage, at The Adventures of Mr Verdant Green, set in Oxford and both published in 1857, one finds a good deal of site-specific  slang. The problem, of course, is that neither of these institutions admitted girls. Nor do they appear in the rash of public school stories that followed towards the end of the century, whether produced by such as Talbot Baines Read (for the serious, earnest end of things) or P.G. Wodehouse (for the deflatory and fun).

However, there was an important exception. The work of Angela Brazil began appearing in 1906 with The Fortunes of Philippa based on her own mother who had come to the UK from Rio de Janeiro to be educated at a girls boarding school. It was a hit, and the acclimatization of the ‘odd one out’ would often feature in her stories. She had created some titles for children but this was the first of the books that made her famous: titles set in girls’ public schools; there would be 49 books and around 70 short stories before she died in 1947. Brazil was hardly alone – the ultra-prolific Enid Blyton inevitably jumped onto the boarding school bandwagon – but where Blyton kowtowed to morality, a Brazil girl was much more fun. As Katharine Hughes suggested in the Guardian [1], ‘Brazil’s books glory in this new complicity, showing loud, boisterous teenagers forming themselves into self-policing groups, untroubled by the distant rumble of prefects and teachers. The girls of St Cyprian’s, St Ronan’s and St Chad’s jump out of windows, play pranks, go awol on cliff tops and tie things to weather vanes. From here it is but a short jump to the dystopian fantasy of the St Trinian’s series, Ronald Searle’s accounts of posh-girl thuggery.’

Hughes also recounts the moment, in 1936, when the then headmistress of St Paul’s Girls School in London ‘declared in assembly that she was minded to gather all of Miss Brazil’s books and burn them. It wasn’t the repetitive plotlines and sketchy characterisations that offended her, nor even the vague possibility that St Paul’s might have loosely figured in one of Brazil’s books; it was the terrible language: “Rouse up, you old bluebottle, can’t you”; “Right you are, O Queen! It’s a blossomy idea!” “Miss Jones is a stunt, as jinky as you like”, and, the one that got everyone especially riled, “Twiggez-vous?”’

Not everyone agreed: reviewing Gillian Freeman’s study of Brazil for The Spectator in 1976 [2] Brigid Brophy suggested that while neither characterization nor plots were remotely exceptional, it was Brazil’s use of slang that won her so devoted and persistent a following. If they are a little young to be the daughters of the ‘new women’ of the 19^th century, some of the livelier girls seem not that far removed from ‘fast girls’ in embryo, or perhaps flappers-to-be. Scapegrace younger sisters of Wodehouse’s Bobbie Wickham or Waugh’s Agatha Runcible? Meanwhile was not The Mystic Seven, created for The Madcap of the School (1917) the first and best evocation of what Blyton would water down for her own royalty statements.

The slang is of course vastly dated. A Fourth Form Friendship (1912) offers grind (hard work), jolly and ripping (excellent), the pater (one’s father), swot (to work hard) and turn off the water-works (stop crying). There is also nigger, though in some tiny mitigation the term is not directly racist but refers to minstrels (whites blacked up for entertainment purposes; it had been thus used since 1840). A Madcap of the School (1917) has the minstrels once more, also known as darkies, coons, Sambos and Dinahs; such hugely popular shows were to be found worldwide but even a century later the terms are very hard to overlook. Other terms include rag (to tease), splendiferous, top-hole and topping (first-rate), nuts on (enthusiastic), the affirmative rather!, jaw-wag (a lecture), jinky (a Brazil coinage and found both as amusing and as nervous, problematic), this child (oneself), chubby (delightful), stuff (mistreat), blighter (a distasteful individual), and a couple of words that reflect the real-life backdrop: Zepp (a Zeppelin airship, currently bombing UK cities) and stunt (an all-purpose word for ‘activity’ in the trenches). Brazil also adjures a character: ‘Don’t on any account shock the neighbourhood by an unseemly exhibition of vulgar slang!’ but one senses a tongue well in cheek. A year later came A Patriotic Schoolgirl (the war raged on and the cover boasted a union flag). The slang included jubilate! (be happy)  blub (to weep), knock off (create at speed), piggy (unpleasant), fast (overly sophisticated), katawampus (ill-behaved), blossomy (very good) and gruesome (the opposite);  bluebottle (an insult), ostrich (to bury one’s head whether literally or figuratively), cock-a-doodle (to gloat) and blow-out (a feast ‘ so far as the rationing order would allow’). The on-going war added the exclamation ‘strafe it all!’ [3] and the militant slogan ‘Save a bun and do the Hun!’

None of it of course was remotely sexual[4]; these are girls in their early to mid-teens (illustrations show their long hair, secured by a single bow; it would not be put up, that sign of adulthood, for some years yet) but there are no boyfriends, and  absolutely no mention of menstruation and that soon to be popular warning of a visible petticoat, ‘Charlie’s dead’ [5] was some time in the future. But nor was there in Wodehouse, school stories or elsewhere. As Richard Usborne put it in his study Wodehouse at Work (1960) the nearest a Wodehouse girl came to a man’s bedroom was when, brimming with vim and espièglerie, she snuck in in order to make some clubman an apple-pie bed.

As for the sources of the slang, who can fully say. Of the 111 terms I have found in the selection of Brazil’s work (a mere foursome out of a 49-strong canon) I have thus far read, nine overlap with Kipling’s earlier essay at school stories: Stalky and Co. They are beat (‘that beats me’), blub, heap ( a lot), hot (enthusiastically, zealously), jaw (as jaw-wag, gossip), quod (prison), scrumptious, sec and swot. In one tale, a couple of girls are given some aged copies of the Boy’s Own Paper but that worthy mag cannot exceed Stalky. Terms include blow-out, bunkum, pater, rather!, sneak, square (honourable) and trump (first-rate.)

One can position a Brazil girl as a proto-flapper and a St Trinian’s girl’s larky great-aunt, but that’s as far as it goes in the context of the teenage girls to come. She stayed strictly in genre. Setting aside and moving on beyond flappers, whom I have chosen to see as candidates for being the ‘first youth cult’, the idea of a succession of youth movements, which deliberately take on a counter-cultural role – however temporarily in most cases – that challenges those prescribed by the adult world, is a post-World War II phenomenon. [6] There had doubtless been fleeting examples of those who might, today, qualify as ‘teen idols’ – Lord Byron, Goethe’s fictional Young Werther, a growing number of movie stars such as Rudolf Valentino – but their fans were not restricted to the young (though the last was usually a female taste). Nor, prior to the Fifties, did the teens-to-be create what might be termed ‘cults’ or ‘movements’. Likewise feminism, of which the version that emerged in the mid-1960s was so important, was already acknowledged to be ‘the second wave’ of a movement that was already much older. It could and did look back to its late 18^th century pioneers, and might even be seen in the creation of the medieval take on the ‘woman question’, the querelle des dames. Youth may have been attracted to the movement but youth were not its leaders.

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[1] K. Hughes ‘Angela Brazil: dorm feasts and red-hot pashes’ in Guardian 14 Feb. 2015

[2] B. Brophy in The Spectator 26 June 1976

[3] ‘Strafe it all. It’s a grizzly nuisance. I should like to slay myself’ (A Patriotic Schoolgirl p. 73)

[4] Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Brazil) suggests otherwise and that certain events – e.g. girls and even girls and teachers kissing – offer a lesbian sub-text (as does the relative frequency of the name ‘Lesbia’.) However it also notes that Brazil may have had no idea of such things, let alone any intention to portray them, and that girlish passions were hardly her invention.

[5] the phrase defeats etymology; first recorded in 1942 (in America) it seems to have peaked in the 1950s. Popular etymology links it to Royalist ladies dipping their petticoats in the blood of the executed Charles I (or less gruesome, simply wearing them to show), but why the 300-year gap before it came on stream?

[6] there had been criminal girl gangs – typically south London’s Forty Elephants – but the importance of these was the crime – primarily shoplifting and thus seen as typically ‘female’ villainy – rather than the gender of the criminal. Teenage certainly had nothing to do with it.