Winifred Watson / Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day / Has naughtiness ever been so nice?

Frances McDormand, left, as Miss Pettigrew and Amy Adams as Miss LaFosse in the 2008 adaptation. Photograph: Allstar/Focus Features

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day: has naughtiness ever been so nice?

This wonderfully warm classic is full of delicious innuendo and risqué fun – all thought up by Winifred Watson while she did the dishes

Sam Jordison
10 September 2019

Here’s something you may not expect to read in a bestselling book from 1938 about a virginal governess:

“But he’s a grand lover,” said Miss LaFosse wistfully.

“No doubt,” said Miss Pettigrew. “All practice makes perfect.”

“He reaches marvellous heights,” pursued Miss LaFosse pleadingly.

“What interests me,” said Miss Pettigrew,” is the staying power.”

“Oh!” said Miss LaFosse.

Oh, indeed. This innuendo is made all the more delicious because the lovely Miss Pettigrew is almost certainly unaware of what’s being implied. Perhaps her original readers were equally oblivious, although I’m hoping that they laughed as much as me at this passage. Winifred Watson had done a commendable job of priming them for naughtiness by this point in the book. As Miss Pettigrew’s unexpectedly enjoyable day develops, and she finds herself swept up into Miss LaFosse’s louche world, she encounters all kinds of taboos. There have been jokes about cocaine and Miss LaFosse’s three lovers. There have been impressive amounts of daytime drinking, wailing saxophones and nightclubs. There has, in other words, been a lot of fun.

It was so much fun that Winifred Watson’s original publisher Methuen became worried. “They feared it was too risqué,” Watson told the Times in 2000, when she was 94 and her book was enjoying a second life after being republished by Persephone. Delightfully, she’d written the material that upset them in just six weeks, thinking up the dialogue while she did the dishes: “I didn’t know anyone like Miss Pettigrew. I just made it all up. I haven’t the faintest idea what governesses really do. I’ve never been to a nightclub and I certainly didn’t know anyone who took cocaine.

It was so much fun that Winifred Watson’s original publisher Methuen became worried. “They feared it was too risqué,” Watson told the Times in 2000, when she was 94 and her book was enjoying a second life after being republished by Persephone. Delightfully, she’d written the material that upset them in just six weeks, thinking up the dialogue while she did the dishes: “I didn’t know anyone like Miss Pettigrew. I just made it all up. I haven’t the faintest idea what governesses really do. I’ve never been to a nightclub and I certainly didn’t know anyone who took cocaine.

All the more impressive that she worried her publishers so. But Methuen had underestimated the reading public, who made the book a bestseller when it eventually came out. Just as bad, they missed one of the most charming things about Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day: all the fun that Miss Pettigrew has is harmless. It isn’t really a book about bad behaviour; it’s about finding goodness. When Miss Pettigrew literally and metaphorically lets her hair down, steps out of her dowdy and threadbare governess clothes and starts hitting the sherry, she leaves behind a life that has been cruel, cold and pinched.

Just after Miss Pettigrew’s employment agency makes the error that sets the plot in motion, sending her to Miss LaFosse instead of a family seeking a governess, we see our hero out on the street:

“Miss Pettigrew joined the throng, a middle-aged, rather angular lady, of medium height, thin through lack of good food, with a timid, defeated expression and terror quite discernible in her eyes, if anyone cared to look. But there was no personal friend or relation in the whole world who knew or cared whether Miss Pettigrew was alive or dead.

Wonderfully, Miss Pettigrew soon meets people who do care. Miss LaFosse is not a “lady” and does not have much of the Christian “virtue” her father demanded – but she is generous, warm and affectionate. So much so that she moves Miss Pettigrew to tears by simply asking if she is “all right”:

“Absolutely,” said Miss Pettigrew. “You can set your mind at rest.”

“Oh you darling!” Miss LaFosse leaned forward impulsively and kissed her again, and there, right on Miss Pettigrew’s clasped hands, fell two drops of water and two more were trickling down her cheeks. Miss Pettigrew flushed a delicate pink.”

“I have not,” said Miss Pettigrew in humble excuse, “had much affection in my life.”

I was almost dabbing at my own eyes at this point – and it was only chapter two. The day had barely begun. Any naughtiness that Miss Pettigrew encounters is also always nice. It’s almost impossible to be scandalised. Almost.

It would be dishonest to not note that there are instances of racism in the book, which might not have felt unusual in 1938, but are nonetheless abhorrent. Fortunately, these moments are few and fleeting. Far more often it’s the warmth and humanity of the book and its characters that resonate. Watson knew she was on to something special, almost as soon as she wrote it, telling the Times: “I can remember to this day looking up and saying to the publisher, ‘You’re wrong.’ I really cared about it and I knew it would be a winner.” And she was right.

THE GUARDIAN