In 1987 cartoonist Posy Simmonds brought down the curtain on the weekly strip cartoon she’d been drawing for the Guardian newspaper and which featured the everyday lives and woes of a gaggle of well-meaning middle-aged, middle-class mums and dads, coloured by a feminist slant on the tribulations of being a stay-at-home mum, or a working mum, or a young woman, or just a woman, in a sexist, man’s world.
The strip focused in particular on the married couple George and Wendy Weber, he an earnest, hunched-over, mustachioed lecturer in sociology at a London polytechnic, she an ex-nurse and harassed mother of six trying to do night school classes, the pair of them united by a commitment to touchy-feely liberal socialism, and vegetarianism and environmentalism. They felt a bit out-dated when they first appeared in the paper in 1977, and they and their world had failed to move with the times, with the triumph of Thatcherism, the unashamed declaration that ‘greed is good’, the ‘Big Bang’ deregulation in the City of London which brought tsunamis of new money coursing through the capital, out into the Home Counties and bought tens of thousands of holiday homes around the countryside, while the Thatcher government did its best to dismantle the post-war welfare state, demonised single mums and welfare scroungers, and huge tranches of heavy industry were denationalised or scrapped.
In 1987 Simmonds axed the Posy strip and concentrated on writing and illustrating children’s books. She continued to do miscellaneous illustrations for the Guardian and other newspapers and magazines. Then in 1992 she returned to the paper with a new strip which lasted a year, chronicling the misadventures of a grumpy, middle-aged, male novelist, J.D. Crouch. (Why, I couldn’t help thinking, does a vehement feminist devote a strip to a man, and a grumpy, middle-aged man at that? Is it because men are more interesting to write about – but surely that’s feminist heresy. Or is it because men, middle-aged grumpy men, are such fun to lambast and satirise?)
This volume, Mustn’t Grumble, brings together that miscellaneous work, plus some of the Crouch series, so feels a bit bitty.
I think the title, Mustn’t Grumble, is ironic. I assume it is an ironic comment on what would nowadays be called the white privilege of most of the characters, who are members of the comfortably-off, London, middle-classes – with a particular focus on Crouch and the London world of writing and publishing – who, despite living what a lot of the rest of the British population would regard as a life of luxury, still manage to be unhappy and find fault with everything.
A calendar from 1988
Simmonds created large-format, monthly cartoons – more illustrated texts – for the Spectator magazine through 1988 and 1989. The calendar format allowed Simmonds to focus on a completely new range of characters, one a month, whose lives are taken to typify the ‘greed is good’ decade as it ended and gave way to the 1900s. Thus:
- January Miles Upmaster (42) LMX broker at Johnson, Duff, Morant, lives in Parsons green with wife Vanessa and daughters Jojo and Davina
- February Chloe Banister (37) design consultant at a top Soho consultancy, a house in Dulwich Village with husband Hugo (TV commercials director) and son Jack, who’s down for Westminster.
- March Jackie Green (29) bed and breakfast landlady, husband’s off work ill, Jackie’s doing lots of jobs to make ends meet and can no longer afford to live in the seaside village of her birth.
- April Desmond Duff (82) retired engineer and resident of Deddingham Court Rest Home.
- May Mr Robin Chutney-Darke, a dealer in 18th and 19th century paintings, educated at Eton.
- June Katie Gilleyman (7) is having a birthday party, which in true bilious Simmonds style, is an opportunity for her to describe the snobbery, hypocrisy and showing off among the various mums.
- July Tony McVitie and Lorraine, waiting exhausted in the departure lounge for the plane back to England from Malta, where they’ve been on holiday and Lorraine’s lovely long legs got a) sunburnt b) bitten by mosquitoes.
- August Farmer Hughes facing financial ruin.
- September Prissie Rugeley, mother of four and wife of a British Army infantry officer stationed in Germany.
- October James Dalston Crouch (59) fading novelist, is at Euston accompanied by sexy young publicity girl from his publishers, having arrived back from a dismal outing to a book signing in Manchester where only six people turned up.
- November Simon Sandercock (33) single, company director, rugger player, in blue and white striped tie and bright red braces, what a hoot he is!
- December A characteristically cynical and downbeat take on Christmas, Simmonds focuses on an ageing failed actor named Gerald, who had high hopes, played a number of roles in provincial theatres and a few sitcoms, and now is reduced to working as Father Christmas in a department store.
What’s striking is how wordy these profiles are, how densely worked-out everyone’s backstory is, as if they are characters in a novel. There’s nothing particularly comic or even entertaining about the characters, except, maybe, the wry smile of recognition which I identified earlier as the prime pleasure from a Posy Simmonds cartoon.
And they’re in colour, full colour, unlike all the Posy strips, attention to colour which will come into its own in the later graphic novels.
Six bounden duties
I had to look up the meaning of this phrase. A ‘bounden duty’ is ‘a responsibility regarded by oneself or others as obligatory’. Each of the six is in the page-sized format of the Posy strips.
- Conservation A message from Aubrey Shyte, owner of Grade II listed Rakesham Hall, in which he spouts the usual crap of owners of very big houses which are largely funded from the public purse, and explains why it is necessary to close the public footpath through his deer park.
- Numeracy and literacy As if for children, the strip compares the world of Smilies (1st class travel, 1st class service, 2nd homes, 2nd cars, 3 hour lunches etc) and Grumblies (1 parent families, 2nd class citizens, 3rd world conditions etc) i.e. the gleeful rich and the miserable poor. The sentiment is hardly novel, and the tone is bleak and bitter. The entertainment, such as it is, comes in the format and in the satirical use of child-style drawings to convey this bitter truth.
- A sense of humour Simmonds parodies a range of different comic styles with dead humourless, depressing, grim content i.e. the first little strip is about the gender wage gap, then how we’re killing the planet with radiation, then the health gap between the rich and the poor, then a working class woman complaining about male chauvinism… Hard to see who this kind of thing is aimed at… Is it preaching to the choir to make them feel more bitter and angry?
- Keeping the lines of communication open Middle class parents in the kitchen with a bottle of wine open discussing their awful children, lazing around reading porn all day… while the teenage kids are in the living room saying their parents are grumpy because they’re going through the menopause and mid-life crisis – both teams saying it’s just a phase the others are going through. This just feels bleak and depressing.
- Not to change one’s spots A comfortably off middle class family claim they haven’t changed a bit, well, they’ve sold the old C CV and bought a Volvo, sold the bean bags and Che Guevara posters, and built a new conservatory on the back of the house, still running a poster shop which is doing frightfully well, and as to politics it’s not them that’s changed, it’s the Labour Party. — Obviously the point is to show how they have changed out of all recognition from their young adult selves.
- To record Some kind of satire on the middle class compulsion to record everything with a camera and on video, with a bit of extra satire / bitterness thrown in at the end saying there are some events too traumatic to be photographed… and that’s when the bloodsucking media step in… Odd, because Posy did of course work most of her life for the bloodsucking media.
The cherry orchard A satire on Londoners and their second homes in the country, cast in the form of a parody of the Chekhov play, with the middle class couple lamenting the fact that the orchard across the road was sold by the farmer to a developer who’s built a bloody great garden centre there! The couple can’t wait to sell up and get back to London.
Hard Times (1992)
As mentioned above, Simmonds returned to the Guardian with a new strip rotating about the failing novelist J.D. Crouch, but giving herself the freedom to feature other ad hoc characters and even – the occasional cameo appearance from the old Weber favourites.
- Hard times An ironic strip in which reinsurance broker Miles Upmaster gets home and berates his young wife for having friends round, eating expensive food etc, seeing as he’s had no bonus for two years, the firm’s reorganising and he might even be sacked. In the final picture he lies back on an elaborate, swagged and bow-tied four-poster bed and laments how hard his life is.
- An explanation by J.D. Crouch, Author Crouch explains that the recent interview and photos of him at home with his family are a travesty, that he dislikes his grown-up son and is going through a rough patch with his second wife.
- Mid-life libido in forward and reverse J.D. Crouch first of all rants to his wife that their son had a pretty young woman over to stay and how dare he use the place as a knocking shop. When his wife puts him right, that they’re not shagging, just friends, he slept on the floor etc, Crouch switches to the polar opposite position and says, Good God, why on earth is his son not knocking off such a fabulous ‘piece’, lovely bum in figure-hugging leather. In other words, Men, eh! Lascivious hypocrites.
- Mens sana Crouch and his adult son have an argument because the old man is always having epic baths, which triggers a trip down memory lane, remembering all the baths he’s had in all the cheap shitty flats, and how much he cared about Thom Gunn and Suez in the 50s, and Ferlinghetti and Czechoslovakia in the 60s, and the more luxury bath he got when his first novel made it big and was adapted for TV. Now we find Crouch splashing about in a huge jacuzzi!
- Literary party Crouch tells us about a literary party he went to, giving his version of events in which he nonchalantly sailed through the crowd – but this is counterpointed by sub-titles pointing out what really happened, which is that Crouch barely got close to the people he said he talked to, and nobody was interested in talking to him except a waitress who said she thought her granny liked his stuff. Depressing portrait of a man on the way down.
- Club ability Crouch’s wife Sophie is invited to his club where a crusty old cigar-smoking bore explains to her why they don’t allow women members and she proceeds to take the mickey, yes, my God, what would happen if women were allowed in to remind men of their child-rearing responsibilities or maybe drinking all alone at the bar or… Feminism = helping middle-class women join exclusive London clubs.
- Haves and have-nots An idealistic young teacher is trying to teach a junior school class to pretend to be flower buds in the soil which slowly wriggle upwards and burst into the light. One little boy gets it, but when she asks the others to do the same they explain he’s only showing off because he’s got a brand new pair of Nike Air trainers.
- Lost Eden A Victorian picture of children playing in the street is criticised by do-gooding modern parents, tut tut, they might be knocked down by a lorry or abducted by a paedo… contrasted with a picture of today’s young people, packed inside onto a sofa, eating junk food and watching violent videos on TV.
- Noises off A well-off middle class woman is in bed with her husband and the can hear the coughing of the vagrant who sleeps in their doorway all night, and she then has an aria describing how awful it is and how awful she and her husband feel, and that’s why they’re double glazing the window so they won’t be able to hear him any more.
- The vileness of penury Vanessa, blonde wife of reinsurance broker Miles (who we’ve met several times by now) answers the door to her ex-cleaner. Miles has been laid off so they’ve had to sack all their staff and the strip consists of a sequence of speeches in which Vanessa asks the tracksuit-bottomed cleaner to feel sorry for her, now that they’re both in the same boat and all.
- Common market A stuck-up posh mum walks round a London market lamenting the scruffy way the common fruit and veg are displayed and comparing everything negatively with the simply super markets you get in France (where she, of course, has a second home) – and wonders why all the stall-keepers scowl at her.
- Insecurity Miles and Vanessa Upmaster (again) she wakes up in the middle of the night (in their wonderfully curtained and beribboned double bed) because she hears something outside and her subsequent fears give a list of all the burglars and criminals a posh white lady can imagine, up to and including the hiss of an ocy-acetylene kit until they realise… it’s the sound of someone having a piss in their doorway.
- Beneath the ivory tower The life of a writer is a hard one, grinding away, wasting time in all kind of displacement activities. And so grumpy J.D. Crouch goes to the grocers where he buys some peas and some such while listening to customers discussing the ups and downs of Lady Di’s marriage to Prince Charles (they were married on 29 July 1981, during 1992 the book about her by Andrew Morton, plus leaked phone recording revealed their marriage was a sham). Crouch takes a characteristically pompous and high line that he doesn’t read ‘newspapers’ or mucky his fingers with current affairs. Whereas we then see him take the groceries home wrapped in a newspaper which he feverishly unfolds, straightens out and reads.
- Agony and ecstasy The Webers haven’t completely disappeared. Here George makes a reappearance. An old friend from the poly took early retirement and was irked when, shortly afterwards, the poly upgraded to a university. Now he meets George and colleagues in the pub who set him right about how working conditions are ten times harder, no-one will fund their course, the seminar room is always booked, the students are doing so many other modules they can’t concentrate on your courses, and so on…
- Object lesson A mum who bears a resemblance to an older, grey-haired Wendy Weber, tries to comfort her daughter who’s convinced she’s fat and ugly, the mum telling her she’s not and she should be glad not to be treated as a ‘sex object’, the result of all the battles her mum and the feminists of her generation fought, and any way she’s bombarded with phone calls from boys. That, mum, the girl is explained, is because I can drive. They want me to be their taxi driver. As she slopes away she sobs, ‘I’d rather be a sex object.’
- Dating a single parent Man arrives to take a woman on a date. Her little one bursts out crying and needs to be comforted. When she asks the teenage daughter to look after the toddler, the teenager bursts out that mum doesn’t care about her revision or her exams. So they all end up crying in a cuddle, and when the mum eventually extricate herself to go with her date, she looks frazzled. Being a woman is so hard!
- Coming cleanish Crouch is having an affair with a young woman (do writers do anything else, in Posy Simmonds?) and spends the strip working through different scenarios how to tell his wife, ending up with bottling out and not telling her at all.
- Acquiring the habit Crouch comes across his teenage children quietly reading books and is astonished and delighted and tells wife Sophie to keep quiet, but she insists they’re a load of old rubbish they found at the jumble sale, full of nauseating stereotypes and their bickering puts the kids off reading so they turn on the TV and get glued to the box.
- Fireworks At a fireworks party a grandad is arguing with his teenage grand-daughter, complaining about her generations’s pessimism, they’ve never had it so good etc. The mother intervenes to break up the fight but finds both the others turning on her, the grandad saying the 60s generation had it lucky, with an economic boom, growth in higher education, jobs galore, cheap flats, sex on tap thanks to the pill, yes and all before AIDS says the daughter and before you know it, old and young have ganged up on the middle-aged mum. It’s tough being a middle-aged woman!
- Sunbeam corner A bizarre strip in which a balding middle-aged man conducts a smiling exercise, in order to keep optimistic, although the words underneath spell the grim news headlines of the day (Maastricht, wages freeze, subsidiarity, British steel, Downing Street, Public spending freeze, Price increases etc.
- We’re dreaming of a white Christmas Aubrey Shyte, the pompous rich landowner, has become a real hate figure for Simmonds, and leads this hypocritical rendering of ‘White Christmas’, against the backdrop of a dingy, rundown street somewhere in London with a couple of homeless people sleeping in doorways, until the snow covers up the homeless and the street looks remarkably scenic and festive. God, Simmonds hates Christmas! Of the ten or so Christmas cartoons she’s done, all are dyspeptic.
A calendar from 1989
Another series of page-large pieces, each featuring a person of the month, described in immense wordy detail and accompanied by a full-scale, colour cartoon, with a spattering of other smaller ones illustrating the text.
- Janvier Mme Rutherford, harassed French teacher, two young children in daycare, husband works at a garden centre, worn down with stress by the horrible kids, growing class sizes, LEA cuts so she has to cover other teacher’s lessons, and soon. God, it’s hard being a woman (teacher).
- February Conversation among a gaggle of middle-aged men and women attending a health spa in the country, ending with the sort of comedy that they sneak out to scoff a packet of Maltesers in the car park.
- March A soliloquy from Australian dentist Warren McMurdo moaning about the bad state posh patient Simon Sandercock arrives in.
- April Rachel (14) on her horse Sultan, at this year’s First Gashford Hunt.
- May Dido is 18 from Haverstock Hill and at a super private school.
- June Etiquette for the new landed gentry: Dealing with trespassers i.e. if you’re nouveau riche and bought a whopping house in the country you need to clear trespassers off your land but be damned certain they’re oiks and walkers, and not other members of the gentry who you need to keep buttered up.
- July Gillian Button (25) with a first in French and Drama, is now a PA at the BBC, and a surprisingly heavy smoker.
- August Clive Troutley (37) a golf addict.
- September When harassed housewife Pippa gets to W in the alphabet book she’s reading her kids, she realises everything named in it is either a health hazard or threatened with extinction (panda, whale etc). Depressing.
- October Adam Nubleigh (27) went to a North London comprehensive but dresses and sounds as if he went to a posh private school and flogs fake antique furniture to the over-rich.
- November Posh Naomi Padfield is a big opera fan. She is given a soliloquy about how she’s driven up to Covent Garden from Beaconsfield despite the beastly traffic on the M40.
- December Colin Cockley is managing director of Retouché Studios, here he is at the firm’s Christmas party.
Note:
- how everyone is white, heterosexual and all are either Londoners or from the sunny Home Counties. Black, Asian or immigrant experience, lower-middle or working-class experience, are things beyond Simmonds’s ken and which she therefore, wisely, avoids.
- The use of rich deep colouring.
- The very heavy use of text. At least half, sometimes more, of the space is text. There’s little funny or amusing about these caricatures, but a great deal of effort has gone into thinking through each of the characters’ backstories.
Bumping along the bottom
Being a further set of the weekly strips Simmonds devoted to failing novelist J.D. Crouch, with appearances from other characters, and a few cameo appearances from our old friends George and Wendy Weber.
Does ‘bumping along the bottom’ refer solely to Crouch, or to the entire middle class which was hit hard by the recession of 1991-2?
- Bumping along the bottom Miles Upmaster, who we’ve met a number of times, is now officially unemployed and trying to sell his house, reduced to scrubbing and cleaning it and then keeping his temper while prospective buyers walk round it poking and prying.
- Scene from a literary life J.D. Crouch takes his dog for a walk on the common and, noticing people stopping and staring, egotistically assumes because he was on TV last night doing an interview. Simmonds gives him plenty of room to preen and swank before pulling back to reveal that all this time his dog is being shagged by another dog. That’s why people are staring and pointing.
- Missing persons Canvassers for political parties are shown working their way along a busy road of suburban houses, and the inhabitants making all kinds of excuses for not speaking to them. Only at the end does one of the frustrated canvassers explain they’re all dodging the poll tax (which required that you had to register to pay the council tax in order to get on the electoral register. An estimated million people preferred to have no vote and so avoid paying the tax).
- Election fever A satire on the Crouch household getting ‘election fever’, told from the point of view of the wife, Sophie, who feels dizzy and nauseous for three weeks (being a Labour voter) compared to grumpy old Crouch the novelist who votes Conservative (Why? ‘Because of my wallet’), the strip follows through election night when, contrary to all the opinion polls, the Conservatives under John Major returned to power (9 April 1992).
- Tired old sociologist George Weber sits, alone and alienated, in a shopping centre and marvels that people are still continuing on the same mindless consumerism which characterised the 1980s, despite the economic crash, unemployment, bankruptcies and so on. His musings are transformed into those of a naturalist studying the great herds of the African savannah.
- Topped balls Crouch is trying to get membership of an exclusive golf club but his attempts are ruined by his wife, Sophie, who insists on coming along, bring the two small children and picking mushrooms.
- Spot the difference Using the split screen or binary technique she’s used elsewhere, Simmonds contrasts the fortunes of a dealer in oil paintings and watercolours at their 1988 ‘view’ and the same event four years later in 1992 i.e. at the 1992 view, he can’t afford canapés, the wine is cheap and nobody is buying.
- Terminal belly ache Waiting at the airport department lounge with his wife and children, Crouch volunteers to go and get a magazine for his wife to read. When he returns after some delay he is in a filthy mood, complaining about the junk people watch and read and eat and drink. Wife Sophie knows what this means. He didn’t find a copy of one his books in the bookstall.
- Déjeuner sur le patio A simply lovely English middle-class couple lament that their simple holiday hideaway in rural France has been ruined by all kinds of pollution (from the septic tank, the chlorine in the swimming pool, the copper sulphate they spray the vines with), there seem to be endless repairs, snarling dogs if you go for a walk and they’re the only ones in the village who didn’t vote for Le Pen. God how they wish they could return to the simple life in London!
- Old rose-tinted spectacles Two big pictures contrasting Then and Now. Once, grown-up folk cast friendly eyes on children… Now they’re scared of them.
Old rose-tinted spectacles by Posy Simmonds (1993)
- One man’s meat A middle-class couple agonise about what to take to their kids’ school’s International Picnic to represent British cuisine. Everything they think of (bacon, ham, sausage rolls, pork pies) will offend one or other religious or cultural sensitivity.
- The brood Seems to be the Weber family’s kitchen in which are Wendy Weber, now that much older and with grey hair, talking to her married daughter Belinda, who appears to have had a baby, and the eldest daughter Sophie. Sophie’s thinking about having a baby and has seen something on the telly about how over-50s can be fertilised. Belinda and Sophie both think that’s gross and, more to the point, both think Wendy should be investing her time and savings in them and their babies.
- P.C. PC 43 A heavy-handed satire about a police constable who uses only politically correct language e.g. referring to the homeless as ‘the involuntarily undomiciled’.
- A lecture Crouch is invited ‘all the way out here’ to the polytechnic where George Weber works to deliver a lecture. Now, afterwards, George is accompanying him to the train station. Initially Crouch complains about the poor attendance and the bad food and the crappy wine and slowly George – an older, grey-haired George Weber – turns the tables and starts to lecture Crouch about how hard it is trying to keep an underfunded university lit and working despite not having the advantage of fancy-ancy Oxbridge colleges.
- Sour grapes of wrath Crouch is at a book signing and seethes with jealousy because no one is asking for his signature but crowds are flocking around comedian Nigel Doyle and working mum and TV presenter Denni Welch. His loathing bursts out into muttered insults and abuse with his PR people telling him this isn’t going to persuade people to come over. This struck me as sad, not funny and is, I think, the third book signing strip we’ve seen.
- The perfect present As usual, Christmas brings out the bilious, cynical and bad-tempered in Posy Simmonds, as she describes the tribulations of a young woman who has become the girlfriend of a married man who left his wife for her. This Christmas the ex-wife is holidaying with her lover in Luxor and the girlfriend knows that, whatever she buys and no matter how much effort she goes to, her boyfriend’s kids will vent all their rage and anger at their parents’ break-up onto her.
- I’m dreaming of… Packed with resonance for fans of the Posy strip, this shows Belinda, eldest daughter of George and Wendy Weber, now married to her banker, (options trader) Alistair Razor-Dorke and director of her own upmarket catering company, as they ponder whether to spend Christmas with her parents (George and Wendy in their poky terrace conversion) listening to them moan against the government, or with his parents (frightfully posh but live in a draughty old country house and will serve posh but decrepit old food) – or stay in their swish two-bedroom, waterfront, duplex apartment, hmmm, it’s not a difficult decision.
- I’m dreaming of… Reappearance of the appalling alcoholic Edmund Heep who rings work to say he’s too sick to come in and describes the night before when he went on a pub crawl with a friend, downing an appalling amount of booze, nearly getting into a fight with skinheads before stumbling into a late night caff and ordering scrambled eggs. Now he is claiming it was the eggs, the eggs that made him ill.
- Christmas: The adoration of the general public As usual, Simmonds’s take on Christmas is jaundiced and cynical. Her Christmas strip for 1988 consisted of one large cartoon showing two sides of Christmas (this binary juxtaposition of past and present or idealised and actual, is an extremely common device). On the left we see the crib with the baby Jesus in it and Mary worshiping surrounded by angels, in the style of a Renaissance painting. On the right we see the identical stable but in this one Father Christmas is doling out presents to excited kiddies whose parents are queueing up in front, under the watchful eye of a security guard with walkie-talkie. There is a comic touch in that many of the mums and dads are saying ‘aaah’ at the religious scene, but the security guard is saying into his walkie-talkie ‘aaah… over.’
The end of January 1989
Once again, this is done in a calendar format, with one strip for every month of the year. I didn’t understand why they’re titled ‘The end of…’ January, February etc. The pictures are smaller than ever and overwhelmed with explanatory text, which sometimes begin to read like short stories.
- The end of January A wordy sequence explaining the career of Kevin Penwallet, once an anthropology lecturer who quite working at the same polytechnic as George Weber to set up a shop in the sweet Cornish?) seaside village of Tresoddit. He started with health foods in 1979, but was forced to bend to prevailing commercialism and in 1989 turned it into Ye Olde Gift Shoppe full of twee knick-knacks before, in 1988, turning it into an upmarket delicatessen catering to the ever-increasing numbers of wealthy Londoners, to a chorus of disapproval from the locals, and from his old friend George Weber who accuses him of ‘collaboration with the consuming interests of the over-rewarded.’
- The end of February George Weber is appalled by the mother’s day cards his daughters are browsing and points out to Wendy that they all present reassuring images of motherhood, mostly from the 19th century, and this is because we, as a society, are traumatised and sacred of numerous new hazards – streets full of muggers and addicts, paedophiles, country full of radioactive sheep and cows with BSE, rivers full of junk and pesticides, ozone layer being eaten away, sex is dangerous (AIDS) – and so need mummy’s hand to cling on to. Trouble is, when he tries to envision a perfectly up-to-date vision of mother caring for her young ones, what he sees is… a child-minder.
- The end of March A sustained blast against the comprehensive pollution and desecration of the countryside, as seen by the endless flow of bumper-to-bumper traffic heading down our polluted motorways.
- The end of April A soliloquy from an unbearably posh upper-class lady telling us how they’ve done up their house, and the whole neighbourhood is gentrified and you can buy decent prosciutto and the tramps have been kicked out of the square which has been turned into a wildflower garden and they can afford the best private education for their kids, mind you all this comes at the high cost of security, security locks, security buzzers, a panic room and an electrified truncheon.
- The end of May: Jerusalem A satire on the new young rich and their passion for redecorating their stonking new homes, set to a parody of Blake’s Jerusalem: ‘And did those brogues in ancient times, Walk upon Nigel’s verdant sward, Or were they only just acquired, In Bond Street with an Access card…’ and so on.
- The end of June: Our friendly neighbourhood Use of the frequent juxtaposition technique, two large pictures showing past and present or appearance and reality, in this case showing the polite greetings made between a cross-section of modern young people out walking, set against…the ferociously aggressive messages conveyed by their huge and frightening dogs.
- The end of July: Turning back the floral clock A history of the floral clock on the seafront parade of some coastal town, as it evolved from 1959, 1969, 1979 to 1989, with tut tutting comments from each generation of locals.
- The end of August This is a laboured satire on a middle-class family with two older children, just back from shopping at their local organic grocers’ with their right-on dad, who proceed to find various slugs and maggots in all the fruit and veg, much to the children’s disgust, but the patronising father assures them this is a good sign, shows no pesky pesticides were used.
- The end of September: A Jeremiad for the new academic year We’re in the staff room of George Weber’s poly where the staff are grimly depressed about the start of a new year, and where the principal lecturer in information design brings them even lower by revealing that his students are doing signs for the new massive ‘Phosco’ superstore being built on the edge of town.
- The end of October Soliloquy by one of Simmonds’s trademark posh mums with massive hairdo who spends the first half lamenting what blood-sucking bastards the people who bought their house are… and the second half explaining how they’ve screwed a great deal out of the people they’re buying from. Hypocrisy doesn’t come much purer.
- The end of November: The march of feminism as shown by the changing shape of women’s shoes from 1969 to 1989, with a bit of satire thrown in about how the Forward March of feminism seems to be being held up by sisters in the 1980s. Tut tut.
- A Christmas Carol A typically sour Simmonds take on Christmas in which the spirit of Christmas, looking very much like our old friend, the alcoholic Edmund Heep, appears to a sleek, well, manicured City banker, all to the accompaniment of a parody of the festive hymn: ‘While Shepherd watched his stocks by night, And monitored the pound, The other chaps went down the pub, And Gloria stood a round…’
As mentioned, there’s so much text and information in some of these cartoons that they read almost like short stories. This affects the size of the pictures, which are often very small and crammed with narrative text, and then further filled with speech or thought balloons – quite a stuffing of text and meaning until the ‘reading’ experience becomes quite complicated or demanding.
All this anticipates the style of her graphic novels with their dense interplay of different types of text (narrative, dialogue, thoughts, along with parodies, songs and quotes) with very tightly-drawn pictures arranged in very precise and rather cramped compositions.
Thoughts
Negative and depressing
When I first read through the six books collected in Mrs Weber’s Omnibus I came to the end deeply disliking Posy Simmonds for her unremitting negativity and satire which I felt lacked wit but overflowed with bile.
Having taken the time and trouble to go through and itemise pretty much every cartoon in Mrs Weber’s Omnibus, I now realise the negative feeling I took away largely stems from this final collection, Mustn’t Grumble, for in it the tone really darkens, she stops being very funny at all and the satire – for example against brutal rich bastards like Aubrey Shyte – becomes genuinely bitter.
Meanwhile the extended series of cartoons about the failure and self-loathing of past-it novelist J.D. Crouch also – for me – had nothing redeeming about it, it’s just episodes from the life of a middle-aged man who is failing and angry against the world.
And the twenty-four calendar characters from the Spectator similarly have next to nothing humorous about them but are all-too-accurate barometers of a society becoming steadily, relentlessly more greedy, self-serving, and shamelessly unequal.
So I realise now that it was mainly this last book which left such a bitter aftertaste in my mind, and overshadowed the fact that most of the earlier collections are much lighter in tone, and do contain genuinely comic moments which are worth savouring and remembering.
Abandoning the Weber family meant, to some extent, abandoning the containment of her bitter vision of the world within the cosy arena of the regular gallery of comic characters.
Set free, unconstrained, but also unsoftened, by the mollifying filter of the Weber characters, Simmonds’s vision emerges in this final collection, as one of real anger and bitterness at the social injustice and the revolting hypocrisy of the new, rich middle classes of Thatcher’s Britain.
Books & Boots 