Mack
Hall, HSG
Major
Pettigrew’s Last Duck Hunt
The
annual shoot at the local estate is by itself worth the price of a copy of Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, by Helen Simonson.
Lord
Dagenham, a worthy variation on P. G. Wodehouse’s eh-wot-oh-rather-don’cha-know
Lord Emsworth, is a somewhat down-at-the-Rolls Royce noble who rents out much
of his ancestral home to a private school and who is selling some of his lands
to an American real estate developer.
The
last annual duck hunt in the doomed countryside ends as a menace to the humans
more than to the ducks. The hunters,
mostly English and American bankers playing at being squires for a day, are on
the firing line when suddenly the field of fire is occupied by: (1) ducks, lots
of ducks, (2) the schoolchildren, who raised the ducks as a science project and
who rush in to defend them, (3) the gamekeeper and the farm hands, trying to
round up both the children and the ducks, (4) environmentalists, and (5) the local
Save Our Village protestors. And, yes,
someone gets bashed with a sign proclaiming “Peace.” The reader sees that coming, and is delighted
when it does.
A
safe modern writer would have fitted all this into a scripted screed against
guns and hunting, all kitted out with global-warming environmentalism and
cuddly Disney children and animals. Miss
Simonson will have none of that; she makes fun of everyone involved, sparing
not even the children: “’They killed our duckies,’ came a wail from a child
holding up a bloody carcass.”
As
Lord Dagenham says, “I had no idea that fee-paying pupils would smell bad.”
Major
Pettigrew’s Last Stand is framed as boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl,
boy-gets-girl-back, only geriatric, but is saved from Famous Greeting Card
Company sugar-free syrup by Miss Simonson’s lemony (seldom acidic) observations
on socialists, yuppies, environmentalists, the upper classes, the lower
classes, country clubs, the sort of people who resent country clubs, the Church
of England, Moslems, Americans, Englishmen, artificial Christmas trees, hunters,
anti-hunters, parties with themes, “the glass-squashed faces of small, angry
children” on school busses, and flavored teas.
Through
all this Miss Simonson develops a delightful love story. The protagonist is Major Pettigrew, retired
from the British Army, and his friend, Mrs. Ali, owner of the local shop. Both are widowed, and they “meet cute,” as the
film cliché goes, but their relationship must voyage from acquaintance through
friendship and finally to love through 355 delightful pages of misunderstandings,
cultural differences, disapproving relatives, disapproving neighbors, a retired
banker “with an almost medical allergy to children,” organic turkeys, neighbor
Alice’s organic vegetarian lasagna that smells like plankton, neighbor Marjory,
whose sole topic of conversation is her gifted and talented grandson, a dotty
vicar, the vicar’s even dottier wife, the aforementioned hunt, an annual club
dance that deteriorates into a food-throwing, stage-collapsing, drink-sloshing
brawl, a continuing sub-theme about a matched pair of Churchill shotguns, and a
knightly rescue of an imprisoned lady.
And ducks.
The
setting is a Wodehouse England that never really existed, flavored by Jane
Austen, Kipling, Agatha Christie, the Romantic poets, Alexander McCall Smith, declasse’
climbers, and the occasional cup of real tea (no rose hips or other debris for
our hero).
Some
of the social assumptions are a bit naïf, and in this the novel sails
dangerously close to being approved of by famous television ladies, but this is
a love story, after all, and one with a happy ending.
Even
so, with lines such as “The major wished young men wouldn’t think so much,” “a
group of faded hippies, with ripped jeans and balding heads,” “Old Mr. Percy
became so drunk that he threw away his cane and subsequently fell through a
glass door while chasing a shrieking woman across the terrace,” and mention of
an assistant imam named Rodney, this is a book that even manly men can read
without fear of their boots magically dissolving into designer cross-trainers.
And
there are ducks.
Major
Pettigrew’s Last Stand, by Helen Simonson, is published by Random House.
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