Krishna
In fact, we will be reviewing two books in this. The one in the title and another called ‘Mrs Harris Goes to New York‘. The reason? One : Because these are very similar and two because they are both very short. So it makes sense to review them as a bundle. First, a bit about the titular character.
Mrs Ada Harris is a charwoman who is, in this book, flying to Paris from her native England at the start of the story. A charwoman is a housemaid/ servant in England those days. She has with her a lot of American dollars and just the allowed amount of British Pounds. She was approaching her sixties. Her ‘char’ status simply means that she was a servant, cleaning up and tidying houses, doing dishes, making the bed etc.
The reason for her visit to Paris? The thought sprung from seeing unexpectedly two astounding dresses in the closet of a client, Lady Dant, in England. When she sees a pair of Dior dresses in the closet, Mrs Harris simply knows that she needs to buy one for herself, even if she never has an occasion to wear one!
Mrs Harris knows she has no chance of getting money enough to travel to Paris, let alone by that dress in her lifetime but she wins a major lottery and suddenly that becomes a possibility, or so she thought.
But due to the number of people who got it right as much as she did, her share of the winnings just came to a hundred pounds and more than the sweet happiness of the winnings, she felt a crushing disappointment that the Dior dress was as unattainable a dream as before.
But Mrs Harris is nothing if not determined. She determines to save the rest, no matter how many years it takes. Suddenly, she wants to wager 50 pounds (fifty!!) on a dog race based on a hunch. When she learns that one of the hounds is called Haute Couture, it seems to be a signal from heaven and she decides to bet all the money on it. She loses it all. Haute Couture leads the first round but sits down to scratch an itch and loses the match! And the money Mrs Harris had bet.
Finally she manages to go to Paris and into Dior. There is a manager who is struggling to promote the political career of her husband. She tells Ada Harris (Yes, Ada is her first name!) that she has no place for her that day and Harris had booked the ticket back the same evening. Harris gains her sympathy and also a front row seat to the show.
She is awfully out of place in the midst of the rich folks who had bought tickets to the show. Yes, this is one of the old fashioned lighthearted books that celebrate the gritty but poor, dauntless “English char” who is equal to anything that life throws at them. From the land of the greatest Empire ever built.
This is an old fashioned feel good story, where an intrepid but poor English woman goes to Paris following her whims, not knowing the customs or the language but being helped by kind hearted folks, making friends with an aristocrat (Marquis de Chassagne), a supermodel Natasha and a nondescript accountant (Fauvel) working for Dior and bringing happiness wherever she goes. If you are a fan of the Wodehousian idealist (not the humour part but the idealistic world assumptions where everyone has a good heart etc etc) and charming old fashioned world and want to be carried away in a lighthearted tale (without worrying about the harsh realities of life which undoubtedly existed then too) this book is for you.
With her charwoman accented English, of course Mrs Harris has no trouble communicating with all French folks around her, in Dior or out of it on the streets.
She goes on helping everyone. For Natasha and Fauvel find love, for Mme Claude Colbert to find the promotion her husband wanted but could so far never achieve. She even helps the Marquis with tips about how to keep flowers in a vase for a long time!
Tragedy strikes after she goes back to England, because she wanted to help a struggling actress to an audition but finally she comes to terms with her regular work, but with a lot of goodwill from across the chanel and with an understanding of the common traits of humanity from both places.
In Mrs Harris Goes to New York, Gussets are the neighbours of Mrs Harris and they take on a child called Henry whom Mrs Harris suspected the Gussets were mildly abusing. Henry was born to Pansy and an American air force man called George Brown who was posted in England but was in the US army. When he had to return to US, Pansy refused to go and he agreed to send her two pounds a week for Henry’s upkeep. Pansy fell in love with another man and Henry was left with the Gussets for upkeep (as they had already eight kids) for one pound a week from Pansy. When the money stopped after a few years and Gussets could not find either the mother or the father, they started taking it out on Henry.
Meanwhile North American Pictures is having a fight between powerful executives about who should be their next President and they both settle on a compromise candidate. Retired John Schreiber, whose wife has employed Mrs Harris. He is now asked to move to America and take over as interim President for five years.
They will have a penthouse in Park Avenue. Henrietta, his wife, who has a deathly fear of the servants she will find in US, resolves to ask Mrs Harris to come and help until she can find someone suitable. With an inkling of what is coming, Mrs Harris resolves to go on one condition, if Mrs Buttersfield, another char woman and a close friend comes too. This would be an excellent opportunity to find Henry’s father and get him to come back and take the child with him.
Meanwhile, in an old newspaper used to stuff a hideous gift, the Contessa for whom Mrs Harris worked asks her to ‘take away the soveneir’ and also ‘get rid of the papers used as packaging’. Mrs Harris always reads old papers and finds the news of marriage of the same George Brown in Minnesota!!
With stunning audacity, Mrs Harris, over the objections of Buttersfield, manages to smuggle Henry into the ship. But when she hears that entering USA with an undocumented boy is going to be well nigh impossible, she is totally at a loss as to what to do. She approaches Marquis Chassagne. Yes the same Marquis she had befriended in Paris and asks him if he could help, he travelling as a French Ambassador to the United States and thus holding a diplomatic passport.
But because of a glitch in the interview process, the Marquis had to claim Henry has his own relation and so had to take him, Henry, into the household. Meanwhile, Ada Harris settles down onto the Penthouse and she and Butterfield manage the enormous parties for celebrities well. Mrs Harris finds time to chase the potential father George Brown, only to find that he is not the person who knew Harry. Back to the drawing board and in USA to search for one of the hundreds of George Browns? Mrs Harris gets discouraged.
One of the passions of Mrs Harris was show business and she is enthralled to find the stream of celebrities visiting the Schrieber household. One person, though, is unbearable : the new sensation from the south called Kentucky Claiborne, who is a complete jerk. And a racist to boot.
When by the help of Schreiber’s office and a bit of luck, the father of the boy is revealed as none other than Kentucky Claiborne, both the Schriebers are stunned, not to mention Ada Harris when she hears of it from them. She now has a dilemma. Making Kentucky aware that Henry is his own son will ruin the life of Henry, since Kentucky is such a slob, not to mention racist and selfish as well.
Mrs Harris goes into a stupor for days and by the time she comes out of it, there is a resolution in place, thanks to Mr Shrieber himself. All ends well.
Now, as you may have surmised here, these are simple feel-good stories where the indomitable charwoman goes making friends everywhere and doing good all around, despite her being a local of London and speaking in Cockney mostly.
She makes friends and people see the golden heart in her; At the end of this book too, she has a huge amount of friends in New York who all come to see her off on her return trip.
All in all, it does what it does well, if you do not expect way too much of a story such as this.
7/10
— Krishna