How to Succeed the Service
p. 60 · Read in the full issue
IF you want to be the perfect Colonial Service wife in six easy lessons, read Emily Bradley’s book, Dearest Priscilla, which will tell you how.
Mrs. -Bradley, herself a Colonial Service wife, wrote her book of sage advice in the form of letters to the mythical Priscilla, a young wife ready to accompany her new husband to his first Colonial Office job in Darkest Africa. But though Mrs.
Bradley’s experience was gained mostly in the African colonies, what she writes could apply equally as well to New Guinea, or the Solomons or Fiji or the Gilbert and Ellice. And although such a book could be silly or irritating or dull or bumptious, it is nothing of the sort. It is amusing, practical, full of good sense and enjoyment. Even I, who have no in tention of doing any more tropical pioneering and certainly not of marrying a Colonial Service official, read it from cover to cover just for the pleasure of it.
Mrs. Bradley’s Colonial wife is a bit of a paragon, but she is not impossibly so.
We have all met one or two of her ilk.
Even if, like all good advice, the book is ignored by those who most need to learn from it, it should be a real practical help to the earnest souls who want to help their husbands succeed in the Service.
Mrs. Bradley discusses with Priscilla such things as clothes, servants, gardens, how to fill in liesure when your husband Is busy elsewhere, how to be a silent partner and keep your nose out of official affairs, living on your pay (unfortunately she does not produce a painless formula for this —there is only the hard way), and how to keep open house without going crazy or broke.
This business of hospitality, official or otherwise, turned my thoughts to to- District Officers and ADO’s and their wives, 6f Papua-New Guinea out posts who are required, at a minute’s notice, to turn their homes into hotels for the wayfarer.
There is, our writer explains, the casual “cutlet for cutlet” entertainment among friends and neighbours over which you have some control u .. n .l , Official hospitality, however comes into ca tegory. There will, she says, So? b or 1^oG^ 1 J 1 ! ?I i ly c Vlslt . by the ?i? r or Secretary, or Auditor he 0 n •.• • • If there are labour troubles, % ™ wave > . lf sere$ ere are experiments or Projectsi afoot in the realms of Forestry
£ Development
or Relations, the experts will des hardly giving you time to change the linen.
There seems to be nothing you can do about this, dear Empire Builder, except grin and bear it. Mrs. Bradley offers no solution and neither can I. As she says, most of these visits are very welcome— provided there is a let-up and the expense is not a “souring anxiety to you.”
You will not, of course, presume upon the temporarily guest-host relationship between you and the exalted official. “You do not ask the Director of Medical Services for Aspirin, nor the Director of Public Works for new camp chairs, nor do you sit him on a broken one hoping he will take the hint.”
Dearest Priscilla is published by Max Parrish & Co., Ltd., London. It costs