Mrs Harris Goes to Moscow

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In Mrs Harris MP, the honest as-ever old char impresses her employer with her no-nonsense political views to such an extent that he - an MP, no less - encourages her to become a voice for the people of Battersea and stand for election herself. I didn’t realise it had a different title, though I remember thinking it was a piece of journalism by EM Delafield rather than the usual Provincial Lady diary. Harris, the two London ladies are incorrectly taken for spies and get into some very compromising situations. Harris is one of those characters you just don't forget, and despite the book coming out many decades ago, it transcends the years. Gallico’s story is straightforward and well-constructed, and it moves along at a fair old pace to its conclusion within 200 pages.

Even Prince Philip is written in to play a small part in events (and now it's hard not to think of his recent death).

Being the sort of woman she is, and featuring in the sort of novels she does, Mrs Harris happens (or may be Mrs ’Arris ’appens) to win a pair of tickets for a package tour to Moscow. For all its farce-like feel, Mrs Harris Goes To Moscow does reveal the dominant themes and experiences that a Western visitor to Moscow in the 1970s might note.

Great to see to see that Bloomsbury have reprinted his books so that a new audience will enjoy them I'm sure. He was removed from this job as his "reviews were too Smart Alecky" (according to Confessions of a Story Teller), and took refuge in the sports department.In 1936 he bought a house on top of a hill in South Devon, England, and settled down with a Great Dane and twenty-three assorted cats. I guess the fact that the author is actually American explains the language in these books, which are peppered with far more bloodys than the characters they depict would likely have used. Butterfield are much the same, and that is part of the problem as we don't really see anything new to round out the characters any further. My only real issue with the book is the set-up for the novel as why would they be giving a trip to Russia rather than another country in Europe. He wrote over forty books, four of which were the adventures of Mrs Harris: Mrs Harris Goes to Paris (1958), Mrs Harris Goes to New York (1959), Mrs Harris, M.

All the clichés are rolled out — a fearsome dezhurnaya (duty woman) stationed outside the lifts on every floor of the hotel, the lack of a Western-style service culture, the rules as to what was and was not allowed of guests. Arris and her various catastrophes, but the constant carping on the Soviet Union, to the point that I'm not sure that this being a Cold War-era novel explains it. Night had supplanted dusk, lighting was in full blaze and she found herself looking upon such a wondrous illumination of coloured walls, towers, belfries, church steeples, some shaped like onions, others wearing what appeared to be Oriental turbans, all flung into the night sky and staggering to the imagination. By a series of miscommunications, mistaken identities, and misunderstandings of what ‘char lady’ could possibly mean, Mrs Harris and her friend Violet Butterfield (the wonderful Vi, who wants none of the adventures that Mrs H seems to thrive on) are believed to be spies by the KGB and believed to be aristocracy by others high up in Russia. The indomitable Mrs Harris is a salt-of-the-earth London charlady who cheerfully cleans the houses of the rich.Their US titles —in full Mary Poppins-esque, Cock-er-ney pronunciation style— chose to drop the ‘H’, as in Mrs ’Arris Goes To Moscow; and, to make things a little clearer Stateside, replaced Mrs Harris, MP with Mrs ’Arris Goes to Parliament. Lockwood about it, he asks her to bring a love letter to Liz, his Russian girlfriend, a tour guide for Intourist, the Russian travel service. Harris book, was written in 1974, some some 15 years after the first two (which were published in 1958 and 1959), and relatively near his passing in 1976, which may account for the different tone. And so Ada Harris and her friend Mrs Butterworth fly east, with the former intent on helping her employer, lovelorn Mr Lockwood. She's not dislikeable, but she is there to represent the author's idea of a type, not to be a fully fleshed out individual.