An inspector calls

Some evening recently we saw the BBC adaptation of Priestley's 'An Inspector Calls', oddly my first meeting. Oddly in that wikipedia tells me that the play is a lefty classic, first performed in the Soviet Union in 1945, then basking in the glory of having won the war against Hitler. I plead in mitigation that sprog 2 did it at school, a doing which included going to the play in London.

An unlikely yarn, but one which nevertheless gripped, partly because of the unfolding story but also because, unlike our usual viewing on ITV3, the story had content: there was tragedy but apportioning the blame was not so easy. Probably best not to read what follows if you intend to see the play for the first time any time soon.

The mill owner sacks a girl for being an agitator.

His daughter gets the girl sacked from her shop - a fancy department store - because the girl was pretty and because the daughter was having a bad day. Girl falls on hard times. Becomes a fallen women in the jargon of the times. The sort of women that both Gladstone and the Salvation Army liked to save.

His prospective son-in-law rescues the girl from the clutches of a grasping & unpleasant alderman in a pick-up bar and ends up having a short affair with her.

His son, some time later, has an affair with her, financed by putting his hand in his father's till.

Both son-in-law and son appear to have been generous to her with money. They did pay, perhaps more than the going rate.

The girl gets pregnant but drops the son when she finds out that he is stealing.

The girl fails to get charity from the charitable committee run by the mill owner's wife, thus accounting for the whole mill owning family.

The girl commits suicide by drinking disinfectant - a convenient but unpleasant.way to do it.

Much bourgeois huffing, puffing and hypocrisy along the way. All good fun.

The mill owner started the ball rolling, but was very much a man of his times. To my mind, the daughter has the most guilt, being guilty of doing an unnecessary wrong, an unforced fault as they say in tennis. But her guilt is much mitigated by her also feeling ashamed of what she has done, being far quicker to feel and to accept guilt than most of the rest of her family. The prospective son-in-law may not be a particularly good person but he has not done anything terribly wrong either. The son, hand in the till apart, neither. The wife, like her husband, a product of her position and the times. The times perhaps being the most guilty. Times when young girls could be destroyed by their betters in this way.

Test question (which was posed in the adaptation): how would the distribution of guilt change if each member of the family had to do with a different girl?

As it turned out, the Evening Standard was spot on target a day or so later with the story scanned above. The world has not changed as much as we might like to think. And there is an ongoing debate here in Epsom about whether £900 a week for a shop security guard is the going rate. Do Harrods pay more or less than the going rate? My argument being that some big name places - like Buckingham Palace - can get away with low wages because of the pull of their names.