crankcase

To get some sense of what flying a bombing mission over Germany in WWII was like, watch the fictional “Masters of the Air” series on Apple TV. The first episode is free to all (and all you’ll need) without any subscription or any special equipment—just do a title search on your smart TV. To get some sense of what the Yorkshire Dales are really like a good deal of the time, watch the version of “Wuthering Heights” directed by Andrea Arnold on the Kanopy app. Siegfried’s love for Audrey is detectable from outer space, but not yet from Audrey’s class-delimited inner one.

A country vet is pretty low in the British class hierarchy. (From the far north of England, even lower.) He’s no Mr. Rochester. Audrey was not living in Skeldale House. As someone pointed out above, she’s been shown arriving early ro start breakfast. “Unlikely” is not never. Certainly it wasn’t for Virginia Woolf, from whose Mrs. Dalloway (1925) the following excerpt involving upper-class toffs at a large country estate is taken: “It was at Bourton that summer, early in the 'nineties, when he was so passionately in love with Clarissa. There were a great many people there, laughing and talking, sitting round a table after tea and the room was bathed in yellow light and full of cigarette smoke. They were talking about a man who had married his housemaid, one of the neighbouring squires, he had forgotten his name. He had married his housemaid, and she had been brought to Bourton to call—an awful visit it had been. She was absurdly over-dressed, "like a cockatoo," Clarissa had said, imitating her, and she never stopped talking. On and on she went, on and on. Clarissa imitated her. Then somebody said—Sally Seton it was—did it make any real difference to one's feelings to know that before they'd married she had had a baby? (In those days, in mixed company, it was a bold thing to say.) He could see Clarissa now, turning bright pink; somehow contracting; and saying, "Oh, I shall never be able to speak to her again!" Whereupon the whole party sitting round the tea-table seemed to wobble. It was very uncomfortable.“ The entire novel can be read here. A very faithful movie adaptation with Vanessa Redgrave can be found at: www.kanopy.com (Free, legal, no ads)

The endgame of “Mrs. Hall” and Siegfried Farnon was formalized the moment an actor in this film signed a contract to play a character now with the same given name, Audrey, as the wife of the real-life person (Donald Sinclair) on whom Siegfried was based. (Given that Sinclair committed suicide two weeks after Audrey died, the use of her name is not to be taken lightly.) And there are not a whole lot of educated, middle-aged Englishmen (even among the unmarried) who could forbear romantic or sexual feelings for any woman who even remotely resembles Anna Madeley. Still can’t “see it”? Well, here is a woman who can. As to Gerald, his ultimate role in this non-drama has already been described on p.35 of the ACGAS discussion thread that preceded this current one for Season 4, all episodes of which can be viewed here.

MISS Harbottle would have made an intelligent, accomplished, physically attractive, age-appropriate romantic companion for Siegfried if he weren’t already promised to Audrey. She was there because they had danced together. The intimidation was sexual. It’s normal.

1/2 crown = 30 pence Prices of stuff in WWII Britain

The latest incident, in what may be the most drawn-out romantic tease in the history of television, can be seen here, @~34:20. Audrey (trying to complete the divorce application): “… On Sunday I’ll be in church, on the earliest day of the year, with Gerald beside me.” Siegfried (audibly and visibly distraught): “I’m not sure I’d considered his intentions towards you before now.” Audrey: “Gerald?! Oh, no, it’s not that. I have no intention of leaving, Mr. Farnon, if that’s what you …” Siegfried (interrupting, embarrassed): “That’s not what I meant.” Audrey: “Will there be anything else?” Yes, there will, you beautiful, oblivious dope, but not until next season, at the earliest.

Irony, @Liywela, irony, in mocking recognition of all those who reached for the smelling salts when Audrey was allowed to dine with the family.

Well, since no one really what “love” really is, either theoretically or functionally, let’s just say there is love and there isn’t, simultaneously, their’s being both alive and dead like Schrödinger’s cat. What I do know for certain is that Siegfried has often been playing a parlour (Br. sp.) word game with Audrey even though be has to cheat to keep up with a mere housekeeper—quite a stretch for a bloke like that—and I also know (because I’ve peeked) that he’s going to give us a brief glimpse of his underlying emotions in the season’s finale. You won’t want to miss it.

I was referring to Audrey and Siegfried acting in loco parentis with respect to Tristan. After Season 2’s Christmas episode, I noted the show’s trope of the hand-on-shoulder for Siegfried/Audrey compared with, in Season 1’s finale, Helen/James and the Chapmans. I considered it another of the very many ways in which the show was signaling the obvious romantic endgame. But there was another aspect to it that I forgot to note. Helen puts her hand on James’s shoulder when he saved Susie’s pup, an effort in which she had helped. Audrey did it while Siegfried was holding the letter from the vet college showing that Tristan had graduated. Siegfried reached back to take Audrey’s hand, as James had done with Helen’s, to acknowledge her role in shepherding their “son” to certification. I find it curious, but unsurprising, that not a single person (until, as I just noticed, @Tiggertoo and @magdalene, while I was. composing) mentioned Siegfried changing his mind about keeping Dash when he saw Audrey wanted him. Listen, the show didn’t cast an Anna Madeley as a housekeeper, give her the name of “Audrey,” and demonstrate umpteen times the ways in which she was intellectually superior to Siegfried, in order to marry her off to a Gerald. But isn’t she still married? Sure, but her husband’s a drunk and bombs are going to be falling on northwestern British cities. The writers can kill him any time they want, no questions asked.

The kindertransport

The role of Audrey at Skeldale House is to make Siegfried whole, to enable him to recover from the traumas of The Great War and the death of his wife. It will happen in the psychological journey he must undertake to be able to marry her. I can imagine two possibilities: recognizing his true feelings due to jealousy over Gerald (trite!), or the one I discuss below. First, it is necessary to grasp the staggering personality difference between Siegfried ‘78 and 2021, as can be immediately seen in Robert Hardy’s expression in the ‘78 openings, and the ways in which Siegfried first greets James in the two series. (All videos, including the entirety of this season’s, are available for free at dailymotion.com.) Their interactions with women are also dramatically different, but I’ll mercifully let it go for now. (The very first episodes of both series also quickly demonstrate the huge gulf between the two Helens in expression, dress, speech and accent. Money matters, and Helen78 first-kisses back hard—S1E7–and showed no trepidations about her wedding night.) Let’s begin with the last three minutes of the current episode which portrayed the existing spiritual/psychological connections I had proposed in the phrase: “…Audrey Hall…with her husband and their adopted son.” The final camera pull-back unveils the full setting of Siegfried and Audrey, side-by-side in matching armchair thrones, master and mistress of Skeldale House, equal and hopeless in love. But alas, so near yet so far. While Siegfried’s Wagnerian namesake braved a ring of fire to find his wife, Siegfried himself faces the much more formidable barrier of internalized British social class conventions. It’ll require a great emotion-laden event to allow a breakthrough, just as it took Siegfried’s grieving over the suicide of his army friend to allow Audrey to call him “Siegfried” and clasp his bare hand (a step forward from her hand on his shoulder in the last episode of Season 2). The wheels have been set in motion for Audrey to be informed, late in Season 5, of Edward being killed or missing in the sinking of HMS Repulse on Dec. 10, 1941. Siegfried will finally and fully open his heart in consolation, with the wedding taking place in Season 6’s 1942, the same year that Don Sinclair married Audrey. So it is written (or it bloody well better be).

The man running the carnival shooting gallery made the mistake of underestimating Audrey Hall. Many here are now in his shoes, as they will only come to realize when they view this season’s Christmas episode. (In general, it’s best not to jump to conclusions about a beautiful woman who was the only one in her household interested in attending a classical music concert that included a piece familiar to her whose name she could pronounce with an impeccable French accent. Just sayin’.)

From Our Business is Killing (Author) “Welcome to my every day. As I’ve discovered in my two years as a vet, being verbally abused by owners is part of the job. A 2021 study conducted by the British Veterinary Association revealed that of 572 veterinarians interviewed, 57 percent had felt intimidated by clients’ language and behavior, a 10 percent increase from the year before. In small-animal practice, it’s even worse, with 66 percent of respondents reporting that they’ve felt intimidated and harassed.” “Until I started working, I never understood why veterinary medicine has such a high suicide rate. Female veterinarians in clinical practice are 3.4 times more likely to die by suicide than the general population; male vets are 2.1 times more likely. Three-quarters of these deaths come from vets in small animal practices like mine.“

Good lord, I can only imagine the pearl-clutching that would have gone on around here if the man had said this, instead. But even that might not have resulted in the level of opprobrium directed at the writers for having Audrey Hall dine at the same table as her husband and their adopted son.

“balls up” origin

“Where are you from?” - Florence Pandhi, played by Sophie Khan Levy.

Siegfried would have had no reason to hide his given name. This Siegfried certainly didn’t. “Siegfried” wasn’t just another German name—it was of a Wagnerian hero well-known to the British educated class. Wight himself first learned it from his parents who were both professional musicians, his mother being a singer of opera. Speaking of the British educated class, which of our unsuspecting lovebirds is in it when the one with a degree has to cheat at a commercial word game in order to keep up with the one without? (Perhaps it shouldn’t be too surprising as the latter is the only character on the show ever to be shown reading an adult book.) And why would a cranky, egotistical male subject himself to that, and with his housekeeper of all people? … Oh. Right. Siegfried’s fictional mate from the Army Veterinary Corps committed suicide with a barbiturate overdose, as did the very real Don Sinclair two weeks after his wife Audrey died in 1995.

… AND called him “Siegfried” AND then how he gazed at her. He will gaze again just before the season ends, albeit in a very different way and in a radically different context. But the underlying reason will remain unchanged.

I was agreeing with your viewpoint and genuinely appreciated your post. The questions weren’t meant to be answered; they were making an argument in support of what you wrote, just taking it further.

Thank you for your knowledgable, literate post. Now, with your understanding of ACGAS in the context of modern British social history, I wonder if you could help us make informed estimates of the answers to the questions below. 1. What is the number of days, when Tristan was away at school and no assistant was on board, that Siegfried and Audrey were the only people in the house? For 1930s rural England: 2. In what percentage of middle-class homes did the housekeeper dine with the owner when they were often the only ones present? 3. In what percentage of middle-class homes where owner and housekeeper dined together when alone, did they also dine together when others were present? 4. How do the percentages of numbers 2 and 3 change when the housekeeper is younger than the owner, has the face and body of Anna Madeley and the personality and intelligence of Mrs. Hall, and has the skills necessary to help an absent-minded owner with low social IQ succeed in his business? 5. In what percentage of homes in which the owner ultimately marries the housekeeper had they habitually been dining together regardless of the presence of others? Thanks in advance for your help.

Did (the young) Vic shovel muck in overalls? No? Were J & H ever alone together? Yes? Then no analogy need apply. —————— A couple from the ranks of the nobility have just had sex on their wedding night. Wife: “Do the lower classes do this?” Husband: “Yes.” Wife: “It’s too good for them.” —————— First kiss 1978 (@47:38) Nothing remotely as passionate occurred pre-maritally in the current adaptation.

Not being able to cook well is one thing, commonly burning food is quite another. (My originating post referred to Helen’s burning food, only.) Knowing you commonly burn food and not knowing/caring if you burnt the food you’re giving to a person you believe you could conceivably marry is another thing still, bordering on what our favorite polymathic idiot savant would likely call non compos mentis. The Biggles series of almost 100 books was written for what have been variously described as “young readers”/“pre-teens”/“children.” There is nothing remotely YA about them. The specific book Tristan was reading, Biggles Goes To War, was published in 1938, so he couldn’t have merely picked up a childhood book to pass the time, he had to have gone out and bought it when he was in his early twenties. Helen and Tristan, as otherwise described, would never have done these things. Is this just lazy writing, or is it anything for a “larf?” (Many older British viewers—are there many young ones?—would have gotten the Biggles joke.) Now let’s talk sex. Helen2001+ is nothing like Helen1978. She actually worked the farm, which included the business of mating huge animals with huge genitalia. She may be “saving it” for marriage, but she’s not naive and, as we’ve seen, hardly lacking in passion. Yet the show has tried to make us believe this now sex-crazed pair have not only done nothing more than chastely kiss for six months, but they never even desired more. (Yes, yes, I know it’s Yorkshire, I know it’s 1938, but the Old Testament has hotter stuff than this.)

A woman smart and meticulous enough to keep an operation’s financial books does not commonly burn dishes and, when it does happen, knows it and is not so idiotic as to then offer it to someone to whom she is sexually attracted. Speaking of which, are we supposed to believe the post-marital Herriots hump like rabbits but never engaged in anything more than tongueless snogging for all that long time between their engagement and wedding? Last season we were shown Tristan reading a Hardy Boys-level book about the heroic adventures of a (racist imperialist) British aviator. This year he’s doing crosswords fit for Oxbridge graduates. Such astonishing sexual and literary progress from proximity to a priapic polymath!

Wight’s history + first scene of the season + dramatic exigencies = James joins RAF

“Wider age gap”?! It’s the other way around, here. Madeley is ten years younger than West, and looks it with her hair down. She’s also more attractive. Take a look at this.