Vol. 24 No. 13 · 11 July 2002
pages 15-16 | 2590 words
So Amused
Sarah Rigby
- Auto da Fay by Fay Weldon
Flamingo, 366 pp, £15.99, May 2002, ISBN 0 00 710992 X
There is an unusual emphasis on ghosts in Fay Weldon’s autobiography. Early on, angels appear to her mother in the local park; a woman in white sits on the six-year-old Weldon’s bed; and ghosts unaccountably darken the rooms at her New Zealand high school (a sort of advance haunting, she now thinks, by the woman who was to be killed nearby in the murder dramatised in the film Heavenly Creatures). Later, there is the drowned pastor she sees on the pier at St Andrews; the poltergeist in Somerset that throws books at unsuspecting children; and, most disturbingly, the weeping ghost in the Saffron Walden house she shares with her mother and sister in early adulthood. This ghost’s presence is powerful: the cat seems to stare and hiss at it and when Weldon is alone with her baby one night, it so terrifies her that she is unable to leave the bedroom to get the child’s dummy, the only thing that will quieten him. Instead, she stays awake, holding the screaming baby and listening to the ghost crying through the door. When Weldon talks to her mother about this the next day, it becomes clear that she, too, feels the house is haunted. They pack and leave within hours and Weldon sells the house from a distance, without ever returning.
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Letters
Vol. 24 No. 15 · 8 August 2002
From Joan Rockwell
Sarah Rigby (LRB, 11 July) repeats the claim that Fay Weldon coined the slogan 'Go to Work on an Egg.' It was in fact Dorothy Sayers who thought it up. Sayers was at the time working for an advertising agency, which she used as the setting for Murder Must Advertise.
Joan Rockwell
Aalborg, Denmark
Vol. 24 No. 16 · 22 August 2002
From Paul Vaughan
I find it hard to believe Joan Rockwell's confident statement (Letters, 8 August) that Dorothy Sayers wrote 'Go to Work on an Egg.' I recall it as a postwar Egg Board slogan: much too late for Sayers. She has been credited, on the other hand, with the slogan 'A Nice Hot Bovril is Better than a Nasty Cold.'
Paul Vaughan
London SW19
Vol. 24 No. 18 · 19 September 2002
From Kate Hutchinson
I too find it hard to believe that Dorothy Sayers wrote 'Go to work on an egg' (Letters, 8 and 22 August). Perhaps Joan Rockwell is getting confused with Montague Egg, a character in a short story by Miss Sayers. She is, however, credited with two more famous slogans: 'It pays to advertise' and 'Guinness is good for you.'
Kate Hutchinson
London E11
From Henry Tattersall
I think we can now take it as given that Dorothy Sayers wasn't around in advertising, or even on Earth, in the days of the Egg Marketing Board. What's striking, and also predictable, is that whenever some prominent literary figure, whether Sayers or Fay Weldon, turns out to have spent time as an advertising copywriter, authorship of one or more epochal slogans is automatically ascribed to them, as if that were the least they might have been expected to achieve during their time in an agency. My own time in advertising taught me that slogans were more likely to happen than to be deliberately thought up, as ordinary headlines lucky enough to take off.
Henry Tattersall
London SW3
Vol. 24 No. 19 · 3 October 2002
From Eugene Sullivan
In her book Auto da Fay, Fay Weldon is careful not to claim that she coined 'Go to work on an egg' (Letters, 19 September). She merely uses the phrase as the title for an account of her work on the TV script for an egg commercial. In fact, it was Francis Ogilvy, then managing director of Mather and Crowther, later Ogilvy Mather, who coined 'Go to work on an egg.' He showed it to Harry Ballam (creative manager), who then asked me (group head) what I thought of it. By the time Fay Weldon took over egg advertising the slogan was a given. Her job was to go to work on the egg campaign and come up with entertaining TV commercials on this theme. And she did.
Eugene Sullivan
Epsom, Surrey
