The Girl on the Boat*

It did not hit me until I had to remember the title of this book that there is one thing that I have not (and probably never will) experience that most of Wodehouse’s earlier characters have.  Namely this: I have never sailed across the Atlantic.  I’ve only crossed that ocean on a plane.  A good deal of action in the pre-1960’s novels involves sailing.  It has been used as a catalyst, throwing two people together, it has been used as a setting for the action and, in at least one instance, it has been a means of escape. 

While a flight across the ocean can feel as though it is taking forever, they rarely last more than eight hours.  During the portion of my life when I made the trip regularly, and wrestled with horrible jet lag, I envied those who were allowed to reset their internal clocks along a more civilized timeframe.  What I would have given to have arrived at port adjusted and in a good mood, instead of fuzzy and vaguely desperate.  It might have made my choice encounters with customs officials more bearable.  There is also the matter of one‘s fellow travelers.  I often begin my flights by looking around at my seat companions and resigning myself to being sneezed upon, or squished, or being talked at, or annoyed by screaming children, or some nightmarish combination, for the duration.  The feeling that I get from Wodehouse’s description of ocean liner travel is different.  There are many more people among whom one can circulate, although there are class divisions, so one does not have the free run of the vessel.  One also has the ability to hole up in one’s cabin on a boat, whereas on a plane you are all pressed together, sometimes more intimately than you would otherwise wish.

Then there are the diversions, the promenades, the dinners, the games, the sitting comfortably on board deck chairs.  On today’s planes, you’re lucky if you get a bag of pretzels hurled at you by a harassed flight attendant and for headphones that actually transmit the sound of the in-flight entertainment.  To be fair, I would probably be driven a little mad by the necessity to change clothes on a revolving basis.  That being said, my impression is that there were a lot more possibilities for plot developments on a boat, and Plum made use of them.  Although I have seen references to female characters being stewardesses in the later novels, I have not yet encountered action set on a plane itself.  Perhaps I shall make an interesting discovery later on, but it seems to me that there is not much scope for drama on a plane in the Wodehouse universe.  Maybe he did not like planes.  I can certainly say that today’s travel conditions have not made me a fan of them either.

*Read April 2015.  I’m slowly catching up.