Mr Twiddle: Agent Provocateur.

I see I drew a moral in my last post.

Here’s another moral drawn; again by Mrs Stock-Engländer, the wife of that arch-Englishman, my father.

My mother, when reading us bedtime stories, was alert to question Enid Blyton’s world view: ‘Into my books I pack ethical and moral teaching,’ Miss Blyton claimed.  A claim dismissed by Mother’s strictest censures.

Even now I recall my mother’s observations, over fifty years ago, when reading a tale of Mr Twiddle (a petit-bourgeois Pickwickian creation of Blyton’s). The moral of one particular bedtime read was: ‘Trust makes way for treachery,’ for kindly Mr Twiddle tested his housemaid’s honesty by calculating to ‘mislay’ coins on the stairs.  The housemaid was tempted and dismissed for theft. I clearly remember my mother’s condemnation of this entrapment as the act of an agent provocateur. 

That was the moral my mother drew, and the moral I pondered on, aged seven.

Postscript . . . Tests of Honesty in a Building Society.

Curiously, I have just stumbled across the following account of a young trainee secretary in a well-known British building society (Life’s Too Short: True Stories About Life at Work, 2010), who reluctantly attended college to . . . 

. . . learn shorthand and touch-typing. This prepared me for my first job  in the Halifax Building Society. Life in a branch of a building society was a gentle introduction to the working world . . . There was one colleague who left one and two pence pieces around the staff room to test our honesty.