Miss Emily Simpson

Both the novel and TV adaptation of The Killings at Badger’s Drift begin with a prologue that introduces Miss Simpson and the circumstances surrounding her death. Both present an idealised depiction of an English village, but the different media formats encourage different ways of setting the scene. The TV adaptation relies more on Miss Simpson to link the different visual aspects of the village which have been highly romanticised: the opening shot is of Miss Simpson riding her bike followed by a wide shot of the village green with a sign in the foreground that reads “Badger’s Drift, Midsomer’s Best Kept Village, 1990, 1991, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996” (Horowitz 00:00:10); she continues her ride along a row of old traditionally styled houses until she is greeted by Dr Lessiter in his classic model Jaguar car, and they have a brief friendly greeting; Miss Simpson also greets Mrs Quine and then Miss Bellringer before we see her lock her bike and walk into the forest. The accompanying music is cheerful, and along with the visual imagery, we are presented with Miss Simpson as a

symbol of this perfect English village, which is evidenced by the friendly cohesive appearance of the community and a sign declaring this village the best kept in all the county.

The novel, on the other hand, provides richer descriptions of Miss Simpson that develop her as a nostalgic symbol of Englishness.

She wore her old leghorn hat with the bee veil pushed back, a faded Horrockses cotton dress, wrinkled white lisle stockings and rather baggy green stained tennis shoes. She was holding a magnifying glass and a sharp stick with a red ribbon tied to it. (Graham 4)

A close analysis of this passage reveals how Englishness has been encoded into the description of Miss Simpson. In particular, the history behind her leghorn hat and Horrockses dress carry nostalgic connotations that are transferred to Miss Simpson through the performativity of wearing them. The Horrockses dress is a nostalgic reminder of the decline of manufacture that was at the forefront of the political and social context of this period.

According to Kate Carter, Horrockses is an English brand that was founded in 1791 as a cotton manufacturer, and in the 1940s they ventured into fashion wear as a means of using and selling the fabric. They were popular with celebrities and royalty, with Queen Mary a notable visitor to the Horrockses boutique (Carter). However, in the 1970s and 1980s the fashion changed and Horrockses passed into obscurity and the label was discontinued in 1983 (Vintage Fashion Guild). The Killings at Badger’s Drift is set four years after this in 1987; like a faded photograph, Miss Simpson’s faded Horrockses dress can be understood through Boym’s typology as a form of a reflective nostalgia that involves cultural memory and the cherishing of a fragment of English history. Although the brand was popular amongst the elite relatively briefly, the loss of the Horrockses label can also be understood within the context of the Thatcher era of the 1980s. Britain had been a major industrial power, but during this period, manufacturing employment fell steeply, which continued a decline from

the manufacturing peak of the 1960s (Beatty and Fothergill 4). The Horrockses dress represents a nostalgic pride in English manufacturing and fashion design and a reminder of the changes that have occurred. This would perhaps have been more poignant in 1987 than today, as many readers at the time would have had strong memories of the pre-Thatcher era and the prestige of the Horrockses brand.

The old leghorn hat she is wearing is also significant; she has a bee veil because she keeps bees in her cottage garden, which reminds us of the close connection between producing and consuming food in a country village. But the significance of leghorn to rural life is deeper and more complicated. Leghorn is the English name given to the Italian city of Livorno, but it also refers to a type of straw that is grown there for use in plaiting and hat manufacture. Although the quality of leghorn varied considerably, the finer quality was especially sought after because it was plait with extremely fine splints of straw. As Nunn writes, “The most romantic-looking hat of the 1850s was a leghorn straw with a very wide brim dipping down at the back and slightly at the front and a high or low crown, trimmed with a lace or tulle veil, ribbons or flowers, or possibly all three” (Nunn). The reference to leghorn distinguishes her hat from being an ordinary or inferior straw hat, and thus connotes an upper-middle class status.

However, the fact that she is wearing a straw hat also has particular relevance to rural life because straw plaiting in England dates back to at least the seventeenth century. During the Napoleonic wars, the import of straw and straw products was severely limited which led to a boom in local production (Carmichael and McOmish 11). The significance of this industry was not only that it provided a substantial income for thousands of working-class families, but it also saw a return to domestic production during a period when industrialisation had moved manufacturing out of people’s homes and into large factories.

The writer William Cobbett was a great proponent of the industry and hoped that it would

“diminish the evils of those scenes of filth and all sorts of tyranny and wickedness” of the cotton factories. In his 1826 book Cottage Economy, Cobbett dedicated a section to harvesting and plaiting straw for the manufacture of hats and bonnets at home. There is an indication that straw plaiting is deeply rooted in the English rural consciousness as this section was featured as prominently as other sections dedicated to bread making, beer making, and stock keeping. Straw plaiting did flourish in the nineteenth century, but then the industry collapsed going from 30,000 plaiters in 1871 to no more than a few hundred in 1907, which was seen as the result of cheap imports coming from China and Japan (Straw).

Reading this within the context of the Thatcher era then, Miss Simpson’s hat can speak of the industrial turmoil of the period as a nostalgic emblem for the idealised cottage lifestyle that Cobbett staunchly promoted. The leghorn hat is an icon of English rural life, and conveys, once again, a connection to an idealised past way of life.

Miss Simpson is also idealised through her house: “It was perfection. The sort of house that turns up on This England calendars and tourist posters” (Graham 41). This England is a quarterly magazine running since 1968 with the current tagline “For all who love our green and pleasant land”. In his criticism of the publication, Patrick Wright claims that “This England had a defiantly posthumous feeling from the start. Its country was full of branch lines, thrashing machines, thatched cottages and traditional English customs” (Wright 1). Its rural nostalgia is confirmed by what the publication refused to show: “There were no motorways, no industrial cities, no suburbs to interfere with the thatched and royalist idyll filling the pages. The same selectivity was applied to people” (Wright 2). The novel makes a correlation between Miss Simpson’s house, perfection, and This England, which triangulates an idealised house: a thatched roof, herringbone brick path edged with lavender, and an immaculate lawn. The perfection of the house depicts Miss Simpson as a portrait of Englishness.

The perfection of her Englishness is further promoted by her uncorrupted maidenhood, as it his hinted that she is a virgin when she encounters two people copulating in the forest:

But this was an alien noise. Miss Simpson stood very still and listened.

It sounded like jerky, laboured breathing and, for a moment, she thought that a large animal had been caught in a trap, but then the breathing was punctuated by strange little cries and moans which were definitely human.

(Graham 5)

Miss Simpson did not recognise the sound of sex, nor did she suspect that the noise was copulation until she saw it. This, and her bed being described as a “virginal bed”

(Graham 45), would strongly suggest that she was a virgin and thus conformed with Christian expectations of unmarried people. Virginity is also highly emblematic within Christian traditions for its association with the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus, and therefore her virginity connotes the purity of her character, and thereby an untainted Englishness. Her murder could accordingly be symbolised as a desecration of Englishness, and the investigation a scrutiny of corrupted ideals. Solving the crime thus involves a restoration of those nostalgic ideals.

The final aspect concerning Miss Simpson that idealises rural life is her food production. Her house is named Beehive Cottage, which emphasises her home production of honey and through it her close relationship with nature. She grows her own parsley and makes parsley wine, and the description of her larder suggests that she makes her own jams and chutneys, while Barnaby notices that “She salted runner beans too, just like his mother had” (Graham 46). This nostalgic moment for Barnaby reminds us of his rural upbringing and conveys the rural traditions of food preservation and the self-reliant nature of rural life.

This is a binary opposite to urban living which is disconnected from food production and instead relies on the mass-produced food products available in supermarkets, such as the

store-bought soup, mentioned in the previous section, that Barnaby relishes despite the additives.

The character of Miss Simpson is an idealised symbol of Englishness in The Killings at Badger’s Drift, both in the novel and the TV series. However, the novel provides a richer

detail of the brands and clothing that links her character with a reflective nostalgia for a disappearing English fashion and rural production, while her house and chastity venerate her as a romanticised figure of uncorrupted Englishness.