We are going into our last weekend with Pygmalion. Two more performances, then I put away Alfie’s rags and riches and say goodbye.
It’s probably a good time to ask what happened to everybody after the play ended. I know Shaw wrote about it, but I think we’re entitled to our own guesses. Particularly as Shaw, presumably in the interest of the play’s timelessness, ignored the thing that was about to happen in England and Europe within a year after the play ends. It’s not entirely impossible that Freddie and Eliza would settle down with their flower shop and greengrocer’s and their classes at the LSE, but it doesn’t seem terribly likely.
So, here goes. First of all, Colonel Pickering, of course, would be recalled, despite his age, and I’m thinking he would wind up with the Rajputs, considering his skill with Hindi. Dead in Basra, then. Poor chap. Freddie, dead as well, first battle of the Marne. I’d rather think of Freddie dying early than think of Freddie limbless and shell-shocked, wouldn’t you? Clara, of course, would be a Land Girl and then an ambulance driver. I rather suspect she’d make it home in one piece, but married to a Canadian. Isn’t that what happened to ambulance drivers?
Higgins would have wound up with Intelligence, of course, working at a desk going through messages. The war would be a great inconvenience to him, but I doubt it would change him much. Mrs. Higgins would be one of those grand old ladies serving tea at some stately-home-turned-hospital, wouldn’t she? I like to think Mrs. Pearce would turn nurse as well, although likely enough once the War started, she’d follow Higgins into Intelligence and become one of those feared ladies who ran Britain for two generations, technically only secretaries, but absolutely in control of the flow of information and supplies.
Alfie? Well, let’s see. Alfie would be in his early forties, well-off and not clubbable. No service for him. Easiest to imagine him dead in a ditch within a year, but just for fun, why not imagine him surviving the war, and a widower, embracing the Army of Salvation and becoming a funder for the temperance movement? Middle class morality claims its victim.
Now, what about Eliza? With her gift for language and mimicry, would she become a spy overseas? It’s not implausible. But frankly, I don’t see it. I think her break with Higgins is enough, despite her naturally affectionate nature, to swing her into the sphere of the Suffragettes. Her experience acting as Higgins secretary, and her gift for language, and her youth as well as her strange classlessness might suit her to a job as private secretary and traveling companion to, say, Sylvia Pankhurst. Then she would follow her into the anti-war movement of the time (Freddie’s early death might have something to do with it as well) and communism. After the war, appalled by her father’s conversion, she goes to Soviet Russia for a few years, and then… what…
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.