Have You Got the Bottle?

Should you be a student of literature casting about for a dissertation topic, may I suggest 'The Milk Bottle in the 20th Century Novel' as an idea? It came to me when I was reading A Fairly Honourable Defeat, which includes milk bottles as a recurring motif.

They are first introduced about halfway through the text:

'The kitchen smelt of decaying matter. It was difficult to trace the source. "I must get rid of all those milk bottles", thought Tallis. Some of them contained weird formations resembling human organs preserved in tubes. It was quite difficult to get these out of the bottles and the last time he tried to he stopped up the sink.'

They recur later, functioning as a measure of one character's energy:

'He did not feel strong enough to tackle the milk bottles',

and again, further on, compounding the breakdown of his marriage:

'They staggered together, knocking over a row of half empty milk bottles ... The kitchen floor was covered with broken glass and stinking yellowish milky mess ...Tallis stared at jagged glass and crumpled newspaper and milk which had already dried into thick yellowish pats and errant gleaming globes of wine-dark Baltic amber. He stared down into a world that had been utterly changed.'

Eventually, they are noticed by another, stronger character:

'Julius scrutinized the kitchen with a faint frown, noting the milk bottles.'

It is he who, by the end of the novel, manages to overcome them:

'"What did you do with all those milk bottles?" said Tallis. "I washed a few and put them outside and I put the rest in the rubbish tip across the road."'

In Barbara Pym's Quartet in Autumn, milk bottles play an even more prominent role. Indeed, one of the characters is so in thrall to them that she fills her shed with the things:

'Then, as the day was fine, she went into the garden and picked her way over the long uncut grass to the shed where she kept milk bottles. These needed to be checked from time to time and occasionally she even went as far as dusting them. Sometimes she would put out one for the milkman but she mustn't let the hoard get too low because, if there was a national emergency of the kind that seemed so frequent nowadays, or even another war, there could well be a shortage of milk bottles.'

This character becomes so concerned when an acquaintance inadvertently leaves an alien milk bottle in her possession that she wraps it up and seeks her out in a library to return it:

'Marcia crept up behind [Letty] as she browsed among the biographies.

"This is yours, I think, " said Marcia in an accusing tone, thrusting the wrapped milk bottle towards her.

"A milk bottle?" Of course, Letty did not remember the occasion and Marcia had to explain it, which she did, loudly, so that other people turned round and the young blond-haired library assistant seemed about to make some kind of protest.

Letty conscious of tension in the air, accepted the bottle without further question.'

If someone as ill-read as me can find two instances so easily, I'm sure there must be many more references to this quintessentially English obsession scattered through the fiction of the twentieth century. I look forward to following the glittering academic career of whichever enterprising young scholar chooses to investigate this fascinating and thus far thoroughly overlooked area of research.