A Taste of Honey GCSE Student Edition by Shelagh Delaney

Author:Shelagh Delaney [Delaney, Shelagh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781474229692
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2016-04-30T05:00:00+00:00

1A city in northern England. The play’s specific setting is the smaller city of Salford, which borders Manchester and is sometimes considered part of it.

2This line is a humorous reference to Helen’s financial dependency on her boyfriends. Jo is exaggerating the link between Helen’s lifestyle and prostitution.

3A gasworks is a factory where gas is produced. Helen’s sarcastic comment highlights the bleak, industrial setting.

4A shilling is an old-fashioned (pre-decimal) coin worth the equivalent of five pence. The flat’s gas fire works through money being put into a meter.

5A fixture is a part of a property that is fixed in place, like a radiator. Helen is jokingly suggesting that the boy might be part of the flat.

6Helen means that her mother would have hit her hard.

7A performance that ‘brings the house down’ is very successful, making the audience applaud loudly.

8This song and others that feature later in the play were romantic classics in the 1950s, having been produced in earlier decades.

9Helen is asking the musicians to accompany her singing.

10Jo makes up the word ‘geniused’ to emphasize her talents and outdo Helen’s compliment.

11‘Flitting’ means to move, particularly from one home to another.

12A reference to the shared toilet and bathroom.

13An impolite way of expressing surprise at someone’s arrival.

14A common surname, ‘Smith’ has the reputation of being used in place of a person’s name to hide their real identity.

15Tenements are city-based apartment blocks, usually cheap and of poor quality.

16This expression, originally used in card games, means to give up.

17To ‘renege’ means to go back on an agreement. Peter is reminding Helen that they have a past as a couple to persuade her to resume their relationship. The business imagery (‘firm’), as in other lines in this scene, reflects the financial element of Helen’s interactions with men.

18A girdle is a sort of corset, commonly worn by women in this period.

19Helen jokes that Peter’s song refers to the room in a pub where the bar is.

20‘Courtship’ is an old-fashioned word for a romantic relationship that ideally concludes in a proposal of marriage. Jo is cheekily pointing out that Helen and Peter have already had sex.

21Peter talks about his cigar, using the language of advertising. His description of the ‘Mammy’ — historically, an African American female servant — would have been socially acceptable in the 1950s.

22The sort of ‘institution’ Jo means is a hospital for the insane.

23In the 1950s, ‘coloured’ was commonly used as an acceptable term for describing people of black and Asian origin. ‘Naval rating’ means sailor.

24A contemporary audience might recognize this line as the title of a song. This line is not a reference to it, however, as the play was produced two years before it was released in 1960.

25Jo is claiming that Helen will not disapprove of Boy.

26‘Leave’ is a period of time off from work, associated with a return to home and family within military professions.

27Mau-Mau is the name of an uprising that took place in Kenya, against British rule, during the 1950s.

28‘Nautical’ means something that relates to the sea or sailors; ‘ardour’ is passion.

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