54 pages • 1-hour read
Major Pettigrew's Last Stand
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Chapters 11-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism and religious discrimination.
Chapter 11 Summary
The Major golfs with Alec and finds Amina teaching some of the female staff a dance. Amina is a dance teacher but admits that she struggles to make ends meet. Amina asks the Major if he can give her and George a ride to Edgecombe after his game. Alec makes fun of the Major’s golf bag, which belonged to his father. Alec mentions that Roger inquired about membership in the club.
After his game, the Major finds Amina arguing with the club secretary, who has asked her to wait by the staff entrance. Amina challenges him for treating her and her son badly. The Major is embarrassed by her antagonism, but later, in private, he apologizes to Amina for the treatment she received. When she speaks about handling prejudice, the Major reminds her that “[o]f course we will make shallow and quite possibly erroneous judgments about each other” (149), and he gently suggests that she has pegged him as an “old git” (149), which is just what she called the secretary. The Major shares that he has an aversion to the modern tendency toward confession. He likewise suggests that respect must be earned and cannot be demanded.
The Major feels uneasy about leaving Amina at Mrs. Ali’s when he remembers that the buses to her hometown are not running. He returns to the shop and encounters Daisy and her set. Daisy has decided to stage a performance at the golf dinner, based on the Major’s father’s service to the Maharajah. She dismisses the Major’s point that his father’s act happened during Partition, and the Mughal Empire belonged to an earlier era. Gertrude mentions that Lord Dagenham would like to recognize the Pettigrews’ proud history, and the atmosphere inside the shop grows tense when Daisy suggests that Mrs. Ali could play some role representing India or Pakistan, and Mrs. Ali reveals that she was born and raised in Cambridge. Abdul Wahid disapproves of his aunt being part of the dinner at all, but the Major says he has asked Mrs. Ali to attend as his guest. Although Abdul Wahid tries to disapprove, Mrs. Ali accepts the Major’s invitation.
Chapter 12 Summary
The Major sees surveyors at work in the field behind his house. Alice, his neighbor, is spying on them. She predicts that Lord Dagenham is selling his land to developers and expects the Major to help her organize a protest. The Major reflects, “There was a slow murder going on all over England these days as great swaths of fields were divided into small, rectangular pieces, like sheep pens, and stuffed with identical houses of bright red brick” (160). The Major writes a letter to the village planning officer and hopes for an amicable resolution.
The Major visits the store and learns that George is Abdul Wahid’s son. The Major feels all this is “a slightly sordid business” (166). Mrs. Ali hopes to reconcile the couple and has offered for Amina and George to live at the shop, but Abdul Wahid has moved out. The Major invites Abdul Wahid to stay at his home. Abdul Wahid brings few belongings, aside from his prayer rug and his copy of the Qur’an. While the Major finds it hard to relate to the rather stern Abdul Wahid, he is glad to be of assistance to Mrs. Ali.
Chapter 13 Summary
Roger arrives without advance notice and treats Abdul Wahid like an intruder. Roger says the Major must be careful of foreigners, and the Major asks if that includes Sandy. Roger says of course not; “Americans are just like us” (173). Roger and Sandy have brought lunch. Sandy asks Abdul Wahid about traditional weaving in Pakistan, and he reveals that he was raised in England and bought his scarf at a department store in Lahore.
At dinner, they discuss religion and also marriage. Roger is surprised that Abdul Wahid is willing to discuss matters of religion. Roger asserts that single parenthood is common among the lower class and foreigners, but he maintains that he and Sandy would be married first, though he believes that fatherhood would constrain his career prospects. He shares Gertrude’s suggestion that Lord Dagenham could sponsor Roger’s membership in the golf club. The Major is taken aback. Roger is delighted that the entertainment at the dinner will be about “the glory of the Pettigrew name” (183). The Major is a bit put off by Roger’s social ambitions. Roger reveals that he has been invited to Lord Dagenham’s shoot. He now wants to borrow his father’s guns. Furious, the Major vindictively mentions that he is invited to the same shoot and will be using the guns himself.
Chapter 14 Summary
The Major goes with George and Mrs. Ali to a park west of town, which stands atop the headland of a cliff. The Major has bought a kite for George to fly. Mrs. Ali warns George to be careful around the cliff. Mrs. Ali wants Abdul Wahid to marry Amina and asks the Major to speak with him. When another mother warns her child against playing with George, the Major is angry. Mrs. Ali hugs George and tells him she loves him.
The Major has a lonely, listless day and feels there is something missing from life. He recalls how he used to rebuke Roger and his friends for being noisy. He talks to Abdul Wahid and is surprised to learn that the young man feels doubtful about marrying Amina. Abdul Wahid says he is in love with an unsuitable woman, and the Major asks if there is any other kind.
Chapter 15 Summary
The Major walks to Lord Dagenham’s estate for the shoot, hoping to make a good impression upon his arrival. Around the empty duck cages, he encounters a young child, who begins screaming. Alice intervenes and takes the child to the bus, as the children who attend the school at the Dagenham estate are being given a field trip for the day. Alice shares that the children are distressed about the hunt. Dagenham remarks that protesters are blocking the road, interfering with the arrival of his guests. Ferguson arrives in a gaudy shooting jacket with a tartan. Everyone wants to see the Major’s Churchills, and Roger is impressed that his father knows Frank Ferguson.
The Major is placed next to Ferguson on the shooting line, and when the American shoots a duck, the Major notes that the bird should properly have been his own target. The Major thinks “of how much these guns had meant to his father” and of the fact that he and his brother “had perhaps been as separated as these two guns in the last, wasted years” (214). Ferguson invites the Major to Scotland for shooting. Roger appears to ingratiate himself, hoping to be invited, too, but the Major recalls how, on his first bird hunt, Roger killed an endangered woodpecker. When children and their teachers appear on the field, the Major shouts at the men to hold their fire.
At the breakfast after, Lord Dagenham and Ferguson invite everyone to see his plans. Roger says he will explain the technical terms to the Major, and the Major retorts that he is the reason Roger was invited. Ferguson, who is now the Laird of Loch Brae, reveals a model development planned for Lord Dagenham’s land. The plan holds several smaller estates designed to interest wealthy buyers and completely renovate the village; these changes will displace Mrs. Ali’s shop. The Major doesn’t like the plan, but Dagenham confides that estates like his are in financial crisis because they can no longer support themselves with the high taxes and low subsidies. Dagenham hopes that, as “a man of great understanding” (227), the Major will take his side. Roger believes this plan will make his career and that they’ll be able to sell Rose Lodge for a great deal of money. Roger tells his father not to sell his guns until after they’ve gone shooting in Scotland. He claims he can find a way to hold Marjorie and Jemima off, since everyone knew the gun was supposed to go to the Major.
Chapters 11-15 Analysis
The expressions of cultural prejudice continue in the vein established in earlier chapters, emphasized by Daisy and Alma’s conversations about their Mughal theme. Beyond simply regarding the Mughal culture as a vehicle for their entertainment, they go so far as to suggest that Mrs. Ali could become a prop in their drama, and they ignorantly invite her to represent either India or Pakistan—purely on the basis of her physical appearance. Mrs. Ali’s response that she was born and raised in Cambridge, England—and therefore is as British in her nationality as the others—indicts the frequent assumption that ethnicity and nationality are equivalent. In a similar vein, Roger’s blasé statement that Americans are just like the British is really a claim about whiteness; he essentially suggests that Americans are not foreigners to the extent that the country’s ethnic majority is white.
Abdul Wahid, like his aunt, is British-born and laments that he is treated as a tourist in Pakistan, where the residents realize that he is not culturally familiar with their land. Yet even so, Roger easily dismisses Abdul Wahid as a “foreigner,” and even more insultingly, he suggests that Abdul Wahid could be a terrorist because of his Islamic religion. While the Major dismisses Roger’s concerns, he does not reprove his son for his racism, and this failing suggests that the Major is still learning to navigate his own prejudices and is struggling with his natural reticence: an internal conflict that will impact the action in the next act.
Roger’s presence on the page also illustrates The Tension Between Family Obligations and Personal Fulfillment as the Major’s affectionate memories vie with his frequent feelings of frustration over his son’s lack of sensitivity; he also disapproves of Roger’s gauche social ambitions. The Major’s discomfort is illustrated in his frequent reflections on moments in which Roger has been an embarrassment to him, as when Roger shot an endangered bird on his first hunt. As a result, the Major now takes a small but malicious satisfaction in the passive-aggressive act of snubbing Roger rather than confronting him directly about his behavior. However, several of his recollections combine with certain comments of Roger’s to suggest that the Major was sometimes a difficult and exacting parent who hurt a younger Roger with his disapproval. The conflicts in their family dynamics offer a parallel to (and a reflection of) the more melodramatic circumstances of Abdul Wahid’s discovery that his forbidden love affair with a woman his family considered unsuitable has resulted in a child out of wedlock (George): a fact that conflicts with both his cultural and religious values.
The Major’s sense that these family connections constitute a “sordid business” is simply a more subtle iteration of Roger’s outright declaration that having children out of wedlock is for those of foreign birth or lower socioeconomic status—that is to stay, not proper. Such declarations are leading the Major to reflect on whether his own beliefs about “proper” behavior are, in fact, a deeper form of prejudice. While Roger’s blunt sense of entitlement makes him a foil to Abdul Wahid’s reticence and humility, both men share the apprehension that their choice to have a family might inhibit their future prospects. This issue introduces a discussion about the value of love and passion even when it poses a conflict with the demands of family expectation.
The Major’s allegiance to Traditional Households and the Resistance to Change is evident in his behavior at Lord Dagenham’s shooting event and his response to the proposed development of Lord Dagenham’s property, which abuts Rose Lodge, the Major’s home. Lord Dagenham’s financial difficulties with his estate illustrate a contemporary economic reality for the British aristocracy that their great homes, which were built in an earlier and predominantly agricultural age, are failing to earn enough income to sustain themselves. Frank Ferguson, for all that his manners and taste offend the Major, illustrates the idea that a man with money can buy his way into a class where land was once strictly controlled by inheritance alone. Similarly, the Major’s lack of appreciation for Gertrude’s personal taste or appearance align with his broader sense that the dignity of the British aristocracy is eroding. This dynamic is dramatically illustrated by the shrill scream of the child whom the Major frightens while carrying his guns to the shoot. While the Major’s insistence that the men stop shooting when women and children appear in the field makes him seem old-fashioned, he also illustrates the idea that certain courtesies, in their best form, are an expression of care for the welfare of others—something that the ambitious and self-centered bankers don’t seem to understand. This contrast raises the question of what aspects of the Major’s old-fashioned values might in fact be valuable and not simply quaint. While the Major has his moment of glory when his Churchills are admired and when he enjoys the respect of the other men, he finds that his sympathies more aligned with those of his eccentric neighbor Alice, and this development servs as further evidence that the Major is interrogating his traditional beliefs and adjusting his perceptions. However, the next chapters will challenge the Major to grasp the difference between tradition and principle.
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