'Too Fat Polka', and other politically incorrect songs of the 1940s

When I was a child, growing up in Hertfordshire just after the second world war, my parents employed a cook called Mrs Sharp, who was a very kind and good woman. But she was also extremely fat and had an enormous protruding stomach that impeded her access to the kitchen stove. Lying around in the house at the time was a 78rpm record of a new popular song from the United States called the ‘Too Fat Polka’, of which the recurrent chorus was ‘I don’t want her, you can have her, she’s too fat for me’. The song, recorded by the then famous but now generally forgotten American broadcaster and entertainer Arthur Godfrey, was a big hit in 1947 when people may have been more amused than offended by gentle mockery of the obese.

I was seven or eight years old at the time, and I liked Mrs Sharp very much. But this did not deter me from carrying with great effort a heavy wind-up gramophone from the sitting-room into the kitchen and playing the record on it there for Mrs Sharp to hear. I can’t remember why I did this, but I feel sure I didn’t mean to offend her. Maybe I thought she would be amused. In any case — even if she wasn’t amused, and it’s hard to believe that she could have been — she showed no sign of anger or resentment and treated me with her usual benevolence. Perhaps she cheerfully accepted her unusual size and thought it quite normal that other people should refer to it.