Mischievously, Betty would make much of it- every day a little pinprick. ‘Oh! Another letter from my daughter’ Valerie was always her daughter, never mere in-law. Betty knew how much it riled her two sisters to realise that she had a more affectionate and close relationship with Valerie than either of them did with their natural daughters. A little twisting of the blade was quite in order, all things considered. For years she had played Cinderella to their ugly sisters, but the fairy godmother never showed up. They went off to the ball, while she sat by the hearth, all her life, looking after their parents, keeping the beds aired for her sisters’ visits.
In later years, when I was in my own home, out of town, I talked Betty and Jane into coming to spend Christmas with me. Betty told Julia what had been arranged and was told ‘You can forget that! While ever my mother is alive, we will be spending Christmas with her, which means you both stay put!’ I tried to make Mom fight it, but all I got was the usual ‘Please Neil, don’t make a fuss. It doesn’t matter. Please, for my sake’, so of course I had to let it go, and Julia got her way again.
By far the greatest affront occurred when Alex had just died. The three sisters were together, before the funeral, and Dorothy was bemoaning her lot. Betty made some sympathetic comment on the lines of knowing what it was to lose a husband. Whereupon they both rounded on her, quite viciously, and told her she didn’t know anything about it. ‘You never had a husband to lose! Married only three years, and him hardly ever there! You know nothing about it!’ Too shocked and hurt to reply, Betty just let it pass. They didn’t realise that she hadn’t lost their reality- George, a husband despised by his overbearing, dominating wife, or Alex, fat, bald, six months into thrombosis, and walking on eggshells through borrowed time. Betty had lost her dreams. She had lost perfection. She had lost what they were going to have before reality made them compromise, because she lost it so cruelly soon. It’s as well Betty waited 20 yrs to tell me this tale. But she always let her family walk all over her.
Outside the house she wasn’t nearly so tolerant. In 1959 we were on a coach, on our way to a holiday in Gt. Yarmouth. As usual, the couple sitting immediately behind the driver kept up a constant conversation with him. Sitting opposite this couple, we could hear every word, not participating (Betty was knitting up a storm, as usual) but involuntary eavesdroppers. At some point, the driver was telling a tale of some altercation on the road, when someone had seen fit to question his ability. The driver had thought to trump the affront with the response-
“I’ve been driving coaches for twenty years!” Betty, without pausing, or dropping a stitch, struck like an assassin-
“Oh. Another one didn’t want to wear khaki!” The blade found its mark. In the remaining hour of the journey, the driver didn’t utter one more word. Betty had correctly marked him down for one of those who in 1939, at the first bugle call, had stampeded, not to the recruiting office, but in the opposite direction, into reserve occupations, so that they wouldn’t have to wear a uniform, and so present a target for nasty men to shoot at.
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