Today I had to find something to read in the shop and found Agatha C's autobiography. I can't think why I haven't read it before. It's very entertaining and a social history to boot.
Almost every autobiography I have ever read if the writer's childhood was lived in the era of servants and the family were wealthy enough to have a few or many, the writer appears to feel embattled by possible criticism and has to pre-empt it by justifying their parents. They do this with assurances to the readers about how well the servants were treated , how contented and loyal they were and how much they loved the family. I don't doubt for one moment that the servants were often very content in what was a secure situation in days when such security was hard to find. So long as their employers were relatively agreeable it can't have been too bad.
On the other hand I would hate to be a maid or 'Nursie.' Would I have minded so much if I had lived in those times? Impossible to tell. I wouldn't have been the same person because I'd have grown in a peatier soil; prepared for my future station; had the alternatives made starkly clear.
Is there any point in trying to compare customs of other times with our own? Like the other Agatha I think meeting is for strangers and when we meet the past in memories we meet it as strangers. We're different people in the 'present' and have different ways of seeing life and ourselves; different expectations. I've been making a list of all the memories I have of childhood experiences that no child nowadays will have. It's a list that will move no-one but myself.
Later I just found an amusing bit in Agatha’s biography. When she was about thirteen or so her mother put her into a small ‘finishing’ school in Paris, belatedly thinking she should have some education after all. Agatha remembers walking with other young lady students through the Bois in crocodile formation, when a man popped out of the bushes, his top half properly clad in jacket, shirt, cravat and tie, but with his trousers significantly undone.
“We must all have seen him, I think, but we all behaved in a decorous manner, as if we had noticed nothing unusual - possibly we may not have been quite sure of what it was we HAD seen. Miss Dryden, who was in charge of us that day, sailed along with the iron-clad belligerence of a battleship. We followed her. ........ I may add that as far as I know not one of us mentioned the incident to any of the other girls; there was not so much as a giggle. We were all splendidly modest in those days.’
The scene as she paints it contrasts starkly with one that I may have written about before - so stop if you’ve heard it - but it stays in my mind as a triumph of sense over sensibility. It took place in the gardens of Cinquantenaire in Brussels one beautiful summer’s day, when my first daughter was 2 years old. A group of us, mothers and children, were gathered around the large sand pit thoughtfully provided for the children (and cats and dogs unfortunately; we built sandpits in our own gardens later once we had realised the danger.) One of the boys was older, five or six maybe, grew bored with infant games and wandered off into the bushes on an adventure of his own. We women were busy gossiping, eating cakes one of us had baked, and sharing coffee from a thermos, occasionally breaking off to wipe sand from the mouths of the fallen, so it took us a while to realise that several of the younger children had followed him and that there was a loud noise of squealing and laughter coming from a few yards away. We investigated hastily and were just in time to see a dishevelled, discombobulated flasher emerge from the bushes pulling his flies together, to the loud disappointment of his audience who were yelling ‘Show us your willy again’ whilst falling about in gleeful spasms of hilarity.
A much more effecive way of dealing with the situation than cries of horror and disgust and a visit to the Gendarmerie which might have resulted in it turning into a trauma. I'm also tempted to say it was a better way of dealing with the event than the way group consciousness voicelessly agreed upon in Agatha's day - 'don't notice this, it's too horrendously embarassing and shocking.'
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Daughter was flashed on the way home from school, when she was early teens. She marched straight in and instructed me sternly to phone the police at once. WPC was supportive and daughter was satisfied. Closure.
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