One Pair of Feet

I've just finished Monica Dickens's One Pair of Feet this evening. It's fairly funny, telling about Dickens's first (and, as it turns out, only) year of nursing school. She went during World War II, which puts her training not too far off that of Betty Neels. I was struck by the similarities: weeping junior nurses in the sluice, tyrannical (or fair and kind) Sisters, remote surgeons. I don't know that I'd recommend it, because Dickens uses some of-her-time but racist phrases occasionally. But I thought of Betts and longed to read some of her books with competent Sisters after reading One Pair of Feet!

avocado pears

On Thursday I was talking with some friends. One of them, a fellow Anglophile, mentioned avocado pears. I asked what they are, because Betts heroines eat them sometimes. I've always had a mental picture of some interesting fruit plate, possibly including pears, shaped to look like a pear.
Well, it turns out that an avocado pear is - an avocado. How anticlimactic! I'd have to check the OED to suss out how they got that name, given that pears have seeds and avocados don't. Weird.

Betts on jezebel.com

You know how amused I am by Betty Neels books. You probably didn't know - why should you? - that I like jezebel.com. So I was delighted to see Betts mentioned on jezebel.com!

article about Harlequins

I haven't forgotten about this blog, but I don't know where my book is. A Betts heroine would have kept up with posts - but then again, a Betts heroine would never be a blogger, because it would take time away from the gardening/antiques shopping/sighing after the Betts hero.
Anyway, there's an interesting article (note: graphic language here and there - read at your own risk!) here.

Britannia All At Sea, chapter 6

I went out for lunch today. To my dismay, I'd brought the wrong book with me, so I had to dig to the bottom of my bag for Britannia so I could read something. Britannia is carried up the stairs by Jake, who diagnoses a sprained ankle (which is confirmed by X-ray the next day). So he keeps her at his house for the next few days, even though she was on the point of going home. She persists in believing that he doesn't love her. Because it's St Nikolaas, his family comes, so he meets his sisters. One of them doesn't like Madeleine, either.
Was this recap boring? Yeah, so was the chapter.

Britannia All at Sea, chapter 5

Yes, it took me a week to muster the willpower to read another chapter of this. This was tiresome, as expected: Britannia and Jake have two farewell dinners, because her holiday is almost over. She wears a lovely pink dress each time, which Jake appreciates. He even says kind things, and kisses her, but it doesn't matter because of Britannia's unaccountable obsession about Madeleine.
On her last afternoon, she rides her bike over to his house, to look at it again. She falls off the bike, and gets a mild concussion and a sprained ankle as a result. The bike falls on top of her - and yes, I know bicycles were heavier back in the day, but I still have a hard time taking this seriously. I'm not impressed with her inability to save herself; she just keeps fainting and crawling a bit until Jake comes and saves her. He somehow knows where she will be - must be a handy skill to have.
Well, at least something happened this chapter!

Britannia All at Sea, chapter 4

I have a dim memory of disliking other Bettses in the past. Dim, I tell you, because everything is pale compared to my contempt for this particularly stupid Betts heroine. First off, Jake is arrogant (p. 65), and she thinks: "Such arrogance...but she could alter that." Seriously, doesn't she read anything in the paper from Agony Aunts? People don't change because you love them.
Then, after Jake takes Britannia on a tour of the hospital, he rushes her away without her coffee. So he brings her home. He pulls into the gates, and drives down the long driveway to his home - I'm picturing something like Manderley here. It's a long enough driveway that Britannia can't see the house at first, and thinks he has taken her to a park without the owner's permission.
She's an idiot, seriously.
When she finally realizes she is at the house she admired a few days before, she says, "well, you might have told me" (p. 69). With great forbearance, he doesn't point out that this was a mystery most children could have solved, handily, and merely replies that he didn't see any readon to tell her.
She meets his mother, and the lovely Madeleine (the woman Jake had been in church with the other day). Britannia feels - and is - underdressed, because she had been starting a bike ride when Jake hauled her off to the hospital. So the timing could have been better for Jake to kiss her, and to say he's halfway in love with her, and to say she'd be a fine wife for him (I'm paraphrasing here).
But Britannia is so stupid that she latches on to his admission that he's forty, and if he hadn't met Britannia he might have married Madeleine, just to keep the family going. She ignores the part where he says that now that he has met Britannia, he'll never marry Madeleine. She even ignores Jake's surprising admission that "I find that without you my life and my heart are empty" (p. 74). She ignores all calls to her good sense, and decides that she's not of the same class as he is, and they can never marry.
This is tiresome because it's demonstably untrue - both of them are upper-middle-class (Britannia less so, but still), and also because there are still five more chapters to go. I just don't know if I can take it.