Britannia, chapter 9

Yep, Betts was just stretching out the story. Jake insists on Britannia leaving that very night: he drives her back home and then drives straight back home again. The day after she gets home, she's back at work - this time, on a geriatric ward - and Jake has confronted Madeleine, who folds like a cheap card table and confesses all. The letter had been written to Britannia, as it turned out. So Jake calls Britannia's dad and arranges for a marriage license, and then picks up Britannia a few days later, interrupting her at her work and arranging for her to leave her job a few days early.
(That's not uncommon for a Betts doctor - arranging for a Betts heroine to leave her job - but it's always appalling.)
Of course she takes him back, despite his temper and high-handedness. But it's worth noting (because Britannia wouldn't ever think to do so) that if he hadn't insisted that she leave his house within half an hour of Chapter Eight ending, and he'd just kept her there for another day or so, everything would have been solved more easily.
Waiting also would have allowed Britannia's ankle to heal. The day before she leaves Jake's home, he's saying, "don't, I beg of you, over-exercise that ankle" (p. 155), and the next day he insists that she leave and, several days later, doesn't even ask after it, although she has been nursing without a day off for several days. Surely that would count as over-exercise? That he doesn't care or even seem to remember seems like a red flag somehow.
Next up: Caroline's Waterloo. I don't remember this one - though skimming the first page it all seemed familiar - but it seems to feature a marriage of convenience. Fingers crossed for that, and also that Caroline's Waterloo doesn't take me six years as Britannia did.

Betts miscellany: "valuable antiques"

In chapter eight of Britannia, Britannia and Mevrouw Luitingh van Thien are touring the house. They tour "magnificent bedrooms furnished with what Britannia could see were valuable antiques". A page later, Britannia picks up a figurine: "'Longton Hall,' she said absent-mindedly, 'mid-eighteenth century and quite charming. Madeleine hates me.'"
Well, if she'd kept the part about Madeleine hating her in mind, I reckon there wouldn't be the tiresome plot development that took up the second half of chapter eight and (no doubt) most of chapter nine, but I digress. What's interesting to me here is the way she looks at the furniture and decorations on this tour.
A friend of mine says she always notices what other people notice, because it's revealing. Some people always notice what a person is wearing, or what books are in a room, or details about the lighting. But here, twice, Britannia doesn't note the color scheme, or the books. She notes the value of the objects: note that "quite charming" comes after the manufacturer and approximate age of the figurine.
(I just looked up "Longton Hall", because I didn't know anything about it. It was soft-paste porcelain made from 1749-1760. Britannia's right about the age, but since all Longton Hall is from the mid-18th century, why mention it?)

Britannia All at Sea, chapter 8

Britannia and Jake's mom tour the house at some length. This isn't particularly noteworthy, except that we're all treated to a bit of foreshadowing: Britannia says she would do anything, even starve, to ensure Jake's happiness. Hmm. Let's see whether anything comes of that. In the meantime, Britannia and Jake visit friends of his: Reilof and Laura, whose story is told in A Hasty Marriage.
Laura and Reilof have one of those lovely big houses just outside Amersfoort. Laura (for those who haven't read A Hasty Marriage) is a jolie laide who magically becomes pretty when she smiles. They have baby twins - a boy and a girl - and Reilof is devoted to Laura, and it's all very cosy. Apparently without irony, Betts comments that Laura and Britannia "have much in common", because Laura was also a nurse.
(If I remember correctly, she has a sister who's awful, perhaps even drugging a baby? Perhaps I'm misremembering. If so, A Hasty Marriage should be an excellent re-read.)
But back to Britannia and Jake: she's described as forthright, but apparently she is also prone to jumping to conclusions and doing almost anything to sabotage her happiness. She decides she wants to marry Jake, but insists that nothing is settled yet, even though Jake's mom and servants and, well, everyone else seem to assume they will marry. Britannia has misgivings because Jake makes arrangements to go see Madeleine the afternoon after their visit to Reilof and Laura, which makes her all too ready to believe Excellent Actress Madeleine, who comes and says that Jake regrets his brief attachment to Britannia, and that only Madeleine can make Jake happy. Her reasons don't make much sense: she claims that language will be an issue (although every main character is fluent in English, and Britannia understands enough Dutch to translate a phone call she overhears), that Britannia can't run the house (although servants abound), and that she won't know how to entertain on the scale Jake expects (which - again, servants, and Jake's mom).
Madeleine waves around a letter that she translates (because that's not suspicious), and on the strength of the greeting and ending of the letter, Britannia decides Madeleine can't possibly be lying.
So Britannia decides she needs to release Jake from whatever loose commitment he had made. He is justifiably annoyed that she does this without listening to his side of the story first, but then is too quick to agree that nothing would ever compel him to explain his side now.
Candidly, I think this would be been better as one of those five-chapter novellas Betts sometimes wrote: I think the story is only spun out because Betts needs to fill her nine chapters, but she ran out of plot some time ago.

a curious kitten

I have a pair of kittens in the house. One likes to knock books off the shelves. So yesterday I went into the study and found quite a collection on the floor, including about a dozen Bettses. This reminded me that I hadn't blogged her for a while (though I was shocked to see that it had been almost six years!
So I thought I'd better pick up Britannia again. I deliberately didn't re-read either the most recent blog entries or chapter seven itself, so I'll come to my chapter 8 recap with little idea of what's going on. (Except that it's a Betts, of course, so it won't be difficult.)

bourgeois Betts

Perhaps it's because I haven't read any Betts for about a year, but I was struck by how bourgeois and cliched the book is (I read part of Britannia all at Sea today). Here are examples from the chapter I read:
Britannia is not wealthy, but she notices her companions' "long evening gowns, beautiful garments such as she had often gazed at in Fortnum and Mason's windows or Harrods". I admit I've gone and looked at the gowns in Fortnum and Mason and in Harrod's, but I find it odd that a nurse would do so "often" when her family isn't wealthy. It seems pointlessly aspirational, or like some weird self-torment.
Of course, Jake's family eats off "exquisite china" with seventeenth-century silver for a formal dinner. This dinner hits almost every cliche from the mid-twentieth century that I can think of: lobster soup, roast leg of pork with spiced peaches (served on "a great silver dish" and carved amid what must have been the most banal carver/surgeon jokes imaginable), and then mangoes in champagne as a sweet, served with champagne. All they needed was caviar and, perhaps, baked Alaska, and we could have had a food cliche BINGO.
In other bourgeois, upper-middle-class news, Britannia and Jake play Chopin on the piano, and Britannia receives a Gucci scarf from Jake.

Britannia all at Sea, chapter 7

Jake proposes! "I have brought you here [to a small room away from the party] to ask you, in peace and quiet, to marry me, Britannia." By Betts standards, that's not a bad proposal. Of course, she's wildly surprised, because she assumed he would marry the tiresome Madeleine.
It's a family party, including Madeleine, who has been invited for so many years that they think it would be rude not to invite her. She's furious at Jake's attentions to Britannia, and for once I have some sympathy. It wouldn't have killed Jake to pull her aside and say, "look, I've been taking you around for years, but now I'm going to propose to Britannia." Though if he had, it would have lessened her wrath and made it less likely she'll cause trouble in chapter eight or nine.
It won't be hard to cause trouble; Jake proposed, and Britannia said yes, but there is no formal announcement or ring yet, possible because Britannia wants to talk to her parents first. Seems reasonable to me, but as I said, it might be left that way so Madeleine can cause trouble in the next two chapters.
This chapter is filled with antiques. At dinner, they eat off seventeenth-century silver. Relatives of Jake's receive antique jewelry from Sint Nikolaas, and at the end of the chapter Jake shows Britannia his house, including antique furniture and paintings commissioned in the nineteenth century. In other words: old money.

mad apologies!

I've been unable to find my copy of Britannia All at Sea for months now, so I finally unbent and did the thing I'd promised myself I'd never do: bought it online. Before now, I'd always gotten my Bettses in person, either through friends or through lucky finds at used bookstores. This took all the serendipity out of it, but it was driving me crazy not to blog. So as soon as I read the next chapter, I'll post - which should be funny, because I barely remember the plot! I'm sure it will come back to me.

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.

the Betts mission statement

This is practically a mission statement for every dysfunctional relationship Betts ever wrote: "He was arrogant and ill-tempered and just about the horridest man she had ever met, and she loved him with all of her heart."
That's from Britannia All at Sea, p. 63, but that sentiment comes up several other times in other Bettses. It's problematic because while the Betts hero usually has a loving moment at the end of the book, it rarely is enough to make up for his bad temper and arrogance in the rest of the book. Why these women think that the Betts heroes will continue to be good people, instead of reverting back to their usual ways, is anyone's guess. I mean, some of these men are practically Dr. House, and we all know how that goes - any unguarded moment of kindness is balanced by a solid week of bad temper.

Britannia All at Sea, chapter 3

Britannia runs into Jake again - and I mean that almost literally; he comes very close to knocking her down with his car. Some tiresome and "spirited" (or so Betts thought, I'm sure, and maybe it was in 1978) dialogue follows. He even stops by for no apparent reason. Funnily enough, at the end of the chapter Britannia still doesn't even grasp that he lives nearby, despite the fact that she keeps running into him on the street.
She goes to church and sees Jake there. He's accompanied by a lovely ("if one liked glossy magazine types", the envious Britannia thinks, p. 49) woman.
Before church, Britannia goes riding with her English friend and their host, and sees a lovely house that she longs to see at closer range, but time doesn't allow for it. She promises herself that she will come back to see the house. Jake comes over and suggests that they ride bicycles together, so she suggests that they go to see the house, and explains that "I had a funny feeling when I saw it first - as though it meant something to me" (p. 51). She goes on (and I can't believe I'm bothering to recap this, because it's so blindingly obvious) that it's strange, because the only people she knows in the Netherlands are her hosts, and Jake. Jake even lets on that he knows the owners, and she's too thick to catch on. The chapter ends with this incredible mystery unsolved.
But before the chapter ends, Jake takes her for a tour of one of the local hospitals. On the way there, they encounter a family in distress, and give a little girl an emergency tracheotomy with the plastic from a ballpoint pen (!). Britannia never does get her tour, because the little girl needs surgery and all that.
By the way, I'l going to introduce a new tag: antiques. Betts heroines are often surprisingly knowledgeable about them - surprising, because they rarely have interests outside of the hero and work. Britannia comes by her knowledge honestly; she used to accompany her father to antique sales and auctions.

Britannia All at Sea, chapter 2

Britannia announces her love for Jake to her parents. To my amusement, her father is bored by this, but her mother takes her seriously and talks to her for a few minutes. I could see my parents having a similar response to a "I've met a man whom I may never see again, and I want to marry him!" announcement.
Britannia's got some vacation coming up, and a friend who invites her to stay in the Netherlands. Of course it's ridiculous to think that Britannia would run into Jake while she's there, and Britannia even thinks that it would be ridiculous.
So of course, Jake lives just up the road.

Oh, sorry. I just had to pause to sigh and shake my head sadly.
So in an interesting twist on the adopted pet theme, Britannia's busy rescuing an injured bird when Jake's car - not a Bentley, but a Rolls-Royce Camargue - pulls up so that they can chat. As my mom would say: of course she is.

Britannia All at Sea, chapter 1

I think this will shape up to be a medical plot, but we'll have to wait and see. It looks like one, definitely - Britannia (or Staff Nurse Smith, whichever you'd rather call her) meets Professor Jake Luitingh van Thien when he comes to the hospital to consult on some cases. Handily enough, he first sees her when she is protecting a helpless nurse from a mean one. He's quiet at first, then a bit of a jerk ("an ill-tempered man, and arrogant, she considered", p. 15).
But despite that, the very next sentence is this: "And over and above that [the ill temper and arrogance], she discovered with an almighty shock, the man she wished to marry", because although they just met a few hours before, she's in love with him.
Oooo-kay. Any objectivity I might have had about Britannia just flew out the window; she fell in love with a jerk by page 16! She has to work overtime, so he does take her out for tea and sandwiches later in the chapter. I guess that's something in his favor.
He asks her whether she's in love, and she says yes - with him, of course, but I wouldn't be surprised if that causes some confusion later on.

apologies

Mad apologies for not posting for a while. I went on vacation, and got back, and went straight back to work. No, seriously: I was working within 8 hours of getting back home. So yesterday I asked myself what was in the backpack that's been sitting in the apartment for a while, and I discovered (with some chagrin) that it's everything I carried on the plane for vacation.
So that's how I found my copy of Britannia at Sea, about which I will post soon.

I need a heee-ro!

I keep forgetting to blog about this! Thankfully, a new CD reminded me.
The Betts I just finished, The Bachelor's Wedding was part of Harlequin's "Holding out for a Hero" series. I'm a Gen Xer, so of course for the last nine or ten days, I've been thinking of the melodramatic Bonnie Tyler song. I suspect the people in the marketing meetings were also amused by this - one couldn'tcome up with a "Holding out for a Hero" marketing campaign without being aware of the song, could one?
I'm not sure that Jason, reader of Juvenal and Horace (in the original, of course), really meets the description of a hero. He did save Araminta from her horrible family, but with a few less scruples she could've done that herself. And the rescue at the end was a bit contrived - Jason's sister called at 5 am, saying her son is missing and possibly injured in this horrible storm, but it takes him seven-odd hours (including an unnecessary stop at the London house) to get there. There wasn't anyone else who could've gone in search of the kid?