‘You must write it all down’ is the age-old plea to elderly relatives about their childhood memories.
‘You must write it all down’ is the age-old plea to elderly relatives about their childhood memories. Fortunately P. Y. Betts, briefly a novelist in the 1930s, was 50 years later persuaded to do just that. Even more fortunately, her memories, now republished, are golddust.
Betts was born in Wandsworth in 1909, meaning that many of the ‘people who say goodbye’ were saying hello to the trenches. Also, several of her childhood friends died of now treatable diseases. Today’s publishers would at this point scream ‘misery memoir’, others would retaliate that people back then had more backbone, but Betts herself refuses either cliché, aware — complicated, perceptive woman that she is — that the truth is always more complicated.
Sadness hangs over the book without suffocating it.
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