Farewell to Fairacre by Miss Read

Author:Miss Read [Read, Miss]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780618154562
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 1990-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

As I lay in bed that night waiting for sleep, I pondered on my doctor's attitude to single women.

It was obvious that he felt that we were to be pitied. We had missed one of the most wonderful experiences in life. We were, in that ghastly phrase, 'unfulfilled'.

What made him think in this way? Was it a dislike of waste? Here I was, for example, a perfectly healthy - well, nearly - specimen of normal womanhood, with all the right interior equipment, I imagined, for reproduction, the tubes, orifices and appropriate spaces, but they had not been called upon to function.

This did not worry me, so why should it worry him? When I thought about it, I felt I had got off lightly in the reproduction stakes. So many of my married friends told me, in nauseating detail, of their experiences of childbirth, that I was glad I was spared the experience.

I could truthfully say that I had never missed having children. When I watched my friends coping with the problems of babyhood, sleepless nights, changing nappies, enduring the screams of teething, and then the later traumas of childhood illnesses, and the still later, and still more anxious, perils of their children's teens, I felt that I was lucky indeed.

Of course, I realised that I had a full-time job with children which might unconsciously have compensated for my spinsterhood. I was glad that I had reminded my kindhearted doctor of this.

But why, if it were not the waste of my organs which upset him, was he still unhappy?

Could it be that he was romantic? So many men are. We are brought up to believe that it is the female of the species that has the hearts-and-flowers attitude to love, who craves attention and decks herself to catch a mate. In fact, it is the other way round. It is the male who brings flowers and chocolates, and dresses himself in fine array.

Take pigeons, for instance, or any other bird. The female is happily pottering about pecking up her breakfast, and the male bird is in a state of wild excitement, his ruff bristling, head down as he circles, making amorous rumblings from the throat. The female takes no notice. She has quite enough to do at the moment, and her wooer's attentions are rather a nuisance. She is definitely not the romantic one.

My thoughts drifted to Minnie Pringle. What would happen to her and that large family? Ern had been warned some time earlier by the police when he had attacked one of his wife's admirers. Poor Minnie was a fool, but more sinned against than sinning, and I was sorry for the children of that stormy household.

Well, I thought, snuggling down into my comfortable bed, maybe it would all blow over and I should hear no more of Minnie's troubles.

But there I was wrong.

Bob Willet was putting a new washer on the tap when I arrived at school the next morning. He broke off to greet me.

'Never had this bother when I was at school here.

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