People Who Say Goodbye by P.Y. Betts
Souvenir Press, 12.95. pp.250.
This is an author, and book, I never dared dream could exist.
Three years ago I was compiling an anthology from the legendary 1937 Night and Day which, set up to oust Punch, came a cropper for financial reasons made none the easier with a libel suit brought against the co-editor Graham Greene by the nine-year-old Shirley Temple.
As entertaining as contributions by those who became well-known were many of the pieces that prompted a trawl through catalogues and indexes in the hope of finding out what else their authors had done and their possible whereabouts this side of paradise.
This led all over the place, but nothing could be found of P.V. Betts. She had contributed a couple of very funny pieces about French food and hotels, and a "Snob's Guide to Good Form", more astute than later incarnations by Nancy Mitford and Peter York. All that I could find was one novel, French Polish, published by Gollancz in 1933.
This was a startlingly humorous account of a group of mischievous, even malevolent adolescent girls at a continental finishing school, each of them virgins only by accident. The only place in which one could read it was the British Museum, where earnest thesis- compilers looked askance at every suppressed explosion of laughter.
What could have become of such a talent? I would probably never know.
The anthology was duly published, although with such lacklustre marketing that the work seemed a waste of time. It then became more than worthwhile. First, the biographer of publisher's reader Edward Garnett got in touch to say that although he did not know P.Y. Betts' whereabouts, he had a letter in which Garnett recommended that Cape reject a still-unpublished Beckett C"I wouldn't touch this with a barge-pole") but take Miss Betts.
Then, even better, Lady Eirene White wrote to say that not only had she been at St Paul's with P.V. Betts in the Twenties but that she now lived in a remote smallholding in Wales to which she had moved after a freelance Thirties and a brief spell in the Land Army.
This hillside proved to contain dogs, cows, ducks, hens, sheep and the most lethal goat since Scoop.
Looking far younger than her 80 years, P.V. Betts supplied recollections of life in Edwardian Wandsworth as spirited (and libellous) as her descriptions of contemporary Wales. Retreat from the metropolis (where she was first published - by Punch - at 19) and marauding American service-men had certainly not dulled her wit. As she picked up a couple of pails and went across the hill to feed baying animals, I scribbled notes of her remarkable talk.
Written up in the Daily Telegraph, this caught the eye of Ernest Hecht at Souvenir Press. He wondered whether she might write another book, one which expanded on such memories as the shadow of Wandsworth Gaol (her mother gleefully looking up at the kitchen clock and announcing, "There's another one hanged").
Startled, she then agreed. Fifteen months later she delivered People Who Say Goodbye. Greene has called it "the most amusing book of childhood memories I can remember reading". It is as if the early Tom Sharpe had written Period Piece. Here are characters - among them a bottle-wielding legalised quack and a schoolmistress whose method was continually to read aloud dictation passages from Daily Mail leaders - as variedly eccentric as the details of a vanished era. All are brought to life in a prose which with such forthright phrases as "ladies' insides were not the only personal fittings to be summarily whipped out. Teeth could go the same way."
Fifty-six years after her first, this second book has one laughing out as loud. Reviewers often trumpet masterpieces; one suspects that they then forget them. So entertaining is People Who Say Goodbye that I am willing - for the five weeks - to buy back a copy from anybody who, in all honesty (with receipt and cogent reason), does not find it an absolute hoot.
Book of the Year
A bit late, a cruelly neglected book was brought to my attention by the excellent John Sandoe of Blacklands Terrace. In a year of reviewing, P. Y. Betts's People Who Say Goodbye: Memories of Childhood (Souvenir) was a read for sheer pleasure and gave me intense delight. It is haunting, unforgettable and one longs for a second-helping. It nudges memory wonderfully, sadly, with great hilarity.
Daily Telegraph, 24 November 1990
This modest little book had been under a great pile at Sandoe's. Johnny de Falbe handed it to me with the words: 'Have a look at this. You might enjoy it.' I did, and obviously a lot of other readers did too: by the end of the year, it had gone into a second printing. A paperback edition was reprinted three or four times.
SATURDAY, MAY 21, 2011 FEATURED POST
People Who Say Goodbye - P Y Betts
People Who Say Goodbye is the latest Slightly Foxed edition, a series of memoirs reprinted by that very enterprising quarterly journal, Slightly Foxed. The books themselves are lovely objects, small cloth-bound hardbacks with the same creamy paper as the quarterly & a ribbon bookmark. I've taken a photo of the title page because I have trouble getting a good shot of the spine. The tiny gold writing always looks blurry. It's difficult to describe the charm of this book. It's all in the tone of the writing, so mordant & unsentimental. On the surface it's just a memoir of growing up in a London suburb around the time of WWI but the way it's written is so engaging that it becomes more than that.
[it missing]
Phyllis was born in 1909 & the memoir ends in around the mid 20s. The family lived in Wandsworth so there was a prison & a military hospital practically on the doorstep. Phyllis used to watch the military funerals go by & watch the crowds outside the prison on execution mornings. Although there is a lot of humour in the book, there are also some passages of great poignancy. Here, Phyllis describes the military funerals of the soldiers who had died of their wounds in the nearby military hospital,
The procession would go by, down the hill into the wintry afternoon with its faint foggy smell that gripped your throat if you were out in it. It was the smell of coal fires and winter. The sky, when the cortege had gone out of sight, would be smoky grey with red streaks over the low-lying ground beyond the cemetery. Those afternoons were very quiet. The road seemed scarcely used. I would wait. Then faintly the bugle would sound, final and sad, the lamenting never-coming-back notes of the Last Post. It seemed to me a dark, smoky, red slash of sound against the quiet grey of the London winter evening coming down. Not long afterwards the soldiers and the horses were to be heard coming back at a smart trot, the coffin and the flag gone from the gun-carriage. The soldiers were hurrying home to their barracks for tea with plum-and-apple jam.
It's that last detail, the plum & apple jam, that is so poignant & just the thing a child would think of. It makes me think of Wilfred Owen's line, "And each slow dusk, a drawing down of blinds."
The Betts family is just fascinating. Mother is almost brutally honest; just after the scene quoted above, Phyllis asks her what happens to all the people buried in the cemetery. They rot, is the answer. Phyllis has to have teeth extracted. Her mother tells her that it will be painful but the pain will be short & sharp. It was & Phyllis was never frightened of the dentist because her mother always told her the truth. She always seems to have employed maids who have a problem (lying, a tendency to be saved by the Salvos, adenoids) & they usually leave the Betts's to "better themselves". Sometimes they come back when the bettering doesn't work.
The doctor her mother always consults is known by Phyllis's father as Old Whhhen-and-Whhhatski because of the way he spoke. He only prescribes two medicines, brown or red, & he's preoccupied with the state of their bowels. He misdiagnoses her brother's diphtheria as tonsillitis. Mr Betts is a clerk in his father in law's business & is a plain speaker who doesn't suffer fools at all. Phyllis's brother is older & very superior in attitude,
A word, but only a word, about my brother. He was my senior by five years and will be rarely mentioned. The reason for this is that he is still living, in his middle eighties with all his wits about him, capable, and perhaps quite willing, to sue me for libel should a loophole for a libel action present itself. Anyone who has had a brother will understand that it is difficult to write about him without incurring the risk of a libel action. If you can't say something kind, don't say anything at all. We have all heard that. So I am not saying anything at all about my brother, or at least not much.
Then there's the contrast between her mother's family (posh but unloving) & her father's (poor but kind). Her mother is considered to have married beneath her & her spinster sisters take a very superior attitude. This grandfather is a very cold man, who Phyllis doesn't hesitate to say she hated. He had no time for children & regarded her infrequent visits as a trial to be got through. Her grandmother is a more shadowy figure Phyllis describes her conversation with such accuracy that she comes alive,
She spoke of Joseph & his coat of many colours not only as if she had lived next door to Joseph, but had patched his coat. All the Biblical characters were everyday people to her. She had taken strongly against Abraham for his cruel treatment of the ram in the thicket and said it was just what you would expect of a man with a beard like that, she had always disliked a beard on a man.
There's also the sad story of Uncle Jack, who comes back from the war with a terrible secret & marries a divorcee with two children, putting himself & his family beyond the pale as well. Phyllis's paternal grandparents are loving & kind. They come to the rescue when Phyllis has to be quarantined while waiting to see whether she has caught diphtheria from her brother. The rich family with oodles of room couldn't possibly have her but her other grandparents don't hesitate.
I was struck by the very realistic view of illness & death, probably typical of a time when medicine was still a matter of hit & miss. A 20 year old girl dies of diabetes because insulin hadn't been discovered & there was no treatment; several childhood friends die of illnesses like black measles, whatever that may have been. And, of course, the military funerals were a constant reminder of the war.
Phyllis was a very self-sufficient child, very matter of fact - or at least, the memoir is written in a very matter of fact way. That's its charm & where most of the humour comes from. Phyllis is never self-pitying. She changed schools often & her mother would never let her buy the gym kit of the new school before she had grown out of the old one so she was always in the wrong colour uniform. Just as she would get a new gym kit, she would change schools & she would still be in the wrong colour uniform. This doesn't bother her at all. She puts up with the teasing & because she is unaffected, it soon stops. She describes her childhood as she remembers it.
According to the Preface to this reprint Phyllis Betts was a short story writer in the 30s but dropped out of sight until she was rediscovered in the late 80s & encouraged to write this. I'd love to know what happened in her life between the 30s & 80s.
LABELS: BOOKS, CHILDHOOD, ENGLAND, MEMOIR, P Y BETTS, SLIGHTLY FOXED, WWI
9 COMMENTS:
Rose - May 21, 2011 at 4:12 PM
How intriguing. For some reason this author's name rings a bell with me but for the life of me I can't think why.
Reply
Anonymous - May 22, 2011 at 10:52 AM
This sounds wonderful. I used to work near the Slightly Foxed bookshop and I never realised they had their own press. I love memoirs from this period -I shall have to look into acquiring a few of these. What a wonderful and intriguing review -thank you!
Reply
lyn - May 22, 2011 at 3:10 PM
Rose, I'd never heard of her until this came along. Bookssnob, the SF editions are wonderful. I have all of them but have only read 3 so far. Usual problem, too many books, not enough time!
Reply
Brenda - August 2, 2011 at 10:23 AM
I just finished reading People Who Say Goodbye and loved it. Laughed outloud often and was moved to tears as well. I am looking for someone to pass it on to..perhaps some of my elderly Brit neighbors. I live in California, and my mother was from Scotland, and I lived in England, so I related to her environment. Brenda
Reply
William - March 30, 2013 at 4:27 AM
Miss Betts bought a smallholding, Tyn y Gwyrdon, on the mountain behind Cellan, near Lampeter. Soon after I met her in 1978 she told me mischievously that people forget a scandal. She remembered mine. She had little money left after buying the farm and furnished using orange boxes - later replaced with copies in hand-crafted elm. The gossip about her was that she had arrived with her partner Margaret, who had suddenly disappeared and returned pregnant. She was very proud of her handsome public school sporty nephew. He was in the oil business in Saudi.
There was a Roman blue glass urn between two panes of glass in a small window - she said Lord Salisbury had given it to her. She had pulled his wife up into her dorm using sheets when she was out with her boyfriends, and got locked out of St Paul's School. When I moved away, "for remembrance" she gave me a pair of lapis lazuli and gold cufflinks. She said were a present from Lord Rosebery, who had been dogged by scandal.
Miss Betts said that the publisher who had persuaded her to write People Who Say Goodbye wanted her later memoirs of literary figures like Spender and Auden - and she would not write about them. She laughingly implied she had shared a bed with the poet - in the sense that on her arrival in Paris the previous occupant of the guest room had been the poet.
She would give a glass of warm goat's milk, port, or a spoon of Greek mountain honey - with a quotation in the original Greek of Sappho about the lover's kisses sweet as honey. She said she had been told she had the hands of a murderer. She liked to flirt.
I am glad her memory lives for others.
William - March 30, 2013 at 4:29 AM
She said that when she was in love she saw things in the beloved they could not see.
lyn - March 30, 2013 at 2:21 PM
How interesting that you knew her. She sounds like a very intriguing & independent woman. Her memoir certainly had a flavour all its own. I still remember it well though it's almost two years since I read it.
Anonymous - August 23, 2014 at 6:42 AM
How very interesting to read Mr. March's insights. I have long looked for further information about P.Y. Betts and am very pleased to find something to flesh out the little I knew. There are books we recognise as being great works - Middlemarch, Anna Karenina -and there are books which while not vying with them intellectually - make a much greater emotional connection with us, and so perhaps we hold these dearer. People Who Say Goodbye is for me, in this latter category. I love the book. I love its acid humour, its intellectual incisiveness, its revelations of a vanished world which is still one with which we can empathise so much.
I would take it to my Desert Island with me.
lyn - August 24 2014
It's certainly a fascinating memoir.It's often the more intimate works that we treasure, isn't it, however much we love the more "important" novels." [Source: Link]
Magazine Issue: 9 April 2011 More from Books
"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. A friend's mother has eyes that are 'angry yet questing, as if ransacking each arriving minute for its expected load of misery'. Much of the time comedy comes to the fore. The landlady of the Kent boarding house where Betts's family spend their holidays has a protruding lower jaw: 'she could have rooted for truffles'. Aunt Ethel looks 'like Lord Longford in drag'. Faced with Belgian visitors who speak no English, Betts's mother says repeatedly that her husband speaks excellent French but won't be home until eight, tapping her wristwatch for emphasis, a sign that has the Belgians rising to their feet and her mother pushing them back down again.
Betts's novelist skills show through in her phrasing - clothes on a washing line 'beat out a rhythm like a dog being sick' - and also her eye for period details: kitchens never had sinks ('connotations of drains and sludge'), the menopause was 'the change of life', and young officers kicked their caps around to achieve 'that chic used look'.
But the book's real joy lies in her observations about people and the lives they lead. Some thoughts, she admits, have occurred only in retrospect, such as that about the happiness of a new couple in the neighbourhood ('honeymoon electricals'). Most, however, were noted at the time, making her a very insightful child. 'People of idealistic left-wing tendencies,' she writes, 'did not seem to enjoy food much, let alone provide it for others.' When an adult asks why the war has to happen, Betts thinks to herself:
The purpose of war was to kill as many of the enemy as possible so that you could take whatever they had that you wanted. It was so obvious. Yet grown-ups were always asking each other what war was for. They should know by now.
The key relationship is with her mother, a difficult sort who operates a 'learn as you burn' policy on health and safety, and refuses to send Betts and her brother to school, as education tends to 'unfit children for life'. Reading her daughter's brilliantly moving and funny book, you can't help feeling she had a point.
Written by Mark Mason
Thursday, 11 August 2011
People Who Say Goodbye by P.Y. Betts
This little memoir, republished by Slightly Foxed Editions, describes an early twentieth century childhood with great verve and humour. P.Y. Betts was born in Wandsworth in 1909 and grew up there, in a house on the road between a military hospital and a cemetery and opposite the undertakers; during the First World War her days are punctuated by military funerals. Feeling a need to formally acknowledge these, the young Phyllis takes to standing on a street corner and raising her blue woolly hat to the passing corteges.
Betts's memoir is a blend of ironic reflection on her childhood from a considerable perspective - the book was first published in 1989 - and the authentic representation of a child's experience and understanding of her world. Smells are terribly important; the noxious smell of boiling cats' meat - once experienced, never forgotten - the fusty and unpleasant smell of wool clothing from the days before dry-cleaning; the clean, soapy smell of a successful washing day, her mother's particular passion. Food is another significant matter; Phyllis is permanently hungry and her mother's insistence on vast quantities of animal fat in her diet does nothing much to assuage this, particularly during the lean years of the War. Her first sustained experience of sugar - shared with her friend Marion and eaten out of a blue bag - makes them "drunk, plain intoxicated with the unaccustomed charge of sugar into the blood. Phyllis's childish logic helps her puncture the hypocrisy of the adults around her, particularly her maternal grandfather and aunts, who live in upper-middle-class splendour not far away. Politically Liberal, they are intensely socially conservative, and when Phyllis, lost in Wandsworth with her friend Percy, finds her way to their house, they are only briefly admitted before being sent home. Phyllis detects this is "something to do" with working-class Percy,
Phyllis's father is affectionately portrayed, with his fondness for his felt bootees at the end of the working day, and his agonies when his wife rises at four to get the copper going. But it is Phyllis's mother, her "brutal parent" with the "radiant smile" who dominates the narrative. Unimpressed by formal education, a traitor to her class background, and determined to keep all the knives in the house sharp as razors, her child-rearing approach is summarised by Phyllis as "learn-while-you-burn". The world is a hazardous place, and her children need to cope with its dangers from an early age, rather than being sheltered from them. She brings a lot of the humour to the story, pressing lettuce on Phyllis's tutors to help cure their scurfy eyelids, declaring that "there were no millimetres when I was young", sportingly agreeing to wear a frilly boudoir cap while scrubbing the doorstep in a sacking apron. But she can be ruthless, too; when Phyllis's brother gets diphtheria, then a notifiable contagious disease, she somehow manages to nurse him at home, despatching Phyllis to her paternal grandparents in Kent where, if she develops the disease, she will be sent to a fever hospital. Phyllis realises she has been "thrown to the wolves" by her mother.
But her grandparents' cottage is Phyllis's idyll, her place of love and security. She celebrates her grandfather, a former chef, who always makes sure there is a glow-worm in the posies of flowers he brings his wife, and her cribbage-loving grandmother, who bakes delicious pies to give to a toothless and incomprehensible neighbour, down on his luck. Her exile from Wandsworth is a golden time: "The lamplight spread a pool of tranquility over the supper table, over the white cloth, the yellow butter, the food illumined as if by some unsought blessing. I saw the two old worn faces in that blessed light and wanted never to leave them, never to say goodbye." The title of the book comes from the young Phyllis's realisation that people who say goodbye seldom return, but her memoir preserves all those who disappeared from view in her life.
This is a beautiful book within and without; P.Y. Betts's other book, a novel called French Polish, seems to be very hard to get hold of, unfortunately. For another perspective on this book, try Simon's review at Stuck-in-a-Book.
Posted by Tanya Izzard at 13:21
Labels: (auto)biography
[20thcenturyvox: People Who Say Goodbye by P.Y. Betts ]
Friday, 22 July 2011
Continuing something of a theme, tonight I'll be writing about P.Y. Betts' People Who Say Goodbye, no.13 in the Slightly Foxed Editions series, and kindly sent to me by the lovely people at Slightly Foxed. This series of reprints seems to be mostly - perhaps wholly? - devoted to memoirs, and limited editions of 2000 of each are printed. Indeed, some have sold out completely, and others have fewer than a hundred copies left - and they are so beautiful that I at least now have a hunger to own the lot.
People Who Say Goodbye was originally published in 1989 by Souvenir Press, when I was three and the author was eighty - and looks back over the first couple of those eight decades, giving a rich and quirky vision of her childhood. Slightly Foxed Editions republished it earlier this year. Betts was apparently a successful writer in the 1930s, contributing to Graham Greene's 'prestigious but short-lived magazine 'Night and Day', according to Hazel Wood in her preface. It is perhaps odd that she should return to the literary world fifty years later with a childhood memoir, but I'm very glad that she did - for no other justification need be given for her expecting the reading public to care about her childhood than that she has written about it in an entirely engaging, amusing, and refreshingly unmournful and unsentimental manner.
Phyllis Betts' childhood in Wandsworth, South London is essentially an ordinary one - made historically extraordinary by having been lived through World War One. One of the most touching and amusing moments in this memoir comes after the war, when Phyllis and a friend are given a bag of sugar - long scarce - and head off to the woods to eat it, laughing hysterically after they have done so. It is moments like this which punctuate People Who Say Goodbye - keenly remembered moments of childhood which are not earth-shattering, but are a delight to read.
Phyllis Betts' parents are a little unconventional, ignoring protocol and society a lot of the time (Phyllis had to attend a new school in her old gym uniform, for instance, since her mother couldn't see the economic sense in changing it simply to fit in) and she has a wide range of relatives who shuttle on and off the page at various junctures.
But the 'plot', if one can have a plot in a memoir, is not what appeals - it is Betts' voice throughout. If she reminded me of anyone, it was Barbara Comyns. No writer I've encountered understands the child's perspective as well as Comyns did - with all its unpredictability, callousness, and odd humour. Well, Betts' is a close second, remembering her own childhood and childlike voice so perfectly (one assumes) that this never feels as though it were written by an eighty year-old. Not that it is written with childish naivety and ignorance, as Emma Smith's excellent memoir The Great Western Beach was - rather we see the world through a child's surreal vantage, without forfeiting the knowledge and perspective of adulthood. It's difficult to define, but it certainly works wonderfully well. To show you what I mean, especially in terms of the Comyns connection, I'd better just give a few examples... here are three from various points of the books:
'People like to hear about other people going mad. It sort of cheers them up that it is not yet Madday for them.'
* * *
'She was a dedicated Fabian and looked the part, with her serious grey eyes, wide intellectual forehead and her air of a pained saint always looking for the good in people and not finding much.'
* * *
"Brattle Place was not, of course, the only place that I had been to for holidays. By the time I was six I had been to a number of different places and, by a coincidence that struck me as marvellous, they all began with a B: Broadstairs, Bournemouth, Brattle Place, Barton, Bagnor and Bexhill. For ages I had known the alphabet with its twenty-six letters, and as the tally of holiday places mounted, all beginning with B, the same as our surname, my sense of wonder increased. There were plenty of other places where people went for holidays, no farther away - Eastbourne, Ramsgate, Hastings, Torquay - yet all the places we went to began with B. The improbability of the thing hinted at the intellectual beauty of mathematics and engrossed me with a sense of the marvellous."
Betts often throws out all sorts of tid-bits which make me want to know more, and then sidles away from them with the insouciance of any raconteur who knows how to keep the audience wanting more, rather than bored by detail. She mentions the Isle of Wight - where, she had heard, 'you could never be more than four miles from the sea, yet in the paper recently there had been a bit about an old lady, well into her eighties, who had lived on the island all her life but had never set eyes on the sea.' Is this true? Why? How could anybody not be filled with curiosity at this! More personally to Betts is the question of her brother. Early in the novel she declares that she will barely write about her brother, since he wouldn't want to be included (how like Barbara Comyns, who did the same with one of her sisters in Sisters By A River) and she is true to her word. Only occasionally is he mentioned, and she quietly says at one point that he 'grew away from her'. How terribly, terribly sad - but left barely spoken, on the page. Betts gives the most extraordinary details and memories all over the place - the minutiae that children notice and remember - but in a strange way she is also reticent.
There is plenty to laugh at in the book, which, although it couldn't be called a comic memoir, certainly makes use of humour along the way. One of the moments I'm sure I'll remember involved Phyllis' desperate hunt to find gifts for her relatives, invariably without success or receiving gratitude:
"... and she gave me a china dog," exclaimed Aunt Ada in bitterness to my mother... "a china dog not fit to put in a servant's bedroom".
This remark, repeated at home by my injured mother, became a family catchphrase. Anything disliked or rejected, be it a pair of scuffed tennis shoes, a note sung flat, or a lump of unchewable gristle, was thereafter described as being 'not fit to put in a servant's bedroom'.
Isn't that lovely? Family catchphrases are always enchanting to share (ours include such strange things as 'it's always the nose', 'HEAVY BOOTS', and the mouthful 'not as nice as you possibly could be if you tried your very hardest) although it is difficult to write much about them without leaving the reader feeling left out - it is one of Betts' merits that the reader feels rather part of the family, or at least an accepted guest.
Lurking behind this unsentimental, energetic childhood memoir is, however, a sadness - the inevitable sadness of nostalgia, perhaps. Towards the end of People Who Say Goodbye, Betts includes a conversation which explains the title. She is talking to Clement, an unconventional boy with whom she has struck up a friendship. He is the first to speak in this excerpt:
"Will you be coming back to see us?"
"I shouldn't think so. In a way I should like to but the way things are I don't expect I shall."
"Why do you say that?"
"Because I've seen that people who come to say goodbye usually don't come back."
"When did you begin to notice this?"
"It came on gradually, from when I was about five right up to now. It's true, you know."
"You were young to notice that that is how things are."
"Fairly young, I suppose, yes."
"Do you remember the people who don't come back?"
"Yes. I remember them all."
"Will you remember me?"
"Of course I shall. If I live to be eighty I shall still remember you here playing the piano - playing 'The Dance of the Blessed Spirits.'."
It is probably a fanciful recollection of eighty-year old Phyllis which puts the age 'eighty' into the mouth of the child Phyllis - but that doesn't affect the sadness of this belief, created in the maelstrom of war with the soldiers who came to say goodbye and never returned.
I don't think I'd have chosen quite such a sombre title for the memoir. These people, who say goodbye, are certainly present in the book - but there is so much more. Who knows what happened to most of the figures in the book. I don't even know what happened to Betts after she became an adult - there is no mention in the memoir, as though childhood were hermetically sealed, revisited now without any acknowledged link to what happened afterwards. And that is what comes most to the fore of People Who Say Goodbye - not the people who say goodbye, but the person to whom it was said. Betts' memoir is not only a very honest and perceptive book about childhood, it is honest and perceptive about a real individual child - a much rarer quality.
I am indebted to Slightly Foxed for sending me a copy, and Lyn for telling me about it in the first place. Click on her name there to go over to the wonderful review she wrote in May. And then go and get a copy of this wonderful little book!
Posted by StuckInABook at 00:01
Labels: 1980s, 1989, Betts, SlightlyFoxed
8 comments:
lyn22 July 2011 at 01:36
Lovely review Simon. I did enjoy PWSG very much even though I'm not always a fan of childhood memoirs. As you say, it's the tone that's so fascinating & the unsentimentality. Thanks for linking to my review too!
helen tilston22 July 2011 at 01:38
Hi Simon
I wanted to stop by and say hello. I am following your blog and have been reading lightly. This, PWSG looks very interesting.
Helenxx
Linda Koons22 July 2011 at 02:23
I treated myself to this one just a bit ago, but haven't read it yet. I have loved every Slightly Foxed edition I've read, and clearly this one won't disappoint either. Memoir is one of my favorite genres. Thanks for a great review.
Virginia22 July 2011 at 05:21
The quotation about the Fabians alone makes me want to read this book. Thanks for the review, Simon!
StuckInABook26 July 2011 at 15:18
Lyn - thanks so much for pointing me in the direction of this book, I really loved it, and I'm finding most things hard to read at the mo. I can't remember if you've read any Barbara Comyns... I think you'd definitely like her, based on liking this!
Helen - hello Helen, thanks for popping by! The book is very interesting indeed, hope you get a chance to read it.
Linda - hi Linda - do read it, this is one of the best memoirs I've read, especially given that she's not really famous outside of the memoir.
Virginia - you're welcome:) I loved those little bits of wit!
Anonymous1 July 2013 at 10:46
I too have just read PWSG, in almost one sitting. Now I am feeling VERY frustrated because there is so much I want to know about this intriguing person that I would love to have known. I want to know how her life continued. She writes in her maiden name.... did she use it as a "nom de plume"or did she remain single. How did she earn her living Is there anyone who can tell me more?
BELZA
Diz White11 August 2013 at 22:42
What happened to P.Y. Betts when she grew up? - my copy of PWSG states she travelled widely in Europe and the U.S. She spent part of the Second World War doing war work, then became a farm labourer in East Anglia - she was evicted by the US Air Force who were building an air base. After the war she moved with a Noah's Ark of animals to farm in Wales where she has lived in seclusion ever since.
Diz White, Author of Cotswolds Memoir: Discovering a Beautiful Region of Britain on a Quest to Buy a 17th Century Cottage
Unknown3 October 2014 at 18:42
Very late to this party, but I had to chime in at last. I just finished this memoir and absolutely adored it.
One of the passages that most struck me was:
"My two aunts on either end of the sofa, with a scatter of light reading between them, were called Ethel and Ada. There was a period, not long ago, when almost everybody had an aunt called Ethel. I even knew one or two who not only had an aunt called Ethel, but were themselves called Ethel and were themselves aunts - Aunt Ethels, that is. There was something about the name that not only brought on aunthood but was somehow marriage-repellant. Ethels did not breed much. Perhaps that is why they have become comparatively rare."