Read an extract from One Hundred Years of Betty by Debra Oswald.
Meet Betty: storyteller, feminist, eternally curious and phenomenally old. On the eve of her hundredth birthday party, Betty tells us her story.
From the creator of Offspring and bestselling author of The Family Doctor, One Hundred Years of Betty is the the story of one ordinary extraordinary woman living through a century of massive change.
'A rich feast of a novel, a perfect balance of sweet and sour. You won't want it to end.' Geraldine Brooks
Read on for a free extract from One Hundred Years of Betty.
12 April 1928.
I was born on the kitchen table of the Deptford house, whooshing out at speed and so slick with waxy vernix, that I shot off the edge of the table into the precarious air.
Clearly I survived because I’m telling this story now as I approach my one hundredth birthday. Trauma to my soft infant skull was avoided because I was caught, according to family folklore, by my second-eldest brother Michael.
Then again, when our father was sozzled in his more nostalgic mode of sozzlement, he would retell the story with my older sister Margaret cast as the slippery baby, or even Michael as the newborn who was caught, not the one who did the catching. We were ten kids in the end, so it was easy to mix us up.
I was number seven which would explain why my arrival was swift. Our poor mother’s birth canal barely had a chance to contract between babies. (Am I being too vulgar and anatomical too soon in this story?)
They christened me Elizabeth, inspired by the princess born two years earlier, but no one in south London ever called me anything but Betty.
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1931.
I recall being hunched underneath the kitchen table. Three years old, head tipped way back, holding a tin can up to my mouth to receive the last dribble of condensed milk. Our Kenneth and our Bernard, the twins, had stolen that tin from the shop three streets away. Condensed milk— glossy, creamy, intensely sweet— was a revelation. I think I shuddered, a full body tremor, when my mouth filled with the taste. It would be some years until I experienced an orgasm— many, many years; so many I’m too embarrassed to divulge that yet— but the condensed milk was my first food orgasm.
1933.
Our mother unfurled a bolt of cheap cotton cloth, printed with scrunched-up yellow flowers against an insipid green background, and spread it out on that same kitchen table. She had managed to pay off the fabric week by week at the draper’s shop. (This must have been during an uncharacteristically stable period of employment for our father.)
Mum was making little happy noises in her throat, fizzy with optimism as she smoothed the shop-bought material. New dresses for her girls would be a huge step up from neighbourhood hand-me-downs. The first flourish in our new life of prosperity.
In turn, eleven-year-old Margaret, five-year-old me and three year- old Josie lay flat on our backs on the fabric spread across the table. Mum cut around each of us in the rough shape of a dress, then used a borrowed sewing machine to join the pieces.
Whatever ill-fitting garment a reader might now be imagining— well, it was worse than that. The yellow dresses were humiliating and a week later the vision of prosperity crumbled when our dad lost his job. Not because of the yellow dresses, obviously.
Let me interrupt myself at this point. Hanging memories off the kitchen table feels a bit laboured. And the truth is, I can’t guarantee accurate recollections from my earliest years.
The neuroscience suggests our early, pre-language experiences shape who we are. That makes sense to me, to think how formed a child is by the time she’s two years old. So, the experiences that matter most are inaccessible. I could try to rely on family stories about what happened when I was eighteen months old to decipher why my brain works the way it does, but such accounts are too dodgy to trust.
Some of the early childhood picture can be sketched from verifiable details— family income (in our case, pitiful and erratic), number of people in the house (too bloody many), or from guessable factors like my father’s blood alcohol levels (ranging between 0.1 and whatever number is just short of lethal). Palaeontologists use fossil traces to understand the past, examining the gaps in rock layers where a creature, long ago dissolved, once lived. I’ve attempted to look at my own fossil record: measuring emotional gaps in my adult self to decipher the shape of the pre-memory moment that created such a hole— for example, the persistent doubt about whether I’m a lovable person, doubt about whether I’m worth a pinch of shit.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
As a child, I was wildly curious about the world but not yet curious about myself. Not in the way so many people are now. Curiosity about myself came later, identifying patterns and motivations that, in retrospect, are embarrassingly obvious. But at the time, I blundered about, driven by unexamined impulses from inside my brain and body. The memory business is untrustworthy, even with a robust attempt at candour, but I will do my best to be honest. I’ll try not to distort the story to justify my own poor behaviour or to milk inappropriate pity. Mind you, feeling pity for each other and pity for our earlier selves is often the kindest response any of us can offer.
One Hundred Years of Betty
by Debra Oswald
One ordinary extraordinary woman living through a century of massive change, from the bestselling author of The Family Doctor. Meet Betty: storyteller, feminist, eternally curious and phenomenally old. On the eve of her hundredth birthday party, Betty tells us her story.
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