Betty
by the Numbers: Emergency!
I once
Heimlich-ed the Jonkheer, and he once swatted my goddaughter in the head when
her hair caught fire as she blew out her birthday candles. I have hauled a blind, elderly spaniel out of
an artificial pond, and I’ve chased two large purse-snatchers and the young,
medium-sized stranger whose purse they were trying to snatch down an
alley. (She hung on, shouting, “That’s
all the money I have;” the snatcher gave a vicious jerk, the strap broke, the
woman fell to the pavement, clutching her purse. I jogged after her assailants for a moment,
then wondered what I’d do if I caught up to them, and turned round. I gave her a hand up and a wad of mostly-unused
tissues, and opened my arms slightly in a ‘hug-if-you-want-one’ gesture. She stared at me for a few seconds, gulped,
sobbed, grabbed the tissues and then launched herself onto me. “You were great,” I repeated, over and over,
patting her back. She was fine, the corn
chips in my groceries, which had been banging against my knees as we ran, were
fine (this is important as they were, at the time, hard to find and expensive
in Dublin), and so we strolled south slowly as she recovered, and she told me
all about Cowes Week, which isn’t as much
fun as my initial hypothesis of Cows Week would be.)
My two
earthquakes have been uneventful, and I don’t recall any gas mains or bombs
exploding while I’ve been nearby. I tend
to stay clear of political and protest rallies, though did once get an
amazingly charismatic grin and a wave from Bill Clinton – one of the perks or
hazards of living near Washington, DC, I suppose (shoals! shoals! paddle
faster!!). By great good fortune burning
houses haven’t come my way much, nor floods.
Growing up outside Boston in the 70s, blizzards and snowstorms were
cause for celebration – no school! popcorn
over the fire! Pretend to be Laura
Ingalls! I also lived on a steep bend as
a child, and would of course offer tea to anyone smashing a car into the rock
that helped mark it, but that didn’t happen too often. The closest I’ve come to amputating a leg was
sitting with a stranger who’d broken hers just by stepping off the curb at a
bad angle until the ambulance came.
“It’s broken,” the paramedic said; “It can’t be,” the woman replied, and who wouldn’t? If you ever need a tracheotomy performed with
a ball point pen, do not come to me, even though I did once walk a new neighbor
up the street to the emergency room after she sliced a chunk out of her finger. When I sliced a chunk out of my own finger,
everyone in Paris generously pitched in to help get it stitched, for free and
absolutely beautifully, according to my doctor back home.
If you must experience an earthquake, try to
make it the kind that hit the east coast of the US in August 2011, causing
minimal injuries, zero deaths, and some cracks in the Washington Monument that
a crew of lucky daredevil masons got to repair live on internet TV.
I would
not have thought, incidentally, that I could fill two paragraphs with tales of
my adventures in courage and kindness to strangers. Please take a moment to think over your own
experiences; I bet you’re more deserving of a Scout badge than you realize.
Thank
you. How many did you get? I’m not surprised (I hope), but I shall be
deeply distressed on your behalf if you’ve ever had as much excitement in any
three- or four-month period as poor Julia Pennyfeather, who begins the winter
of 1971 with a blizzard at her Scottish patient’s home, where she’s forced to
forage for diabetes-friendly provisions and chivvy the sole household attendant
into keeping the fires going for several chilly and gastronomically-repetitive
days, then heads down the M1 and encounters a multi-car pile-up replete with
corpses, then, after making it to the Netherlands without incident, gets lost
in a cold, rainy woods and falls asleep on the ground risking exposure, and then gears up for overtime as a polio
epidemic sweeps the village. By The Fifth Day of Christmas, she was past
due for some tender words and jewelry.
Or
how about the unlucky (in some things) Daisy Gillard, whose RDD keeps Discovering Daisy (1999) covered in
canal scum, dirt, blood and sand as she, again in the course of a very few
months, falls into a canal, gets knocked out by muggers, rushes to the aid of
an elderly woman hit by a car, and gets caught in a violent windstorm on the
beach. For her, I should think just
remaining upright and dry would constitute an HEA.
Daisy and Julius's third son, Devon, carrying on a family tradition
In
case you haven’t guessed, 79 Nurses: A
Neels Database-to-Be includes a column for emergencies. Here come the caveats: first, it’s subjective. One person’s emergency is another person’s
heavy cold. Second, sometimes an
emergency takes place deep into the book, when I am comfortably disposed on the
couch without a Post-it® note or pen and paper handy, and I’m in no mood to
leap up and grab computer, and then I doze off a bit and forget all about it,
so maybe an emergency or two never makes it into the spreadsheet. Finally, maybe on a grey Sunday, Aunt
Snooty-Nose’s vicious lies to our hero about his beloved’s abrupt departure
from the family home feels like an emergency, while on a sunny Saturday of a
long weekend, beanpole-ish stalker Helena von Youwishsister’s vicious lies to
our heroine about how soon she’ll be Mrs. Dr. Helena just feel like a minor
snooze. So. Nothing’s set in stone, people.
With
that understanding-of-sorts, I count a total of 211 emergencies over 135 books,
or 1.6 per book – per heroine, really, because bar Gijs van der Eekerk’s succor
of some offstage drunks with severed arteries, which Beatrice sadly
misinterprets as a night out with an imaginary strumpet (Wedding Bells for Beatrice, 1994), our heroine gets involved every
time. Unless, that is, she’s one of the
lucky seven who experience no catastrophes on the road to true love. Betty ran out of natural disasters, muggers
and car crashes intermittently in the 1980s, with one heroine getting off scot-free
in each year from 1980 to 1983, and then in 1987 Rachel Downing makes it
through a novel unscathed – unless you want to count as an emergency having one’s presumed
boyfriend show up in a hotel lobby with a floozy, take one look at one’s
thunderstruck face and declaim a blithe, “Oh, well – Off with the Old Love.” Then, in her last five books, all copyright
2001, Betty imagined just three emergencies, with Emma’s Wedding and The
Doctor’s Girl relatively unscathed.
Of
those who are subject to adrenaline rushes, four of our heroines, or 3%,
including the Misses Pennyfeather and Gillard above, suffer four calls to
battle stations; 13, or 10%, engage in three pulse-pounding adventures; 45, or
33%, get through two sticky situations; and 66, or 49%, are distressed by a
single disaster. But what disasters they
are! Car crashes, bus crashes, bicycle
crashes, plane crashes, whatever the boating equivalent of a crash is, measles,
whooping cough, flu, stroke, coronary, diabetic coma, runaways, fire, flood, war... Jiminy!
There’s not a single famine, actually, except maybe way offstage when Julius mistakenly decides Daisy can stay out of
trouble for a few weeks and hies himself off to Africa to set up a feeding
station (Discovering Daisy). And, of course, lots of grimacing into the
increasingly-empty larder whenever we get stranded in the snow.
The
most common emergency is what I’ve called an “endangered individual.” They’re not necessarily sick or injured, but
they’re at risk in some way. Of our 211
stat situations, 23%, or 49, involve abandoned or neglected babies; runaway
brides, wards and sisters; evil kidnapping step-relatives; people trapped in
toy stores or creaky cottages; lost grannies, kiddies or heroine-ies and their
ilk. Next most common is illness and
injury, at 20%, or 41, of our incidents, although only one of laburnum-seed
eating. Then come vehicle crashes of one
sort and another, at 17%, or 36 pile-ups.
Criminal assault accounts for 11%, or 23, of misfortunes.
‘Nuff said, people
I
was taken aback by that number, actually.
In her first 21 books, Betty had only one assault, perpetrated by a
patient overdosed on cannabis trying to choke Staff Nurse Parsons. Chalk up a Victory for Victoria (1972), however, as Alexander van Schuylen arrives
to save the day. In the next 35 books, I
count six assaults, but three are against animals and one is by an animal, so they’re
not quite the same as when Sister Loveday Pearce gets threatened by three
youngsters – three easily-quelled youngsters, it transpires – on the street, or
Louisa Seymour overdoses her infant niece and nephew. (Cruise
to a Wedding in 1974 and Winter
Wedding in 1979) In the last 79
books, from All Else Confusion in
1982, when tinkers kidnap little sister, through Daisy’s mugging, we have 16
assaults, which accounts for 20% of the books and 15% of the incidents in that
period. Phoebe, Charity, Emily,
Beatrice, both Sarahs, both Daisys, Mary Jane, Julie, Henrietta, Bertha,
Ermentrude and Claudia are all involved somehow or other in muggings, or
injured whilst thwarting burglaries.
You don’t know this yet, sonny, what with your
neurological development not yet at the stage that understands cause and effect
or delayed gratification, but that shot is a whole lot better than polio.
Ready,
Betty Keira? There are 12 incidents
(just 6% of all emergencies, and only 9% of the books, dear) of people or
animals being thrust somehow into canals, ponds, one loch and one gully. They make for exciting scenes, though,
beginning with poor George Rodman and the littlest van den Berg Eyffert falling
through the ice whilst skating on unsafe
ice due to the criminal scheming
of beanpole-thin yet big, fat liar
Therese LeFabre. That’s in Damsel in Green (1970). In Tangled
Autumn (1971), we get our first animal thrown overboard: Sappha finds a puppy tied up in a brick-bound
sack and thrown into a canal to drown. She
falls in effecting rescue, and is in turn rescued by Rolf. After that, there are only another three
critters sacrificed to the exigencies of dawning love – plus a few kids, a
Norwegian or four, and an overweight Londoner.
Eleven
storms, ten fires, seven blizzard/snowstorms, six bombs and six births (five
humans, one horse), three demonstrations turned rowdy, and two each of floods,
wild winds, non-bomb explosions and earthquakes. One roof caves in, and one armed conflict
breaks out in Bosnia, requiring surgical aid.
Add them all up, and you get quite enough excitement for any literary
career.
And
who suffers from all these catastrophes?
He does – just three ruddy times, for heaven’s sake. Gerard gets lost in a Scottish mist, and
meets up with Deborah and a clutch of schoolgirls in Stars Through the Mist (1973) (Deborah’s one of the four-emergency
ladies; she also gets a tractor rollover, a retainer cutting her hand, and a
Fiat-crunching auto accident.) Jake
breaks a leg rescuing a fjord-faller in Midnight
Sun’s Magic (1979), and Lauris and Julia are both caught up in a brief but
violent passing demonstration in At the
End of the Day (1985). He doesn’t
count as a victim, incidentally, if he only strode through the rubble to pluck
her out, or launched himself into the icy pond to retrieve her and the neighbor
child.
And
he need do so quite frightfully often, as our heroine is the victim in 52, or
25%, of emergencies. Mostly just once in
the course of a book, but five of the ladies suffer two horrific fates, and
that poor, dear Daisy Gillard counts as victim in the canal-fall, the mugging,
and the windstorm. (Incidentally, Julius saves her from none of these!)
I’m sending Daisy one
of these shirts, and expect Dr. de Huizma to write the appropriate
prescriptions.
Betty
also has it in for kids, who are the victims of some 17%, 35, of her imagined
horror shows. His family members are put
at risk 19 times (9%), and hers 16 times (8%), with considerable overlap with
the children category. Animals are made
to suffer in 14 incidents, including an especially tricky spate during the
Carter administration – in 15 books from 1977’s The Hasty Marriage to 1980’s Caroline’s
Waterloo, we have six incidents of animal abuse, including a dog hit by a
car, a cat tortured by youths, a kitten stuck in a tree, a dog lost in a storm
and found in a canal, a rabbit caught in a snare, and a pregnant donkey abused
by tinkers.
By
contrast, the elderly are roughed up only 11 times (5%), and faithful retainers
only five (2%). This says something
about career choice, I believe. Or
lifestyle choice. Or something.
The
big wrap-up: I count 119 emergencies
where dramatic rescue by hero or heroine is warranted. This does not include little brothers with
rheumatic fever – they need patient nursing and holidays abroad, not drama – or
fires in Northern estates in which the firefighters are on their own to haul
those needlewomen out of the attic, and Gerard only arrives in time to take
Julia south in his Rolls. However, in
those cases where she, he or they must effect a rescue: she starts 49 of the rescues, for 45% of the
time. He joins in on 40 of them, since
she’s gotten wrapped up in weeds, or her arms aren’t powerful enough to lift
the old lady from the well, or her legs have gone numb from the icy water,
etc. He gets full credit for the rescue
in 39% of cases, or 43 incidents, since she’s the victim, for silly’s sake. They work together, more or less equally,
over 27 situations – that’s 25%, and really the best way to show high
likelihood of their H actually being EA. Think of George and
Phoebe laboring together over those laburnum-seed afflicted youngsters, or Tishy
and Jason making sure the bull doesn’t get to Georgina and the baby. Teamwork! The essence of marriage!
Beautiful
but deadly: a laburnum tree in flower
Looking at the full list, I'm inclined to shake my head a bit at Betty's penchant for shoving young women, nephews, stepdaughters, grannies and absent-minded dads into the path of onrushing disasters. One must admit that it works, though. Love is, after all, a matter of hormones, and
nothing gets the hormones flowing like a farmhouse on fire.
PS: I am sure we all have some truly dreadful stories we could tell of crashes, medical disasters and the like. I don't intend to make light of those in any way. My lighthearted tone is not intended to offend, and if the subject or style of this essay causes you any distress, I do most sincerely apologize.
