Sun and Candlelight--1979

I love thee to the level of everyday's most quiet need, by sun and candle light...I love thee with the breath, smiles, tears of all my life. --Elizabeth Barrett Browning ..........Well, Mijneer Doctor van Dutch-stein, I don't mind if you do.

So that's where the name comes from and from a woman who wrote books titled, A Dream Came True, The Course of True Love, and Marrying Mary, this is a stretch and a welcome one.

Alethea Thomas (Do we say it Uh-lee-thee-uh or Al-thee-uh?) is 27 dark, lovely (she can't be old and plain, can she?), and a cracking good nurse as Theobald's Orthopaedic Ward Sister. She has a penchant for shady characters and oily housemen and that's really a shame because...

Sarre van Diederijk is neither. He's 39 and divorced. Divorced. Divorced. Divorced. His ex-wife is not dead either which is the only instance I can think of where a Neels hero is so encumbered. She (the ex!) was happy to abandon her one-year-old children though and sail off into the Peruvian sunset with a man who is doubtless named Armando and wears solid gold pinky rings. So Sarre has two kids, a orthopaedic practice in Groningen and a Cockney houseman named Al who drops his 'aitches and was collected in much the same way as a canal puppy or an abandoned kitten. (It is surprising that he doesn't just call him Moses or Flotsam.)

Plot:
Alethea is having the single worst night of her life. There she is in her fine black voile patterned with flowers, expecting a ring and a declaration of undying love from a man named Nick. Instead of wedded bliss she is asked to contemplate the age-old human question: But will you love me tomorrow? If she were any judge of character she would have watched Nick doing his round at the hospital as Seducer of young ladies/orthopaedic houseman, taken one look at his name tag and made an about face. Nicks are not to be trusted.
They'd been dating for months and this was not enough time to uncover the fact that Nick was only softening her up for "a weekend in Brighton"--which, while one step up from a proposition for "tea at a friend's flat", still amounts to the same thing.
Editorial note: Months? It took this couple months to discover that she was "the most unsporting girl for miles around" and that he was a lout of elephantine proportions? As I might be tempted to say, "That's a lotta curry dinners."
If Nick was not firmly established as a worm already, he makes some intensely lame excuse about not being able to afford a wife yet (Mijneer Nathan van Voorhees and I first set up housekeeping in a palatial basement apartment with a gusty shower and half an oven. Too poor to marry? Please. Sell it somewhere else. ) Anyway, he takes her ladylike refusal poorly. And by 'poorly' I mean that he stands up from his table at the 'nice enough to convince Alethea that seduction is a highbrow affair' restaurant and beats it. So there she is, stuck with the check, a dwindling cup of coffee and the mortification of knowing that her patterned voile was all for naught.
But Sarre comes to the rescue, paying the bill and speaking loudly enough for the patrons to understand that He. Is. Not. Picking. Her. Up. He's not the kind to make invitations to Brighton, we see. In these less romantic times, Alethea would have had a debit card with her and then taken Nick to small claims court for the balance of the bill. So, for the sake of the story, we can be thankful that the banks are closed and she was only carrying small change.
Of course she bursts into tears when they finally get out the door and I could kiss The Venerable Neels and dance around her like a maypole for allowing Dastardly Nick to catch a glimpse of his unwilling maiden and a tall stranger headed to the Nurses' Home at the end of the night. "Yes!" shouts the Neels, spiking her ball and celebrating in the end zone, "Take that, you Defiler of Innocents!"
Sarre ends up being a consultant for Alethea's ward and saves her from several nasty cracks that the Dastardly Nick is willing to let fall. (who is already dating an only child of a successful grocer! Which reminds me of Margaret Thatcher, btw.) So, though Nick would like to make Alethea suffer for being so unsporting, he can't quite land a blow.
Sarre is quick to seize an opening, whisking a half-hearted Alethea off for dinners in outfits she manages to look gorgeous in even though she is a bit of a drip. ("Nick, Nick. Nick, moan, moan, moan...ad infinitum). Still, she makes a rather deep observation that if Nick wanted her back she would probably go and would never forgive herself for it. I, on the other hand, am willing to forgive a girl a good deal for such honest dealings with herself.
Sarre proposes. It comes a touch out of nowhere but the juicy bit is that he hasn't bothered to prepare her for the fact that he has 11-year-old twins until he's popped the question. In my limited (married at 21) experience there are several things a couple gets out of the way on the first date:

1. Will you ever, never, or possibly go to Brighton? Under what circumstances? How many curry dinners will it take?
2. Do you have small humans living under your care that I shall have to care for, arrange visitation with, or support? Will we be required to be on a first name basis and will I have to teach him to pee in a potty?

She is given a few days to mull step-motherhood. Fully intending to say "no", she says "yes". (Isn't that just like a woman.) But Sarre is a babe so I will overlook her spinelessness.
They offer him sandwiches and beer.
Editorial note: Okay, so in the land of Neels, lady's don't drink beer and Alethea is at her grandmother's house with a female housekeeper as well. That's three ladies and they happen to have a beer. Do they keep it in food storage? Is it beer they keep in the fall-out bunker? Is it Dharma Initiative beer? Does beer even keep? "Namaste, Sarre. Have a beer."And now I will post a picture of Sawyer because it seems to be a moral imperative.
The engagement goes like this:

• Hey, since I'm divorced you don't get a church wedding. Crossing my fingers that that doesn't matter to you!
• Hey, let me slow down the gunmetal grey Jaguar XJ-5 with pearl grey leather upholstery on the M11 and chuck you the ring box filled with Standard Dutch Issue Family Heirloom Sapphire and Diamond Engagement Ring. I'm chucking it at you instead of turning into a lay by because my ex-wife killed me inside. Oh look. It fits!
• Hey, come meet my kids. No, no, Sarel and Jacomina always look like that...
• We'll be in Holland and I'll refuse to show you around the awesome house not once, but twice, because I know that showing someone around your ancestral home is code for "I *heart* you--and I wouldn't want you to get that idea.
• Hey, meet my totally intimidating semi-hot co-worker.

They get married in a registrar's office and are able to arrange a Service of Blessing. One Church of England parish website says this:
The Service of Blessing after a Civil Marriage has no restrictions around it. It is used by those who may not qualify for marriage in [the church] for...legal reasons, or who prefer to keep the religious and legal parts separate. Both are profound and beautiful services and enable you to enter into your marriage in the church.
To skip the bother of having to explain this detail ever again, The Great Neels cheerfully killed off straying brides of our long-suffering heroes for the next twenty years, leaving behind her a bloody path of destruction littered with car accidents and plane crashes. Many South American men were casualties of this policy as well.
They get to Groningen and Sarel and Jacomina look at her with "hate". She is "frightened" that they will never like her. She should have been frightened that they would put strychnine in the Earl Grey but her imagination was sadly lacking. Unforgivable things they do to her:

• Pet mouse in the bed.
• Ruination of a smashing lavender evening gown by intentionally upending a vase of flowers on it. The Soulless Nanny stares on unmoved.
• Verbal insubordination. The Soulless Nanny stares on...
• Vandalism of personal objects
• Potential man-slaughter (but let's save that for later)

Nanny (who is middle-aged and not some old person who might be excused for thinking she will get tossed out on her ear) is like some malevolent Iago and Sarel and Jacomina look like something from Children of the Corn. The plagues of Egypt are raining down on Alethea and Sarre remains oblivious. It doesn't help that she thinks snitching is a no-no. But life with Sarre is nice ("If only it were Nick...") and when she is taken to see the marriage settlements (like a post-nup?) she feels a warm glow. Sarre is loaded. I'd feel a warm glow too...
Not long after this she has her moment of realization. "It's Sarre not what's-his-name!" There follows one of the nicest moments of realization in any Neels novel. She thinks (for no reason other than his haggard and sad expression) that he loves Anna. It does not, however, lead to kissing so let us not pursue it.
Sarre takes her to Romantic Hamburg! (I'm trying here to cast a pink lamp glow on Hamburg. No snickering from the peanut gallery.) There he buys her a really expensive antique music box because he forgot the cardinal rule of kids. (In unison now!) "Children Ruin Everything." (Seriously, I'm going to cross-stitch that into a sampler.)
When she gets back they...um...step on it several times on purpose. Her distress is obvious and Sarre is heartened that she cares so much about something he bought for her. A magician restores it perfectly--in one day.
They have a spat about Anna (who doesn't matter and never matters) and then her grandmother comes to visit. Grandma listens to her story about her nice little life and then cuts to the chase, "Yes, dear, now supposing you tell me all about it." Granny wins.
Sarel and Jacomina stretch their credibility by being able to sustain such a long and sustained loathing of Alethea. (Real children don't have the attention span for this.) They lure her to an abandoned house and hope to lock her inside for a bit. Instead, they finally get their just desserts by falling down a hole. Alethea shows her devotion to them by hopping in after them and playing "Three down a hole!"
Sarre rescues them by making her lift two 11-year-olds above her head (ouch!) and then sends everyone off for a hot bath which leaves me in slack-jawed admiration of his water heater.
But they're not done mis-communicating and he gives her tickets to go back home.
Meanwhile the Children of the Corn have been replaced with The. Best. Kids. Ever. No, really. It's as though there was an alien abduction down in the hole. As bad as they were they are that good now. I'm a sucker for their contrition so it sort of works for me. Nanny, however, gets a pass on all the subversive, frowny-faced behavior. I would trust the woman to hoover the ground floor of my house and I'd still shake her down for the family silver at the end of the day. But they're going to trust her with the kiddos again. (I'd set up a teddy bear-cam. Just saying.)
Sarre is sending Alethea away so she gets ready to go but not before having a go at the brandy bottle and running Sarre to ground. "He must be told," she thinks to herself tipsily. She bursts into the board room as only an Olivia can and has her say in his office.
Public kissing!

The End

Food: Soup with garlic (why does this sound awful?), zabaglione (?), Rice Crispies (I'll make those!), rhubarb pie (well sugared), pork pie, Dundee cakes, apple pie and ginger cake

Fashion: Sarre's brother's first girlfriend wears frizzed hair and a dress that looks like a silver tissue tent so of course they break up.

Rating: This is a bit of a Curate's Egg--excellent in parts. I'll give it a mince pie even though sections of it are really quite good and original because Nanny and the kids get off waaaaaaay to easily for my peace of mind and for the health of the republic.
Point of order: The Betty doesn't usually bring up the sexual revolution. In her later novels she just skated over any question of that and this is among the reasons her books are called anachronistic and old fashioned. A girl wandering around in clothing from the 1940s is old fashioned. Owning a collection of Neil Diamond records (ahem...whistling) is old fashioned. Drying your clothes on a clothesline is old fashioned. Ladies that choose not to go to Brighton should never be called old fashioned. Also, you've got to admire Betty for not succumbing to an icky double standard where her heroes are concerned. They weren't having any visits to Brighton either.
Okay, now I'll get off the soapbox.

Making Sure of Sarah--1999

Forgive the tarted up cover. Grab a book cover. And sit yourself down for one of Betty Neels' most delightful little novelettes.

Sarah Beckwith, 23, is one of the luckiest heroines you're ever likely to meet, blessed as she is with plain looks (the Araminta), a swearing stepfather, a vague and smothering mother, and a life of servile drudgery. Lucky, you say? Yes. Because our hero meets her as she's asleep on a chair in Casualty, drenched in canal water (which Betty Neels was never romantic about) and smelling vile.

Mr. Litrik ter Breukel, 35, is a consultant orthopaedic surgeon for St. Bravo's in Arnhem, Holland whose main occupation, you might be forgiven for thinking, is to wait around until the girl of his dreams drops pungently into his lap.

Plot:
He's immediately in love (I mean before she's even opened her eyes) and while this has happened with great regularity in the world of La Neels it is usually disclosed on page 218 in an offhand manner ("I loved you the first time I saw you darling but don't lets mind about that now when we only have two more paragraphs to conclude the formalities..."). In this one though, Neels sticks with him like a limpet and Gentle Readers are treated to a Litrik who is perpetually delighted, gobsmacked and transported by the fact that Sarah is in the vicinity. --Which leads to wonderful lines like:
He had no intention of letting her go, and for once a kindly Fate lent a helping hand; Sarah gave a small choking gasp. 'I'm going to be sick...'
and
...they made polite conversation...Mr. ter Breukel listened to her voice entranced; as far as he was concerned she could recite the multiplication tables and he would find it exciting..."

He also spends a good deal of time struggling to rearrange his features into less lover-like expressions and plotting his future with ruthlessness and zero discretion. Everyone--his sister Suzanne, his great-Aunt, her middle-aged companion, her family doctor and another English specialist--will all figure out easily that Litrik is planning to carry Sarah off at her earliest convenience. As you can see, Litrik is not our average stoic hero with unreadable expressions.

He engineers a job for her after her parents are laid up at a hospital in Holland and then keeps an eye on her when she removes the grouchy invalids back to their house in Clapham Common. Sarah is portrayed as much put-upon but the house has a housekeeper, a woman to come in and do the rough and (while the step-father is laid-up) a male nurse to come in for several hours a day. Still, she has to help with the cooking and ironing and fetching and carrying so I suppose she doesn't have much time to herself even if it doesn't sound like there's much to do.

She meets a young doctor named Robert Swift who serves to muddy the water (but not for long).

Instead of marrying her out of hand, Litrik decides that young and cooped-up as she is she would do well to have a job and meet some people her own age. To that end he compromises the medical ethics of himself and at least one other doctor by arranging for the parents to go to Bournemouth for several months and for the hospital (where he is a consultant) to give her a job in the canteen. Why the canteen? He's got his reasons:

The kitchens wouldn't do at all, and nor would the house doctors' quarters; he wasn't so old that he couldn't remember that young housemen tended to relax like small boys when they had the chance...

Which is all very tricksy if you think about it. Let her have a taste of life but make it working slavishly in a hospital canteen nowhere near high-spirited young lads who might take it in their mind to ask her out on a date. I think that's what's called 'priming the pump'. And of course she must be rescued before developing varicose veins. After an altercation with 'youths' in a 'demonstration' (a great evil to be avoided)he proposes a sensible arrangement whereby he marries her.

Of course she can't! Because by now she loves him too and marrying someone whom you love who doesn't love you back...unthinkable! Which is a puzzler for me where Betty Neels is concerned as this rule is by no means philosophically consistent throughout her body of work.
She works out the refusal thus: She must think up some really good reason--a career in something or other--computers.
I do love it when La Neels wanders cryptically onto the computers reservation.

She leaves the hospital when her parents make their vacation a permanent arrangement (Yay!) and finds work re-shelving cans in a grocery store. Well, we all know how re-shelving jobs go. He, like all Neels heroes and in rather a paternalist move, resigns her position with the manager, whisks her back home and does a serious proposal this time. Eureka! She accepts. Her engagement ring is a sapphire and diamond affair.

The End

Rating: Queen of Puddings. This novel, sprinkled about with Litrik's delighted plotting, is as cute as a button. It's only around a hundred pages, so moves along at a pretty nice clip. Though at the end she tends to throw everything and the kitchen sink in, red-herring housemen, dead end jobs, imminent homelessness...

Food: koffietafel, sole with champagne sauce, pancakes stuffed with goat cheese, chocolate and almond pudding, apple turnovers and steak and kidney pie

Fashion: trousers(!) and a pink sweater, brackish canal-water soaked dress, an unflattering all-purpose jersey dress--dare I think uncrushable?

Authors mentioned: Ruth Rendell, Jack Higgins, P.D. James, Evelyn Anthony, Freeling

Nurse Harriet Goes to Holland-1970

The original title was Tempestuous April. I do not understand why this was considered objectionable enough to be renamed. And then the later editions become Tempestuous April again. Go figure.

Are you ready for the Cook's Tour? Because Betty Neels threw everything but the sluice (British word alert!) room sink in this, one of her earliest works.

The principles:

St. Nick's Men's Surgical Night Sister Harriet "Haughty Harry" Slocombe (yes that is the best nickname ever!) a gorgeous dainty blond who eats like a horse, crushes the pretensions of overly-familiar housemen (hence the name), carries a pocket knife with her at all times and has two older sisters(who get names and babies) and three younger brothers (only one of whom is named--the others presumably live in foster care as we see neither hide nor hair of them). She travels to Friesland with her best friend Sieske who becomes engaged to her boyfriend Wierd--which qualifies as loopiest Dutch/Fries name in the entire Betty Neels canon.

Dr. Friso (which I always want to read as "Crisco") Eijsinck does not have a harassed expression, a permanent stoop nor a soup stained waistcoat (like she'd been imagining he had). Instead, he's 34, sardonic, a great one for the ladies and the owner of a dark blue Bentley, a sturdy Land Rover and...wait for it...an AC 428 Fastback--which she's already seen and fallen in love with him in so that we are presented with the most wonderfully ridiculous sentence in the whole book: "Every now and then she thought about the man in the AC 428 Fastback." From this we must conclude that Betty possibly had an endorsement deal with the AC 428 Fastback guys and was raking in the dough from product placement. Otherwise she would have said, "...about the man in the blue sports car..." Kudos Betty.

Plot:
Fairly run of the mill--girl and boy meet and immediately fall in love. He turns out to be not so nice but then he sort of is. Lots and lots of sightseeing in the surrounding countryside ensues (seriously, it was like Betty thought she would never write another book again and felt the need to include everything). Think I'm kidding? Here's a partial list:

Franeker
Delft
Amsterdam (along with particular sites named)
Sneek(to sail in a boat and talk about a botter)
Hoorn
Schveningen
den Haag
tulips
Queen Juliana (she's walking at a brisk trot through the tulip garden at Keuknhof)Brief discussion on Fries engagements, sailing practices, hand shaking customs, bicycling, canals (there's actually an accident involving one), dijks and reclaimed lands, Dutch midwifery law (yes, actually)
La Bonneterie
Great Pier
A semi-important statue of a cow
And a laundry list of Dutch customs and words: tot ziens, dominee, guldens, polders, dank u, botter, deftig. (I could go on.)

I'm not sure but that this book might serve me better than a Rick Steve's travel guide. Anyway, she ends up using her pocketknife and midwifery skills to both rescue a dog and assist in a delivery in a house located in a flooded polder. And if that sounds like several Betty Neels novels disemboweled themselves on one page you're not alone. She would return to all these memes in novels to come.

The doctor now treats Harry with diminished disdain (though he does make a crack about her dressing up for his benefit when she's wearing an "almond green thin wool dress" capped by a silk turban. You should never comment on a woman's looks when she's wearing a turban (see below) as it is obviously indicative of her fragile mental condition. But he's bit of a git. (Though it pains me to say it.)
He woos her by lecturing her in turns on orchids and the weather and by trotting out this line, "Shall I add you to my list of girlfriends?" Clearly he doesn't know who he's dealing with.

Finally they seem to be getting along--or he is just quoting he Friesian National Oath for kicks?--when he tells her that love lasts "so long as the wind from the clouds shall blow and the world shall stand". But before you can say My dijk's sprung a leak, the wind stopped blowing and the world fell recumbent. Yup, he's given her the cold shoulder and she's taking the next boat back to London.

See, while they were busy discovering love's true bliss there was a viper in the grass. Teike is a fourteen-year-old little sister to Sieske. She is also a sociopath. Probably she kicks dogs and tears the wings off butterflies and has a future of poisoning neighborhood cats. Having developed a totally rational passion for the good doctor she sets out to sabotage the relationship. And boy does she. Disappointingly, she is never administered the spanking she so obviously requires.

All's well that ends well, though. He chases her back to Dartmoor and proposes in a village shop (common to Neelsdom) and, as nice as you like, tells everyone that the wedding is "tomorrow at 11." The End.

Rating:
I'm really not sure why I didn't like our hero very much. I mean, cold aloof and mocking is practically a requirement in the land of Betty Neels. Still, he seemed unnecessarily irritating. At one point he says, "And if I tell you that I shall miss you a great deal more than Moses (a dog), what will be your answer, my dear Harriet?" I had a marriage proposal that sounded suspiciously like this one. My advice? Throw him over and wait for the short Mexican. So, I'll give our hero a "treacle tart"--not terrible but I've seen better.

What gets my unqualified endorsement is the nursing atmospherics at the very beginning. You can almost see the ghost of Grandma Hanna spending her night nursing inconveniently-timed cardiac arrests, stuffing patients back in bed, walking the ward barefooted. It's the best and most realistic depiction of nursing I think I've read. So lashings of whipped cream on that.

If I even the two out I'd give this a "mince pie". It was a great early effort but she had not yet learned to make her heroes likable and her travel guide less episodic.

What Kind of Girl Do You Think I Am?

We made pizza for dinner tonight. Neels heroines would only eat pizza under duress and with housemen [British word alert](who are trying to make time) or laggard fiances (who are not).