It was just as well I had ripped off my Ear Correcting Bandages. Had I been bound up in my usual bedtime torture-wear, I would never have heard my mother’s screams.
The bandages were part of my preparation for the great husband hunt. I was only fifteen years old, but my mother recognized a difficult case when she saw one. She had taken up the challenge the day after my twelfth birthday and never spared herself since.
‘The early bird, Poppy,’ she always said, when I complained. ‘The early bird.’
And so, assisted by my aunt, she began an all-fronts campaign to catch me a worm.
I was forbidden candy and other waist-thickening substances. I was enrolled for classes in piano, singing and cotillion dancing, and spent an hour every day in a backboard, during which I practiced French pronunciation whilst a series of Irish maids tried to straighten my hair, or at least, defeat its natural wiriness into the kind of soft loose curls preferred by husbands.
On
