andydaly wrote:
Quote:
JS wrote:We only 'see' Mrs Cochrane from the point of view of those who don't like/approve of her. Maybe if we saw it from someone sympathetic towards her, we'd get a different story.
Drabble, anyone?
Drabble, anyone?
I took up this challenge and wrote my first drabble over the weekend
. Then I saw that Lesley had tackled the same subject. So, feeling rather daring, I thought I'd post mine anyway (although I think Lesley's version is more convincing). Still, here goes with the first bit....Taverton
Cornwall/Devon border
15 April 19—
My darling Grizel
How often have I wanted to write or say these words to you. But somehow I can do it only now, when I know this is the last communication you will ever receive from me. I am dying, I know that, so have started to write this in the hope that it might go some way to explain my behaviour to you when you were a child and, I regret to say, when you were an adult also.
I hope you will do me the courtesy of reading this letter, although I wouldn’t blame you if you threw it on the fire, unopened. That’s probably what I would do, in your place. But then, I’ve made so many mistakes in my life and I hope, hope and pray that you might at least read this, even if you can’t find it in yourself to forgive me.
It was a great shock to me to find that your father had a daughter. I’m not sure if you knew, but he didn’t tell me that he had even been married. When I met him I thought it was the first time for both of us. Certainly he didn’t appear to be a married man or even, as I now know he was, a widower. When I met him he was very much the bachelor, living at, dining at his club in town and generally seeming free from any domestic concerns. I had no idea, none at all, that he had been briefly – and so excruciatingly happily – married to your mother and that no-one, no-one at all, could hope to take her place.
He was my first suitor, you know, and I couldn’t believe that he had chosen me. We met through my brother – they were business acquaintances – and right from that first moment, I felt that if only he would notice me, then I’d be the happiest girl in the world. And he seemed to like me too – it was a miracle, or felt like it.
You see, Grizel, he was so handsome and so respectable. My family, well, I know I’ve never let you (or anyone else) know, but respectability was not a claim anyone could make for us. My father, I can now admit, was little more than a fraudster and, although my mother tried to bring us up properly, there was never enough money and we were always moving from place to place. I used to look with such envy at the other girls I would meet. They had piano lessons, ponies, nice clothes to wear and things to eat – all the things you had as a child, Grizel. I, on the other hand, managed to scrape a little education and knew I would have to work for a living.
It was just before I was to take my first job – as a governess, with virtually no salary but with accommodation included – that I met your father. My brother, who, I’m sorry to say, took after my father in his business dealings, was trying to persuade your father to join him in a venture. I think, although it pains me to say it, that my brother thought my ‘charms’ might help persuade your father to invest. He was too smart for that, however. But, although he abandoned the investment, he pursued me.
But I always thought she was more sinned against than sinning, at the beginning. It is Grizel's father who ought to be writing this letter to his only daughter.
.
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. I've often wondered if Mrs C's attitude towards Grizel might have been influenced by the fact that she had no children of her own.