MARY'S BIT or NEVER A DOLL MOMENT
As a devotee of Golden Age and locked room detections, I enjoyed Mary Roberts Rinehart's When A Man Marries, a blending of both. As I related in a review over on Mystery File, http://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=108 as the plot unspools one of several young folk who suddenly find themselves quarantined in a large house because the butler has just been stricken with smallpox wagers a large sum they'll all escape from quarantine within 24 hours.
I got a particular kick from this novel as I once spent some time in quarantine. However, unlike WAMM no mouthwatering food hampers from upscale emporiums were delivered to our door and we had no officer of the law locked in our furnace room, largely because we had no furnace. Our lumps of honest working class nutty slack fueling our kitchen fire lived in the coal hole under the stairs going down from scullery door to back yard. As for food, we ate our usual fare, heavy on carbohydrates and washed down with highly sweetened and villainously strong tea. Except for my younger sister, who had scarlet fever and could scarcely manage soft nourishment such as jelly or blancmange.
My durance vile, then, was necessary under health regulations vis a vis precautions against the spread of infectious diseases.
Philippa Pearce's l958 classic YA novel Tom's Midnight Garden may be the only such work whose launching point is directly related to these requirements, for Tom is packed off to stay with an aunt and uncle because his brother is suffering from measles. In our case, however, my sister had came down with something much worse. Commonly described as strep throat with a rash, it's more than that. It can be fatal and in some cases lead to rheumatic fever or kidney damage but neither of us knew that at the time. I'd forgotten that in Little Women, Jo and Meg March both recovered from bouts with it but when Beth caught it she never recovered full health and it contributed to her death at a young age. Then too my sister's illness also occurred some years before I read Frankenstein, in which Victor Frankenstein's mother dies from scarlet fever caught from Victor's cousin Elizabeth.
Thus it was that my sibling, flushed and feverish and with the tell-tale "strawberry" tongue and bumpy rash, had to be sent off to the local isolation hospital. She was carried downstairs, looking very small and frail on a stretcher somehow maneuvered around the narrow L at the top of our steep stairs and under the shelf halfway down the flight where our gas meter resided. After she was trundled away in the big white ambulance, disinfection of various items and boiling of bed linen and such got under way. Officially quarantined, I remained off school but at home for three or four days, allowing time for the illness to put in its second appearance at our house if it was going to do so.
But the thing of it was I didn't want my sister to be alone at the isolation hospital. Parents were not allowed to go on the wards and could only look at their ailing children through a corridor window. Patients' siblings of course were not even allowed to set foot on the premises. How then to accomplish the plan?
My mother had warned me that under no circumstances was I to utilise the crockery and cutlery set aside for my sister's use...so naturally when alone I did just that, hoping to fall ill and be hauled off to isolation as well. Just to make certain I had also washed after my sister, using the same water and borrowing her towel. But it was no go. My immune system must have been working on time and a half, as I never caught scarlet fever although it was certainly not for lack of trying.
Before my sister was whisked away with luggage consisting only of toothbrush, slippers, nighty, and dressing gown I gave her one of my dolls to take with her. Alas, another thing we didn't know was the iron-clad rule that when such cherished possessions were taken into the isolation hospital they never came back out. Thankfully my sister got better and came home in due course -- but I'm still annoyed about that doll.
AND FINALLY
Since we're all in this mess together even though socially apart, we liked the advice from Bill Preston in a certain time-travelling adventure with best friend Ted Logan: be excellent to each other. Meantime, the next issue of Orphan Scrivener will travel to subscriber in-boxes on June 15th.
See you then!
Mary R & Eric
who invite you to visit their home page, to be found hanging out on the virtual washing line that is the Web at http://reedmayermysteries.000webhostapp.com/ There you'll discover the
usual suspects, including more personal essays, a bibliography, and our growing libraries of links to free e-texts of classic and Golden Age mysteries, ghost stories, and tales of the supernatural. It also hosts the Orphan Scrivener archive, so don't say you weren't warned!
Our joint blog, largely devoted to reviews of Golden Age of Mystery fiction, lurks about at http://ericreedmysteries.blogspot.com/ Intrepid subscribers may also wish to know our noms des Twitter are @marymaywrite and @groggytales. Drop in some time!
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