Carnival

by Compton Mackenzie

Genres: General Fiction; Classics

Synopsis

Jenny Pearl, a dancer, falls in love with Maurice Avery, a young dilettante who leaves her when she refuses to become his mistress. Despairingly, she falls into a loveless marriage with Trewhella, a Cornish farmer who becomes insanely jealous when Avery reappears on the scene . . . Vivid, moving and ultimately tragic, CARNIVAL was first published in 1912 to wide critical acclaim, helping to establish Mackenzie as one of the foremost British novelists of his generation. It has since been filmed three times and adapted for the stage and as an opera.

Release date: November 22, 2012

Publisher: John Murray

Print pages: 132

Sample

Foreword

In the autumn of 1907, having had a play produced at Edinburgh that spring and a slim book of poems published that October, I went to spend the winter at Cury, half-way between Helston and the Lizard. One afternoon a farmer of my acquaintance asked me to come to tea and meet his wife whom he had just wooed and married in the course of a brief visit to London.

‘Do ’ee know the Leicester Lounge?’ he asked.

The Leicester Lounge was a raffish bar at the corner of Leicester Square, looking down Coventry Street, where to-day stands Peter Robinson’s shop.

‘I do indeed,’ I told him.

‘Well, I took a fancy to one of the barmaids there and after I’d argued with her for a bit she married me. She’s down home along now.’

So I went to tea, and in the kitchen of that farmhouse a quarter of a mile inland from a wild coast was sitting a young woman in her late twenties with an elaborate peroxide coiffure beneath which a pink-powdered face gazed in bewilderment at its surroundings while the sea-wind rattled the windows and moaned in the chimneys.

The bride was obviously embarrassed by my visit and I was aware of such a profound mental distress that I could never bring myself to intrude upon it again. Yet the memory of that inappropriate figure in that farmhouse kitchen haunted my fancy, and I made up my mind to write a play one day in an attempt to provide an explanation for the state of mind which led a barmaid in the Leicester Lounge to marry a dour Cornish farmer after a week’s wooing.

Meanwhile, I spent the next six months in writing my first novel, and the next three years in finding a publisher for it. I made a vow I would not attempt so much as a short story until The Passionate Elopement was published.

In the late summer of 1910, H. G. Pélissier of the Follies offered me the job of writing the words to his music for a revue at the Alhambra called All Change Here; the words having been written, I was asked to turn the corps de ballet into a revue chorus and find girls in it able to sing trios and quartets. Few young authors can have been blessed with such an opportunity as those wonderful girls gave me to reach the heart of London. I still hear from some of them and I gratefully set on record that the foundation of my pile of books, over seventy volumes high now, was laid by those girls at the Alhambra forty years ago.

One afternoon I came out from a long rehearsal during which I leaned back in the dim, empty stalls, watching the corps de ballet flit like gay ghosts about the shadows of the stage. I came out just before the shutting in of a rainy autumn dusk and noticed an inquisitive figure waiting by the stage door. He was not unlike my Cornish farmer of three years ago as he stood there to eye the girls hurrying home to rest before the evening performance, and suddenly I fancied one of them, gay and lovable, transported by circumstance to a storm-beaten farmhouse. The story of Carnival began to take shape in my imagination.

My first novel The Passionate Elopement was published on January 17th, 1911, my twenty-eighth birthday, and on the next day I sat down to write my second novel, the original title for which was London Pride. However, a play with that name was announced and I had to find another. Columbine was the next choice and finally that gave way to Carnival.

The first dozen chapters of the book were written at 36 Church Row, Hampstead, where my wife and I had taken the Muirhead Bones’ flat for six months. Then in the spring we went back to the house in Phillack opposite Hayle in St. Ives’ Bay where we were now living, and the rest of the book was written there with many interruptions by the work I was doing for the Follies. I finished Carnival at about three o’clock of a wild January morning. Martin Secker, my publisher, was lying asleep on a sofa. The fire had flickered out. I punched him hard and shouted: ‘I’ve finished. Shall I read you the last chapter?’ He heard it, and said: ‘Thank God, it’s finished.’ He had reason for gratitude because the book was due to be published in a fortnight, and the printers were waiting for the final copy.

Carnival was published on January 17th, 1912, and although it was dismissed by the Times Literary Supplement in a few frigid lines among the ‘also ran’ novels of that week, which in those days was a really serious set-back for a young author, the rest of the reviews with very few exceptions were generous. J. M. Barrie sent me a heartening letter. Yeats, much to my surprise, gravely approved of the book. Henry James, while insisting that my heroine lacked the heroic stature for so elaborate a treatment, declared the book was in the tradition of those French romances like Vie de Bohême, ‘all roses and sweet champagne and young love’.

‘And lest you should be hurt by what I have said about your heroine, let me hasten to add that I should say the same of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.’

Gerald du Maurier suggested that I should make a play of Carnival for him, but Frank Curzon, under whose management he was, objected to Maurice Avery’s being off the stage for the whole of the third act, and as I could not see a remedy for this I missed the great pleasure of writing a part for an actor I much admired.

That summer an enquiry came from William A. Brady, whose wife, Miss Grace George, had decided she would like to play the part of Jenny Pearl. So in September 1912 I sailed for the United States and a dramatized version was produced at the Garrick Theatre, Toronto, in November. Miss Grace George has been the only actress on the stage or in the films who has come near to my own idea of Jenny Pearl.

In 1915 Carnival was filmed for the first time. In 1922 I made another dramatic version under the title Columbine, Matheson Lang having used Carnival as a title for a melodrama he had adapted from the Italian. Columbine was first played at Nottingham, and later at the Prince’s Theatre in London. In 1929 Eric Maschwitz made a remarkable radio version of the book which in its original form played from 9.30 p.m. to midnight, and was revived several times in a ninety-minute version made by Val Gielgud. That collaboration with Val Gielgud and Eric Maschwitz was among the most enjoyable experiences of my life. In 1931 a second film version was made with the stupid title Dance Little Lady. I declined to see a performance. In 1945 a third film was made, which kept the title Carnival but little else of the book I had written thirty years before. I refused to see a performance of this, but I did catch an unavoidable glimpse of a trailer of the film in Hong Kong and congratulated myself on that refusal.

A short opera was made of Carnival for the B.B.C., and in the spring of 1951 I read an abridged version of it for the ‘Book at Bedtime’.

The book has been published in various editions by some eight publishers and the total sales in Britain and America were over half a million when it went out of print during the last war. It has been translated twice into French, and into several other languages.

I was tempted in correcting this new edition for press to make alterations to suit the lessons I have learnt in writing during the last forty years, but I resisted the impulse. Long ago I told Henry James that when I came back from the First World War I intended to rewrite Carnival.

He held up his hands in a wide gesture of dismay.

‘You alarm . . . you . . . appal me with such news,’ he declared, his large smooth face momentarily puckered with genuine distress. ‘I once wasted ten . . . indeed, twelve precious years in foolishly supposing that in the light of experience I could grope my way toward a more . . . toward that always elusive . . . in short that I could add yet something to what, when it was written, I had given all that I could give at that time. Renounce this preposterous ambition of yours, my dear boy. You have been granted the boon which above all a novelist should beg for himself. You have been granted that boon with a generosity beyond that accorded to any of your young contemporaries. You fling the ball up against the wall and it rebounds immediately into your hands. Whereas I . . .’, he looked round that room in the Chelsea flat from the windows of which one saw the river shimmering through a filigree of boughs now almost bare of leaves, ‘whereas I fling the ball against the wall, whence it rebounds not into my hands, but on to the next wall and from that wall to the next.’ He followed with apprehensive glance the flight of that ghastly ball round the room. ‘Until,’ he concluded, ‘at last it falls to the ground and dribbles very, very slowly toward my feet, and I, all my old bones aching, stoop, and most laboriously pick it up.’

Some critics have maintained that Carnival breaks in two with the marriage of Jenny Pearl to Zachary Trewhella. They may be right, but in as much as the original conception of the book was inspired by the strange scene in that Cornish farmhouse when I met the perplexed bride from the Leicester Lounge, I have never been able to see the marriage of Jenny as a break. That is a natural prejudice, and fondness for the book that made his name may be forgiven to any writer.

Compton Mackenzie, 1951

I

Birth of Columbine

All day long over the grey Islington street, October casting pearly mists had turned the sun to silver and made London a city of meditation whose tumbled roofs and parapets and glancing spires appeared serene and baseless as in a lake’s tranquillity.

The traffic, muted by the glory of a fine autumn day, marched, it seemed, more slowly and to a sound of heavier drums. Like mountain echoes street cries haunted the burnished air, while a muffin-man, abroad too early for the season, swung his bell intermittently with a pastoral sound. Even the milk-cart, heard in the next street, provoked the imagination of distant armour. The houses seemed to acquire from the grey and silver web of October enchantment a mysterious immensity. There was no feeling of stressful humanity even in the myriad sounds that in a sheen of beauty floated about the day. The sun went down behind roofs and left the sky plumed with rosy feathers. There was a cold grey minute before dusk came stealing in richly and profoundly blue: then night sprang upon the street, and through the darkness an equinoctial wind swept moaning.

Along the gutters the brown leaves danced: the tall plane tree at the end of the street would not be motionless until December should freeze the black branches in diapery against a sombre sky. Along the gutters the leaves whispered and ran and shivered and leaped, while the gas-jets flapped in pale lamps.

There was no starshine on the night Jenny Raeburn was born, only a perpetual sound of leaves dancing and the footsteps of people going home.

Mrs. Raeburn had not been very conscious of the day’s calm beauty. Her travail had been long: the reward scarcely apprehended. Already two elder children had closed upon her the gates of youth, and she was inclined to resent the expense of so much pain for an additional tie. There was not much to make the great adventure of childbirth endurable. The transitory amazement of a few relatives was a meagre consolation for the doubts and agonies of nine slow months. But the muslin curtains, tied back with raffish pink bows, had really worried her most of all. Something was wrong with them: their dinginess or want of symmetry annoyed her.

With one of those rare efforts towards imaginative comprehension which the sight of pain arouses in dull and stolid men, her husband had enquired, when he came back from work, whether there was anything he could do.

‘Those curtains,’ she had murmured.

‘Don’t you get worrying yourself about curtains,’ he had replied. ‘You’ve got something better to do than aggravate yourself with curtains. The curtains is all right.’

Wearily she had turned her face to the sad-coloured wall-paper. Wearily she had transferred her discontent to the absence of one of the small brass knobs at the foot of the bed.

‘And that knob. You never remember to get a new one.’

‘Now it’s knobs!’ he had exclaimed, wondering at the foolishness of a woman’s mind in the shadows of coming events. ‘Don’t you bother your head about knobs neither. Try and get a bit of sleep or something, do.’

With this exhortation he had retired from the darkening room to wander round the house, lighting various jets of gas, turning them down to the faintest blue glimmer, and hoping all the while that one of his wife’s sisters would not emerge from the country at the rumour of the baby’s arrival in order to force her advice upon a powerless household.

Edith and Alfred, his two elder children, had been carried off by the other aunt to her residence in Barnsbury, whence in three weeks they would be brought back to home and twilight speculations upon the arrival of a little brother or sister. In parenthesis, he hoped it would not be twins. They would be so difficult to explain, and the chaps in the shop would laugh. The midwife came down to boil some milk and make final arrangements. The presence of this ample lady disturbed him. The gale rattling the windows of the kitchen did not provide any feeling of firelight snugness, but rather made his thoughts more restless, was even so insistent as to carry them on its wings, weak formless thoughts, to the end of Hagworth Street, where the bar of the Masonic Arms spread a wider and more cheerful illumination than was to be found in the harried kitchen of Number Seventeen. So Charlie Raeburn went out to spend time and money in piloting several friends across the shallows of Mr. Gladstone’s mind.

Upstairs Mrs. Raeburn, left alone, again contemplated the annoying curtains; though by now they were scarcely visible against the gloom outside. She dragged herself off the bed and moving across to the window stood there, rubbing the muslin between her fingers. She remained for a while thus, peering at the backs of the houses opposite that, small though they really were, loomed with menace in the lonely dusk. Shadows of women at work, always at work, went to and fro upon the blinds. There were muffled sounds of children crying, the occasional splash of emptied pails, and against the last glimmer of sunset the smoke of chimneys blown furiously outwards. To complete the air of sadness and desolation the faded leaf of a dried-up geranium was lisping against the windowpane. She gave up fingering the muslin curtains and came back to the middle of the room, wondering vaguely when the next bout of pain was due and why the ‘woman’ didn’t come upstairs and make her comfortable. There were matches on the toilet-table; so she lit a candle whose light gave every piece of ugly furniture a shadow and made the room ghostly and unfamiliar. Presently she held the light beside her face and stared at herself in the glass, and thought how pretty she still looked and, flushed by the fever, how young.

She experienced a sensation of fading personality. She seemed actually to be losing herself. Eyes, bright with excitement, glittered back from the mirror, and suddenly there came upon her overwhelmingly the fear of death.

And if she died, would anybody pity her, or would she lie forgotten always after the momentary tribute of white chrysanthemums? Death, death, she found herself saying over to the tune of a clock ticking in the passage. But she had no desire to die. Christmas was near with its shop-lit excursions and mistletoe and merriment. Why should she die? No, she would fight hard. A girl or a boy? What did it matter? Nothing mattered. Perhaps a girl would be nicer, and she should be called Rose. And yet, on second thoughts, when you came to think of it, Rose was a cold sort of a name and Rosie was common. Why not call her Jenny? That was better – with, perhaps, Pearl or Ruby to follow, when its extravagance would pass unnoticed. A girl should always have two names. But Jenny was the sweeter. Nevertheless, it would be as well to support so homely a name with a really ladylike one – something out of the ordinary.

Why had she married Charlie? All her relatives said she had married beneath her. Father had been a butcher – a prosperous man – and even he, in the family tradition, had not been considered good enough for her mother who was a chemist’s daughter. Yet, she, Florence Unwin, had married a joiner. Why had she married Charlie? Looking back over the seven years of their married life, she could not remember a time when she had loved him as she had dreamed of love, in the airy room over the busy shop, as she had dreamed of love staring through the sunny window away beyond the Angel, beyond the great London skies. Charlie was so stupid, so dull; moreover, though not a drunkard, he was fond of half-pints and smelt of sawdust and furniture polish. Her sisters never liked, never would like him. She had smirched the great tradition of respectability. What would her grandfather the chemist have said? That dignified old man in brown velvet coat, treated always with deference even by her father, the jolly handsome butcher? Florence Unwin married to a joiner – a man unable to afford to keep his house free from the inevitable lodger who owned the best bedroom, the bedroom that by right should have been hers. She had disgraced the family and for no high motive of passion – and once she was young and pretty. And still young, after all, and still pretty. She was only thirty-three now. Why had she married at all? But then her sisters did give themselves airs, and the jolly, handsome butcher had enjoyed too well and too often those drives to Jack Straw’s Castle on fine Sunday afternoons under the rolling Hampstead clouds, had left little enough when he died, and Charlie came along, and perhaps even marriage with him had been less intolerable than existence among the frozen sitting-rooms of her two sisters, drapers’ wives though they both were.

And the aunts, those three severe women? She might, perhaps, have lived with them when the jolly, handsome butcher died, with them in their house at Clapton, with them eternally dusting innumerable china ornaments and correcting elusive mats. The invitation had been extended, but was forbidding as a mourning-card or the melancholy visit of an insurance agent with his gossip of death. Death? Was she going to die?

It did not matter. The pain was growing more acute. She dragged herself to the door and called down to the midwife, called two or three times.

There was no answer except from the clock with its whisper of Death and Death. Where was the woman? Where was Charlie? She called again. Then she remembered through what seemed years of grinding agony that the street door was slammed some time ago. Charlie must have gone out. With the woman? Had he run away from her? Was she, the wife, for ever abandoned? Was there no life in all the world to reach her solitude? The house was fearfully, unnaturally silent. She reached up to the cold gas bracket, and the light flared up without adding a ray of cheerfulness to the creaking passage. Higher still she turned it until it sang towards the ceiling, a thin geyser of flame. The chequers upon the oil-cloth became blurred as tears of self-pity welled up in her eyes. She was deserted, and in pain.

Her mind sailed off along morbid channels to the grim populations of hysteria. She experienced the merely nervous sensation of many black beetles running at liberty around the empty kitchen. It was a visualization of tingling nerves, and, fostered by the weakening influence of labour pains, it extended beyond the mere thought to the endowment of a mental picture with powerful and malign purpose so that, after a moment or two, she came to imagining that between her and the world outside black beetles were creating an impassable barrier.

Could Charlie and the woman really have run away? She called again and peered over the flimsy balustrade down to the ground floor. Or was the woman lying in the kitchen drunk? Lying there, incapable of action, among the black beetles? She called again: ‘Mrs. Nightman! Mrs. Nightman!’

How dry her hands were, how parched her tongue; and her eyes, how they burned.

Was she actually dying? Was this engulfing silence the beginning of death? What was death?

And what was that? What were those three tall, black figures moving along the narrow passage downstairs? What were they, so solemn and tall and silent, moving with inexorable steps higher and higher?

‘Mrs. Nightman, Mrs. Nightman!’ she shrieked, and stumbled in agony of body and horror of mind back to the flickering bedroom, back to the bed.

And then there was light and a murmur of voices, saying: ‘We have come to see how you are feeling, Florence,’ and sitting by her bed she recognized the three aunts from Clapton in their bugles and cameos and glittering bonnets.

There was a man, too, whom she had only just time to realize was the doctor, not the undertaker, before she was aware that the final effort of her tortured body was being made without assistance from her own will or courage.

She waved away the sympathizers. She was glad to see the doctor and Mrs. Nightman herding them from the room, like gaunt black sheep; but they came back again as inquisitive animals will when, after what seemed a thousand thousand years of pain, she could hear something crying and the trickle of water and the singing of a kettle.

Perhaps it was Aunt Fanny who said: ‘It’s a dear little girl.’

The doctor nodded, and Mrs. Raeburn stirred and with wide eyes gazed at her baby.

‘It is Jenny, after all,’ she murmured; then wished for the warmth of a new-born child against her breast.

II

Fairies at the Christening

A fortnight after the birth of Jenny, her three great-aunts, black and stately as ever, paid a second visit to the mother.

‘And how is Florrie?’ enquired Aunt Alice.

‘Going on fine,’ said Florrie.

‘And what is the baby to be called?’ asked Aunt Fanny.

‘Jenny, and perhaps Pearl as well.’

‘Jenny?’

‘Pearl?’

‘Jenny Pearl?’

The three aunts disapproved the choice with combined interrogation.

‘We were thinking,’ announced Aunt Alice, ‘your aunts were thinking, Florrie, that since we have a good deal of room at Carminia House—’

‘It would be a capital plan for the baby to live with us,’ went on Aunt Mary.

‘For since our father died’ (old Frederick Horner the chemist had been under a laudatory stone slab at Kensal Green for a quarter of a century), ‘there has been room and to spare at Carminia House,’ said Aunt Fanny.

‘The baby would be well brought up,’ Aunt Alice declared.

‘Very well brought up, and sent to a genteel academy for young – ladies.’ The break before the last word was due to Miss Horner’s momentary but distinctly perceptible criticism of the unladylike bedroom where her niece lay suckling her baby girl.

‘We should not want her at once, of course,’ Aunt Fanny explained. ‘We should not expect to be able to look after her properly – though I believe there are now many Infant Foods very highly recommended even by doctors.’

Perhaps it was the pride of chemical ancestry that sustained Miss Frances Horner through the indelicacy of the last admission. But old maids’ flesh was weak, and the carmine suffusing her waxen cheeks drove the eldest sister into an attempt to cover her confusion by adding that she for one was glad in these days of neglected duties to see a mother nursing her own child.

‘We feel,’ she went on, ‘that the arrival of a little girl shows very clearly that the Almighty intended us to adopt her. Had it – had she proved to be a boy, we should have made no suggestions about her except, perhaps, that her name should be Frederick after our father the chymist.’

‘With possibly Philip as a second name,’ Miss Mary Horner put in.

‘Philip?’ her sisters asked.

And now Miss Mary blushed, whether on account of a breach of sisterly etiquette or whether for some guilty memory of a long-withered affection, was never discovered by her elders or anyone else either.

‘Philip?’ her sisters repeated.

‘It is a very respectable name,’ said Miss Mary apologetically, and for the life of her could only recall Philip of Spain, whose admirable qualities were not enough marked to justify her in breaking in upon Miss Horner’s continuation of the discussion.

‘Feeling as we do,’ the latter said, ‘that a divine providence has given a girl-child to the world on account of our earnest prayers, we think we have a certain right to give our advice, to urge that you, my dear Florence, should allow us the opportunity of regulating her education and securing her future. We enjoy between us a comfortable little sum of money, half of which we propose to set aside for the child. The rest has already been promised to the Reverend Williams to be applied as he shall think fit.’

‘Like an ointment, I suppose,’ said Florrie.

‘Like an ointment? Like what ointment?’

‘You seem to think that money will cure everything – if it’s applied. But who’s going to look after Jenny if you die? Because,’ she went on before they had time to answer, ‘Jenny isn’t going to be applied to the Reverend Williams. She isn’t going to mope all day with Bibles as big as tramcars stuck on her knees. No, thank you, Aunt Alice, Jenny’ll stay with her mother.’

‘Then you won’t allow us to adopt her?’ snapped Miss Horner, sitting up so straight in the cane-bottomed chair that it creaked again and again.

‘I don’t think,’ Aunt Fanny put in, ‘that you are quite old enough to understand the temptations of a young girl?’

‘Aren’t I?’ said Florence. ‘I think I know a sight more about ’em than you do, Aunt Fanny. I am a mother, when all’s said and done.’

‘But have you got salvation?’ asked Miss Horner.

‘I don’t see what salvation and all that’s got to do with my Jenny,’ Mrs. Raeburn argued.

‘But you would like her to be sure of everlasting happiness?’ enquired Miss Fanny mildly, amazed at her niece’s obstinacy.

‘I’d like her to be a good girl, yes.’

‘But how can she be good till she has found the Lord? We’re none of us good,’ declared Miss Mary, ‘till we have been washed in the blood of the Lamb.’

‘I quite believe you’re in earnest, Aunt Alice,’ declared Mrs. Raeburn. ‘In earnest and anxious to do well by Jenny, but I don’t hold and never did hold with cooping children up. Poor little things!’

‘There wouldn’t be any cooping up. As a child of grace, she would often go out walking with her aunts, and sometimes, perhaps, be allowed to carry the tracts.’

Mrs. Raeburn looked down in the round blue eyes of Jenny.

‘Perhaps you’d like her to jump to glory with a tambourine?’ she said.

‘Jump to glory with a tambourine?’ echoed Miss Horner.

‘Or bang the ears off of Satan with a blaring drum? Or go squalling up aloft with them saucy Salvation hussies?’

The austere old ladies were deeply shocked by the levity of their niece’s enquiries.

Sincerely happy, sincerely good, they were unable to understand anyone not burning to feel at home in the whitewashed chapel which to them was an abode of murmurous peace. They wanted everybody to recognize with glad familiarity every text that decorated the bleak walls with an assurance of heavenly joys. Their quiet encounters with spiritual facts had nothing in common with those misguided folk who were escorted by brass bands along the shining road to God. They were happy in the exclusiveness of their religion not from any conscious want of charity, but from the exaltation aroused by the privilege of divine intimacy and the joyful sense of being favourites in heavenly places. The Rev. Josiah Williams, for all his liver-coloured complexion and clayey nose, was to them a celestial ambassador. His profuse outpourings of prayer took them higher than any skylark with its quivering wings. His turgid discourses, where every metaphor seemed to have escaped from a Store’s price-list, were to them more fruitful of imaginative results than any poet’s song. His grave visits, when he seemed always to be either washing his hands or wiping his boots, left in the hearts of the three old maids memories more roseate than any sunset of the Apennines. Therefore, when Mrs. Raeburn demanded to know if they were anxious for Jenny to jump to glory with a tambourine, the religious economy of the three Miss Horners was upset. On consideration, even jumping to glory without a tambourine struck them as an indelicate method of reaching Paradise.

‘And wherever did you get the notion of adopting Jenny?’ continued the niece. ‘For I’m sure I never suggested any such thing.’

‘We got the notion from above, Florence,’ explained Miss Fanny. ‘It was a direct command from our Heavenly Father. I had a vision.’

‘Your Aunt Fanny,’ proclaimed the elder sister, ‘dreamed she was nursing a white rabbit. Now we have not eaten rabbits since on an occasion when the Reverend Williams was taking a little supper with us, we unfortunately had a bad one – a high one. There had been nothing to suggest rabbits, let alone white rabbits, to your Aunt Fanny. So I said: “Florence is going to have a baby. It must be a warning.” We consulted the Reverend Williams who said it was very remarkable, and must mean the Almighty was calling upon us as He called upon the infant Samuel. We enquired first if either of your sisters was going to have a baby also. Caroline Threadgale wrote an extremely rude letter and Mabel Purkiss was