ABSTRACT
There is a certain fitness to beginning a chapter about disorderly ramblings and narratives of subjectivity by breaking the rules of academic discourse and indulging in some personal reminiscences about my mother. She was born on 8 June 1906 at Landaff in Wales and was christened Bettie because, as she often told me, her father said that ‘there had to be a Bettie Caple’. One of the stories about her early childhood I particularly enjoyed had as its setting their Georgian terrace house in Bath. Bettie removed the rods that held the carpet in place on the hall stairs, pulled the carpet tight, then came swooping down it on a tea-tray into the hallway. Stories of such childhood naughtinesses, both hers and mine, were always told with a distinct relish, suggestive of their special appeal for someone who as an adult was much more self-effacing than this earlier self appears to have been.
