Elizabeth Evelyn Kampfner (Andrews)

Based on my speech at Betty’s funeral service at St Luke’s Church Jan 10th 2020. Mine was the first of 3 short talks. My brief was Betty growing up, nursing and going to Singapore. Helen had the 1980’s and John, the later years.
 
 
We are going to see a wonderful slideshow at the end of this service where there are many portraits of Betty and photos of her with family and friends. There are also many of her in recent years because Nura and Rose and all her wonderful carers documented each outing. Each visit to the rose garden in Regents Park (in one she’s wearing a sweater with roses) or to Brighton or to a local restaurant, are captured with her posing cheekily in her wheelchair. She’s wearing snazzy sunglasses and stylish clothes although she is stick thin.
 
What we don’t have – are photos of Betty growing up. I’ve talked to Lesley who’s here today. She’s Betty’s niece, our cousin and the daughter of one of Betty’s two brothers – Bill Andrews. Lesley found one photo of Betty as a teenager. That’s it. All we have. I wonder why. It haunts me. Lesley said earlier today, ‘It’s because they were robbed of their childhood’.
 
It was a hard life. There was bread and dripping for supper and meat only at weekends. Betty and her two brothers slept in one bed. (Audrey their little sister was born when Betty was thirteen). The two boys had their head at one end of the bed and Betty’s was at the other. When one said ‘roll’ they all had to turn together. It was a story she told many times. But there weren’t many other anecdotes about growing up. Except about being an evacuee with Bill and going to Wales to a farm where she had to work hard but she didn’t seem to mind it. In her flat across the street from this church, there are figurines of a boy and a girl with little suitcases. ‘That’s us’, she often said and it seemed she had bought these porcelain children with their meek faces out of a sense of deep empathy.
 
Her few other stories had a Gothic quality. A young uncle drowned himself during the Depression after he was jilted. He rowed out in a boat on the River Medway and jumped in with stones in his pockets.  A gypsy knocked on her grandmother’s door when she was a cheery woman in her twenties, and told her she’d die in 2 weeks. And she did.
 
These tales seemed like the Struwwelpeter cautionary poems that she loved. She collected a library of children’s books. Many illustrated children’s bibles but also Enid Blyton, Robert Louis Stevenson and fairy tales. I don’t believe that these stories were read to her as a child or that she had these books. Or access to any books. She particularly loved the Victorian sentimentality of characters like Little Nell from The Old Curiosity Shop, Cosette from Les Miserables and the waifs and urchins in Chaplin’s films.
 
I don’t believe she had dolls growing up or I think she would have mentioned them. The doll collection that she began in London after she got back from Singapore, was extensive. It wasn’t a collection driven by provenance but more by a choice of face, hair and personality and whether a doll would be a distinctive addition to the tribe and whether there was a good chance that more clothes would be available in antique shops. Each had a large wardrobe. Many were given prams or parasols.
 
In Singapore she gave Helen and me giant dolls. She said they were supposed to be babies who could sit up but were not yet toddlers. She knitted them leggings, cardigans, hats that buttoned under the chin and booties. So these giant baby dolls were forced to wear wool in the tropics. It didn’t seem that they really belonged to us. One was always in lemon yellow and the other in sky blue. We didn’t give them names. They were garden fixtures. They sat at a child’s table in children’s chairs. We were supposed to sit in the other chairs. We would occasionally dutifully give them tea made from crushed hibiscus petals. I think this was really to oblige Betty for photo ops. She took wonderful pictures with her Rolleiflex. She took photos for friends for their Christmas cards.
 
I know these toys gave Betty enormous pleasure. Looking back now, I was dimly aware that she wanted to give us a storybook environment – everything she had never had. She planned imaginative children’s parties. No one else had parties like this. She enlisted friends and neighbours. They were story-telling parties. A memorable one was a funfair where each child was given tokens and everyone was engrossed wandering through the garden trying out the stalls. I want to tell Mala who is here today, I remember your brother Chelva being a scary fortune teller. He sat in The Wendy House and a punter had to stick a  hand through a window give up a token and then he gave them a crystal ball reading in a boomy voice.
 
Betty’s words for things seemed to come from a different world. What she called a ‘Wendy house’ appeared one Christmas. It took up a third of our lawn. It was soon painted blue and yellow. And within days there was a sign on the door - ‘Daffodil Cottage’. We had never seen a daffodil or a cottage but the name gave the house immediate cachet because it was so bewilderingly English.
 
To me, our mother was exotically and romantically English. She came from a place called Kent which was ‘the garden of England’ and she was ‘a maid of Kent’. There were apple orchards all around and she had worked on hop fields in the summer. I pictured her in straw hat and basket. The town she came from was called Chatham and it was near the town of Rochester where Charles Dickens set many of his stories. She would emphasize that is was near the ancient towns of the Cinque Ports.
It seemed an unfathomable treasure chest. I heard all this when I was very young. When I went to Chatham at the age of 4, I remember being horrified. The place was a dump! But since she was so proud of Kent, I chose to try to forget the smoky town, my grandmother’s pokey flat and the scrubby, bleak, toyless garden that was all the tenant’s children had to play in.
 
She escaped that background, but I am not sure if she fought to get out and see the world, or if it all happened because it was natural for her to take risks as part of her drive to do well and strive harder.
 
This may all sound like she didn’t know how to have fun. So let’s scotch that. Though she later said Singapore had been boring, she had an amazing social life. She loved being a hostess. She’d throw perfect dinner parties and Christmas lunches with friends at a huge round table. Our special friends were the Tans, the Rajahs and the Hoes.
 
We’d go on holidays and weekend trips with the Hoe family. Both parents were doctors and they had four children who matched us in age. We’d go to their grandfather’s rubber plantation in Malaysia which had a small beach house or to another home they had surrounded by roses in the Cameron Highlands. Here we all had races though Helen and I ran in woolly cardigans because the weather was cool and we were practicing being English. Betty would have spirited arguments with Jack Hoe about the right knives to use in Chinese cooking and debated with everyone about medicine. She was adamant that nurses were superior to doctors.  
 
But still the ‘Maid of Kent’ title seemed to fit a mother who was often in pretty dresses with large skirts and who smelt wonderful. The dress that was a standout was ‘the strawberry dress’ – blue gingham and strawberries that matched her lipstick. We would play with the lipstick, rouge, Oil of Olay and perfume on her dressing table. That’s all that was there.  She didn’t believe in makeup, never dyed her hair and rarely wore earrings.
 
She came from a nominal C of E family and went to Sunday school and taught Sunday school. She then became a member of the fundamentalist Plymouth Brethren Church as a teenager. She explained that her faith meant there was clear separation between good and evil. To that end, a believer developed a strong conscience so that essentially it became second nature to refuse the evil and choose the good. There was a deep simplicity to this and she couldn’t and didn’t want to explain how it was possible to achieve this sense of commitment and the security it appeared to offer. ‘Just have faith’ she would say. And what if you didn’t? If it didn’t happen to you? Well that was tough luck but you were still very aware that the devil was everywhere. If you were lazy, the devil would be hovering. Laziness was a sin and you couldn’t sleep in at weekends or school holidays. She was proud that she was a child born on a Saturday who, as the rhyme goes, ‘works hard for a living’.
 
She did. She got herself into grammar school. No mean feat. She didn’t have the uniform and one was cobbled together and she said she was forever bullied. At sixteen she left because she had to help the family. She became a nursery nurse with a view to doing nursing training at eighteen. She has said she wanted to be a writer or journalist and indeed she sent me wonderfully evocative blue aerogrammes when I spent a summer working in America. I still have them. I think nursing was one of the few options that were really available but actually it was a great fit for her. She paid attention to detail, was organized, worked tirelessly and cared about hygiene. In fact she’s famous amongst my school friends for insisting on mopping the kitchen floor before she went to bed after a dinner party.
 
There are many black and white photos of her as a young nurse. These are the first photos we have of her. A tiny waisted, smiling, somewhat shy, young woman. Holding newborns when she was a district midwife visiting homes on a bicycle (she said the TV series was very authentic) or laughing mischievously with soldiers. She joined the Queen Alexandra Nursing Corps and travelled to British military hospitals in Trieste, Hong Kong and then Singapore. There she is in starched apron and cloak looking something between a nun and an angel. That’s how it seemed to me as a child and that romantic image has persisted. She became a ward sister and then Matron. She did well but I don’t think she was ambitious. I don’t think she had a plan for her career. Or for her life. She just wanted to do whatever she was doing as well as she possibly could. It was part of her religious fervor I think – to be good. As good as you possibly could be.
 
And so one day at the British Military Hospital in Singapore, she met our dad. The legend is that she told him off about some order he had given for a patient’s food that she disagreed with and she got her way. Fred was the first Jew she had met. She never understood his religion nor embraced it but they agreed that they wouldn’t bring us up with any religion. They’d let us choose. As I said, I was always bemused that Jesus was supposed to come to you and all would be well. Maybe if we sang ‘Jesus wants me for a sunbeam’ often enough? It was a child’s song she sang gutsily and it expressed all that religion seemed to mean for her – that if you were a good girl, Jesus would be there with welcoming arms.
 
As would St Peter at the pearly gates. She had no doubt whatsoever that he’d be there with hosts of beautiful angels when the time came.