Bertie and his parents

[erynn999.livejournal.com]

A really interesting discussion has been going on in the comments on my fic A Butler's Advice regarding Bertie and his sometimes-antagonistic relationship with his family, but also some speculation about Bertie's parents and his relationship (or lack thereof) with them.

Bertie rarely says anything about his parents and never talks about their deaths, as I recall. There has been some speculation that he was probably closer to the servants who raised him than to either his parents or his aunts. What would have been "normal" for someone of Bertie's social class at the time? We know he spent a lot of time away at school. When, how and why would Bertie's parents have died? How do you think he reacted?

What does everyone here think? What's fanon opinion and what, if anything, have people written about it in their stories?

If this results in any fics (perhaps you could consider this a story prompt as well as a discussion prompt), I think that would be fantastic!

Comments

[sailthouforth.livejournal.com]

I've always imagined Bertie's parents to have died when he was very young (not older than four or five) and for them to have died together, at the same time. Automobile accident is generally what springs to mind, but given the imprecise setting of Bertie's world I'm not sure if that's practical. I've also thought his sister to be 8-10 years older than him, and that she stuck to him like glue when it happened to make sure they didn't get separated and sent to live with different relatives, that sort of thing.

Someone as open and affectionate as Bertie probably would have reminisced about specific servants in his stories if they'd done the majority of his upbringing; on the other hand, he seems to blur the line between servant and friend with Jeeves and perhaps that's due to being on more intimate terms with servants during his childhood. I can't decide!

I do think, however, that his schoolmasters and peers had a lot more to do with his upbringing than we give them credit for -- consider how much time he spent away at school with how much time he spent with his relatives (who, I hate to say it, probably passed Bertie and his sister around during the holidays; summers at Woollam Chersey and Christmases at Brinkley Court, that sort of thing). So he probably never spent more than a month or two a year in any given household, but about eight months a year away at school. This is how I account for Bertie's weakness for the "but we were at school together!" line that his friends so often employ: wouldn't you find yourself susceptible to pleas from old school friends if you used to see them more than you saw your own family?

[ironicbees.livejournal.com]

What a coincidence, I was just about to post a discussion topic myself (different subject)! I'll put it off for a bit so people don't miss this one. :D

I think when Bertie was a boy they were still in the period when children were supposed to be seen and not heard, although it was probably not as strict by his time. Seconding everything thesyntaxdr said about his upbringing being influenced more by schoolmasters & peers than his parents. Nurses/governesses as well, before he went off to school. Perhaps he viewed his parents as fond but somewhat distant figures.

I get the impression that Bertie's parents died within a very short time of each other, if not at the same time. I tend to lean toward car accident as the cause, and that it happened when Bertie was no more than 9 or so.

Bertie's an affectionate person and there's some reason to think he was fond of his mother at least. So I'm sure he was upset by their deaths. But I have no idea how quickly he'd have recovered. Aunt Agatha likely expected him to keep a stiff upper lip about the whole thing.

[ironicbees.livejournal.com]

Someone as open and affectionate as Bertie probably would have reminisced about specific servants in his stories if they'd done the majority of his upbringing; on the other hand, he seems to blur the line between servant and friend with Jeeves and perhaps that's due to being on more intimate terms with servants during his childhood. I can't decide!

He does mention having a nurse who had hiccups, but that's the only remotely specific one I can recall off the top of my head.

But he also does frequently mention how he's on good terms with various servants, like how he and Seppings have been buddies since his boyhood and they'd often discuss Seppings' lumbago; he says good morning to housemaids (or was it parlormaids?) and claims few men are more ready to sympathize with their distress; etc.

[hazeltea.livejournal.com]

Stories from the time period gloss over illness as well, as it was far more common, like in Cold Comfort Farm,Flora's parents die within months of each other due to "The annual Spanish Plague, or influenza", and she doesn't miss them or mourn because she only saw them a few times a year and barely know them- they traveled, and she was at boarding school. It's dismissed as being quite an ordinary situation. On holidays, she stayed with a friend. I think Bertie's situation was similar to this, except that he stayed with aunts and uncles during holidays.

[imshi.livejournal.com]

Given how common it was for parents to barely see their children I don't think it's that unlikely that he barely knew them... Just two examples off the top of my head are the kids in Mary Poppins who barely ever see their father or mother (though obviously that was written later) and in A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh their son spends most of his time with his nanny except at certain times of day when he does something with his father and/or mother... So yeah, he probably barely knew them, and I always assumed they died when he was quite young (between 5 and 10). It's funny though because I always assumed that they died together in a car crash or something... I wonder why that's come up so often.

[erynn999.livejournal.com]

I suspect it comes up often because it's quick and convenient, and it's one of the few ways most of us can think of that they'd both go together, to be honest.

[imshi.livejournal.com]

You're probably right. I do think it's interesting that that's what everyone has fixed on though. It could just as easily have been illness or something, but I suppose that's far less common now so it wouldn't occur to us.

[erynn999.livejournal.com]

Yeah, though considering, it's probably more likely to have been the Spanis Flu, as hazeltea suggests, given how deadly it was. In 1918, for instance, it killed some 50 million people. It would have had to be before that for Bertie's parents, I'm pretty sure, but still, it's damned sobering.

[erynn999.livejournal.com]

Of pretty much everything I've seen postulated, flu or something similar is quite possibly the most likely, honestly. I think that we forget how awful things could be without modern medicine sometimes, even just a hundred years ago. Hell, in a lot of parts of the world right now, death by disease in the prime of adulthood is not that uncommon. We know that Bertie knew his mother, or it might well have been death in childbirth. That's still horrifyingly common.

[imshi.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I know! I think there was a question on Qi once about why ducks killed more people than the atom bomb and it was because of the Spanish Flu which the ducks carried... Anyway, yeah, I think on reflection it's actually more likely to be that than a car accident, especially given the time we're talking about which would be the late 1890s to early 1900s? I can't imagine car accidents were that common..

[erynn999.livejournal.com]

I can't see Bertie really being born much earlier than 1895 at the very earliest, and if he were born in 1895, he'd have been old enough to fight in WWI, being about 20-ish in 1914, so you'd have to decide in your head-canon whether or not he was that old. 1918, when the pandemic hit, was the year the war ended, so that would place Bertie as being too young for what we know of the series in the 1920s if his parents died that year. I tend to place his birth year as somewhere between 1898 and 1904, personally, more toward the early end of that period.

[imshi.livejournal.com]

He doesn't ever say he was in WWI does he? I would say, yeah, around 1903-04 probably, because then he'd be too young for WWI (kind of, given they were taking 14/15 yr olds by the end, but anyway!) but old enough by the 20s for the books to line up properly... It all gets so complicated when you start thinking too hard about it, haha.

[erynn999.livejournal.com]

I think it would depend on the family as to how strict that was. I still got the "children are to be seen and not heard" from my dad's mother until I was at least ten. It wasn't strictly enforced, but it was held up as an ideal and brought out with a vengeance if we were annoying at all.

Schoolmasters probably had a lot of influence on him, though he hasn't much good to say about them any more than he does about aunts. We know that he got chased by Percy before he married Agatha, back when Bertie was just a boy and stealing his cigars, so he probably was visiting other estates where his relatives had friends or where his friends lived.

Given what we know, I'm not sure there would have been any particular adult (beyond maybe Seppings) that he associated with a lot and talked with on a familiar basis. I'd love to see a collection of quotes where Bertie's talking about servants and his interactions with them beyond his relationship with Jeeves so that we have some idea what the background is.

Also? I'd love to see your conversation topic! This is always such a cool community. For such a small fandom in terms of numbers of people actively writing fic (compared to, say, the Stargate franchise or Harry Potter or Star Trek, for example), we have so much awesome stuff going on, and there's almost always a fic in progress with somebody, or a new one being posted every week or two. So sweet. *happy sigh*

[erynn999.livejournal.com]

I think even in the 1910s it would be possible for an auto accident to be the cause, particularly given that Bertie's family is very wealthy. The wikipedia article on the history of autos says that 30,204 cars were produced in France in 1903, which was 43% of the world's motorcars (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_automobile), so a rich English family even then might well have had one. Given that cars in that time weren't closed, an accident would be pretty much guaranteed to throw people out of the vehicle. Apparently, from about 1905, the price came down to where a middle-class family could afford one, largely due to mass production. The Edwardian stuff (up to about 1914) is specifically covered here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brass_Era_car).

That's probably more than you wanted to know but, yes, Bertie's parents could easily have died in a car crash before 1910.

And also, your reasoning for the "but we were at school together" stuff hitting Bertie so hard really makes sense.

[ironicbees.livejournal.com]

I'm sure he did visit other families a lot as a kid. There's also Sir Reginald Something at Bleaching Court, who was a friend of Bertie's dad, and Bertie has a standing invitation to visit at any time.

Good idea! I'll make myself a note to search for servant-related quotes. There's already a bunch in my notes, but I know I've missed some. Will have to keep an eye out when I read.

I know! I'm continually surprised that this fandom is as active as it is and still drawing in new members. XD I'll post later tomorrow.

Oh, and reading others' comments on Bertie's parents' deaths, I'm starting to agree that death from illness might be more likely than auto accident. His parents being rich, I can see them having a car even if they weren't yet common with the general masses, and I think road safety was more lax then. But yes, fatal illness was very prevalent. The 1918 flu epidemic was probably too late for them, but there were numerous other diseases and epidemics that could have killed them. I hate to think of them suffering rather than going out quickly, though.

[erynn999.livejournal.com]

Jeeves mentions having "dabbled in the war" but Bertie certainly never mentions having been in the military. They were probably taking those 14/15 year olds because they'd lied about their age, and I doubt they would have taken one from the upper classes, to be honest. The upper class kids pretty much automatically became officers, and that required at least a certain amount of schooling.

And yeah, it was never supposed to really line up logically, and Plum seemed to be pretending that WWI never really happened in Bertie's world, I sometimes think.

[ironicbees.livejournal.com]

Whoopsie, should have read this comment before posting about auto accidents below. Oh well. Your comments echo my thoughts exactly. Thanks for the info! :)

[erynn999.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think that's why a lot of us kind of go for the "car accident" thing -- because it's not slow and lingering and horrible, which flu or pneumonia or scarlet fever or some other awful thing would be.

As to Bertie's various invitations and such, I think he really is a sweet and pretty popular guy, but (as we've noted elsewhere) he's not necessarily the most reliable narrator, and his family may be more down on him than the rest of the world.

[erynn999.livejournal.com]

I am a lean, mean, researchin' machine! ;)

[imshi.livejournal.com]

That's true! And honestly, I can't imagine Bertie lying about his age so that he could go and fight. It's just not in his character...

It's the sort of thing that I sometimes ignore, or conveniently skate over when I write fic and stuff, just because it really doesn't fit with the tone of what I'm writing or I don't feel like dealing with the effects of it on the characters. Which I can imagine Plum doing. And yeah, I've often wondered how they quite work... It's probably one of those wonderful paused worlds where it's going to be the 20s forever...

[ironicbees.livejournal.com]

I think his hosts' objections are not so much to Bertie himself as to the trouble that tends to follow him. ;) He also has kind of a low self image, which likely colors his perceptions.

[erynn999.livejournal.com]

To me, it's always kind of just "jazz age" with a little bit of gangster noir tossed in for good measure, but without world war 2 happening at all. Sort of this misty AU 1920s-1040s thingummy.

[erynn999.livejournal.com]

Gods yes, on both counts! Poor Bertie. Wherever he goes, disaster is sure to follow. I'm sure it did before he met Jeeves, considering his sock-napping, silver-thieving previous "valet" Meadowes and that barking drunken arse Brinkely or Barkley or whatever the hell his name was in which version of the story we get.

[imshi.livejournal.com]

Gosh that'd be nice. It breaks my heart slightly to think of Bertie and Jeeves being pulled into WWII.

[erynn999.livejournal.com]

Gods, me too. I glossed over it a bit in my MUNCLE crossover, where we see them in the 1960s, but the world of Man from UNCLE is a distinctly Cold War reality and WWII happened there in all its ugliness.

There's one really long ongoing story here with Bertie and Jeeves dealing with the War, and it's a damned hard one to read, though well-written. Just heartbreaking. At least they're together in it, though, and the author is writing it essentially to show how they would manage to survive it together. That, at least, leaves me hopeful that they'll both come out at the end alive.

Personally, I suspect Jeeves would say "damn this" and stuff Bertie in a box and take him wherever it was least likely there would be any fighting. Patriotic or not, he wouldn't want to risk Bertie.