Anybody Can Do Anything by Betty MacDonald

Betty is lonely and isolated, despite her rambunctious neighbours Pa and Ma Kettle, and only humour keeps her going:

There is no electricity and no indoor plumbing: she and Bob can take baths only twice a week, in a washtub in the kitchen – when the stove is hot enough to heat the water. She also has to trim the kerosene lamps by hand and scrub the wooden floors, which are made of white pine planks and impossible to keep clean. There is no sharing of household chores with Bob, and she has to fetch ninety-nine per cent of the water for washing clothes into the cabin herself. But even after the house is more fixed up Betty's life remains one of constant drudgery. It begins to feel like home, even if the kitchen still has the malignant stove which thwarts Betty's every attempt at cooking. Now, finally, they lay floors, put in windows, fix broken sills and sagging doors and put in a sink - without water, but at least with a drain. After frequent rain, mildew has been forming on the clothes in the closets and when they get into bed at night the bedclothes are clammy. Only then does husband Bob allow them to start on the lesser matter of the house, which lacks both doors and windows and other such little necessities. This was the stuff of her first book and the beginnings of a unique writer: in 1945 she published The Egg and I, a hugely funny, lightly fictionalised account of her life as a chicken farmer.Īt first the two are occupied with just getting the previously derelict farm into some kind of shape: building the chicken houses, planting the garden and a back field (with a horse, not machinery), clearing the orchard of stumps, and buying several hundred yeeping baby chicks. Here Betty had to contend with a difficult husband, loneliness, pregnancy, primitive neighbors, and thousands of chickens. The newlyweds immediately started a chicken ranch in the remote American Northwest. Well educated and raised as a lady, young Betty Bard in 1927 married an ex-soldier she barely knew.

Anybody Can Do Anything by Betty MacDonald