Chapter 17

Prudence told him, “For the moment, Reg, do nothing. I phoned your mother back, and explained a little to her about you, me and the girls, but I emphasised that you need a lot of time to adjust from being a loner to dealing with people at large. She said she was willing to wait. I believe her, Reg.”

“Thank you, Prudence. I don’t think I could have done that myself. I couldn’t have told her about you girls. You are a wonderful, thoughtful girl. It is no wonder that I love you.”

Still standing behind Reg, Prudence put her arms round him, and gave him a passionate hug. “Reg, I referred to her as ‘mother’ on the phone, as if I was your wife. Is that all right with you, dear?”

“Prudence, you ARE my wife, as far as I am concerned. I have no finances to provide a home for my wife, or I should say wives, and I apologise for that lack of wherewithal. I have been gob-smacked by what has happened to me in just a few weeks. I never envisaged my life to be like this. In fact, I did not even plan ahead beyond my degree. I was so stupid!”

She demurred. “Stupid – no. Just unable to see far ahead. You are no different to most people in that respect. Planning a future does not seem to be normal in most people. As for me, Frances, Freda and Erika, we had our future planned by our parents. They did not see us finding a man to marry, so they steered us towards getting a useful university degree to enable each of us to earn a living as a single woman.

We went along with that assumption, as none of us ever imagined a man who would look at us and see a woman worth caring for. Frances’ Mum was lucky: she DID find such a man, but they are so rare that the chances of meeting one was astronomically remote. Finding you was a real bonus, Reg. Please always stay with me. I don’t intend to leave you, ever.”

Reg was recovering his poise. “My darling Prudence, do you mind if I let the lecturers and students see that you are my girl?”

“Reg, it is time you let them see that ALL four of us are your girls. All of us girls will be so proud to be seen with you in public. Can I hold your hand when we walk together, darling?”

“Hey, that is a great idea! When I walk with any of you, I will hold your hand, and you will hold mine, and the world will see us as a unit.”

“Yes, I agree with you, Reg, but can I suggest you don’t try to hold hands with all four of us at the same time? Just do it with one girl, and perhaps another girl the next day, so we all get a chance?”

“Okay, but we should arrange this with the others beforehand. We don’t want squabbles about who holds my hand, do we?”

“Fine. Now let me see your face, so I know you will be presentable.” She scrutinised his face, and wiped it with a towel. “Hmm ... not bad, but you are a little red-eyed. Do you have any eye-drops?”

“Nope. Never needed them.”

“Well, I have some. I have had to cry at times. Let me get them and put a little in your eyes. That will soothe them.”

She rushed off to find the drops, and was soon back with them, with Frances tagging along. Frances watched as Prudence carefully inserted the drops, then asked why.

“Frances, I insisted that Reg phone his mother to tell her he had a girlfriend, just as we are doing with our own parents. It turned out better than expected. His mother, being on her own now, has realised she misses her son, and recognised she had not treated him well.

When Reg found that his mother now cared about him, he started to break down but had strength of mind to close the call before it happened. He was a bit of a wreck for a while, but he is okay now; just needs his reddened eyes seen to.”

Frances exclaimed, “Oh, my poor boy! And I wasn’t here for you.”

Prudence jumped in, “I was, though, Frances, and that is all that matters: one of his girls was there for him. It doesn’t matter which.”

“I suppose. I have to get used to us being a group, and not just singletons. I keep thinking of Reg as MY man.”

Prudence admitted, “I think the same way, Frances. For each of us, he is MY man. That is correct, but he is also OUR man, and we have to allow for that factor in anything we do.”

“True. You have really fitted into our clique, Prudence. You are thinking about our clan the same as the rest of us; as one of the group, not being self-centred.”

“Since I fell in love with Reg, Frances, that is what I am forced to do. If I want to have Reg, I have to have the rest of you as well.”

“We all have to live with that, Prudence.”

“Oh, another thing, Frances. Reg wants to hold hands with whichever of us he is walking with outside. He feels he should publicly show his feelings for each of us, this way. I approved of the idea. I presume you do also?”

“Nice idea. Typical boy-girl action. We can do that when walking between classes, even inside the building.”

“I assumed that,” said Reg. “I want to show my commitment to each of you, in public; not just sitting together at lunchtime. This is a one-to-one obvious relationship, holding hands. We will confuse everyone when it is a different girl next time!” He laughed at the thought.

Prudence arrived on her scooter ahead of Frances’ car, and parked her vehicle in a corner under a tree. She made her way slowly to the car park entrance and waited. As soon as Frances got her car parked, her passengers grabbed their bags and cases and hurried to the entrance to join Prudence.

They clustered to allow Frances to catch up, then moved as a group towards the buildings where their classes were held. Prudence and Reg were heading for the same class, so they elected to be the hand-holding pair.

They ambled along the corridor to the lecture room, with only a few fellow students noticing the hand-holding. When they entered the room, Reg led the way, looking for seating for them as a pair. Finding a suitable spot, he guided Prudence to her seat, only releasing her hand when she was comfortably seated. He sat down beside her, turned to give her a happy smile, and for a moment they kissed then sat demurely to listen to the history lecturer.

“Ladies and gentlemen, today’s lecture is about social structures at their basic: the family unit. Everyone assumes that their own family unit is the norm, and in most countries, that assumption is valid. However, it is not necessarily valid in other countries, or even in other parts of their own country.

This is the trouble with norms: Its very normality cannot be taken for granted.

Take for example marriage age: Here in England the normal marriage age is eighteen, but sixteen is acceptable if the parents give their approval. Muslim families regard 15 as acceptable, but civil law insists on 16. It has long been sixteen in Scotland, which occasioned the Gretna Green runaway marriages. There are similar problems where civil law demands one man and one woman, where Muslim tradition allows for up to four wives for a man. Only the first is recognised in English law, so additional wives are neither able to have official ceremonies or recognition, and will no doubt be regarded as mere mistresses.

Incidentally, the Koran does not give a blanket approval of polygamy. The condition is that if a man has to look after a number of orphans, and cannot cope, then he can marry a second, third, or fourth wife to achieve that end. That is the only justification or conditional authority offered by the Koran, despite what many Muslims appear to believe.

You will no doubt have read about early Mormon practice in the United States where polygamy, for apparently religious reasons, was regarded as the norm for many years in Mormon communities. I said ‘apparently’, because the practice of polygamy is a means of rapidly increasing the numbers of a select group. One should be able to recognise a pragmatic decision being adopted as a religious tradition, for once a practice is claimed to be in accordance with religious dogma, it is more easily enforceable among followers of the group or cult.

Eventually the Mormon church, under considerable social and political pressure reverted to the majority American view, and resumed monogamy as standard practice, thus making it possible for Utah to become a state.

However, even today there are some Mormon families formed with more than one wife. If the ladies are all Mormon, they will be in that family structure willingly, even if their own church nationally officially frowns on the practice. Becoming a second wife is preferable to a girl who otherwise might not obtain a husband. There are always pluses and minuses to any family structure.

There is usually a logical basis for polygamy, and in some cases for polyandry – where one woman has more than one husband. Often in the latter case there is a background of either a shortage of women, or a surfeit of men, which comes to the same thing. In some medieval circumstances, where many men have died through war, disease, or natural disaster, the local authorities might give approval for second wives to mop up the glut of widows.

Genuine polygamy was practiced in Germanic countries in early medieval times, but only the nobility could afford the practice. This grew out of earlier tribal traditions.

However, to get back to minimum ages; in medieval times one had a practice of children being married at an early age, officially seven, usually for dynastic reasons. The marriage would not normally be consummated until puberty, when the young wife was menstruating, usually twelve, and a boy at fourteen. That would be a recognition that she was now a woman. The normal kind of marriage in the community was usually embarked upon as soon as a girl had reached puberty. This was a reflection of several important factors in the lives of common people. First, as there was no such things as pensions in old age or disability, you needed your adult children to look after you.

The sooner you started producing children, the quicker they would become adults of working age and so net contributors to the family finances.

Again, the mortality figures, where they can be assumed without any real statistical records, implied very young ages for working people. Reaching forty-five was regarded as being an old person. The health question is vastly important. Diseases that are easily treated today killed most patients, as almost no-one had access to a doctor. The older women of the village were normally the repository of medical knowledge, and that was almost all herbal treatments or midwifery experience.

Incidentally, most of the women who were later accused of witchcraft were such herbalists. Their accusers were afraid of the powerful influence that their healing power gave them in a community, and accusing them of witchcraft was an easy way of attacking them. There was no legal protection for anyone accused of witchcraft; impartial evidence was never required, almost all evidence was hearsay reports. Tests for witches, where applied, amounted to: if you survived, that proved you were a witch. If you died, then sad; God knows you are innocent.

It is reminiscent of the infamous coin toss: “Heads I win; Tails you lose.”

It was the same with witch-finding using a needle: stick a needle all over a person’s body, and eventually the body will cease reacting to the constant pain stimulus. That simple human fact was regarded as proof that you were a witch. Someone higher up in society should have insisted that the test be performed on witchfinders or the accusers first! That would have sorted the matter out.

So, having disposed of witchcraft, we can get back to the question of family structures. As usual, economic status determined what was allowed to you. The better-off in society were expected to abide strictly by the Roman Catholic religious rules, and in marriage the Church took this to extremes, based on Old Testament tribal rules of five degrees of affinity. The Church expanded this to an impossible seven degrees.

Any ‘close’ relationship barred you from marriage, even if the relationship was not genetic in form.

Originally, such rules came out of small tribal societies, where you wanted to avoid inbreeding. The Roman Catholic Church applied these rules strenuously, purely because they were sanctioned by The Bible.

They conveniently ignored the same Old Testament’s instructions on what to do when you overcame a distant tribe. These instructions were to kill all the men and boys and absorb the women and small children into your tribe – presumably as slaves for breeding. I don’t recall the Pope ever demanding such rules for medieval warfare. The nearest equivalent was the Japanese when they invaded China and Korea in the 1930s. They forced many local women into Japanese army brothels to keep their troops entertained. For many decades after that war, Japan refused to even admit that such actions happened.