I’ve been wearing my deerstalker hat for a considerable time to try and solve the mystery of the peculiar and solitary interest in my blog called ‘Who remembers Violet Elizabeth Bott.‘ Ever since I first put it up this particular blog has had a regular visitor, sometimes there are one or two people who look but as a general rule it is one single person who calls it up and reads it. I would dearly like to know who that person is and why it interests him so much that he will return to it so frequently.
Do any of you know if it is possible to get WordPress to reveal his identity? I think there’s a story behind it and I would love to know what it is.
The blog began by a consideration of the four books I was reading at the time, which were ‘War and Peace’, ‘Death plays a part’ by Lesley Cookman, ‘Tom Brown’s school days’ and Kate Atkinson’s ‘A God in Ruins.’
At an early point in Kate Atkinson’s book there is a sequence called ‘The Adventures of Augustus’ which an aunt has written about our hero’s childhood, seeing him as a “scuffed, badly behaved schoolboy, his cap glued permanently to the back of his head and a cowlick of hair in his eyes and a catapult hanging out of his pocket.” That was such an exact description of ‘Just William’ I wanted to rush out and find a copy of one of the books, which I’d gobbled up when I was nine years old and read it again for old times sake. Just to look at the book covers made me quite nostalgic.
But then of course I went on to remember the dreaded Violet Elizabeth Bott, who was the next door neighbour to our William. She had ringlets and a lisp and was quite hideously spoilt, threatening to ‘thcream and thecream until I thick’ if she didn’t get her own way instantly. When I was nine, I simply saw her as a character to hate, now I can see that she was a bully and that set me wondering about bullies, because I’m also reading ‘Tom Brown’s School Days’ and that’s a blueprint for how a big public school can and does produce hideous bullies. One of the pupils in that novel holds Tom Brown so close to the fire in order to torment him, that he scorches the kid’s legs. The cane is used by far too many people in this story, but Tom Brown has convinced himself that it’s all being done to “make a man of him.” Hmmm. But what sort of man? I ask myself. By that time my brain had slotted itself into a completely new gear and I got to thinking about how many bullies there are in our society now and wondering why it should be.
Since I wrote this blog the bullies have virtually taken over our government and the situation we’re living in has grown even worse than I feared it would be in February 2016 when I wrote the blog.
My solitary visitor turned up yet again yesterday and now what’s left of my brain is working overtime to try and work out who on earth it could be.
Any help would be deeply appreciated. I like a good mystery me.
Beryl Kingston Blog 
That is a mystery indeed, maybe they are trying to recapture their childhood! Our junior school teacher used to read William at the end of the day. My school friend, whose mother was a teacher, was not allowed to have the William books because of the ‘bad language’. Perhaps your mystery blogger is Martin Jarvis, he must have been reading William stories on Radio 4 for decades!
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