WOMAN’S CONFESSION

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22164, 18 January 1934, Page 16

WOMAN’S CONFESSION

“OLD ALL MY DAYS” STRANGE LIFE HISTORY NO FRIVOLITY AND NO YOUTH. “ I have never had any frivolity or any youth. I have been old all my days.” This is the heartcry of a woman of 62. She told this to a judge in an open London court, and later she told the. story of her uneventful life to an interviewer. “During the whole of my life I have been in love only once, and that was with my husband,” she said. This .woman, Mrs Sarah Mabel Reed, widow of the late Mr Thomas Alfred Reed, first made her confession at the hearing of a probate action in which she had disputed the terms of her husband’s will. Her husband died in October, 1931, leaving estate valued at £79,000. Mrs Reed opposed a second will of September, 1923, iu which she was excluded, contending that at the time-it was made her husband was not of sound mind and had delusions about her. In this will Mr Reed left the bulk of his fortune to his children and grandchildren, expressing a wish that they should allow his widow sufficient to maintain her in reasonable manner during widowhood “ without swank.” ]

The case was settled out of court, when counsel for Mrs Reed withdrew entirely the allegations made against her husband at , the hearing. „ “ Looking back on my 62 years of lite, it seems that I have been old ever _ since I left the cradle,” Mrs Reed said in the interview. “Always I have shouldered everybody else’s troubles because I wag not made to do anything else. I think I must be the only woman in the world who has never been to a dance. I don’t know whatfrivolity is. “ I was 28 before I ever kissed a man. That was on the night I became engaged to my husband. Till then I had never known what it was fo have the ‘ flutters.’ Until my marriage my whole life was devoted to study and to looking after my mother and father and our home at Cardiff. Seldom did I know what it was to go to a party, “ In 28 years I went to the theatre only on very rare occasions. I had two brothers, but'T seldom saw them, as they were too intent on their studies.

“ Then came my marriage. My husband took a newly-purchased house, to which he removed all the old furniture of his first marriage. My husband then J.ad only a.few hundred pounds in the bank. But I -was very happy. He was ambitious, and was often away, on business for long periods at various seaports up and down tire country and abroad. But I was always there waiting for him when he came back.

“My husband was really a most extravagant lover. In everything he was the soul of impetuosity 1 Often he would fall on his knees at my feet, calling me the most beautiful woman in the world. Almost up to the time of-big death lie would write me three letters every day when he was away. We had two children, but my 11-year-old son died of pleurisy in 1920. My daughter married in the same year.

“ This seems to b e the whole of my humble history. It is a self-confessed history of a meek and shy woman who his never for a single minute of her life known what it is to be really young.”