Juffrouw Engel's Childhood Home is the old red-brick house concealed in the woods behind the hills where Juffrouw Engel was born and spent her early childhood. Its history binds together the losses that left her vulnerable to Agatha Bulstronk, the disputed ownership that kept her from returning, and the eventual recovery of both the house and her inheritance. When Juffrouw Engel finally moved back, the familiar furnishings and paintings were still there: the house had preserved a material trace of the life taken from her.

Setting and Early Family Life

The house stood in the village where Juffrouw Engel’s father worked as a doctor. It was an old house of red brick, set apart in the woods behind the hills and sufficiently hidden that Juffrouw Engel thought Matilda Wormwood might not know it. The secluded setting contrasts with the house’s place at the center of her family history: it was not simply a property, but the home in which she was born and the setting from which she was separated as a child.

Juffrouw Engel’s mother died when she was two. Her father had a busy medical practice, so he asked his wife’s unmarried sister to live with them and manage the household and care for the child. The aunt agreed and moved into the house. Juffrouw Engel remembered disliking her from the beginning and missing her mother intensely. She also described her aunt as unkind, though her father did not know this: he was rarely home, and the aunt behaved differently when he was present. The house therefore held an intimate family history that Juffrouw Engel’s father, occupied by his work, did not fully see.

Bereavement and Disputed Ownership

When Juffrouw Engel was five, her father died suddenly. She was left in the house with her aunt, who became her legal guardian and, as Juffrouw Engel recounted it, acquired full parental authority over her. The aunt also became the owner of the house. Juffrouw Engel later said that her father’s death was surrounded by mystery, but she had been too young at the time to question it. The missing explanation for his death and the transfer of the home thus belong to the same unresolved family past, without the story establishing what happened to him.

As an adult, Juffrouw Engel believed that the house should have passed to her. She explained to Matilda Wormwood that a guardian might be allowed to live in a home for a limited period, while the property would generally be held for the child and become the child’s on reaching adulthood. This is Juffrouw Engel’s account of how the arrangement ought to have worked; in practice, the documents and her aunt’s control prevented her from claiming the house. Her father’s will could not be found, and she suspected that someone had destroyed it.

Agatha Bulstronk produced a paper that she claimed her brother-in-law had signed, supposedly leaving the house to her in return for caring for Juffrouw Engel. Juffrouw Engel was certain it was forged, but said that no one could prove it. Her aunt was also a respected and influential member of the community, while Juffrouw Engel lacked the money to hire a good lawyer and challenge the claim. The house’s disputed ownership was therefore sustained not by a resolution of the underlying doubt, but by the unequal resources and authority of the two women.

The arrangement extended beyond the house. When Juffrouw Engel became a teacher, her aunt demanded repayment for years of food, clothing, and shoes, calling the sum thousands of pounds. She required Juffrouw Engel to surrender her salary for ten years, leaving her only one pound a week for personal spending, and arranged for the school to deposit the salary directly into her bank account. Juffrouw Engel signed the document that secured this arrangement. She later recognized that her wages might have been her chance at freedom, but explained that a lifetime of fear had left her unable to refuse. The house and the salary were different forms of control, both rooted in the power her aunt had acquired after her father’s death.

The Cottage and the Lost Home

While her aunt was still asleep, Juffrouw Engel would rise early to walk. On one of these walks, two years before telling Matilda Wormwood the story, she found a small, empty cottage and traced its ownership to a farmer. She asked to rent it, although the farmer warned her that it had no running water and was not fit to live in. Juffrouw Engel insisted that she had fallen in love with it and wanted to live there; the farmer agreed to let her rent it for ten pence a week.

The cottage was not her childhood home, and finding it did not settle her claim to the red-brick house. It did, however, give her a place of her own, however bare, and she described renting it as her greatest triumph. Set beside the disputed family home, the cottage marks the modest scale of the freedom she could secure for herself while Agatha Bulstronk continued to occupy the house and retain control of her inheritance.

Return to the Red House

Two days after Agatha Bulstronk disappeared, Juffrouw Engel received a registered letter from a local notary. Her father’s will had unexpectedly come to light. According to the document, Juffrouw Engel had been the legal owner since her father’s death of a property on the edge of the village known as the Red House, until recently occupied by Agatha Bulstronk. The will also left her father’s savings to her; the money, the letter reported, had remained safe in the bank. The notary asked her to come to his office so that the house and funds could be put in her name.

Juffrouw Engel did so, and within three weeks she moved into the Red House, the home where she had grown up. The furniture and paintings from her earlier life had been left there. Their survival gives the return a concrete dimension: she recovered not only a legal claim, but a house still containing objects associated with her family and childhood. The will resolved the ownership dispute in the story where Juffrouw Engel’s belief and lack of resources had not been enough to do so.

The restored home also became the setting for Juffrouw Engel’s friendship with Matilda Wormwood. Matilda visited after school every day, and the two formed a close bond. When Matilda’s family prepared to leave, Juffrouw Engel offered to care for her and pay all her expenses, while making clear that she would take Matilda only with her parents’ agreement. Her mother accepted the proposal with indifference, and her father gave permission in his haste to catch a plane. The home that had once been the site of Juffrouw Engel’s dispossession thus became the place where she could offer a child the care and security she herself had lacked.