Juffrouw Engel’s father dies when she is five, and her aunt becomes her guardian, an early family catastrophe that leaves the child without either parent and places her home and upbringing under the control of a relative she fears. Recounted to Matilda Wormwood years later, the history begins with bereavement and deepens into an account of uncertain death, lost property, and a childhood in which legal authority offers no protection from private cruelty.

Identity and Family Background

Juffrouw Engel was born in a secluded old red-brick house in the woods beyond the hills, where her father worked as the village doctor. Her mother died when Juffrouw Engel was two. Because her father had a busy practice and needed someone to manage the household and care for his young daughter, he asked his wife’s unmarried sister to move in. The aunt was about thirty, by Juffrouw Engel’s later estimate.

The arrival of a maternal relative did not restore the security lost with her mother. Juffrouw Engel says she disliked her aunt from the beginning and found her unkind. Her father, however, was rarely home. When he was present, the aunt behaved differently, so he did not see the treatment that shaped his daughter’s early life. Juffrouw Engel’s account thus places the future guardian inside the household before the father’s death: she was already a source of fear, but her conduct remained hidden from the parent who might have intervened.

Her Father’s Death and the Transfer of Authority

When Juffrouw Engel was five, her father died suddenly. She describes the change in stark terms: one moment he was there, and the next he was gone. Too young at the time to question the circumstances, she later learned that the death was surrounded by mystery. No precise account of how he died was established in her telling; suicide was what it appeared to be, although she stresses that no one could easily believe such a thing of a sensible, balanced man.

As Juffrouw Engel recounts the uncertainty to Matilda, Matilda voices the darker possibility that the aunt killed him and made the death look like suicide. Juffrouw Engel does not confirm that accusation. She answers that no such conclusion should be reached without evidence. The distinction matters: the story makes suspicion part of the family history, not a proven solution to it. Her father’s death remains unresolved, and the account supplies no evidence that establishes the aunt’s responsibility.

The immediate consequence was clear even where the cause of death was not. Juffrouw Engel was left alone with her aunt, who became her legal guardian and, in Juffrouw Engel’s account, acquired full parental authority over her. The aunt also became the owner of the house, though Juffrouw Engel says this happened somehow rather than explaining a settled or transparent transfer. Bereavement therefore changed more than the composition of the household: it left a child dependent on the very person she had already learned to fear, while control of the family home passed out of her hands.

Childhood Under Her Aunt’s Control

After her father was gone, the aunt’s treatment grew far worse. Juffrouw Engel calls her a monster and describes life with her as a nightmare. She says she was timid and shy rather than strong-willed, and became so frightened that she trembled when her aunt entered a room. By the age of ten, she had become, in her own description, her aunt’s slave.

That description is grounded in ordinary, repeated work imposed on a child: Juffrouw Engel made her aunt’s bed, washed and ironed her clothes, cooked, and performed the household duties. She attended the same school Matilda later attends, but lived at home and had no safe alternative to the aunt’s demands. Asked whether she could have complained, she responds that there was no one to complain to and that fear had kept her silent. The legal guardianship that followed her father’s death functioned in practice as unchallenged domestic power; the account offers no protective adult or institution that could counter it.

The Inheritance Dispute and Its Long Aftermath

The effects of the father’s death persisted after Juffrouw Engel became an adult and qualified as a teacher. Her aunt claimed that she owed thousands and thousands of pounds for food, clothes, and shoes provided during her upbringing, then demanded that Juffrouw Engel repay the supposed debt by surrendering her salary for ten years. The aunt arranged for the school to deposit the wages directly into her own bank account, gave Juffrouw Engel only one pound of pocket money a week, and had her sign a paper. Juffrouw Engel later recognised that her salary might have offered a path to freedom, but says that a lifetime of fear left her unable to refuse.

The same imbalance shaped the dispute over the childhood home. Juffrouw Engel believed the house should have been held for her and become hers when she was grown, but her aunt produced a document purportedly signed by her father, leaving the property to his sister-in-law in return for caring for Juffrouw Engel. Juffrouw Engel was certain the document was forged, yet said no one could prove it. She lacked money to take the matter to a lawyer, while her aunt had considerable influence and was highly respected in the community. These are Juffrouw Engel’s account of the competing claims and her assessment of the paper, not an independent legal finding.

The later discovery of the father’s actual will reversed the practical outcome. A local notary informed Juffrouw Engel that the will had mysteriously turned up and established that she had been the legal owner, since her father’s death, of the property on the village’s outskirts known as Het Rode Huis. The document also left her father’s savings to her; the money had remained safe in the bank. Within three weeks of receiving the letter, she moved into the house where she had grown up, with its old furniture and paintings still there. The aunt’s earlier hold over the home was undone, though the text leaves unexplained how the will reappeared or what happened to the aunt after she left.

Narrative Significance

Juffrouw Engel tells this history to Matilda in a quiet conversation at the cottage, and Matilda’s questions bring the difference between known fact and suspicion into the open. The account makes the childhood event the beginning of a longer dispossession: the father’s death gives the aunt authority, the uncertainty around the death shadows that authority, and the disputed will allows the loss of the home to continue into Juffrouw Engel’s adult life. Its eventual recovery restores the house and savings, but cannot undo the years in which she was made to serve the person who controlled them.

The story also gives Matilda a model of the distance between formal power and actual protection. Juffrouw Engel had a guardian, attended school, and later earned a salary, yet those facts did not enable her to escape the aunt’s coercion or challenge the property claim. In the later resolution of Matilda’s own home life, the contrast becomes especially pointed: Matilda must ask her parents’ permission to remain with Juffrouw Engel, while Juffrouw Engel’s recollection shows how a child’s dependence on adults can be used to confine rather than care for her. The father’s death is therefore both a bereavement and the hinge on which the story’s history of guardianship, exploitation, and eventual recovery turns.