Marij Engel—Agatha Bulstronk

Marij Engel—Agatha Bulstronk is a relationship shaped by a stark reversal: Agatha Bulstronk enters Marij Engel’s home as her mother’s sister and apparent caregiver, but after Engel is orphaned, she becomes the person who controls her labor, money, and access to her inheritance. Engel’s account traces how that dependence was established when she was a child, how it continued into adulthood, and how leaving the family home became a limited but important act of resistance.

Origins and Guardianship

Engel was born in a red-brick house, hidden in woodland beyond the hills, where her father worked as the village doctor. Her mother died when Engel was two. Because her father had a busy medical practice and needed someone to manage the household and care for his daughter, he invited Bulstronk, his wife’s unmarried sister, to live with them. Bulstronk was about thirty. Engel says she disliked her aunt from the beginning and missed her mother intensely, but her father did not know how unhappy she was: he was rarely home, and Bulstronk behaved differently when he was present.

When Engel was five, her father died suddenly. His death later seemed to her to be surrounded by mystery, but she stresses that she was too young at the time to question it. His death left her alone with Bulstronk, who became her legal guardian and held full parental authority over her. The red-brick house also passed into the aunt’s possession by some means. The double loss—of her father and of her secure place in the home—left the child dependent on the very person she already feared.

The family’s isolation deepened that dependence. Engel says that other relatives were either dead or had emigrated, and that this remained the case. She attended the same school Matilda later attended, but she continued to live at home. There was no other family member to whom she could readily turn, and, as she later explains, fear kept her from complaining. Guardianship in this relationship was therefore not simply a formal status: it placed Bulstronk in control of Engel’s everyday life while leaving the child without an apparent alternative source of protection.

Abuse and Domestic Servitude

Engel describes Bulstronk’s conduct after her father’s death as terrifying. She refuses to recount the specific things her aunt did, calling them too awful to discuss, but explains the effect: she became so frightened that she trembled when Bulstronk entered a room. Engel contrasts her own shy, unassertive nature with Matilda’s confidence, making clear that the aunt’s power rested not only on authority but also on the fear she had cultivated.

By the time Engel was ten, she says, years of being oppressed and humiliated had made her Bulstronk’s slave. She obeyed every order immediately, whatever it was. Her work included the whole household: making Bulstronk’s bed, washing and ironing her clothes, cooking, and learning the domestic tasks the home required. These details show how the relationship reached beyond occasional cruelty. Bulstronk relied on a child to maintain the household, while Engel’s obedience was secured through a combination of legal dependence, isolation, and terror.

Matilda asks whether Engel could have complained to anyone. Engel’s response is that she was too frightened to do so and had no one to ask. Her account thus links the silence around the abuse to the conditions in which it occurred: the guardian controlled the household, Engel had no nearby family to support her, and the child had been reduced to automatic compliance. Engel does not supply a catalogue of Bulstronk’s acts, but the consequences she names—fear, trembling, servitude, and silence—make the coercive character of the relationship plain.

Wages and the Attempt to Leave

As an adult, Engel’s dependence continued through money. When she obtained work as a teacher, Bulstronk claimed that Engel owed her for the food, clothes, and shoes she had provided during her upbringing. She put the total at thousands of pounds and demanded Engel’s salary for ten years as repayment. Engel was to receive only one pound a week as pocket money; Bulstronk arranged for the school to pay the salary directly into her bank account and had Engel sign a paper.

Matilda recognizes that a salary could have offered Engel a route to freedom. Engel agrees, but explains that she had spent nearly her whole life as Bulstronk’s slave and still lacked the courage to refuse. The episode extends the old imbalance into adult life: even after earning a wage through her own work, Engel could not freely use it. The arrangement converted past care, which Bulstronk represented as a debt, into continuing financial control.

Engel’s first major break came two years before she told Matilda her story. She had begun taking early walks while Bulstronk slept and discovered an empty cottage. Its farmer-owner was milking cows when she approached him. Although he warned that the cottage had no running water and nothing else to make it an easy home, Engel insisted that she wanted to live there. She was drawn to it, described herself as romantic, and agreed to pay ten pence a week. She gave the farmer forty pence for a month’s rent in advance.

Leaving still required a deliberate confrontation. After preparing dinner, Engel went upstairs, packed her few possessions into a cardboard box, then came down and told Bulstronk she was leaving because she had rented a house. Her aunt responded with fury and challenged how someone earning only one pound a week could rent a place. Engel’s answer—that she had done so—marks a small but decisive change in their established pattern: for once, she acted before seeking her aunt’s permission and stated her decision rather than obeying an order.

The Disputed Home and the Limits of Escape

The cottage did not resolve the question of what Bulstronk had taken from Engel. Engel explains that her father’s will was never found and appeared to have been destroyed. She believes her aunt was responsible, but the conversation does not establish who destroyed it or prove the circumstances of her father’s death. Engel says she was too young to wonder about the death at the time and learned of its surrounding mystery only later; suspicion in the conversation remains distinct from proof.

Without a will, Engel understands herself to be her father’s nearest relative and therefore the person who should inherit the house. Bulstronk, however, produced a document said to bear Engel’s father’s signature and to leave the house to his sister-in-law in return for her care of Engel. Engel is certain the document was forged, but says no one can prove that. She cannot afford a lawyer, and Bulstronk is a respected, influential member of the community. Legal uncertainty and social power thus reinforce the family imbalance: Engel believes the home is hers, yet lacks the money and influence to challenge the paper that keeps it from her.

The relationship consequently does not end with a clean recovery of what was lost. Engel’s move to the cottage gives her a home of her own, but her account leaves the childhood house and inheritance disputed. The movement from the red-brick house to the bare rented cottage also measures the cost of separation: she escapes Bulstronk’s daily control by accepting a dwelling without running water, while the property she associates with her father remains beyond her reach. Her story presents the aunt–niece bond as a progression from imposed caregiving to coercive guardianship and financial exploitation, with Engel’s departure providing a meaningful assertion of independence but not undoing the material and emotional consequences of years under Bulstronk’s authority.