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Joan's mother loved her very much, so she was not happy when she married an army officer when she was twenty-one years old and went to live in
another country with her husband.
"When am I going to see Joan again?" she thought. "And how is she going to live abroad among strangers without her mother near her?"
Joan wrote to her parents every Sunday, and then a year later, she had a baby. It was a girl, and she and her husband gave it
the name Kate and thought that she was the cleverest and most beautiful child in the world. After that, Joan's parents
received plenty of letters and postcards every week about Kate and all the wonderful things she had done. There were also lots of
colour photographs of the baby, but there was never any news about Joan herself.
Joan's mother knew that parents always thought that their own children were special, and better than any others, and she also knew that they photographed them
all the time, so she did not find all this news about Kate and all the photographs of her very interesting. She wished that
Joan's letters had more news about herself and what she was doing in them. When she replied to Joan's letters, she always asked
about her. She wrote two or three times: "Are you tired after the baby? Are you resting enough? Is Fred (he was Joan's husband)
helping you? Does anyone come in to clean your house for you? When are you going to come home? Do you need anything? Does the
baby keep you awake at night?" and other things like that. But Joan's replies were always about Kate, and there was never any news about
herself. In the end Joan's mother was rather angry, so she wrote to Joan that she was very glad that Joan had a very clever child,
because she herself had never had one.
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