A Christmas to Remember

by Carol Matas

  Luke

  Wednesday, December 20, 1916

  Dear Luke,

  IMPORTANT!! Make sure you read my December 18 letter FIRST. (If you’ve got it.) Otherwise you won’t understand this one.

  Yesterday I was at the trolley stop with Deirdre and Muriel and who shows up but Eva and her brother, Werner. Eva says hello, but we turned our backs as if she wasn’t there. I felt terrible, like I was a different person.

  On the trolley it was worse. Some old men were talking loudly about the Huns in Canada and how the government should lock them all up. They were talking about the War Act (I think that’s what they said), and saying it’s one thing closing down the German schools and newspapers and making the Huns carry special papers, but it’s another thing letting them live on our streets and eat our food, and on and on. And the whole time, Deirdre and Muriel were smirking and pointing fingers at Eva and I was so embarrassed I wanted to shrivel up and disappear.

  Well after a few blocks Eva said something to Werner, and they stood up to get off, even though it wasn’t their stop, and Eva unexpectedly called out, “Merry Christmas, Everybody!” People smiled and returned the greeting, even the old men (because of course they couldn’t tell she was German), and I wanted to do the same.

  The worst part is that Eva caught my eye before stepping down and, even though her voice had sounded cheerful (the way it does when you say Merry Christmas), her face looked so desperate sad I wanted to get off with her. But I didn’t have the courage, not with Deirdre scowling beside me.

  Ever since I joined the G.A.F. Club my stomach’s been churning — you know, Luke, the way you feel when you’ve eaten something nasty. When I think about you and the war, well then it’s not so bad because I feel that I’m doing my patriotic duty. It’s just all the other times, when I’m thinking of Eva.

  I’m sorry to go on like that.

  You can look forward to another parcel soon. Mum’s been doing more baking and I’ve made you a special batch of fudge.

  Your loving sister,

  Charlotte

  London, England

  December 30, 1916

  Dear Folks,

  Hold onto your hats, I’m in the “Big Smoke!” That’s what they call London. You think we get fog in Halifax? It’s nothing compared to here.

  Spent Christmas Day at Whitley Camp and it wasn’t bad, all things considered, but I sure missed you folks. The army gave us a Christmas feast of roast goose with mashed potatoes, followed by mince pie and plum pudding. We each got a parcel from the local Ladies Auxilliary (I pulled off a towel, soap and socks) and a Christmas stocking stuffed to the very toe from the Red Cross at home. And from a bunch of other sources, more towels, socks, cigarettes, chocolates — you name it, even pickles! It’s good to know that folks are thinking of the soldiers.

  I was lucky enough to get a three-day pass so have been in London to see the sights. The chaplain arranged for transportation, sightseeing and billets. A pal and I were put up by a friendly couple who treated us like kings.

  London’s full of soldiers and there’s no end of entertainments — moving pictures, theatres, dances, concerts, pubs, restaurants — it’s quite the high life I’ve been leading these last 3 days. And get this, I’ve even had a good hot bath!

  Heard the darndest story about a truce in France the first Christmas of the war. It was Christmas Eve, and Tommy and Fritz no more than 30 or 50 yards away from each other, and when one side started singing carols, the other side joined in! They agreed not to fire, and before long, up and down the line, they were putting little Christmas trees with candles on the parapets and meeting in No Man’s Land, laughing, joking, sharing gifts — even playing soccer, for gosh sakes! Can you imagine?

  It would never happen now, not with all the casualties, but it makes me wonder what I would do if it did happen. Could I look Fritz in the eye and sing carols? Or toss him a soccer ball? Would I see a boy my own age? Or would I see a Kraut who’d mow me down without blinking an eye? When I get home, will I ever be able to see or hear a Kraut without thinking “Enemy”??

  Gosh, listen to me go on! We’re not supposed to THINK in the army. That’s what comes of all this waiting.

  Guess I should stop grumbling. We’re training to be better soldiers, right? So when the time comes we’ll do a better job of playing the game, no matter what our lot might be.

  My wishes for 1917 are the same as yours, I reckon — Victory for the Allies and a Blackburn Family Reunion!!! Keep those letters coming, and have a Happy New Year!

  Your loving son and brother,

  Luke

  P.S. January 2, 1917 Didn’t post the above soon enough so here’s more news. Yesterday we got a late “Christmas present” from the British Army — our Kitchener Boots! Know what that means? One, we can chuck out the falling-apart boots we got in Canada and two, the time has come! We’ll probably get the boots well broken in before we tackle Fritz, but finally we’ll see some action!!

  January 1, 1917

  Dear Luke,

  Happy New Year! How was your Christmas?

  We went to a special Christmas service in the morning and spent most of the day quietly at home, singing carols, reading (Anne of Avonlea!) and eating too much. We drank a toast to you at dinner. Mum tried to be merry but she took it some hard, your not being here. We reminded her that you’re safe in England, not at the Front, and that cheered her some — until Ruth says, “Luke won’t be missing us, Mum — he’s probably still in London having the time of his life!”

  Poor Duncan got his skates for Christmas, but there’s no ice for skating. No snow, either.

  Remember my last letter, about the G.A.F. Club? Well, Friday after supper I set out for Deirdre’s party, got as far as her street and saw Muriel and some other girls going into Deirdre’s house, as merry as could be, and I couldn’t take another step. All I could think about was Eva.

  So before I knew it I was at her door. I wouldn’t have blamed her if she’d shut the door in my face, but she didn’t. She didn’t even let me finish my apology. She invited me in, and I joined her and her family for tea and gingerbread, and brought out the fudge I’d been taking to Deirdre’s. And there we were, sitting at the kitchen table, laughing, chatting, making plans for the rest of the holidays as if nothing had happened. You can’t imagine my relief! I walked home that night with my heart almost full of the Christmas spirit — almost, because the war is still on — but for sure I felt lighter in my heart.

  Eva is a better and braver person than I am. And I can’t stop being her friend, not on account of her dad. He’s more Canadian than German now anyway, isn’t he? I’m hoping the other girls will come round to the same way of thinking, but if they don’t, they’ll miss out on having a generous, forgiving friend.

  Mum says she’s proud of me for making the decision on my own. Duncan says I was stupid to join the Club in the first place, as if breaking a friendship could make a difference to the war. Mending our friendship made a big difference, Luke, so please don’t think I’m a disloyal sort of person.

  On Boxing Day Eva came over with a loaf of her mum’s special Christmas bread. It’s called stöllen, and it’s full of nuts, raisins and other dried fruits. We sat down for cocoa and big slices of stöllen and everybody loved it, and afterwards Mum gave Eva some fruitcake for her family.

  We can’t wait to hear about your Christmas. If you’ve written already, our letters might cross in the middle of the Atlantic. But if you haven’t written, do it now and that’s an order! (Duncan told me to put that.)

  Our New Year’s wish is for an Allied Victory before you leave England — no matter how much you’re itching to get Over There. Wouldn’t that be a wonderful beginning to 1917?!

  Your loving sister,

  Charlotte

  Flora longed for a family of her own after living in an orphanage for almost ten years. She found one with her aunt and uncle, though she spent long hours at the woollen mill, where the work was sometimes dange
rous. When that danger strikes close to home, it is time for yet one more move, and trying to get along with new relatives.

  Reading Henry

  December 10, 1888

  Miss McPhee is getting married! She told us this morning just before the dinner hour. She is to marry Mr. Sutherland, who owns the feed and tack store in Kamloops. She showed us a photograph of him. He has a moustache but, thank goodness, no whiskers. I would not like to think of Miss McPhee marrying a man with whiskers.

  After the news, Miss McPhee dismissed us and the boys just gobbled their dinners and roared outside to continue their snowball war. Even though there are now four boys in my family, I still find them mysterious. Have they no curiosity about interesting things? Of course, all the girls stayed in to ask Miss McPhee questions. Even cousin Martha, who cannot sit still and attend to her lessons, sat quiet as a mouse, listening.

  The wedding will be on December 29. Miss McPhee is going to live in town in a house that Mr. Sutherland built, with plaster walls and a bay window. (Bertha David asked if she would have lace curtains and Miss McPhee said she hoped so, by and by.)

  When Mr. Sutherland decided he wished to marry Miss McPhee he wrote to her father who lives in Ontario to ask for her hand. (Martha asked why he just wanted her hand and Miss McPhee laughed and sorted that out. She is so good at explaining things and not just Geography). Mr. McPhee told Mrs. McPhee who told Miss McPhee’s older sister who wrote to Miss McPhee’s middle sister who is also a teacher and lives in Victoria who told Miss McPhee that Mr. Sutherland said that Miss McPhee was “his share of the world’s treasure.” Even though Miss McPhee’s parents are sad that she will live so far away in British Columbia, they said yes.

  Miss McPhee’s middle sister is sewing her trousseau. Miss McPhee remembered that she was a teacher and wrote the word trousseau on the blackboard so that we would learn the spelling. Then she forgot she was a teacher and told us that everything was “scrumptious.” She will have two nighties, two underskirts, four pairs of drawers and six slip-waists as well as dresses and a jacket. Imagine having that many clothes all new and all at the same time. And none of it made of old flour sacks, I’m sure.

  Then Bertha asked if Miss McPhee would wear some of her scrumptious trousseau to school after she’s married and Miss McPhee told us that she would not be coming back in the new year. Martha started to cry and I could have cried too. “I thought you understood that,” said Miss McPhee. “Married women cannot be teachers.” Then she gave Martha a hug.

  We talked so long that Miss McPhee forgot to ring the bell and in the afternoon we had to skip sums. You would think that would make cousin Henry happy, because he has trouble with sums, but it didn’t. On the walk home I tried to talk to him about the wedding but he was silent, as usual. Auntie Janet says he is shy, but he only seems to be shy with me. And how can he stay shy for so long? It has been months since we came west to join Uncle Wilf’s family.

  I am happy for Miss McPhee. But I’m sad for me. Will the new teacher be nice? And why can’t married women be teachers? Back in Almonte nobody said that married women could not work in the mill. Even women who were expecting babies worked at the mill. I suppose being a teacher is more respectable. But getting married is also respectable. So wouldn’t being a married teacher make you respectable times two? Life is not as tidy as sums.

  December 11, 1888

  I’ve just come in from the barn. If I were blind, I would always know the barn by the smell. Horses, dust, leather, hay and, this evening, whisky. Ollie is out there treating one of the horses who has colic. The treatment is laudanum, whisky and water. Ollie said he would have the cayuse right as rain by the morning. Ollie says “cayuse” instead of “horse.”

  Even though Ollie is just a cowhand he knows as much as a vet. Uncle Wilfred says that nobody can read the range like Ollie. Reading the range means that he can look at any field and figure out how many cattle can graze there and for how long. When he told me that, I thought of Mr. Houghton, the wool sorter back at the mill, and how he could “read” a fleece and know what sort of wool it would make.

  Ollie likes to tell stories of the big cattle drives. “Weeks and weeks of bannock, beans, bacon and coffee.” Tonight he told me how you can get cattle to cross a river. If it’s spring, you rope the calves and put them in a boat and when the calves start bawling the other cows plunge into the river to follow them across. If it’s fall, it is harder. You make a trail down a steep bank and get the cattle moving and then the cowboys have to scare the cows by hooting and hollering and banging rocks in cans to force the cattle into the cold water.

  Uncle Wilfred says that Ollie can be very fierce when he drinks too much whisky, but I’ve never seen him fierce, only gentle with the animals, patient with explaining things and exciting when he tells stories. I suppose Miss Beulah Young and her Temperance ladies would try to make him sign the pledge and give up whisky for the rest of his life.

  December 12, 1888

  I told the news of the wedding over supper and everybody paid attention, but then Martha spilled her stew and baby Sadie started wailing, so Uncle James danced her around the room singing “There is a Tavern in the Town.” Then Uncle Wilf started to talk about how there is going to be a baseball game on New Year’s Day in Kamloops to celebrate an eclipse of the sun, and somehow the wedding was forgotten.

  Before writing today’s news in this diary I flipped back to read what I wrote in days gone by. So much has happened that it feels as though I’m reading a storybook, a story about a girl named Flora, who found a family and worked in a woollen mill and had a kitten named Mungo. A little girl.

  When I looked back to this exact day a year ago I noticed that there was no entry for December 12 and I remembered why. This was the day that Uncle James had his terrible accident at the mill. Nobody seems to have noticed. Perhaps he and Auntie Janet have remembered, but are not saying anything.

  When I see Uncle James rounding up cattle or joshing with Ollie I can hardly remember the pale, angry man he was after his accident when the mill machinery mangled his hand.

  If cousin Henry were friendlier I might talk to him about it. I know that a boy can be a good friend, because Murdo was. But Henry doesn’t like me. I don’t know why. I try to be kind. Sometimes I long for Alice and Mary Anne from the Home, or any girl my own age.

  December 13, 1888

  I thought I had imagined it but now I know. Henry is not just unfriendly. He hates me. We are doing long division in school. Miss McPhee tried every way to explain it to Henry but he just couldn’t understand it. At supper Uncle Wilf asked about our day and I told everyone about long division and how I remembered how to do it from helping the boys at the Home. Then Auntie Janet said I was very good at household sums and figuring out if we could buy bacon, back in Almonte. Then Uncle asked Henry how he was getting on and Henry said that he hated long division and he hated school and then he stormed off to the barn. Auntie Nellie said she was hopeless at sums too and just to leave him be, but Uncle Wilf said Henry needed to do well at school to get on with life. Then he asked if I would help Henry. Secretly I thought that Henry might talk to me if we did long division together, so I said yes.

  So Uncle Wilf fetched Henry from the barn and Auntie Nellie put a lamp at the end of the table and warned the little ones that they were not to bother us. I had a good idea. At least, I thought it was a good idea. I thought of Ollie and his story of getting cattle across the river. I tried to tell the story as well as he had. “So you come to a deep river and there is one boat. The river is icy cold and the cattle won’t cross. So you rope the calves and put them in the boat. They are bawling and bawling for their mothers and finally, the other cattle plunge into the river. The cowboys are yelling and banging rocks in cans and the water is whipped into a foam. Here’s the problem. The boat can only take seven calves at a time and you’ve got eighty-two. How many trips does it take and how many calves are left over for the last trip?” Then I wrote the numbers down as a lo
ng division sum.

  First of all, Henry said that you can’t fit seven calves in a boat. Then I said that he should imagine a boat that could take seven calves, or he could change it to five calves. Henry stared at the paper for a time and then he grabbed my wrist, hard, and whispered so nobody could hear, “Stop pretending to be a teacher. Stop being so clever.” It was like he had declared war.

  December 14, 1888

  I am miserable. Henry won’t even look at me. I don’t know what to do.

  December 15, 1888

  I wasn’t going to bother Auntie Janet, but this morning we had a minute to ourselves. The family went off to Kamloops for supplies. I like it when Auntie Janet is nursing Sadie because it means she stays in one place. I spoke right up. “Why does Henry hate me?”

  I thought Auntie might say grown-up things like, “Oh, Henry doesn’t hate you, what makes you think that?” but she didn’t. She believes what I say. She just said, “Oh, you poor thing, I don’t know.” Then she told me about a woman in the weave room at the mill who took a dislike to her. “She treated me like poison ivy and I never knew why. Finally I decided just to pretend that we were friends. Sometimes if you pretend something is true, it becomes true.” I asked if it worked and she said, “We never became bosom pals, but she did warm up a degree or two. We could at least work together.”

  Pretend something is true and it becomes true … I thought on that a while. I used to pretend fairies were true and they never were. Auntie Janet must have been thinking such thoughts too because then she said, “Mind you, for years I’ve been pretending to have raven locks and alabaster skin and last time I looked I still have brown hair and freckles, so it isn’t foolproof.”

  But it is still worth a try.

  December 16, 1888

  This evening Uncle Wilf asked how Henry’s long division lessons with me were coming and Henry just said “We’re not doing that any more.” He said it so fiercely that even Uncle Wilf did not know what to say.