Although Catharine never forgot her dead babies, she had to suppress her own grief for her husband’s sake. With each setback, despair weighed more heavily on Thomas. A crescendo of demands from creditors in England, Peterborough and Cobourg forced the Traills into financial crisis. Reluctantly, they left Ashburnham and moved into a run-down farmhouse three miles out of town. Catharine hoped they could achieve self-sufficiency on this modest acreage. Thomas put a down payment on the house and spent his scanty remaining funds on seed and livestock. Catharine insisted everything would be fine, planted yet another garden of marigolds and mallow, and named the house Saville—the name of one of the Traill properties in the Orkneys. Stuck in the bush once again, she drew heavily on her faith that the Lord would provide. She never revealed her loneliness to her husband, who had again withdrawn into the dark recesses of chronic depression. Instead, she fell back on her faith. As she dug and weeded in the kitchen garden, or lifted heavy cast-iron pans of porridge from the stove, she would pause briefly, straighten her aching back, close her eyes and utter silent prayers. She confided to Ellen Dunlop, “There is no privation I feel more than not having the means of going to church.”
Susanna knew from Catharine’s letters that the Traills were in a bad way. Catharine poured out her worries to Susanna: “I feel…like a vessel without a pilot drifting before an overwhelming storm on every side rocks and shoals and no friendly port in sight.…The game of life seems to me a difficult one to play …” Through mutual friends, Susanna heard how Catharine’s six children (an eighth baby, William Edward, was born in 1844) were rarely able to leave the house because their clothes were in rags. James, thirteen, and nine-year-old Harry had only one pair of broken and patched boots between them, so they took it in turns to go out into the snowdrifts and bitter winds to find firewood or draw water from the well. The older girls, Kate (now ten) and Annie (eight) could not attend school because they had no shoes, and because Catharine, crippled with rheumatism, relied on them to do the work of the servants that she could no longer afford. Poor little Mary, her youngest daughter, suffered constantly from infected eyes and ears, and cried so much that she wore her mother’s patience “to rags.” The little girls helped wash and patch their worn garments, feed the baby, preserve fruits and vegetables and prepare the boiled potatoes, gruel and porridge that was their diet. The Traills were so poor that they could not even afford tallow for candles; at night, Catharine burned pine knots, rich in resin, to provide light.
Susanna could not leave her young family in Belleville to help Catharine, who was two days’ journey away. But as often as possible, the Moodies sent the Traills packages of castoff clothes and supplies of tea and sugar. Susanna urged her sister to submit a steady flow of material to Lovell’s Literary Garland. Grinding poverty was hardly the environment in which the composition of light-hearted articles and stories flourished, but with dogged professionalism, Catharine struggled on, acknowledging that the five-pounds-per sheet fee helped pay off “small annoying debts that we cannot leave unsettled.”
When news of the Traills’ move back to the bush reached Eliza, Agnes, Jane and Sarah Strickland, the English sisters were all anxious about Catharine. Unlike Susanna, however, they had no understanding of the brutal hardships she faced. Poverty for the childless Stricklands in Suffolk and London meant frayed cuffs and cheap cuts of meat. They couldn’t even imagine the icy horror of barefoot children in a Canadian winter, the sad whimper of a hungry infant or the struggle of a malnourished ten-year-old boy to drag home firewood.
Agnes had never forgiven Catharine for marrying Thomas. She was convinced that all the Traills’ troubles were his fault. “Ah, why did she involve her bright days in such a sea of trouble,” Agnes wrote to Susanna in 1841, about Catharine. “There was neither hope nor reason in marrying such a man as our poor brother Traill notwithstanding his many amiable qualities …my heart bleeds at the sacrifice she has made.” But a couple of years later, Agnes was jolted out of her complacency. A rumour reached England that the Traills were “in the last state of destitution and misery.” Agnes was horrified, both by the heart-wrenching details of her sister’s poverty and by the idea that her family was the subject of gossip on her own side of the Atlantic. She quickly sent off several parcels of fabric and second-hand clothes. Agnes knew that her parcels were also precious to the Moodies in Belleville, but she explained to her youngest sister that, “The dire straits which poor Kate’s circumstances appear to have reached makes it imperatively necessary for me to make a personal sacrifice in order to send her some money, little enough but more than I can spare. Consequently, I have nothing to send for you except a little French cambric …”
Agnes resurrected all her old prejudices as she considered Catharine’s problems. “Of course I must give to her who wants the means of existence as I knew she would with that disastrous and ill-judged marriage….I wish I had not been so true a prophetess. It is heartbreaking to think of our poor Kate, who was so kind and deserving of a better fate, becoming the victim of such a marriage. My only wonder is that she has kept the wolf from the door for so long.… I think Mr. Traill’s own kindred ought to try and help him.” But Mr. Traill’s own kindred in the Orkneys were already shouldering the responsibility of raising the two sons of his first marriage. They assumed that the grand and well-connected Agnes Strickland would subsidize the Traill ménage in Canada.
Sometimes Thomas must have felt singled out by misfortune. Fired up with fellow feeling for another Scottish immigrant, he had backed a loan for the young Scot to build a mill on the Otonabee River. The young man was drowned, and Thomas found himself obliged to pay his friend’s debts. Even run-down, shabby Saville was now beyond his means. Catharine had to pack up her meagre possessions and move out before Thomas had a chance to harvest the crops he had planted. By now, the threat of bankruptcy had rendered him catatonic. “The harrassing state of uncertainty in which we are kept about our future plans is preying dreadfully on Traill’s mind,” Catharine wrote to Susanna in 1846, “nor can I rouse him from it.”
Perhaps a benevolent deity did hover over the Traills, as Catharine believed, shielding her family from complete disaster. It must have seemed that way when the Reverend George Wilson Bridges, an eccentric English cleric, stepped into their lives to rescue them from homelessness. Somehow a copy of The Backwoods of Canada had found its way to Jamaica several years earlier, where it had fallen into the hands of Bridges, then rector of the Parish of St. Anne’s. Bridges had just suffered a series of bizarre and devastating family tragedies. After nineteen years of what he had thought was a happy marriage, his wife had abruptly deserted him, his own family had turned against him, and his four daughters were drowned in a freak sailing accident. Bridges was left in Jamaica with a three-year-old son. Shattered by loss, Bridges read The Backwoods of Canada and decided to abandon the tropical climate and comforts of Jamaica for the chilly and tangled backwoods of Canada. Perhaps he was persuaded by the cheerful warmth of Catharine’s observations, written long before hardship had ground her down. Perhaps a revulsion for the languid, self-indulgent white élite of Jamaican society propelled Bridges to seek a more bracing, self-sufficient life. Whatever the reason, he decided to make Mrs. Traill his model and follow her to Upper Canada. He wrote in a memoir that if he had not “gone wild he would doubtless have gone mad.” In 1837, he arrived in the newly settled community of Gore’s Landing, on the south shore of Rice Lake, twenty-two miles by road and steamer from Catharine.
George Bridges must have cut an extraordinary figure in the wilds of pre-Confederation Canada. A tall, bony man who swept about in brocaded robes and smoking jackets, he was completely out of place among its shabby-coated farmers and merchants. Bridges’s idea of luxury was well-aged port; his neighbours’ idea of luxury was enough chairs in their own homes for every family member to have a seat. Bridges’s neighbours in Gore’s Landing thought the newcomer was indeed mad when he started building a house on the lakeshore. Recklessly obli
vious to the extremes of Canada’s climate, Bridges hired local carpenters to erect a six-floored octagonal structure with barred windows and an underground entrance. Then he himself put together tables, chairs and shelves out of red cedar, so the whole house smelled like a Finnish sauna. When the peculiar residence was finished he invited his heroine to visit. In wine made by Bridges from local grapes, he and Catharine toasted his new home and she named it Wolf Tower.
Given Bridges’s history (and his rumoured propensity for opium), it is not surprising that he didn’t last long in the backwoods. His house was a stifling conservatory in the summer months, as the sun beat down on its glass windows, and a lethal icehouse in the winter, when freezing drafts whistled up its six levels and round its open floors. After four years, Bridges had had enough and once again walked away from his life, heading this time to England. But he stayed in touch with Catharine. When he heard how tough things had become for the Traills by April 1846, he offered them Wolf Tower as a rent-free residence.
The offer of free lodgings came in the nick of time for Catharine. She immediately wrote to Susanna, describing just how grim their circumstances had been before Bridges had stepped in: “My dear husband was fretting himself to death and me too, for both my health and spirits were sinking under the load of mental anxiety more on his account than the circumstances, and want of strengthening diet.” She had run out of wood for the stove, flour to make bread, and meat or fish other than the perch that her sons caught in the Otonabee. But now Thomas had set off for Wolf Tower “in high spirits for Traill,” with their nine-year-old Harry, to plant some spring wheat. A few days later, Catharine and the other five children, plus their furniture, two cows and two sheep, boarded a noisy steam-driven paddle-wheeler, the Forester, which took them from Peterborough down the Otonabee River and across Rice Lake to Gore’s Landing.
“When I came to reside at Wolf Tower,” Catharine would recall in later years, “I came in weak health having scarcely recovered from a long and terrible fit of illness, but so renovating did I find the free, healthy air of the beautiful hills that in a very short time I was quite strong and able to ramble about with my children among the picturesque glens and wild ravines of this romantic spot, revelling in this rich and rare flower garden of nature’s own planting. The children were never weary of climbing the lofty sides of the hills that surrounded the ravine, forming the bed of one of those hill torrents to which they have given the name of ‘The Valley of the Big Stone’ from a huge boulder of grey granite that occupies the centre of it.”
The romance of Wolf Tower lifted Catharine’s spirits. In her mid-forties, Catharine was overweight and unhealthy, and on damp days she complained of aching joints. A network of broken spider veins covered her round cheeks, her blond hair was thinning and stringy, and her eyes were ringed with dark shadows. But now her gurgling laugh echoed up Wolf Tower’s spiralling staircases, and she recovered the sparkle in her bright-blue eyes. During the warm summer months, she enjoyed teaching her children their letters in the fifth-floor conservatory, with its panoramic views of green hills and blue water. She persuaded the newly appointed Anglican minister of St. George’s Church, Gore’s Landing, to conduct open-air church services at the big grey lump of granite her children had named “the Big Stone.” Catharine’s eyes filled with happy tears as she looked around her and thought of the words of her favourite psalm: “The pastures of the wilderness drip; and the little hills rejoice on every side. The pastures are clothed with flocks: the valleys also stand so thick with grain that they laugh and sing.” Perhaps the flocks were missing, and the grain was sparse, but as she always liked to insist, “The sight of green things is life to me.”
As an adult, Annie Traill would recall that she and her siblings were “happy as larks” during these years: “We children used to scramble over the hills and ravines, delighting over the beautiful flowers and shrubs which grew so luxuriantly everywhere, and my dear mother, when able, used to accompany us.” Agnes continued to send generous parcels, despite her exasperation with her brother-in-law. One year the parcel contained table cloths, children’s books, German silver spoons, a metal teapot, two coats for the boys, needles, thread, a pair of cutting shears, towelling, a Scottish plaid gown for which Agnes had no more use, six pairs of white stockings, some boots for Catharine and lengths of calico, muslin, blue-check shirting and flannel. “Very acceptable the things will be,” Catharine told Susanna, “for I was beginning to think with wonder how I would find clothing for these poor children, now reduced to worse than bareness.” Agnes had also sent along the latest volume of her Queens of England series, and a copy of the Juvenile Scrapbook: A Gage d’Amour for the Young, an anthology edited by Jane Strickland which contained several pieces by Agnes.
In retrospect, Annie would realize how difficult her mother’s life was during these years. She and her sister Kate did much of the baby care and domestic work, but “the burden fell on [mother] and she was not strong.” James and Harry Traill, in their early teens, worked almost full-time in the fields, because Thomas was a wreck of his former self. Looking at the emaciated and melancholic figure who barely spoke above a clipped whisper, it was hard to believe he had once been a cosmopolitan, well-groomed gentleman. His teeth were stained and his hair matted; he looked haunted by anxieties. A Scottish visitor described Thomas as wearing “a shawl around his neck that one would not have picked out of the gutter and that had not been washed for a month—a nose very much smeared with snuff, hands and face evidently in want of soap and water yet with all this unprepossessing exterior evidently a kind hearted and well informed man.” But Catharine, recalled Annie, was “ever cheerful and ready to tell stories or sing to our dear father in the evening.”
With the onset of winter, it became evident that Wolf Tower was a hopelessly impractical residence to keep warm, and the Traills soon moved on. But they liked the area so much that they didn’t move far. For the next couple of years, they rented another house, which they called Mount Ararat, near the Rice Lake Plains, as the lake’s rolling south shore was known. Catharine’s stamina, not to mention her good humour, was extraordinary: her ninth and last baby was born in 1848, when she was forty-five. (He was named Walter in memory of Thomas’s oldest son, who had died at age thirty, three years earlier.) She was constantly bothered by excruciating attacks of rheumatism. “I cannot now lift my hand to my head without great pain,” she wrote to Susanna in 1849, “nor can I put it back without being forced to scream out with the agonising pain I endure in moving it….I suffer at times great pain in my right knee …” Yet her children could always bring a smile to her face. One day, her daughter Annie would later recall, her mother discovered that a set of silver teaspoons, each bearing the Traill family crest, had disappeared. The set was one of the few possessions from home that Thomas and Catharine still possessed. When Catharine questioned her children, each in turn denied that he or she had touched the precious spoons, until the inquisiton reached five-year-old William. The little boy confessed that he had planted the spoons in the garden, to make them grow. His father and elder brothers rushed outside to dig them up, but the child could not recall where he had buried them. They never turned up, but Catharine loved to tell the tale for the rest of her life.
In 1849, Catharine saw a wooden house just east of Gore’s Landing that she decided they must buy. Oaklands was a large log cabin, which meant it had pokey windows and was dark inside, but it had a substantial stone chimney. It was also cheap, because it stood on the top of a windy hill and was miles from the woodlot. Raising the down payment was a problem for the penniless Traills, but Catharine found a way. For years, Thomas had clung to his officer’s commission as the qualification that would secure for him the elusive government job. Now his wife persuaded him that, at fifty-two, he would do better to cash the commission in and use the proceeds to buy the house. Thomas raised some additional funds by borrowing from his brother-in-law Sam Strickland and from John Moodie. After ten wretched years of rent
ed, borrowed or mortgaged houses, in 1849 the Traills once again had their own home. It was not ideal: bitterly cold north winds swept across the hills, reminding Catharine of the east winds that swept along the Norfolk coast in January, and Oaklands was a difficult house to heat. Catharine wrote to a friend one January, “We sit in the small parlour and keep but two fires, consequently the bedrooms are cold.” But the Traills finally felt settled.
The move did little for Thomas, however, who remained in a permanent and paralyzing state of depression. “I cannot endure to see my poor husband so utterly cast down,” Catharine wrote to Susanna in Belleville. “I wish that he could look beyond the present and remember that the brightest of earthly prospects endure but for a season—and it is the same with the trials and sorrows of life—they too come to an end.”
From time to time in her own correspondence, Catharine reluctantly confided her own bouts of despair. “There is a cloud gathering over us that I see no means of averting,” she told Frances Stewart in 1851.The following year, she wrote to Susanna of how she longed to visit her, and enjoy “the great comfort to me of seeing you and talking over many matters that I cannot write.” But she was a resilient woman who had learned to escape gnawing anxieties by taking refuge in nature: the huge maple trees, the scampering chipmunks, the delicate saxifrage and white violets that she carefully pressed between layers of cotton in one of Thomas’s books. She also knew what was expected of an English lady: she had seen how her own mother had coped with the loss of her husband when she was forty-six, how she had managed to put a brave face on adversity. Catherine rarely indulged in grumbles. Instead she forced herself to look on the bright side, reminding herself often that God’s grace would protect her. In her daily entries in her journal, Catharine often sounds like the wife of a prosperous gentleman-farmer in Surrey. Gazing out at the distant lake, and watching a cloud of passenger pigeons careen across the mother-of-pearl sky, she noted: “I know of no place more suitable for the residence of an English gentleman’s family. There is hardly a lot of land that might not be converted into a park.”
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