by Jean Little
December 16
A disaster! James took me aside after the meal tonight to talk to me. He thinks he knows whom the dog belongs to — one of the fiercest hunters in the tribe. James heard him complain the other day that his favourite hunting dog had been injured and then gone missing before he could deal with her. I asked what he meant by “deal with her,” but James said that was all Red Fox had said. I asked if he couldn’t find out more, but he pointed out that if he did that, he would also have to tell Red Fox where his dog was, or lose honour. In fact, he said that if White Loon found out that we know who the owner is, she would be sure to make me return Cocoa.
December 17
Kate is blackmailing me! She told me that she is going to find out who the owner is and give the dog back. She said that Cocoa eats too much and that James — yes, James — is not getting enough food. She is worried about him. He is looking pale and drawn and somehow she blames the dog! She says that I either find a way to get more food into the house or she will give up the dog. How can I find us more food?
December 18
I have gone to the Hudson’s Bay store and offered my extra pair of moccasins for some porridge and flour. We were definitely low on both and everyone was making do with half portions over the last week. If Father finds out he will be so angry I dread to think. He’ll feel I’ve brought disgrace on the family. And I certainly hope White Loon doesn’t discover this, since she made me an extra pair only after I pleaded with her, telling her I needed them because my old ones were getting too small. I know only too well that these were to go to Kate, who will grow into them all too soon. How am I to explain this extra food? It seems that I am going from one trouble to another.
December 19
Kate was very happy with the extra rations this morning and looked at James with a small smile as he wolfed down every spoonful. I kept up a desperate chatter with Father and White Loon so they wouldn’t notice that everyone’s bowls were much fuller than normal. I must admit that I put just a little less in theirs so they would not notice. (That was easy with White Loon, as she can barely hold down any food and asks me to give her only a little.)
December 20
Another near miss, Dear Diary, and this one very scary! Red Fox went through our camp today looking for Cocoa. I could hear someone calling outside so I peeked out the door and there he was walking about and calling as loud as could be. And here is the amazing part. She cowered under the table and shook! Yes, it’s true! She obviously understood quite well that he was looking for her and she refused to go to him. That tells me that he must have been cruel to her and it also explains why she ran away. I cannot give her back! But now that he is searching for her, how much longer can she stay? She hobbles around now quite nicely, by the way, and has become extremely fond of everyone in the house — even Kate, much to Kate’s chagrin. When anyone walks in she licks them all over. She plays ball with Robbie out back and can hobble after it at quite a pace, bringing it faithfully back to him. But the sweetest thing is that she seems to know that White Loon is with child, because at night when White Loon sits on a fur rug near the fire, Cocoa lies beside her with her head on White Loon’s stomach! It is almost as if she is protecting the child already. And although Cocoa is a hunter, White Loon tells me that when the men were out hunting and the women would also need to leave the camp to gather berries and such, some dogs would take care of the children.
December 21
Kate is going to betray me! She announced at dinner that it is wrong for us to be harbouring this animal and that we must return it. Robbie almost hit her, he was so angry! James looked at her in a puzzled way, unable to fathom why she should feel so strongly. He has no idea that she has decided that Cocoa is stealing the very food from his mouth.
(And me in shock having no idea that she felt like this about him, no idea at all! If Alice, who set her sights on James from the first moment she noticed him, finds out, there really will be trouble!) Father reluctantly agreed with Kate. He said that we must make an effort to discover the owner. James looked at me sideways, but gave nothing away. I am convinced that Cocoa will be killed if we return her, as she will never again be fast enough to be a good hunter. Had she been a pet it might be different. On the other hand, to be fair, how can I know this for certain? Perhaps Red Fox has a family and they are attached to Cocoa — as attached as I am. Then again, if that is true, why did Cocoa cower like that when she heard Red Fox calling her name?
I need to find out. I must make a foray into the camp.
December 22
I convinced White Loon that it has been too long since she has visited with her mother and that we should go to their camp. We set off after breakfast. The day was clear and cold. We left Cocoa inside, and Kate was also left to do chores that White Loon set her. It was quite a walk to the camp. White Loon told me that soon the camp would be moving as it did last year, to follow the buffalo, and we would probably move with them again too. Frankly, I look forward to it. Living in tents is no colder than the huts, and far less work. And I loved the games we played and the respite from the daily chores. The work when the buffalo were killed was fierce, but the play made up for it all.
We were received warmly by Leaf Bud and we sat with her in her tent, trading stories and news. My Cree is very good now and I can understand most things, although I cannot express myself that well.
White Loon brought up the dog very casually, mentioning that she had seen a dog in our camp that seemed to belong to no one. Leaf Bud immediately exclaimed that it must be Red Fox’s dog — it had hurt itself while hunting and slunk away. I asked if Red Fox had a family that would miss the dog. She laughed and answered no, that Red Fox only cared because he spent many hours training this dog and wanted it back so he did not have to work so hard again.
Inside, I sighed with relief. But I should not have. White Loon said that anyone finding the dog would be bound by honour to return it and her mother agreed. What was I to do?
We were in for quite a shock when we returned home. Kate was weeping when we walked into the hut. Now, dear Diary, you know very well that Kate never weeps! I was so taken aback that at first I didn’t know how to react. White Loon rushed over to her and took her hand. “What has happened?” she asked.
“I was attacked by a coyote when I went to get water,” Kate replied, showing bite marks on one arm and deep scratches on both. White Loon tried to hide her concern but we all know that a bite from an animal can fester and kill. On the other hand, Kate could have been killed outright. I was about to ask her how she survived when she said, “Cocoa saved me.”
I whirled around to look for Cocoa, my heart in my throat. Was she dead? Had she sacrificed herself for Kate?
“Where is she?” I asked.
“Out back, guarding the hut,” Kate answered. “I was worried about Robbie and his friends being attacked when they came home, so I left her outside.”
White Loon gave me no time to check on Cocoa. We had to treat Kate’s wound right away. I gathered the herbs from the small larder we had organized and we pummelled them together and made a poultice to put on the open wounds. Then White Loon made a tea from birchbark and made sure Kate drank it all down. She washed Kate’s arms with snow and made sure that they were as clean as possible before we applied the poultice. Kate’s face was white as the snow, as she realized the danger she was in. When all was done I hurried to the back and found Cocoa, who was sitting up, alert and watchful. I gave her a big hug and told her to stay and watch out for Robbie.
That night when James and Father had returned from the hunt with three rabbits and I had cleaned and cooked them and we had all eaten until full, we discussed Cocoa and Kate’s close call. Father declared that we had a true dilemma. We were honour bound to return the dog, and yet we had found a true friend in Cocoa and no one, now not even Kate, wanted to give her up.
Then I had an idea. Handsel Monday was only two weeks away. I made a suggestion. “I would happily give up any present
you were going to give me,” I said. “You could instead give it to Red Fox. My present would be keeping Cocoa.”
In no time Robbie, James — and yes, even Kate — had chimed in and made the same offer.
“I have little enough money to spend, but I could pool what I have and buy a small knife at the store,” Father said. “Are you all certain this is what you want?”
We all were.
Now we only need to wait and see if Red Fox will agree.
January 5, 1818
Cocoa is ours! I am sorry I have not written, but we have been so busy. Kate developed a fever and was very sick. I have been nursing her constantly until last night, when suddenly her eyes cleared and her fever broke and she announced that she was starving. Father needed time to make a deal with the manager at the store, but finally yesterday he travelled to the Indian camp and offered Red Fox the knife in exchange for his dog. Red Fox was a little suspicious about how long we had had the dog, but Father managed to convince him that at first we did not know who the owner was. Red Fox did accept in the end, and today was the most wonderful beginning of the New Year. Cocoa is officially my dog now! But everyone in the family loves her and I have no doubt she will continue to protect us and take care of us. And here is a strange thing — the bickering and misery we were all prone to only weeks ago has now been replaced by games with Cocoa of an evening, or a scramble to see who will cuddle up with her for the night. A good start to the New Year indeed.
Marianna Wilson, one of thousands of Home Children sent from British orphanages to Canada by philanthropist Dr. Thomas Barnardo, lives with the Cope family in Ontario. Marianna now has a diary of her own, courtesy of her friend Victoria.
A Home Girl’s Christmas
Friday evening, December 2, 1898
Victoria Cope gave me this notebook to use as a diary when I told her she had inspired me to keep one. She let me read hers first. It was a little strange to read all about Jasper and me coming here a year and a half ago and everything that happened to us after we arrived from Dr. Barnardo’s Homes in England. She said I should wait until New Year’s Day to begin but I am not going to. I can’t wait that long to blow off steam about Sadie Harris. The things she has said to me are troubling my mind. I cannot discuss her with Victoria because poor Sadie needs people to be nice to her and, if Vic knew what S. thinks, she might hold it against her.
The weeks leading up to Christmas could be sad ones as I think of my own mother and my little lost sister. When Jasper and our baby sister (the first Emily Rose) and I were sent to Canada we didn’t know what to expect. But Dr. and Mrs. Cope are kind to me. (Not like David, their oldest son.) Tom and Vic treat me like one of the family. And of course there is baby Rosie, named after my real sister, Emily Rose.
I wonder where my own Emily Rose is now. We never even met the couple who adopted her, and we were given no chance to tell them anything about our family. Mam would not have wanted her to be taken away from us, but there was nothing I could do to stop them. The Barnardo people just kept saying our mother had died and they were thinking what was best for our baby. Nobody gave me a chance to say what I thought until she was gone. I could not think it out either. But I believe our baby should know about Mam and her family in England and also be able to find Jasper and me if she needs us. What the young think doesn’t count, though. I am old enough to work as hard as any grown woman, but that doesn’t count either. It is bitter to be a child at such a time.
I hope Victoria does not ask to read this diary. She has too soft a heart to be faced with the hardships we have been through.
Yet all this is not what I want to write about. I want to put down what Sadie Harris said to me at school and how it stung. I’ll have to do it tomorrow, though. I am too tired to write it all down tonight. Barnardo girls, or Home Girls as some call us, get up early to light the stove and get the breakfast started. I can think while I’m putting the porridge on and fetching in kindling, but I cannot write.
Saturday, December 3
Sadie is a Home Girl too, a skinny little thing with a pinched, pale face. Her skin is the colour of a raw potato. Her cheeks don’t ever grow pink and her lips are thin and look almost bloodless. Molly, the other Home Girl in our class, heard that Sadie came from the poorhouse, and I can tell anyone who asks that children in the poorhouse get no good food. I know how awful it is — thin gruel, dry bread, cabbage cooked until it is limp and no longer green. “This thing has forgotten it was ever a cabbage,” Mam said the day before she took us away and put us in Dr. Barnardo’s orphans’ home. It was only supposed to be until she could earn enough money to take us back.
You would think all this would make me and Sadie Harris friends, but it does not. Feeling pity for someone does not make you like the person.
It even makes you angry at her because it is such a rasping sort of feeling, rubbing your heart raw. I do not want to lose my memories of those terrible days, but I wish the pain would go out of them the way an old scar stops hurting even though you can still rub it and picture the wound. If the pain went away entirely, though, perhaps I would not be able to call up Mam’s face and the way her fingers felt when she took hold of the back of my neck and gave it a gentle shake. “Enough of that, girl,” she would say.
When I look at Sadie, I feel as though I have swallowed a file and it is stuck inside me, rubbing up and down. Sadie’s nose is sharp and her eyes are a washed-out blue. Her hair is light brown like brown sugar. It is always dragged back into a knot which makes her look like a little old woman instead of a child. She works for a bedridden woman who orders Sadie around from her couch. The law says she has to send Sadie to school, but she only lets her come when she has done all her morning chores. Sadie usually arrives around ten or even eleven and has to be back at the woman’s house by three. The teacher should tell the woman that Sadie needs more time in school, but that does not happen when the person is a Home Child.
I have never seen S. smile. The other day, I began talking to her about our lives before we came here and she pulled me away into a corner of the schoolyard where nobody could overhear. Then she told me that I am not to say she was ever at Barnardo’s. She is telling people she is an orphan whose parents died in a fire. She has a whole story made up about how her father owned his own shop in Bath but it burned down and she was left an orphan. As soon as she is old enough to escape and has saved up some money, she plans to run off and make a fresh start, and she is not going to tell anyone she was ever at Barnardo’s. She says she won’t tell her husband, when she gets one, or her children. I asked her why and she just looked at me in her cold scornful way and said she is ashamed of being a Home Girl.
I can tell she really lived down by the docks in London and she spoke Cockney just like most of us. But she is studying how to speak proper. I told her I saw nothing to be ashamed of and neither does Molly, who came from Barnardo’s too, or Jasper.
She sniffed and asked if I had been treated like a member of the family or like a slavey. I started to say just like a member of the family and then I remembered David calling us “scum” at first. He is still pretty cool sometimes.
“I knew it,” Sadie said with a cat’s pounce. “So you keep away from me, Mary Anna Wilson. I am going to better myself, and being friends with you won’t do me any good.”
She knows my name is Marianna, like the girl in Tennyson’s poem, but she always says Mary and then Anna. I know she thinks it is a common name.
Then she rapped out a vulgar question that showed how common she is herself. “Who is the richest girl in here?”
“Prue,” I told her and walked away.
Prue Bellingham won’t have anything to do with Sadie even if Sadie never drops another h. Prue’s mother never lets her mix with lesser folk. I feel as sorry for Prue as I do for Sadie. Her mother’s as stiff as Dr. Cope’s shirts were when Victoria put in double the amount of starch. Unbending. Prue never dares sit on the grass for fear of staining her skirt and she always has two clean
handkerchiefs in her pocket.
And I am ashamed that I dislike both her and Sadie, the poor things, but I do. Toplofty, uppity, nose-in-the-air prigs.
That is enough about Sadie. I just had to get down how she made me feel before it exploded like the bottle of ginger beer Jasper hid in the cellar and forgot.
Sunday afternoon, December 4
I have had my diary for three days now, but it was talking to Sadie that made me need to begin writing in it. The thing that makes it so strange is that I am not ashamed of who I am or where I come from, and yet deep inside, I understand Sadie’s struggle. You feel you are in a race with a lot of other girls, but you have a sharp, heavy stone in your shoe and you cannot get it out and you begin to fall behind. I know I have fallen behind where I might be if I were really Victoria’s flesh-and-blood sister. The Copes are wonderfully kind to us, except for David sometimes, but nobody needs to be kind to Victoria. My mam would say she was born with a silver spoon in her mouth.
Right now, Vic is so busy practising her piece for the Christmas concert that she doesn’t notice I have started writing in my notebook. This year she is not only in a tableau but she is playing the piano. She loves being in the tableau but she hates the piano. She even calls her piano teacher Miss Hopeless instead of her proper name, Miss Hope. (And she calls the piece she’s practising “Humersquee.” It is really called “Humoresque,” I think.) How I envy her those wonderful piano lessons she so abominates!
Once in a while, when the family are all out, I press down the keys ever so gently and pick out bits of tunes. Even when I have to stop, I hear the notes playing on inside my heart. Sometimes I pretend I am playing scales, as Victoria does, but I do it on the edge of the table or on my quilt in bed. I wish I could have lessons. My father used to play the concertina long ago and he let me press the keys sometimes. I used to sing too. Mam said I was “full of music,” but that was in a lost time. I am so seldom alone now. And there is always housework I should be doing. After all, nice as they are to me, I am still their Home Girl. I am never reminded of it outright, but they do not look at me as another Victoria. Aunt Lily counts on me, though, in a way she never counts on Vic. When something goes wrong, I am the one she calls to help her.
