I wonder if any homesick dreams haunt Elizabeth Townsend’s slumber of over a hundred years!
William and Eliza Macneill had a large family of which all the members possessed marked intellectual power. Their education consisted only in the scanty, occasional terms of the district school of those rude, early days; but, had circumstances been kinder, some of them would have climbed high. My grandfather, Alexander Macneill, was a man of strong and pure literary tastes, with a considerable knack of prose composition.37 My great-uncle, William Macneill, could write excellent satirical verse. But his older brother, James Macneill, was a born poet.38 He composed hundreds of poems, which he would sometimes recite to favoured persons. They were never written down, and not a line of them, so far as I know, is now extant. But I heard my grandfather repeat many of them, and they were real poetry, most of them being satirical or mock-heroic. They were witty, pointed, and dramatic. Uncle James was something of a “mute, inglorious” Burns.39 Circumstances compelled him to spend his life on a remote Prince Edward Island farm; had he had the advantages of education that are within reach of any schoolboy to-day, I am convinced he would have been neither mute nor inglorious.
The “Aunt Mary Lawson,” to whom I dedicated The Story Girl, was another daughter of William and Eliza Macneill.40 No story of my “career” would be complete without a tribute to her, for she was one of the formative influences of my childhood. She was really quite the most wonderful woman in many respects that I have ever known. She had never had any educational advantages. But she had a naturally powerful mind, a keen intelligence, and a most remarkable memory which retained to the day of her death all that she had ever heard or read or seen. She was a brilliant conversationalist, and it was a treat to get Aunt Mary started on tales and recollections of her youth, and all the vivid doings and sayings of the folk in those young years of the Province.41 We were “chums,” she and I, when she was in the seventies and I was in my teens. I cannot, in any words at my command, pay the debt I owe to Aunt Mary Lawson.
FIGURE 10 This is my great aunt, Mrs. Lawson, who told me many of the tales that I subsequently wrote into my stories. I often wished that I had her fund of story material. Undated photograph. (Courtesy of the L.M. Montgomery Collection, Archival and Special Collections, University of Guelph Library.)
FIGURE 11 My old home at Cavendish, Prince Edward Island, taken from the front. In the grove to the left was our playhouse with the wonderful door that we made ourselves. Undated photograph. (Courtesy of the L.M. Montgomery Collection, Archival and Special Collections, University of Guelph Library.)
When I was twenty-one months old my mother died, in the old home at Cavendish, after a lingering illness.42 I distinctly remember seeing her in her coffin – it is my earliest memory. My father was standing by the casket holding me in his arms. I wore a little white dress of embroidered muslin, and Father was crying. Women were seated around the room, and I recall two in front of me on the sofa who were whispering to each other and looking pityingly at Father and me. Behind them the window was open, and green vines were trailing across it, while their shadows danced over the floor in a square of sunshine.
I looked down at Mother’s dead face. It was a sweet face, albeit worn and wasted by months of suffering. My mother had been beautiful, and Death, so cruel in all else, had spared the delicate outline of feature, the long silken lashes brushing the hollow cheek, and the smooth masses of golden-brown hair.
I did not feel any sorrow, for I knew nothing of what it all meant. I was only vaguely troubled. Why was Mother so still? And why was Father crying? I reached down and laid my baby hand against Mother’s cheek. Even yet I can feel the coldness of that touch. Somebody in the room sobbed and said, “Poor child.” The chill of Mother’s face had frightened me; I turned and put my arms appealingly about Father’s neck and he kissed me. Comforted, I looked down again at the sweet, placid face as he carried me away. That one precious memory is all I have of the girlish mother who sleeps in the old burying-ground of Cavendish, lulled forever by the murmur of the sea.43
I was brought up by my grandparents in the old Macneill Homestead in Cavendish. Cavendish is a farming settlement on the north shore of Prince Edward Island. It was eleven miles from a railway and twenty-four miles from the nearest town. It was settled in 1790 by three Scotch families – the Macneills, Simpsons, and Clarks. These families had inter-married to such an extent that it was necessary to be born or bred in Cavendish in order to know whom it was safe to criticize. I heard Aunt Mary Lawson once naively admit that “the Macneills and Simpsons always considered themselves a little better than the common run;”44 and there was a certain rather ill-natured local saying which was always being cast up to us of the clans by outsiders, “From the conceit of the Simpsons, the pride of the Macneills, and the vain-glory of the Clarks, good Lord deliver us.”45 Whatever were their faults, they were loyal, clannish, upright, God-fearing folk, inheriting traditions of faith and simplicity and aspiration.
I spent my childhood and girlhood in an old-fashioned Cavendish farmhouse, surrounded by apple orchards. The first six years of my life are hazy in recollection. Here and there, a memory picture stands out in vivid colours.46 One of these was the wonderful moment when, I fondly supposed, I discovered the exact locality of Heaven.
One Sunday, when I could not have been more than four years old, I was in the old Clifton Church with Aunt Emily.47 I heard the minister say something about Heaven – that strange, mysterious place about which my only definite idea was that it was “where Mother had gone.”
“Where is Heaven?” I whispered to Aunt Emily, although I knew well that whispering in church was an unpardonable sin. Aunt Emily did not commit it. Silently, gravely, she pointed upward. With the literal and implicit belief of childhood, I took it for granted that this meant that portion of Clifton Church which was above the ceiling. There was a little square hole in the ceiling. Why could we not go up through it and see Mother? This was a great puzzle to me. I resolved that when I grew bigger I would go to Clifton and find some means of getting up into Heaven and finding Mother. This belief and hope was a great, though secret, comfort to me for several years. Heaven was no remote, unattainable place – “some brilliant but distant shore.”48 No, no! It was only ten miles away, in the attic of Clifton Church! Very, very sadly and slowly I surrendered that belief.49
Hood wrote, in his charming I Remember that he was farther off from Heaven than when he was a boy.50 To me, too, the world seemed a colder, lonelier place when age and experience at length forced upon my reluctant seven-year-old consciousness the despairing conviction that Heaven was not so near me as I had dreamed. Mayhap, ’twas even nearer, “nearer than breathing, closer than hands or feet”51 but the ideas of childhood are, necessarily, very concrete; and when I once accepted the fact that the gates of pearl and streets of gold52 were not in the attic of Clifton Church, I felt as though they might as well be beyond the farthest star.
Many of those early memories are connected with visits to Grandfather Montgomery’s farm at Park Corner.53 He and his family lived in the “old house” then, a most quaint and delightful old place as I remember it, full of cupboards and nooks, and little, unexpected flights of stairs. It was there, when I was about five years old, that I had the only serious illness of my life – an attack of typhoid fever.54
FIGURE 12 The old Presbyterian Church under whose roof I thought Heaven was, and that one could get to it through the little square hole in the ceiling. I planned to go up there some day. Undated photograph. (Courtesy of the L.M. Montgomery Collection, Archival and Special Collections, University of Guelph Library.)
The night before I took ill I was out in the kitchen with the servants, feeling as well as usual, “wide-awake and full of ginger,” as the old cook used to declare. I was sitting before the stove, and cook was “riddling” the fire with a long, straight bar of iron used for that purpose. She laid it down on the hearth and I promptly caught it up, intending to do some “ri
ddling” myself, an occupation I much liked, loving to see the glowing red embers fall down on the black ashes.
Alas, I picked the poker up by the wrong end! As a result, my hand was terribly burned. It was my first initiation into physical pain, at least, the first one of which I have any recollection.
I suffered horribly and cried bitterly; yet I took considerable satisfaction out of the commotion I had caused. For the time being I was splendidly, satisfyingly important. Grandfather scolded the poor, distracted cook. Father entreated that something be done for me, frenzied folk ran about suggesting and applying a score of different remedies.55 Finally I cried myself to sleep, holding my hand and arm to the elbow in a pail of ice-cold water, the only thing that gave me any relief.
I awoke the next morning with a violent headache that grew worse as the day advanced. In a few days the doctor pronounced my illness to be typhoid fever. I do not know how long I was ill, but several times I was very low and nobody thought I could possibly recover.
Grandmother Macneill was sent for at the beginning of my illness. I was so delighted to see her that the excitement increased my fever to an alarming pitch, and after she had gone out, Father, thinking to calm me, told me that she had gone home. He meant well, but it was an unfortunate statement. I believed it implicitly – too implicitly. When Grandmother came in again I could not be convinced that it was she. No! She had gone home. Consequently, this woman must be Mrs. Murphy, a woman who worked at Grandfather’s frequently, and who was tall and thin, like Grandmother.
I did not like Mrs. Murphy and I flatly refused to have her near me at all. Nothing could convince me that it was Grandmother. This was put down to delirium, but I do not think it was. I was quite conscious at the time. It was rather the fixed impression made on my mind in its weak state by what Father had told me. Grandmother had gone home, I reasoned, hence, she could not be there. Therefore, the woman who looked like her must be some one else.
It was not until I was able to sit up that I got over this delusion. One evening it simply dawned on me that it really was Grandmother. I was so happy, and could not bear to be out of her arms. I kept stroking her face constantly and saying in amazement and delight, “Why, you’re not Mrs. Murphy, after all; you are Grandma.”
Typhoid fever patients were not dieted so strictly during convalescence in those days as they are now. I remember one day, long before I was able to sit up, and only a short time after the fever had left me, that my dinner consisted of fried sausages – rich, pungent, savoury, home made sausages, such as are never found in these degenerate days. It was the first day that I had felt hungry, and I ate ravenously. Of course, by all the rules of the game, those sausages should have killed me, and so cut short that “career” of which I am writing. But they did not. These things are fated. I am sure that nothing short of predestination saved me from the consequences of those sausages.
Two incidents of the following summer stand out in my memory, probably because they were so keenly and so understandably bitter. One day I heard Grandmother reading from a newspaper an item to the effect that the end of the world was to come the following Sunday.56 At that time I had a most absolute and piteous belief in everything that was “printed.” Whatever was in a newspaper must be true. I have lost this touching faith, I regret to say, and life is the poorer by the absence of many thrills of delight and horror.
From the time I heard that awesome prediction until Sunday was over I lived in an agony of terror and dread. The grown-up folk laughed at me, and refused to take my questions seriously. Now, I was almost as much afraid of being laughed at as of the Judgment Day. But all through the Saturday before that fateful Sunday I vexed Aunt Emily to distraction by repeatedly asking her if we should go to Sunday-school the next afternoon. Her assurance that of course we should go was a considerable comfort to me. If she really expected that there would be Sunday-school she could not believe that the next day would see the end of the world.
But then – it had been printed. That night was a time of intense wretchedness for me. Sleep was entirely out of the question. Might I not hear “the last trump” at any moment?57 I can laugh at it now – any one would laugh. But it was real torture to a credulous child, just as real as any mental agony in after life.
Sunday was even more interminable than Sundays usually were, then. But it came to an end at last, and, as its “dark, descending sun” dimpled the purple sky-line of the Gulf,58 I drew a long breath of relief. The beautiful green world of blossom and sunshine had not been burned up; it was going to last for a while longer. But I never forgot the suffering of that Sunday.
Many years later I used the incident as the foundation of the chapter “The Judgment Sunday” in The Story Girl. But the children of King Orchard had the sustaining companionship of each other. I had trodden the wine-press alone.59
The other incident was much more trifling. The Martin Forbes of The Story Girl had his prototype in an old man who visited at my grandfather’s for a week. Forbes was not his name, of course.60 He was, I believe, an amiable, respectable, and respected, old gentleman. But he won my undying hatred by calling me “Johnny” every time he spoke to me.
How I raged at him! It seemed to me a most deadly and unforgivable insult. My anger amused him hugely and incited him to persist in using the objectionable name. I could have torn that man in pieces had I had the power! When he went away I refused to shake hands with him, whereupon he laughed uproariously and said, “Oh, well, I won’t call you ‘Johnny’ any more. After this I’ll call you ‘Sammy,’” which was, of course, adding fuel to the fire.
For years I couldn’t hear that man’s name without a sense of hot anger. Fully five years afterward, when I was ten, I remember writing this in my diary: “Mr. James Forbes is dead. He is the brother of a horrid man in Summerside who called me ‘Johnny.’”
I never saw poor old Mr. Forbes again, so I never had to endure the indignity of being called “Sammy.” He is now dead himself, and I daresay the fact that he called me “Johnny” was not brought up in judgment against him. Yet he may have committed what might be considered far greater sins that yet would not inflict on any one a tithe of the humiliation which his teasing inflicted on a child’s sensitive mind.
That experience taught me one lesson, at least. I never tease a child. If I had any tendency to do so, I should certainly be prevented by the still keen recollection of what I suffered at Mr. Forbes’ hands. To him, it was merely the “fun” of teasing a “touchy” child. To me, it was the poison of asps.61
The next summer, when I was six, I began to go to school. The Cavendish school-house was a white-washed, low-eaved building on the side of the road just outside our gate. To the west and south was a spruce grove, covering a sloping hill. That old spruce grove, with its sprinkling of maple, was a fairy realm of beauty and romance to my childish imagination. I shall always be thankful that my school was near a grove – a place with winding paths and treasure-trove of ferns and mosses and wood-flowers. It was a stronger and better educative influence in my life than the lessons learned at the desk in the school-house.62
And there was a brook in it, too – a delightful brook, with a big, deep, clear spring – where we went for buckets of water, and no end of pools and nooks where the pupils put their bottles of milk to keep sweet and cold until dinner hour. Each pupil had his or her own particular place, and woe betide a lad or lass who usurped another’s prescriptive spot. I, alas, had no rights in the brook. Not for me was the pleasure of “scooting” down the winding path before school-time to put my bottle against a mossy log, where the sunlit water might dance and ripple against its creamy whiteness.
I had to go home to my dinner every day, and I was scandalously ungrateful for the privilege. Of course, I realize now that I was very fortunate in being able to go home every day for a good, warm dinner. But I could not see it in that light then. It was not half so interesting as taking lunch to school and eating it in sociable rings on the playground, or in group
s under the trees. Great was my delight on those few stormy winter days when I had to take my dinner, too. I was “one of the crowd” then, not set apart in any lonely distinction of superior advantages.
Another thing that worried me with a sense of unlikeness was the fact that I was never allowed to go to school barefooted. All the other children went so, and I felt that this was a humiliating difference. At home I could run barefoot, but in school I must wear “buttoned boots.” Not long ago, a girl who went to school with me confessed that she had always envied me those “lovely buttoned boots.” Human nature always desirous of what it has not got! There was I, aching to go barefoot like my mates; there were they, resentfully thinking that it was bliss to wear buttoned boots!
I do not think that the majority of grown-ups have any real conception of the tortures sensitive children suffer over any marked difference between themselves and the other denizens of their small world. I remember one winter I was sent to school wearing a new style of apron. I think still that it was rather ugly. Then I thought it was hideous. It was a long, sack-like garment, with sleeves. Those sleeves were the crowning indignity. Nobody in school had ever worn aprons with sleeves before. When I went to school one of the girls sneeringly remarked that they were baby aprons. This capped all! I could not bear to wear them, but wear them I had to. The humiliation never grew less. To the end of their existence, and they did wear horribly well, those “baby” aprons marked for me the extreme limit of human endurance.63
A Name for Herself Page 28
