This column first appeared in the Victoria Daily Times on Sept. 7, 1940.
A nice, quiet, contented column seems right for this week, after the rush of summer holidays, the goings and coming of visitors, meeting boats and buses, making sandwiches for picnics, remembering to get dressed early in the afternoon, and getting the front verandah swept (for there would surely be early callers, the day was so fine), bouquets to change, lavender to pick for the visitors and meals to plan.
Now the summer, the high summer, has faded down into the early autumn, and the fall term rolls into action. The children have gone back to school, with new books, new clothes, new studies.
Inside the house, there are good smells of spiced vinegar and fruit preserving. The oil-covered cookbook is on the kitchen table ready to impart its knowledge of nine-day pickles, now advanced to the second stage of their issue of days. The next one will bring them the final process, when they are slowly cooked in the vinegar with “a piece of alum the size of a walnut.”
The bean pickles in the thick sauce, flavoured with celery seed, are done, and put away in the apple house. Ripe cucumbers are waiting to be picked, and the crop of tomatoes reddens in the bright sunshine.
The sunshine is not as bright as it was; a harvest haze gives it an amber tone, which seems to fit the yellow leaves showing through the green. Without any movement of the wind, these fall one by one, to let us know that the year has turned its face definitely toward the time of gathering.
No time of the year is more delightful than these rich days. The apples redden on the trees, so heavily loaded that props have to be put in for support. Apples on the ground must be picked up, ripe beans and peas must be saved, nothing can be wasted this year. Food will be the world’s great need before another harvest comes and may turn the tide in our favour.
We have our winter potatoes planted, and they show green on the brown soil. If the season is as favourable as the last two have been, we will have new potatoes at Christmas. The wallflowers are set out, for blooming at the end of February, and fine, thrifty little plants they are.
The bantams, Daphne and her brood and the others, have done their ear-wigging so well we did not lose a zinnia this year. From one package of seed we have two good rows still in full bloom, rich in colour in all the gypsy shades from pale yellow to Morocco brown through crimson, rose and flame and burning orange. Zinnias are thick and straight in the stem, stiff in a bouquet, but their colours are so bright they bring life to any room. They and the salpiglossis have given us continuous flowers all summer, and there’s good mileage in them still.
This last week has brought many prairie visitors to the coast, interesting people, whose delight in the sea and the snow-capped mountains and the strange flowers, known only in catalogues, is good to see. They are the real flower-lovers, these people who nurse house plants through the winter, and raise tulips in pots.
And what good conversation they bring. I had one visitor this week, a man from Saskatchewan, but formerly from Northampton, who held us all in the grip of his eloquence. He had some of the quaint phrases and poetic touch of Richard Llewellyn, whose story, How Green Was My Valley, I have recently read.
His crowning story was about his great-grandfather, who did a bit of poaching on the squire’s estate and that was the only time the family tasted pheasant. But one evil night he was caught at it. He eluded his pursuers and took refuge in the pigsty under straw.
But he knew he was marked and it would be Van Dieman’s Land. So, hastily bidding goodbye to his wife and family, he set out for Liverpool and America. He would find work there, and send for them all. And so he passed out on that long quest for freedom and fortune. His wife was left to feed the family, and did washing for the gentry, without even a washboard, just her own two hands.
She never gave up hope of Harry’s success — and time went on. Then came the American war, and some men went from their village, drafted into the army to quell American independence, and Harry’s wife hoped they would meet Harry. But when only one of them returned and he had not met Harry, that hope died. Still she went on washing, and believing, and somehow the family lived, the girls went out to service, married, had children, and the fight for existence was carried on.
The man who had returned from America had evidently done well there. He bought cattle when he came home, rented a farm, dressed well. Oh! But America must be the grand place! If only Harry could have written a letter, but Harry couldn’t write, poor fellow he had worked from the time he was nine.
Time passed, and the day came for the rich farmer, the returned man, to die. He sent for Harry’s wife in great haste, for there was something on his mind. So she left her washing and went, and the story came out. He had seen Harry in America, and Harry had given him 500 pounds to carry home to her, to bring her and the family to American! But the devil got him, and he kept it! I interrupted there.
“Did he make any restitution at all?”
“He cried full score,” said the narrator, without heeding my question, “and turned his face to the wall and died, and my great grandmother went back to her washing. She never gave up hope that Harry would send for them — but Harry was never heard of.” And that was the end of the story.
We all sat silent then in the fell grip of destiny. But the storyteller went on with his theme.
“You see,” he said cheerfully, “how life goes on — no story ever ends. The man who robbed my great grandmother held back the family for two generations, but now we’re here, and have been since I was 20.
“We still love the things she loved. She craved education, she believed in God and she knew that somehow odds would break and day would dawn. So do we. Individuals may seem to be defeated, but faith lives on — nothing walks with aimless feet.”
His bright blue eyes had a boyish gleam in spite of his 70 years, and in that gleam I saw the spirit of the woman who washed without even a washboard, and held to her faith. And I saw, too, the spirit that today is saving the world.
