A Trip to Stony Lake
Susanna leaned heavily on the arm of her nephew, Percy Strickland, as she hobbled along the dusty road. It was a sultry June morn-ing—the hottest day so far of 1872—and the distance from Westove, Catharine’s cottage, to the Lakefield steamer dock seemed longer than she recalled. She regretted that she had agreed to walk with Percy when she could have been riding with her sister in his horse-drawn buggy. But Percy had put her on her mettle with a careless remark, as he looked at his two stout aunts, that the buggy would “scarcely hold two fairies” like them. Determined not to let her seventy-year-old sister show her up, sixty-eight-year-old Susanna had insisted on walking the mile to the dock situated just behind the little Anglican Church built by her late brother Sam, who had died five years earlier. Now her lace-up black leather boots were pinching her corns. She would have loved to stop and mop the “glow” from her brow.
Once the landing dock was in sight, however, her good humour returned. It had been a pleasant surprise when Percy had arrived at Catharine’s front door that morning to invite his aunts to join a family excursion on the steamer to Stony Lake. Susanna had not seen Stony Lake for years. She vividly recalled the expedition that she and John had made in 1835 by canoe from their log home on Lake Katchewanooka. They had been in Canada less than three years and were still enjoying their “halcyon days” in the bush. The trip been an epiphany for her—a moment when the sheer grandeur of the Canadian landscape had blotted out the endless gnaw of homesickness. The opportunity to revisit such an achingly beautiful landscape was irresistible.
When Percy and Susanna stepped onto the dock, a small crowd was already waiting to board the steamer Chippewa. There was Catharine’s friend, the Reverend Vincent Clementi, and his wife and niece; Catharine and her daughter Kate; Percy’s brothers George, Robert and Roland Strickland, and Roland’s wife and Robert’s two daughters; plus a handful of other Lakefield residents. There was also a pile of luggage. The gentlemen all had fishing rods and baskets; the ladies had straw hats, parasols and reticules filled with remedies for seasickness and sunburn; Catharine had the basket she always carried for rock, fern and flower specimens; Mrs. Vincent Clementi and Mrs. Roland Strickland had the makings of a picnic.
Catharine and Susanna settled themselves on the wooden seats in the cabin of the little vessel, while the men stood on the deck overhead, by the engine room. Acquaintances often confused the two sisters, with their sharp blue eyes, white hair and lacy widows’ bonnets. But differences were more apparent than similarities when they were together. “I am dark and much older looking,” Susanna insisted, “and she is a pretty old lady with a soft smiling face and nice pink cheeks.” The Chippewa, which had been plying the Lakefield to Stony Lake route since the previous year, was emitting an urgent hiss: it had got up enough steam in its boiler to cast off. Its red-painted funnel gave a resounding whistle as the boat headed upstream through Lake Katchewanooka towards Clear Lake.
With every passing year, more of the forest disappeared and the log booms from Clear Lake down the Otonabee River grew larger.
Susanna’s two nephews, Roland and George, had a particular interest in showing off the delights of Stony Lake. They co-owned the eighty-foot Chippewa with its nineteen-horsepower engine. Roland Strickland, one of the most important timber merchants in the area, used the steamer in the spring to tow his log booms from Stony Lake to Lakefield, and he was eager to drum up passenger traffic for the vessel during the summer months. Aunt Moodie, the well-known author, might be very useful in his campaign to promote the attractions of the waterways above Lakefield. She still received invitations from Montreal magazine editors to contribute to their publications: perhaps she might turn her descriptive talents to the Strickland enterprise?
As the Chippewa churned through the water, Catharine chatted away to anyone who settled near her, but Susanna was silent as she eagerly searched the scenery for familiar landmarks. As she gazed out the cabin window at the east shore of Lake Katchewanooka, she could scarcely make out the property on which she and John had worked so hard in the 1830s. She knew from her visit in 1865 that their old house had collapsed, but only now, as she took in the entire setting, did she appreciate the change in the landscape that ruthless logging had wrought. “The woods about it are all gone, and a new growth of small cedars fringes the shore in front,” she wrote later to her son-in-law, John Vickers. “There is a tolerable looking modern cottage on the spot that the old log house once occupied, and the old barn survives on the same spot on which it was built, more than 30 years ago, but the woods that framed it are all down, and it has a bare, desolate look.”
To Susanna’s eyes, the land looked plucked and shaved with its stubble of stumps. The giant pines, oaks and maples that had topped the skyline were felled, and wispy second-growth birch and cedar were only starting to replace them. Huge quantities of lumber had been taken out of the area. The limestone falls down which water had once roared and foamed from Clear Lake had been blasted out in 1871 to make a lock, so that logs could be floated into Lake Katchewanooka more easily. Banks that were once covered in brilliant red cardinal flowers and orange tiger-lilies had been flooded to make a millpond. The magnificent emptiness of sparkling Clear Lake was interrupted by scattered habitation along its west shore. Susanna, who did not share her sister’s concerns about vanishing species, was happy to see these signs of life. She decided that “a pretty Catholic church, and burying ground, and a small picturesque group of cottages, gives an air of civilization to the once romantic place.”
In 1835, the Moodies had pulled their canoe up at the mill by Young’s Point Falls and been served a feast of “bush dainties” by the Young family. Susanna had been particularly startled to be offered coffee that had been boiled in the frying pan—“for the first and last time in my life,” she would remember thirty-seven years later. Now, Susanna was delighted to discover that the recently appointed master at the new lock between Lake Katchewanooka and Clear Lake was none other than Pat Young, son of the old miller: “He greeted me with intense Irish glee, and asked after the two pretty little girls he carried down in his arms asleep to put in Moodie’s canoe at night,” she told John Vickers, Katie’s husband. “And sure, was he not delighted to hear that they both had married Irish husbands and that little Katie was the mother of nine children. ‘Sure, she was always the clever stirring little thing.’”
The steamer continued through Clear Lake, and the temperature rose in the Chippewa’s cabin as the hot yellow sun climbed in the sky. Susanna fanned herself with the latest issue of the Canadian Monthly and National Review, and Catharine undid the button at the throat of her black gown. Finally, when the sun was directly overhead, the Chippewa nosed its way into Stony Lake. Although thirty years of logging had wiped out the mighty oaks and white pines from its shoreline, the lake itself was as dramatic as Susanna recalled. She stared about her at the great red-granite rocks along the north shore, heaved steeply up “like the bare bones of some ancient world.” She looked at the reflections of dark woods “frowning down from their lofty granite ridges” into the cold, blue water. She heard Percy insisting that there were over 1,200 islands, and she wondered how long it would be before this marvellous, vast, lonely place became as popular amongst sightseers as the English Lake District.
Thanks to the efforts of the Strickland family, it didn’t take long for Stony Lake to be discovered. The first tourists started arriving to disrupt the “wild and lonely grandeur” as soon as there was a regular steamer service each summer through Lake Katchewanooka and Clear Lake. And three years after Susanna and Catharine took their trip, a new train service from Peterborough to the Lakefield wharf doubled the steamers’ business. Soon the fighting qualities of Stony Lake muskellunge, the delicate pink flesh of its salmon trout, the profusion of private islands, the azure clarity of its waters and the abundance of deer, partridge and ruffed grouse in the surrounding woods were famous amongst fishermen and hunters as far south as Ohio and New York. Local entrepreneurs built shoreline hotels with well-stocked bars and acted as guides for sportsmen. The Canadian Illustrated News named Stony Lake “possibly the prettiest locality in Canada.” In 1893, Catharine’s daughter Kate bought a three-acre island, Minnewawa, where Catharine spent happy summers. She slept in the rustic cabin and delighted in the island’s “most beautiful oaks and pines,” as she told her son William, “and the wild picturesque outline of the rocky mounts and deep valleys.” Within twenty years of Susanna’s and Catharine’s summer trip in 1872, the whole area had acquired a new name, the Kawartha Lakes (a corruption of the Ojibwa word kawatha, meaning “bright waters and happy land”), and become an established part of the summer cottaging ritual for many Canadian families.
In 1872, however, the two sisters were still looking at an empty expanse of glistening water and an unbroken shoreline. As the Chippewa’s paddle slowed, and the vessel came to a halt about twenty-five miles from Lakefield, the men in the party retrieved their fishing rods and baited their hooks. The Reverend Mr. Clementi and Percy Strickland were particularly lucky, and soon several plump black bass and salmon trout were gutted and ready to be fried on a portable stove. They made “a capital dinner,” in Susanna’s opinion. Then the party disembarked on the north shore, where there was a natural landing place, called “Julien’s landing” after an old French-Canadian fur trader who had built a shack there. Kate Traill set off to climb a nearby hill, called “the big sugar loaf rock,” while the elderly members of the party sought the shade of the woods. Some aspects of the wilderness had not changed in three decades: the black-flies and mosquitoes were still relentless. Catharine, hot on the trail of a delicate fern that she just knew lingered in these woods, brushed them off with an imperious wave of her hand. But Susanna had never made the best of things, and she was not about to start now. As she angrily tried to swat the insects, she almost stepped on a snake. It was enough to send her marching back on board. Nevertheless, she described the trip to friends as “a grand party.”
After she was widowed, in 1869, Susanna had been slow to take up Catharine’s invitations to stay with her at Westove, in Lakefield. Susanna never displayed either the sense of family or the instinct for survival that Catharine always had. When Catharine was vulnerable, she retreated without hesitation into the comforting Lakefield fold of the Strickland clan. She had done this both in 1832, when the Traills first arrived in Canada, and in 1859, after Thomas Traill’s death. But Susanna floundered after John’s death, just as the Moodies had floundered after their arrival in Upper Canada in 1832. She had no roof to call her own, and she spent the rest of her life ricocheting amongst various friends and relations. The trip to Stony Lake took place at the start of one of her longest sojourns with Catharine at Westove, after Susanna had tried and rejected a variety of other options.
Immediately after John’s death, Susanna had joined her youngest son, Robert, in Seaforth, sixty miles northwest of Toronto. Of Susanna’s five children, only her youngest son had felt the full force of this passionate woman’s love. Robert had been born in the relative comfort of the Belleville years. By the time he was a toddler, Susanna had lost one child in infancy and another child, Johnnie, in a drowning accident. Little Robert was infinitely precious to her—and like his father, he could always raise her spirits. After John’s death, he was the first to insist that Susanna should come and live with him. He had recently been appointed stationmaster at Seaforth, which was on the Grand Trunk Railway branch-line between Goderich and Stratford. His offer to Susanna was more than generous, since it meant that he would have to support, on a very limited salary, not only his delicate wife Nellie and their three small children, but a mother and a mother-in-law who couldn’t stand each other. They were all crammed into a badly built, four-room house, the front door of which opened directly onto the platform. Every time a train thundered by, or drew to a shuddering halt, the house shook. Nellie’s mother, Mrs. Russell, constantly shrieked at the children or slapped them, setting off gales of tears. Susanna spent most of her time in her own bedroom, painting, knitting or writing, and wishing she had somebody to talk to. “Ah my dear sister,” she wrote to Catharine. “My poor, sore heart is so empty….The days seem so long and sad.”
Susanna, alone and lonely.
After a year of the chaos in Robert’s household, Susanna had had enough. Catharine entreated her sister to come and stay with her, but Susanna yearned to return to Belleville and John’s grave. “Whenever, lately, I visited my husband’s grave, it appeared to me such a blessed haven of rest, that I longed with an intense longing to lie down beside him. Poor darling, the harebells and Ox-eyes were growing upon his lowly bed … ” She decided to take lodgings in Belleville with some old friends, Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Rous. But this arrangement soured, because Susanna found the Rous daughter “selfish, indolent and conceited” and Mrs. Rous’s stews and hashes indigestible. “It is quite a misfortune to have been a good cook,” she wrote to Catharine. “It makes one very dainty, but I can’t help it.” She moved on to rooms with Mrs. John Dougall, on the Kingston Road. But she grumbled that Mrs. Dougall was not feeding her properly, despite the ample rent she was paid. Her health deteriorated. “I have suffered awful agonies from inflammation of the stomach and bowels and frightful haemorrhage which has reduced me to a bag of bones,” she complained to friends.
Robert Moodie, Susanna’s beloved youngest child, with his wife Nellie and one of their seven children.
Susanna’s health problems weren’t helped by two worries. She wanted to continue her literary career—in particular, she was eager to publish some of her husband’s work. But without John’s guidance, her writing and editing skills deserted her. She agreed to let George Maclean Rose, of the Toronto publishing house Hunter, Rose and Company, bring out a new edition of her own Roughing It in the Bush, but she couldn’t even draft an updated introduction. “You must help me with matter for the Canadian preface,” she implored Katie Vickers. “I forget all the subjects dear John told me to write about on the present state and prospects of Canada.” It took her months to draft an introductory chapter in which she defended herself against her critics, celebrated the progress of the previous forty years and insisted that “some of the happiest years of my life” had been spent in the colony.
The second source of stress for Susanna was her family. Susanna’s relations with her eldest four children continued to deteriorate. As adults, both Katie and Agnes found their mother exasperating. When she stayed with them, she was demanding and critical. Susanna was a little too free with her opinions on child-raising and sketch-writing (“I think her publishing has not been profitable,” she wrote to her sister Catharine, about Agnes Chamberlin, “but she would not listen to my advice”). Susanna’s devotion to her husband had been particularly hard for the two boys, Dunbar and Donald, who always felt second-best. In 1866, to his mother’s consternation, shiftless Donald had married Julia Russell, the sister of Dunbar’s wife Eliza. Susanna had now decided that she didn’t like either of the two Jamaican sisters, and she could never resist being catty about them in her letters to Catharine (“It is only that horrid woman,” she told her sister, that prevented Donald from writing home). By the 1870s, both men were living as far away from their mother as they could afford on very limited means. Dunbar was in Colorado, in an experimental agricultural community. Donald was an alcoholic, who was constantly scrounging money from relatives and whose wife eventually left him. Neither ever visited their widowed mother, although she always kept in touch with both of them.
Robert Moodie was more sympathetic to his mother than his elder brothers and sisters. But he was struggling with health and financial problems of his own, which worried Susanna. “The dear kind fellow has a shocking cough,” Susanna wrote to Catharine, “and is very thin and delicate.” As though he did not have tribulations enough, an additional blow struck in 1871. His wife Nellie was overcome with what Susanna described as “raving madness.” Today, Nellie would be diagnosed as suffering from postnatal depression: she had just given birth to her fourth child, and was subject to alternating fits of weeping and rage. But there was no clear diagnosis one hundred years ago. Instead, she was committed to the grim wards of Toronto’s Lunatic Asylum, whose “raving maniacs” (including the murderess Grace Marks) Susanna had visited twenty years earlier. Robert was left with four young children, an unpleasant mother-in-law and bills for both Nellie’s treatment and his baby’s wet-nurse.
Susanna was stuck. She didn’t like her Belleville lodgings, but she could not return to Robert’s cramped household. Sensing her sister’s unhappiness, Catharine continued to press her to come and live in Lakefield. Susanna did not really want to be her sister’s guest—she valued her independence, and she knew that Westove had become a refuge for lame ducks. Every fatherless child, ailing friend and grumpy adolescent within the extended Strickland network knew that Aunt Traill’s door was always open to them. But there were few alternatives for Aunt Moodie. So in the spring of 1872, Susanna accepted her sister’s invitation and boarded the train to Peterborough.
Catharine always loved family reunions. She and her daughter Kate put a stove, a carpet and a cherrywood dresser in the unused bedroom on the second floor for Susanna, and Catharine wrote in delight that “my dear sister Moodie” was going to be “an inmate with us.” At first, Susanna was profoundly relieved to have found such a pleasant home. “Nothing could exceed the kindness of my dear sister and her good daughter,” she told her daughter Katie Vickers. “We live twice as well as I did at Mrs. D.’s, without the miserable and begrudged scarcity and eternal liver and fish dinners. If I feel hungry I can get a bit of bread and butter without having to keep a store of food in private.” As summer approached, she sat in Catharine’s garden, “in a dreamy sort of rapture communing with nature and my own soul,” smelling the lilac and honeysuckle that her sister had planted and watching “the bright winged birds and butterflies disport themselves.” Catharine’s carefully nurtured collection bed of twenty-five different kinds of fern did not interest Susanna, but the summer riot of roses and delphiniums brought back pleasant memories of Suffolk. Often, she would take Catharine’s four-year-old granddaughter Katie Traill down to the water’s edge to watch the perch and sunfish darting through the shadows just below the surface.
The arrangement appeared to suit everybody. From England, Sarah Strickland Gwillym wrote to Susanna to express the satisfaction felt by all four English sisters, now well into their seventies and in varying degrees of health: “I cannot say how glad I am that you have arranged to live with dear Kate. I think it will be a mutual comfort to you both.” Agnes and Sarah probably hoped that if their Canadian sisters shared living expenses, they would need fewer handouts from home.
However, the English sisters might have guessed that Susanna and Catharine would not be happy under one roof for long. They themselves had refused to contemplate living with each other. To Agnes’s chagrin, she had been unable to bully Sarah into allowing her to move into Sarah’s comfortable home in the Lake District. Agnes, in turn, had refused to allow Jane to share her elegant Georgian house in Southwold, purchased after their mother’s death and the sale of Reydon Hall. Jane had had to content herself with buying a humble cottage next door to Agnes. Elizabeth wouldn’t live with anybody: she preferred a reclusive life in her own house, Abbott’s Lodge, in Tilford, Surrey. The only relative she visited was her brother Tom, now retired from the merchant navy. Given this pattern of scratchy relationships, it is no surprise to discover that harmony did not prevail for long at Westove, either.
Susanna and Catharine were too different, and by now too set in their ways, to live together. If anyone was sick, Catharine would start boiling roots and herbs, according to old Indian recipes. Some of her remedies sound terrifying: the limewater gargle that she recommended for a sore throat consisted of diluted quicklime. Susanna, on the other hand, would insist on producing Brown’s Bronchial Troches or Ayre’s Liver Pills—nostrums that were all the rage in the late nineteenth century but were rarely effective. When Catharine’s daughter Annie Atwood arrived with an unruly swarm of children, Susanna would get snappy. (“You must just turn a deaf ear to criticisms on the little ones as though you heard it not,” Catharine told Annie. “It is just her way you know.”) Susanna objected to the number of people continually trooping through the house, and the consequent expense. (“Aunt has only a few dollars in the Bank,” she wrote to her daughter Katie Vickers. “But she will entertain … ”) Sarah Gwillym, on the other side of the Atlantic, got the impression that the household was messy and disorganized. When an envelope arrived in England with unfinished scraps of two letters from Catharine, Sarah wrote back: “Tell her with my love that her last letters were rather disappointing….I suppose that as she seemed to have more than a houseful of people with her that she had more on her hands than she could well get through, poor dear, though I suppose that in Canada all visitors help till all the duties are done.”
Susanna spent more and more of her time in her bedroom, reading and going through old papers rather than joining the endless family gatherings in the drawing room downstairs. She refused to join Catharine for overnight visits to relatives’ houses. She had been asked by a collector for a copy of her famous sister Agnes Strickland’s autograph, and as she searched through a pile of old letters, she was often moved to tears. “I had no idea that I had so many, and such long letters from Agnes, and until my unlucky book was published, so full of affection,” she told Katie Vickers, adding triumphantly, “Mrs. Traill seemed quite astonished that Agnes had written such letters to me!” As the months went by, Susanna’s thoughts of Agnes became increasingly fond and she barely remembered how Agnes’s reaction to Roughing It in the Bush had stung her.
In 1872, Susanna and Catharine were disturbed to hear that Agnes, now seventy-six, had suffered a serious fall on the stairs of a friend’s house and broken her leg. Jane Strickland wrote from Southwold that the accident had been a prelude to serious bronchial problems for Agnes: “the attack was both paralytic and apoplectic, but you must not name it to her or let any of her relatives in Canada mention it as that would make her unhappy.” Agnes’s health slowly collapsed, and she died in July 1874. A few weeks later, her brother Thomas Strickland passed away.
Susanna expressed quite as much grief as Catharine at Agnes’s death. She was quick to correct various errors made in an obituary that appeared in the Toronto Globe, and to add a eulogy of her own: “An affectionate, loving daughter, a faithful sister and friend, kind and benevolent to the poor, and possessing warm sympathies for the sick and suffering; she never let the adulation of the world interfere with the blessed domestic charities.”
But indomitable Agnes had never forgiven her youngest sister for that “unlucky book.” At her death, she was not going to give Susanna the pleasure of believing that she could rival Catharine as the family favourite. Susanna must have been stunned when, a few weeks later, she heard the contents of Agnes’s will. Agnes left the copyright to her Lives of the Queens of England, still a bestseller in Victorian England, jointly to Catharine Parr Traill and Percy Strickland. (Her sister Elizabeth was furious, since by rights half belonged to her; however, Elizabeth died the following year). There was no specific bequest for Susanna. Agnes did not leave her sister even a single keepsake from Reydon, “which was rather mean I must say,” Catharine acknowledged.
In the fall of 1874, a large box arrived in Lakefield from Sarah Gwillym. It contained a treasure-trove: the splendid wardrobe in which Agnes had made her entrances at various royal, noble and civic occasions. Catharine pulled out black silk and brocade gowns, jet and gold jewellery, pearl-encrusted collars and intricate lace flounces, whalebone corsets and horsehair petticoats, muslin underskirts and voluminous velvet cloaks, elaborately decorated bonnets, shawls and gloves. “It is so many years ago since I looked upon articles so rich and costly,” she marvelled. Most articles were distributed amongst various granddaughters and great-nieces. The only items Susanna received were a bracelet and a jasper brooch.
Soon after the parcel arrived, Susanna decided to leave Lakefield. Perhaps she had simply had enough of Westove’s endless stream of relatives with their crying babies. It must have been hard for her to stomach the contrast between Catharine’s children, who showered their mother with affection and worried about her health, and her own offspring, whose attention to her was fitful at best. Or maybe she left because Agnes’s will, with its ostentatious concern for Catharine and disregard for Susanna, pushed her youngest sister’s nose painfully out of joint. For whatever reason, Susanna packed her bags and took the train back to Toronto.
From now on, Susanna stayed only a few weeks at Lakefield each summer, and spent the rest of the time in Toronto, where Robert now lived, and where she could be close to her Moodie and Vickers grandchildren. There was a more varied stream of visitors in Toronto than in Lakefield to amuse Susanna with talk of exotic new fashions, such as spotted veils and women’s rights. It was still not very comfortable living with Robert (he moved house seven times in less than three years), but Nellie Moodie had returned home after three years in the asylum and was willing to cherish her cantankerous mother-in-law.
Susanna was a petulant old woman, but she always kept her sense of humour. Her own children found her moods hard to bear, but her grandchildren appreciated her mischievous stories about their relatives. Who wouldn’t be amused by a grandmother who wrote funny verse, as Susanna did to fourteen-year-old William Vickers, the fourth of Katie Vickers’s ten children? William, a student at Upper Canada College in Toronto, had lost the March 1885 that the old lady seemed ready another pair. Susanna replied:
You careless fellow!—What, lost your mitts?
Aren’t you afraid I’ll give you fits?
Punch your head, or slap your face,
Or send to a corner in dire disgrace?
Were I a lady young and fair,
You would certainly take the greatest care,
Of the smallest thing her love could proffer,
So what excuse my lad can you offer?
By 1876, Susanna’s eyesight was no longer sharp enough to knit, but her wit was quite sharp enough for verse.
When I take up the pins in your behalf
I give you leave my boy to laugh—
At old Knitty Knotty, who loves you well,
And hopes to see you a learned swell.
When Catharine and Susanna were apart, they thought fondly of each other—even though they knew that, together, they got on each other’s nerves. They exchanged frequent letters, never forgetting to mark each other’s birthdays. Susanna wrote to “my beloved sister of old” whose face “seems looking at me through the dim mist of years in its youthful bloom.” She assured friends that “My dear sister Catharine is as amiable and loveable as ever….We still love with the old love through weal or woe.” The sisters were now in their seventies, and with each passing year, more ailments filled their letters. Catharine’s lumbago made writing uncomfortable; Susanna had an “odious hernia” which prevented her from walking very far. Both women complained of failing memories (although each could reel off the name of every single family member on each side of the Atlantic). More poignantly, Susanna began to suffer spells of dementia. “I had no idea,” she wrote sadly in 1882, “that age was such a ruthless destroyer of the senses and so perfectly obliterates the past, by mingling it up with the present.”
In 1883, Catharine received a summons from Robert Moodie: Susanna was sick. As Catharine boarded the 2:30 pm train to Toronto at Lakefield Station on a gloomy November afternoon, she wondered whether she would ever see any of her sisters again in this world. “There are only four of all the old Stricklands left,” Catharine had written sadly to Ellen Dunlop that morning. “Two in England—Mrs. Gwillym 85—Jane Margaret 83—myself 81—and dear Mrs. Moodie in her eightieth year—an aged sisterhood.” After a seven-hour journey, she stepped onto the platform at the yet-unfinished Union Station and was immediately bewildered by the throng of people, the whistles and clangs of huge locomotives, the white brightness of the huge station’s new electric lights. But Robert Moodie, reliable as always, was there to greet her, carry her shabby cloth bag and find a cab to take them to his house on Wilton Crescent, between Jarvis and Sherbourne streets.
Catharine slowly clambered up the narrow staircase of the brick duplex to the bedroom overlooking the back garden, where Susanna had spent most of the previous two years. She was shocked when she saw Susanna: “She looked aged and feeble and I found the fine intellect much weakened … more than I could have supposed. Only at times she would brighten up, and seem more like her old self; but it was like flashes of light on dull cloudy days.” Catharine’s ten-day visit proved a tonic for both these sturdy women. Susanna insisted on struggling down the narrow stairs to Robert’s parlour, where her old piano now stood. Then Catharine would sit down and pick out the hymns they had learned in their Suffolk childhood. Susanna insisted that Charles Wesley was “the king of hymn writers,” and the sisters’ quavery sopranos would join together in the words of “Jesu, lover of my soul” or “Forth in thy Name, O Lord, I go.” Many of the poignant verses must have recalled for the sisters their hard times in the backwoods, when they and their young families had assembled on Sundays in Catharine’s parlour to sing the same verses:
Other refuge have I none,
Hangs my helpless soul on thee;
Leave, ah! leave me not alone,
Still support and comfort me.
Catharine’s visit gave Susanna a new lease on life. For a few months, the shadows of dementia retreated from her mind, and she recovered her appetite for visitors. When a dapper, middle-aged Englishman, with shiny black boots and a jaunty self-assurance, turned up at Robert’s house, she was eager to talk to him. The visitor was James Ewing Ritchie, a well-known English travel writer. Ritchie had been commissioned by the London periodical the Christian World to cross the Atlantic in order to prepare a series of articles on the pros and cons of emigration to Canada. But Susanna knew Ritchie as the son of Andrew Ritchie, once the pastor of Wrentham Congregational Church, three miles north of Reydon. It was Pastor Ritchie who had converted the young and spiritually restless Susanna to Congregationalism in 1830.
James Ritchie had inquired into the whereabouts of Agnes Strickland’s sisters as soon as he arrived in Canada. He knew that their stories, and their link to the famous royal biographer, would make great copy. Before he had even tracked them down, he’d drafted a few dramatic paragraphs about two “delicately nurtured ladies” who had been “familiar with the best of London literary society” and had then arrived in the “waste, howling wilderness” of Canada and slaved as “no servant girl slaves in England.” Now he had finally located Susanna in Toronto, and he reported that she possessed “a mental vigour and active memory rare in one so aged.” They talked for hours about her memories of her Suffolk childhood and of Regency London.
After talking to Susanna, Ritchie knew that both sisters had incredible stories to tell. So he made a special side trip in order to visit Lakefield and knocked on the door of Westove. Catharine, who had fussed over James when he was a little boy, was even more delighted to see him than Susanna had been—it is easy to imagine a smart London journalist flinching from the garrulous flow of reminiscences he had sparked. Ritchie told his readers that he was bowled over by Mrs. Traill’s “queenlike” manners and enthusiasm for nature: “In spite of all the hardships she has had to undergo as wife and mother in the wilderness, her face still retains something of the freshness and fairness of her youth. She is a wonderful old lady.” Ritchie lavished praise on the literary output of both women, and on their role as “pioneers of Canadian literature.” Much of Ritchie’s interview with Susanna was reprinted in the Globe, and his whole collection of articles was published in London in 1885 under the title To Canada with Emigrants.
Even after all these years, the English sisters winced when they saw references in the London press to their Canadian sisters’ humble circumstances. All that Roughing It in the Bush mortification flamed again in Jane Strickland, who wrote a tetchy letter to Susanna. Jane dismissed James Ritchie as “Sir Snob” and deplored his patronizing style: “While praising [Catharine’s] elegant arrangements he takes care to inform his readers ‘it is only a wooden house.’…We all thought him a disgusting child. He must have written in pure spite.”
Susanna’s interview with James Ritchie was amongst the last encounters she had with anyone outside her family circle. Strange fantasies began to flood her mind—fantasies that she had been robbed and was now penniless. The fantasies intensified over the next few months as Susanna’s sanity slowly slipped away. She could no longer read; she could not walk without assistance; she confused her children with her grandchildren. By the end of 1884, she required constant nursing, and Robert Moodie and his sister Katie Vickers decided to move their mother to Katie’s mansion at 52 Adelaide Street.
Susanna’s daughter Katie and her husband John Vickers, with seven of their ten children, in the parlour of their opulent mansion on Toronto’s Adelaide Street.
Yet it was not until March 1885 that the old lady seemed ready to relinquish her hold on life. Catharine arrived to sit with her and listen to her inchoate ramblings. Susanna was a wreck of her former independent, private self. Catharine wrote to Ellen Dunlop: “I cannot leave her as she frets if I go away and when she comes in to me she keeps talking and rambles so that I lose all thought of anything and every one else…. My sister who used to rail against dolls to play with and call them hideous idols and find fault with mothers for giving little children dolls to play with has a great wax doll dressed like a baby and this she nurses and caresses—and believes it is her own living babe and cannot bear it out of her sight….This is to me the saddest sight for it shews the entire change that has come over her fine intellect. She is a child again in very truth.”
It was a wretched, anguished death. On Easter Sunday, the new bell of St. Andrew’s Church on King Street began to clang. Susanna grew dreadfully agitated. She got it into her head that the bell tolled for a murderer who had cut off her head, and she struggled out of bed to kneel on the floor and pray for his soul. For the next thirty-six hours, the poor old woman was repeatedly startled awake by fearsome delusions and nightmares. Finally, as her nurse, daughter and sister slumped exhausted by her bedside, she fell into a coma. Catharine listened to her laboured breaths. “The total loss of your dear aunt’s faculties,” Catharine told her daughter Annie Atwood, “had indeed reconciled us to the final close of her life on earth … the restful peace of God seemed to have taken the place of all the sad harassed pained expression that was for so long sad to witness on that beloved face.” Staring at her sister’s face, Catharine was transported to the bedroom of Reydon Hall, where she had last seen her own mother “calmly sleeping” fifty-two years earlier. As she watched and prayed, Susanna drew her last breath.
Robert Moodie arranged for his mother’s remains to travel to Belleville by train. Susanna Moodie was buried in the newly laid-out graveyard to the west of the city, overlooking the Bay of Quinte. The bodies of her husband John and her two sons were taken from the old graveyard, in the centre of town, and buried next to her. John Vickers paid for a splendid white marble angel, wearing a Moodie-like expression of fierce pride and holding a star aloft, to be erected at the grave. The Globe published a long obituary, applauding Susanna’s determination to help create a Canadian literature: “Many a struggling Canadian author has reason to thank her for encouragement and advice kindly given.” The obituary writer described Roughing It in the Bush as the best-read book ever written in Canada and made the prescient comment: “Its pictures of patient suffering and endurance will last long after the landmarks with which they are associated will have disappeared.”
