Epilogue

With much regret Flora agreed that it was not possible to take Mungo on the trip west. She gave him to Lillie, who spoiled him just as much as Flora had. He made the most of his nine lives and lived to be seventeen years old.

Upon their arrival in British Columbia, Flora’s family got suddenly much bigger. The Wilfred Duncans had five children, and late in 1888 Janet had the first of what would be four children of her own. Flora’s world was rich in cousins and she ended up with as much family as anyone could want.

Murdo and his family stayed on at the mill in Almonte. One of the room supervisors noticed Murdo’s engineering interests and recommended him for further training. By eighteen Murdo was a mill mechanic — a job he kept his whole working life. With such a wide country between them, though, the Campbells and the Duncans eventually lost touch.

Life on the ranch turned out to be hard work. Uncle James worked with the cattle and horses. Wilfred said that he believed that James spoke horse and cow. James’s disabled hand made some jobs more difficult, but he always said that if he had ten fingers he would still be weaving his life away. Auntie Janet had to learn many new skills, such as canning and the care of chickens.

And life in the west did not mean the end of child labour. Some days, what with gardening, cooking, washing and child-minding, Flora worked every bit as hard and as long as she had in the mill, but there were three big differences. The first was that the work varied with the seasons. Sometimes it was very busy, but often there was time for lots of fun — Flora never lost her love of the “tobog” and she learned to play the mandolin. The second difference was that their hard work resulted in rewards they could see, improvements to the ranch and to their shared lives. The third difference was that Flora had a chance to go to school. She went right through high school and was the first graduate of the school she helped make possible.

Flora married at age eighteen — a young man who was kind, responsible and could sing the birds out of the trees. He had the extravagant first name of Ulysses, which meant that the apple peeling had been right. He worked in the general store in Kamloops and eventually took over the business. By the time Canada celebrated Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, Flora had two babies, and by the new century she was the mother of four. Flora and Ulysses settled permanently in Kamloops, building a house, raising a family, running a business and weaving a life.

Flora’s children often helped in the store after school. Sometimes, if they wanted to play hockey or go fishing instead, they complained. Flora, who was a no-nonsense mother, always answered by telling them that if they wanted to know what hard work was, they should have worked in a mill. The children listened politely to their mother’s stories of the olden days, but really they preferred her stories of princesses and fairies, stories she had learned from her Auntie Janet and told over and over again by the fire on cold winter nights or sitting by the river in summer.

When Auntie Janet left the mill she took with her a bag of wool scraps from the mungo barrel. During the first winter in the west she and Flora cut and pieced and made a quilt from the scraps. It was not beautiful, as the colours were mostly dark blues, browns and greys, but it was warm and durable. Over the years, as it became worn, Flora would mend it, and as she sewed she would think back to the brief chapter in her life when she was a doffer, a piecer, and an Almonter — the chapter in which she first found a family.