Friday, June 1
Today is Verity’s birthday. She is eighteen!
“At last!” she said at breakfast. Now what did she mean by that? She has changed lately. She just sits and stares into space and thinks and thinks about something. But when you offer her a penny for her thoughts, she just says her thoughts are worth much more than that.
Sunday, June 3
Father did not preach this morning. He has broken down under the nervous strain. That is what Mother says. Maybe it is something like what happened to Richard. Father cries and hardly ever comes out of his study. The church is giving him “leave of absence.” I can hardly remember a Sunday morning in my life when my father did not give the sermon. We all actually stayed home. Reverend Archibald preached and he came to the house after the service, but he only stayed a few minutes. He went in to talk to Father and came out shaking his head.
“How was he?” Mother asked, her eyes filled with worry.
“He would not talk to me,” Mr. Archibald said. “We must give him time, Mrs. Bates. And pray for him, of course.”
Monday, June 4
I got a letter from Jack! It is very short so I will copy it here.
Dear Eliza,
I keep thinking how lonely you must be. Hugo was your special brother and you were special to him too. Our family is not good at saying these things, but I miss him too and if I can help you somehow, write to me.
Love, Jack
His letter brought tears to my eyes but they did not hurt like other tears. It made me feel as though he had given me a big hug.
I picked up the mail this morning so nobody saw the letter come. I will show them later maybe. Right now it is private. I have not written back to him but I will.
Wednesday, June 6
Dear Reader, life seems never to be ordinary now. Mother came into Verity’s and my room tonight and told me that she is sending the Twins and Belle and me away to Aunt Martha for a holiday. Father needs complete rest. Verity does not have to go because of her schooling, and because she works at the Red Cross now. She spends all her time over there, serving mugs of tea to other women rolling bandages or rolling them herself or packing boxes to be sent overseas. I wonder sometimes how the men feel when they find a toothbrush inside and soap and so on. I think they really want warm socks and Russian toffee much more. I stuck a copy of one of Hugo’s books into a box going to him once and he wrote back as pleased as though I had sent him jewels.
I was stunned at the idea of leaving home but I managed to ask about my schooling. After all, I’m supposed to take the entrance exams that tell if you are ready to enter high school. But Mother said she had talked to my teacher and the principal and they are going to pass me without my writing the examinations. They said I was “a fine student with a good mind.” I should be happy to hear that but it does not sound real, and it does not matter one whit.
How can I bear to be sent away? I cannot. I thought of refusing, but Mother looks so white and her eyes have grown huge and when she looks at me she reminds me of a wounded deer I saw once. Father took me on a walk in the woods with him. All at once a doe plunged out of the trees and passed us, not even noticing we were there. She had been shot in the flank but not killed outright. It was terrible. She was so piteous. Hunters came crashing through the trees looking for her and Father pulled me away. We heard them shoot her and Father said it was good because she would not have to suffer any longer. But I still see her eyes in my dreams sometimes. I did not tell the younger ones.
“I know you want to stay, Eliza,” Mother said in the new husky voice which is all we hear now. “But Aunt Martha will need you. Four children means a lot more work.” She is right. There will be more food to cook, more clothes to wash and mend, more faces to scrub, more buttons to do up, lots more worry. “Also, whether you believe it or not,” Mother finished up, “the younger kiddies will depend on you to comfort them. You will be their ‘home’ in a strange place. Father and I are counting on you.”
There was nothing I could say after that so I nodded and managed not to burst into tears until I got to my own room. I’ve always wanted her to say words like those: “Father and I are counting on you.” But hearing her say them in reality was not one bit the way I imagined. I wanted to feel important, but I just feel shut out and sent away. We go on the Monday train.
I remember longing to go out and lie on a grassy hill and stare up at the sky. Well, I will be able to at Aunt Martha’s. I don’t want to now.
Charlie wants to take Isaac with us but Aunt Martha has her dogs and Mother told Charlie that Father needed Isaac to help heal his hurt. Charlie cried. When Mother tried to remind him how he had always loved Fleet and Scalawag, Aunt Martha’s dogs, he roared out that he was not crying about leaving Isaac. He was crying because he wanted Hugo back. “Boys feel bad too,” he gulped out and he sobbed against Mother’s front.
That started Susannah sniffling and then Belle began to sob. I forced myself not to join in or the kitchen would have been under water. It is not only diphtheria and typhoid that are catching, but tears and laughter too. Giggles are more contagious than measles.
I helped mop up the flood. Yet all the time we feel so terrible, I smell the lilacs outside my window. They are so sweet you drink in their fragrance in great gulps. We had such a cold spring that I thought there would be no flowers. Snow in May! Then Belle brought in some small dandelions. They smell like dandelions even though they are only half grown. Hugo will never smell them again. Never again.
Later
I wrote to Jack and told him we are going to Aunt Martha’s in Guelph. I said I copied his letter into my journal. I told him that, even though Hugo was special, I loved him too and we all miss him. That was all I could manage.
We went to church this morning without Father. Mother kept us at home until the last minute so nobody had a chance to cry over us, I think. She did not say so but I am pretty sure I am right. I noticed we all kept our eyes on The Book of Praise instead of looking around as usual. When it was over she led us out the side door and home at a gallop. Nobody mentioned anything except Charlie, who said that if we’d been in a race, we’d have won hands down.
Monday, June 11
I am writing this on the train. It makes my pen jiggle. The Twins are across the aisle reading and watching out the window. Belle is asleep against me but my writing does not seem to trouble her. Her eyelids are still puffy from crying when Mother stood waving to us. Belle has never gone anywhere without Mother before. I have not gone away from her very often either. Mother’s eyelids were red, although she did manage not to break down at the station. Father was at home and acted as though we were not leaving.
We spent last night packing. It was strange. I kept feeling little shooting bits of excitement because we were going on a trip and we might have a grand time. Part of me could hardly wait until I was sitting on the train smelling that sooty train smell and hearing the whistle and chugging out of the station. And another part felt shoved out of the nest and forsaken. The moment came when Mother and Verity said goodbye to us. At the last minute, even Charlie was rubbing away tears. Once we got out of the station we opened the lunch Moppy had packed for us, and which we were supposed to save until noon. She had made us lovely devilled eggs. We jammed them into our mouths and gulped them down whole. We crammed in the bread and butter too and we had food smeared all over our lips and chins. We did stop at last and left a bit for later. But somehow eating that way helped us stop feeling so totally empty and pushed aside. It is as though, now there is trouble at home, we aren’t wanted. Being bad comforted us, and I am glad we did it even though I should feel sorry for misbehaving. I am supposed to be a Good Example. Mother should not expect it of me. Verity is the one who’s been practising that part ever since she was a baby.
“You know what?” Belle said all at once in a cozy little voice. “We are being sent into exile like a prince in a story.”
We all laughed at her, especially because she made it sound fine and dandy. But it helped me, thinking I was like some poor princess sent away by her cruel uncle into the wilderness.
“I think we are like Heidi,” Susannah said. “But we do have each other.”
Aunt Martha’s is not like Klara’s house in Frankfurt, but it is good to pretend. We still have a long way to go. We have to change at Union Station. Mother said they could get someone to help us but I have done it before. We will be fine. All the same, I’ll be glad when we’re on the train to Guelph.
In the next train
We made the switch without a hitch. Charlie was a great help. He keeps calm.
Belle has gone back to sleep, which is a blessing. People keep getting on and off. Here comes a soldier in uniform.
I cannot concentrate any longer, dear Reader. Excuse me.
Bedtime, at Aunt Martha’s
Just after I stopped writing, Belle woke up and brought up her boots. She got vomit all over both of us. Thank goodness she missed the journal! (I am devoted to you, dear Reader, but I don’t think I could have gone on writing in a book covered with puke.) Did you know that Shakespeare describes babies as “mewling and puking in their nurse’s arms.” Isn’t that revolting? When Father read that bit aloud to me he said, “No wonder the man spent most of his time writing plays away from home.”
I was so mortified. We got most of the vomit off in the tiny, tilting bathroom, but she kept weeping and wanting to go home.
That soldier saved the day. He had one pant leg folded up and he walked with crutches. But he was funny, kind and he likes children. He began teasing right away and he made Belle laugh in spite of herself. When her head popped up over the seat Charlie told her to keep her head down, as if she were a soldier in a trench.
Then we all sang “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” and “Pack Up Your Troubles.” Charlie asked the soldier what the men thought was the hardest thing to bear in the War. He was serious but the soldier made joking answers. “No dry socks,” he said.
“No. I mean really,” Charlie said.
“Oh, you mean really. Well, here’s the real answer. Having no mother to tuck me in,” he grinned.
Susannah hissed to Charlie that his wound was worst.
“No, no,” the soldier said. “Losing that leg got me sent home.” He told us he was being eaten alive by bugs of every kind imaginable, and drowned in mud in the trenches. Now, he said, still teasing, the minute he gets home, he’ll get to sleep in his very own bed without being chewed on by things too terrible to mention. “And I won’t have to worry about sausages falling on me any longer.”
Belle stared at him goggle-eyed. “I love sausages,” she said.
Charlie told her the soldier was teasing. Then the man himself told her the “sausages” he was talking about were bombs. We told him about Hugo and he said we should be very proud to have a brother who had served at Vimy Ridge.
“We are proud,” Susannah said softly.
Then the soldier, whose name turned out to be Timothy Whitney, had to get off. And then we were at the station in Guelph.
Aunt Martha was there to meet us in her red velvet hat. She calls it her small rebellion hat. We came out here in their gig. The Twins squashed together and I held Belle perched on my lap. Aunt Martha kept telling Blueboy to hurry up and he ambled along at his usual clip-clop.
“He’s a lovely horse,” I said.
Brace yourself for a shock, dear Reader. Aunt Martha looked at me sideways and said she was getting a Tin Lizzie.
“You can’t drive,” yelled clever Charlie.
“I will be able to by the time I bring Lizzie home,” said our shocking aunt. “I’m having lessons.” I don’t know whether it is true or a joke.
I have a room all to myself. It gives me the strangest feeling. I have shared with my sister ever since I moved out of a crib. Dear Reader, believe it or not, I miss Verity. And I need my penny whistle.
Friday, June 15
We all feel so far from home. This afternoon I took the younger children down to the river to swim. I reminded them how lovely it is to have the Speed River close by, so we can swim whenever we like. The mill pond in Uxbridge is not the same. What I said was true but we went right on being homesick.
“I’d rather not swim and get to stay home,” Charlie grumbled.
The others all agreed, with faces as cheerful as tombstones. I was standing on the bank watching them paddle when Belle was pushed under by Susannah. I jumped in to rescue her and then I stopped being all prissy and nearly grown up. I became the Princess Wild Rose, and Belle was my baby sister. We were fleeing from Charlie, who was a wicked baron. Susannah named him “The Archduke Ferdinand.” The real archduke got shot in Sarajevo in 1914 and that was what started the War, but not one of us knows exactly who he was. His name is just right for a villain. Susannah was his evil henchman, slinking about like the villains in Jo March’s plays.
Belle stopped, all at once, and said, “Was the real archduke on our side or theirs?”
Nobody was clear about this detail.
“Do you mean that Hugo got killed all because of some archduke we don’t even know?” my small sister pronounced. Her cheeks went very red and her eyes shot sparks.
“There was more to it,” I said. “But you will have to ask Father to explain it. I can’t.”
It does sound crazy. But she gave up the subject, at last, and we went back to our game.
We got soaking wet. Belle screamed such deafening shrieks when she got kidnapped by brigands, that two women who live nearby came out on their front verandahs to see if she was in danger. She stood up, with river water running off her in streams and said, very sweetly, “I’m fine. I’m only a baby princess who is about to be carried off by that evil Archduke Ferdinand.”
The taller lady looked surprised. Then she laughed. “What will he do to you?” she asked.
“Inflict some vile torture in his castle dungeon, I expect,” said Belle cheerfully.
“Dear me,” said the lady shaking her head. Then she asked if we were the Bates children. We nodded and her face stopped smiling. “I was so sorry to hear about your loss,” she told me.
Her eyes dug into me like fishhooks. I think she was waiting for me to cry. I grabbed Belle by her sopping wet shoulder and swung her around. When I growled at her to come along home she did not fuss. Neither did the other two.
“Old cat,” Charlie muttered. Thank goodness his voice was low enough so I could pretend I had not heard him.
Then, as we sloshed along in shoes full of muddy water, Belle asked if I thought we were like the soldiers in the trenches.
I looked down at Belle, who was still waiting for me to answer. The mud on our shoes was nothing compared to what I had heard Richard Webb and others speak of. I started to tell her how awful it was and then stopped. It was like Hugo writing me a cheerful letter. She is so tender-hearted. So I just nodded.
Aunt Martha shook her head over us, but stayed calm. I suppose she is used to children getting dirty. There is more mud in the country. Guelph is not really the country, but Grandmother and Aunt Martha live by the river in the old farmhouse just beyond the edge of town. Grandfather farmed there until he died and now other farmers rent the land.
I think maybe Aunt Martha feels as sorry for us as that lady who talked to us at the river. But our aunt is not the kind of person who makes a big to-do over a bit of dirt.
She just got us to take off our shoes and then she handed me the floor mop. I was glad Moppy had brought me up to know how to get a muddy floor sparkling clean.
Saturday, June 16
Aunt Martha astonished me tonight. She really is having driving lessons so she can buy herself a car. I think she is the only woman driver I know personally.
“Eliza, you will soon have the vote. Do you want to be a modern woman or not?” she said.
I almost said that Verity does not want to drive or vote, but then I wondered if I was wrong about my big sister. She looks so different with her hair bobbed and she is acting differently too. Maybe she is turning into a modern woman. I certainly want to vote and drive.
Sunday, June 17
We went fishing this afternoon. It is lovely to be far enough away from home that Father’s flock cannot see us and disapprove of what we do. We caught eleven fish. They were very small, but Aunt Martha and I cleaned them anyway and she fried them for our supper. I am not usually a girl who loves to eat fish, but I enjoyed those. Delectable and crisp as crispy. Aunt Martha used corn meal to fry them in, with wheat being scarce. But she also used lots of butter. They still have their little Jersey cow Lizabelle. She was born when Belle was a baby and got named after us. She is so gentle. Susannah and Charlie have both learned to milk her. Belle wants to but her hands are too small, I think.
“Let’s stay until we catch one hundred next time,” Charlie said, staring mournfully at the empty platter.
Monday, June 18
Today I missed Cornelia. I was surprised. Even though Susannah is smarter than Cornelia in some ways, Corny is nearer my age and she thinks about the same things. We wonder about growing up. Well, maybe Corny does not wonder when she is alone, but she listens while I talk about our bodies. She blushes. I think it is silly to blush because your body is changing. Since I have always shared a room with Verity, I know things Corny doesn’t.
We went to Aunt Agnes’s house today and ended up looking at photograph albums. We saw pictures of Mother and her two sisters when they were our age. I look like Aunt Martha, Verity looks like Aunt Agnes, Susannah looks like Mother and Belle looks like herself.
Grandmother told me I was the “spitting image” of Martha. I wonder why people say that. I asked her. She had no idea.
They also say Charlie is “a chip off the old block,” meaning he looks like Father. Why are girls never chips off the old block? I guess it would be peculiar to think of your mother as an old block of wood. Yet wood can be beautiful.
I feel guilty enjoying the country food so much. We have real butter and an egg every day. Bacon too and pork sausages. We brought those home from Aunt Agnes’s house. I wonder what Father would say about it when we’re all supposed to be doing without.
I told Grandmother what I was thinking. Her answer shocked me but made me laugh too. “What the eye doesn’t see, Eliza,” she said with a little grin, “the heart doesn’t grieve over.”
When I wrote a letter home, I didn’t tell about the food.
Wednesday, June 20
I want to go home in the worst way. Mother sent a letter to Aunt Martha and told her to tell me that Cornelia is very ill. She got red measles and then complications of some kind. This can be very dangerous. They are worried about her heart. Mother said to pray for her. I am trying. But I don’t know which are the right words. Mother says she is relieved Belle is far from the contagion.
Tuesday, June 26
Belle is ill too, but she does not have measles. She has a head cold. It wouldn’t be bad if it weren’t for her delicate health. Colds always go to her chest. Aunt Martha says there is nothing to worry about. Belle does look pitiful, though, and she begs for Mother to come. Mother wrote to say that as soon as Belle is well enough, we can all come home. Thank goodness! I didn’t ask, but Father must have recovered his strength.
Mother did not say a word about Cornelia’s health. I hope she is getting better. Surely she must be. She can’t be contagious any longer or Mother would not let us come near.