Christabel and Walter were spending the weekend at the Plough. Fanny and Ronnie’s new baby daughter was to be christened on Sunday. Evie and Mattie were little Sophy’s godmothers, Christabel was standing in as proxy for Mattie. This made good sense, as Walter was the baby’s godfather.
Sophia was thrilled to have the baby named after her. Will gently reminded her that she mustn’t neglect their three grandsons, on whom she had doted until now.
‘Let Evie hold her, she’s used to babies, unlike me,’ Christabel whispered in Fanny’s ear, as parents and godparents walked to the font for the baptism.
The baby was asleep until the holy water was poured over the crown of her head. By then, she’d been passed, wrapped in her crocheted cobwebby shawl, to the parson. She gave an indignant yell. Everyone present approved her reaction – part of the tradition. Duly named, and dried, Sophy was returned to her proud parents.
‘Mattie should have been here,’ Christabel said to Evie, as they walked back to the house together. Christabel clicked along in high-heeled shoes, while Evie strode out in her comfortable T-bar-strapped sandals.
Evie glanced at her. Christabel was very much a city girl, she thought, with Marcel-waved hair, smart grey-flannel suit with velvet cuffs and collar, a wide-brimmed hat and sheer silk stockings. Quite a contrast to herself, in her good school skirt and plain cream blouse. ‘All good experience. Has it inspired you?’ she asked frankly.
‘No … Walter’s mum keeps dropping heavy hints, but … you can’t have two women in one kitchen. The truth is, Evie, despite the recession, I’m really doing well in my current job, and I’m in line for promotion. I’d never have achieved that at the emporium, in Plymouth – though I’ll always be grateful to Mr Fullilove for giving me my first chance. There is another reason, which I hope will show that I am not altogether selfish—’
‘Oh, Christabel, I’d never think that of you!’ Evie interrupted. ‘I know how you cared for your mother and put her first, taking on responsibility at an early age—’
‘Doesn’t that sound like you, too, Evie? I don’t regret those years, for one moment. But my mother’s doctor warned me that her illness could well be inherited, if not by me, perhaps by a daughter, if I had one. I discussed it with Walter, and we agreed, we shouldn’t risk it.’
‘Well, I’m glad you were able to talk about it. How is Walter doing at work?’
‘He finds selling insurance dull at times, but it is a job. Badly paid, but necessary. We are lucky to be in full employment. How about you?’
‘I know I am in the right profession. I’m happy!’
‘I wish you could find a partner in life – someone like dear Walter, or Griff!’
‘As they are both taken there’s not much chance of that!’ Evie smiled.
Christabel stumbled, held on to her friend’s helping hand. She guessed that Evie still carried a torch for Walter, as she did for Griff, despite her contented, loving marriage. Neither of us will say, she thought, but it brings the two of us closer together.
The papers back home were full of ‘the gathering storm’ in Europe. On the prairies summer storms at night were frequent, as they were to be all through the thirties, rolling in from the west around dusk, causing fear and havoc until the early hours. The sky was rent by the electric zigzag of forked lightning and the thunder exploded like gunfire, reminiscent of trench warfare to any veterans. The sheet lightning, however, without the rumbling thunder, was even more terrifying and unexpected.
Bert came down white-faced from his loft room one morning. ‘I couldn’t help thinking: my bed is against the chimney wall and that lightning might flash down the flue and strike the iron bedstead,’ he said. ‘My, I was quaking!’
‘Megan came rushing into our room and dived under our covers,’ Mattie said ruefully. ‘I guess it’s my fault because my mother was terrified of storms too, and I feel compelled to carry out the same rituals as she did, when I was a child. Covering the mirrors and making sure all the cutlery is shut away in the drawer.… Scissors, too. Anything made of shiny metal, Mother said, could attract the lightning. We were told to keep away from water, even the washing-up! All the windows and doors were shut.
‘Mother was certainly right about one thing, when she said, “A storm will turn the cream.” I don’t suppose I will be making ice cream today, eh?’
‘Ooh!’ Megan said reproachfully.
Griff was rubbing his tired eyes. He hadn’t had much sleep either. He’d ventured out a couple of times to check the cows, and to bring the terrified yard dog into the kitchen. ‘This darn drought worries me – if we don’t get some rain soon to dampen things down, there’ll be dust storms. The wind will see to that.’
He and Bert ate their porridge standing up and, after gulping down their tea, they departed to see if there was any damage to the barns.
They were lucky on this occasion, but Gretchen reported later that Kjetl’s father had not been so fortunate. ‘Their big barn was struck – no lightning-rod conductor, he says. It didn’t catch fire like another of their barns did a few weeks ago, when they had to rescue the horses and my dad and the boys rushed over to help put out the flames. Anyway, this time the flash hit a rafter and travelled down a stud against which Kjetl’s dad had leaned his pitchfork. It split the handle clean down the middle. At least the women didn’t have to form a human chain with buckets to douse that! Kjetl’s dad said that handle was over twenty years old, and had been good enough for another twenty!’
Megan was not the only one who missed Bert when his patience was rewarded with an offer of a four-day working week as an engineer on the railway. Gretchen kept asking, ‘Heard how Bert is getting on?’ so Mattie copied out his address for her and suggested, ‘Why don’t you write and ask him yourself?’
This coincided with the onset of colder weather and a slump in the sales of ice cream, so Mattie resumed her dairy duties and deliveries. Tin Lizzie conked out and Harry at the garage, advised Griff to part-exchange her for a nippy little truck, which had room for a couple of passengers on the front seat, and would transport their products. Mattie learned to drive in a week. The wagon horses still had a role to play on the farm.
Megan liked visiting the garage. It was a square building which Harry had put up himself next to the general store. He lived in an apartment over the store, which had originally belonged to his parents. On the forecourt was a single gas pump, and when Harry was in the pit examining the underside of a motor, and a horn sounded, Griff would leave his desk in the cramped office at the side and ‘fill ’em up’, as he put it.
‘Don’t touch that,’ he warned his inquisitive daughter, whether it was the spike on which the bills were impaled, or the precarious pile of oil cans in a corner.
The rafters were used as repositories for various bits of small equipment. Harry, a kindly, middle-aged chap who wore greasy overalls and a flat cap, was amazingly athletic. He climbed a swaying ladder to retrieve items and sometimes swung perilously by one hand or hooked his knees round a rafter to reach what he was after. Harry was a jolly bachelor, but he had a twinkle in his eye when ladies were around. He was light on his feet at the church social dances, so he was popular in the Paul Jones. He hadn’t married, he said, because, ‘Who would put up with all the dirty washing, and all the noise, oil spills and smells?’
Megan agreed that the smells in the general stores, from sacks of meal to jars of mint humbugs were nicer! Her favourite thing was watching Mattie press dollops of yellow ice cream into cones. She waited her turn, until the queue of kids was satisfied.
The hamlet was expanding all the time, with more folk settling and building there. It was fast becoming a small town, with a bandstand and a war memorial, in the form of a cross, dedicated to those who died in the Great War. Half a dozen men were honoured belatedly. The local newspaper opened a one-room office, with a barber’s shop above, and Harry’s nephew had smartened up an old property into a café, which was proving very popular.
There were no evergreens on the prairie, but plenty of deciduous trees, many of which reminded Mattie of home, like ash, box elder and willow. The willows, together with cottonwoods, were always near water. Mattie loved to watch the lofty silver-maple trees in her garden, planted by their predecessors, from her kitchen window, when she was standing at the sink. Silvery leaves shimmered, twirled and danced in the breeze, as if in time to the music from the wireless. Mattie thought that a wonderful invention!
There was one last foraging expedition to gather wild fruits that fall. Griff and Mattie hurried through their morning chores in order to keep their promise to Megan and Gretchen to take a picnic lunch up the hillside.
‘Why? Why’?’ Megan demanded to know, when she saw things that caught her imagination on their walk to Hickory Hill, known as Old Hick. She pointed out the rock piles which appeared to have been placed haphazardly on the outer edges of the fields.
‘Ask Dad,’ Mattie said, with a sigh.
Griff told his daughter. ‘I’m not sure if you can understand it yet, but you will, when you learn about it at school. There were ancient glaciers – I’ll show you a picture in a book when we get back home – and these great blocks of ice melted and the rocks were left. The settlers had to dig them out of the ground before they could plough it. That’s how they got piled up like this.’
Gretchen had been listening attentively too. ‘You know my friend Kjetl? Well, he was ploughing with the horses once on his dad’s farm and the plough hit a huge rock and he was thrown in the air, but somehow he landed back in the seat and not on the ground. Every bone in his body was jarred. His dad said the same thing had happened to him when he was a boy, so lightning does strike twice in the same place—’
‘You said it was the plough, not lightning!’ Megan interrupted.
‘Something I do know,’ Mattie said now. ‘The Indians found a lot of uses for these rocks before the settlers piled ’em up. They made hammers, axes, and ground seeds with the rocks. My friend Treesa, at Moose Jaw, told me that. When the Indians moved from place to place, before the pioneers came, they used the stones to hold down the edges of their tepees. I haven’t seen one yet, but they say there are circles of stones to show where they camped.’
They had arrived at the slopes. Nimble Megan ran ahead, pausing only to pluck a few currants still clinging to the shrubs, and eating them, because she couldn’t wait for Gretchen to come up with the basket.
‘Don’t touch that prickly cactus!’ Mattie called out in warning. She knew her daughter would find those smooth oval berries tempting now that they had turned from green to a ripe red.
‘You can eat ’em,’ Gretchen asserted, ‘but they’re all sticky jelly inside and full of seeds. Don’t worry, Missus, I heard Megan yelp when she got too near them spines….’
Megan knew better than to pick the little wild plums. The locals said they were poisonous, but Mattie suspected that they were tasteless, with tough skins like the ones back home. They weren’t worth canning. ‘Leave them for the wildlife,’ as Mattie said.
They ate their cheese-and-pickle sandwiches and ginger cake and drank tea from the flask. Megan was reprimanded for throwing her crusts into the bushes. She had an answer, of course. ‘I’m feeding the wildlife, Mommy.’
While Mattie and Gretchen cleared up the remains of the picnic, Griff and Megan went exploring further up Old Hick.
‘When the snow comes,’ Griff told his daughter, ‘We’ll come up here with a sledge and slide down all the way to the bottom!’
‘Promise, Dad, promise!’
‘All right, I promise. But in return, you must help your mom fill the baskets, eh?’
He watched as she hurried ahead, to fulfil her part of the bargain. Megan will be five this Christmas, he thought, and it won’t seem long before she starts school, after that. Maybe I’ll never have a little son to work with me on the farm, but Bert was right, when he said Megan is a girl and a half! She takes after my lovely Mattie, of course….
Griff felt in his inside pocket for his sketchpad and charcoal. He was in the habit of ‘capturing the moment’ where his daughter was concerned. They had quite a gallery of sketches pinned to the living-room walls. Mattie had been inspired by these to write a diary of ‘the dairy on the prairie’ as she called it. ‘One day,’ she said, ‘we’ll put our pictures and prose together and make a book!’
Later, when they were in bed, and Megan was fast asleep, still with traces of purple from the squashed berries on her hands and round her mouth, for as Mattie said, ‘They are just like indelible ink! You need several good washes to remove them,’ Griff hugged Mattie close and whispered: ‘It was a good day, wasn’t it? One for the diary!’
‘Mmm,’ she agreed.
‘D’you ever regret coming here, Mattie?’
‘Never,’ she said firmly.
‘We haven’t been able to keep our promise to visit home. It’ll be nine years next spring since we left Southampton, after all.’
‘They understand, Griff. We can’t afford to take time off work.’
‘I know – but I don’t like not to keep my word.…’
‘You’re a very honourable person, Griff, and I love you for it,’ she said.