“But then,” Ben said, “we’d have to have some kind of a wedding supper, and find a decent-sized place to have it, and no matter how small we tried to keep it, it would get bigger.”
“And my mother would insist on us being married in church, and then she’d want to know why I couldn’t come home and be married in our church at the Point and invite half the harbour to the wedding supper,” Kit pointed out, laughing.
So they were married by the regimental chaplain, and Ben was given two days’ leave which they spent at the Atlantic Hotel, barely leaving their room. Then Ben returned to the base to continue his training, and Kit returned to her boarding house and waited.
On the fourth of October the Florizel sailed out of St. John’s Harbour with the First Five Hundred, the Blue Puttees, on board. Kit was part of the crowd lining the streets as the men marched from Pleasantville down to the harbour, then she joined the crush of people on Water Street, hundreds of other wives, sweethearts, mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, and crowds of cheering citizens. The band played “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.” Kit tried not to think about what Ben had told her – how poorly prepared the men were, how little training they’d had, how the Ross rifles they were meant to shoot still had not arrived from Canada. The news from France and Belgium frightened her. On the day the First Five Hundred sailed, a headline in the paper under “War News” read: “Struggle Yet to Come Will be Long and Terrible.”
After the ship sails that night, Kit goes back to Cousin Ethel’s house and waits, not sure what she is waiting for. A letter from Ben? News of the Regiment arriving in England? Or something else?
She remembers reading that in olden times, when a king died suddenly, his widow would be watched closely for two or three months afterwards, in case she might turn out to be pregnant with a royal heir whose existence would have to be taken into account in any future political machinations. The son and heir of Ben Porter, newly graduated lawyer, of Elliston, Newfoundland, would hardly have a great impact on world affairs, yet Kit hugs the possibility close during those weeks after the Florizel sails. She is unsure how she would feel if she really were pregnant. Does she even want to be a mother? Marriage itself holds enough ambivalence for her, though she was quick enough to hurry to the altar under pressure of being a war bride. Could she raise a child alone, if Ben doesn’t return? Is it that most trite of all wishes – that she will have “something left of him” to remember him by if he is killed over there?
In any event, whatever her motive, she has nothing. Her monthlies come as usual in October, and word arrives that the Regiment has landed in England. Kit writes to her family and Ben’s, telling them of the hurried wedding, and receives their good wishes. Triffie’s letter sounds wistful, regretting that neither of them ever got the chance to be each other’s bridesmaid. Well, girl, who knows, we might each be married twice more, for all we know, Kit thinks. But it’s the kind of thing you could say aloud, followed with a laugh; you can’t write it in a letter. Especially when your husband is at war.
Miss Shaw calls Kit into the office. Knowing that married women are not supposed to hold teaching positions, Kit fears the worst. Instead, she gets good news. With the outbreak of war, Miss Halliday has elected to stay in England, her war-torn country, where she too is about to become a war bride. In times like these, Miss Halliday writes, a woman must follow her heart instead of her head. Or so Miss Shaw tells Kit, drawing one corner of her mouth down. Her tone is reminiscent of Mark Antony insisting that Brutus was an honourable man.
“Faced with the exigencies of war,” Miss Shaw goes on – she really is the sort of person who can drop the word “exigencies” into a sentence and sound quite natural doing it – “the Board is prepared to waive the usual strictures against married women teaching, to allow us to retain the services of a gifted alumna whose husband is serving his country. Congratulations, Mrs. Porter – the position is yours for the duration.”
“For the duration.” Kit likes the phrase, which is popular at the moment. Everything in St. John’s, everything in her life, has a sense of held breath, an air of impermanence. Nobody knows exactly when and how life will continue; everyone waits for news from overseas. Nothing that happens here matters.
Ben’s letters describe training in England, a grueling apprenticeship that makes it clear to the Newfoundland recruits how inadequate their hasty preparation was. Now they have their Ross rifles, and are being taught to shoot them at living men. The Allies have the Germans stalled at the Marne; both sides have dug in and will not give up any more territory. Ben reports that the boys of the Blue Puttees are anxious to see action yet frighteningly unready for it.
Kit’s life rolls on. She is teaching where she always dreamed of teaching, living in St. John’s. In the middle of November, Cousin Ethel quite suddenly takes a bad case of pneumonia and dies. Not surprising, perhaps, in a woman of seventy-seven. What is surprising is that her will leaves the house to Kit. Within the space of a few months Kit is an independent woman while still a wife, a homeowner as well as a teacher – an implausible collection of circumstances, largely made possible by the tragedy of war.
It is a tragedy; of course it is. She hates going to bed in the big four-poster at Cousin Ethel’s house alone and thinking of Ben’s body, of their two nights at the hotel, of all the wasted nights they are spending apart. She yearns for Ben, misses him, prays for him. Yet cherishes her freedom to go on teaching, and feels guilty for that.
Sometimes, walking home from her classes to that three-storey house on Gower Street that is now her home, empty but for herself and the elderly housemaid, Kit wonders if she is quite as desolate as a war bride ought to be. She misses Ben, yet she knows other women whose husbands have gone to war and they have something she lacks – or rather, she has something they lack. The other soldiers’ wives of her acquaintance seem lost, as if they are empty at the core, hollow without the presence of their husbands to give shape and meaning to their lives.
Perhaps it’s only that I didn’t have time to get used to being married, Kit thinks. Although she and Ben kept company for six years, she was still a single woman, on her own as the teacher in Elliston and later in Trinity. Even at Dalhousie, she was a co-ed; being courted by Ben was secondary to the pursuit of her own education. Kit hasn’t questioned, until now, whether there was anything wrong with that. Is she – quite – normal? Is it right for a woman always to hold a piece of herself apart, even in marriage? If Ben were here right now, would there still be this piece of Kit that is separate from Kit-and-Ben, from Mr. and Mrs. Porter?
The thought doesn’t quite leave her, continues to nudge at the back of her mind even while she corrects papers and writes letters. Something about the way other women lose themselves in marriage, give themselves up to their husbands. Especially those who marry for love. She thinks of Byron: Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart; ’Tis woman’s whole existence. Not that she takes Byron – especially in Don Juan – as any sort of expert on the female mind. Yet she has seen this, over and over, how love – or marriage, which is not always the same thing – becomes a woman’s whole existence. And even now, when Kit loses sleep at nights worrying about Ben, she knows love is not, never can be, her whole existence.
In the bleakest part of a sleepless night, picturing Ben in the midst of the worst horrors of war, her mind returns to the question. She finds herself leaving the battlefields of France and returning to the past, to her own childhood. To the Missing Point schoolroom, to Abel Morgan’s fish store, to the stones of the Long Beach.
Is something wrong with me? Kit wonders. Was something broken, damaged, early on, so that she cannot be whole, cannot give her whole self to love? So that she must always hold something back?
She doesn’t want to be broken. She wants to be whole, wholly in love, reunited with a husband who returns safe and sound from war. Yet she cannot fully stifle that other part of her, the girl inside who will always be Kit Saunders, and never quite be subs
umed into Mrs. Ben Porter.
She rolls over in bed, closes her eyes and tries to sleep. For now, her ability to be separate from Ben, an independent woman, is an asset rather than a liability. While it may be a failing, it defines who she is in this moment. For the duration.
Triffie
Missing Point
October, 1915
My dearest Peony,
How heavy my heart was as the train bore away this latest group of local boys to St. John’s for Points Beyond. Now that we have heard our Regiment has finally reached the front and is fighting in Gallipoli, it all feels so much closer. The dangers these lads will face seem far Darker than they did last Fall when we saw our first brave recruits sail away. With the sinking of the Viknor back in the winter, and the word that our Regiment is off to fight at Gallipoli, it has finally hit home that this is no Grand Adventure, but a deadly business.
Or – I ask myself – does it seem more real to me, because now one of my own Flesh and Blood has gone to that dread conflict? Perhaps I am gay and cheerful enough when waving off other women’s sons and husbands, but – ah, though I have no son of my own to send, and though my husband knows his duty to Katie and me far too well for him to be lured Overseas, still I have said goodbye to one who is dear as Son or Brother to me, and my heart misgives me.
On the platform of the Bay Roberts railway station, as Will, Char, Isaac and the other three boys put their bags on the train, Isaac’s father plays the fiddle. He chooses “The Minstrel Boy to the War Has Gone.” The tune, thin and tremulous in the chilly autumn air, would be mournful enough even if you didn’t know that the next line was In the ranks of death you may find him.
Triffie was the first person Will told when he made the decision to sign up. Not that there was any great mystery to it; he and all his friends had said from the day war was declared that they would join up when they were old enough. Triffie prayed that day would never come, as did Betty, Ruth and Aunt Rachel. Will had not yet been seventeen last August; it seemed safe to hope that the war would be over within a year.
But now, in this bleak autumn of 1915, the news from overseas is grim. British troops have faced poison gas attacks and slogged through the mud of the trenches. Letters home from the boys who have volunteered are published in every issue of the Bay Roberts newspaper, each giving a brave report and exhorting other men to join up. Many more have answered the call to join the Naval Reserves or the Regiment, but no boy from Missing Point has yet appeared in the casualty lists. Triffie fears that their time is coming. Every town, every harbour, maybe even every family, will pay their debt to King and country before this is all over, she fears.
In the Anglican Church service where she prays beside Jacob John on Sunday mornings, the minister prays for peace and victory. In the little Adventist Church on Saturdays, they do not pray for a British victory, but that Jesus will come quickly, that this turmoil will truly herald His return. Only the Second Coming, Trif thinks, will redeem all this suffering, make some meaning out of the senseless suffering of boys who are barely men.
“It’ll break your mother’s heart,” she warned Will when he came to tell her that it was all decided. He and Charlie had both had their eighteenth birthdays. They were only waiting on Isaac, whose birthday was a few weeks after Will’s.
Will shook his head. “Mother’s heart will be broke either way, Trif. She don’t want me to go get killed, but she don’t want me to stay behind and be a coward, neither.”
“You’re not a coward if you don’t volunteer to go overseas, Will. Don’t go just because you’re scared of what people will think of you.”
“I’m not!” He pushed a shock of blond hair out of his eyes, looking so like a child again as he did it that it wrung her heart. Going off to war? It wasn’t possible. “I can’t explain it, but – I got to go. I got my reasons, and I know ’tis the right thing to do.”
She leaned against the rail. They were standing on the front bridge, Will sitting up on the railing while Triffie beat out the rugs and brushed them down. Now she laid aside the rug – one she had hooked herself the past winter, her own design of their house with the hill rising up behind it and the pine trees in the yard – and looked up at Will. He was a few inches taller than she, and his shoulders and chest were broadened by a man’s work. He’d spent six summers on the Labrador and gone twice to the seal hunt. Half boy, half man. Like most of the soldiers over there, the boys going off to fight in a place called Gallipoli that Triffie, for all her education, wouldn’t have been able to find on a map before the war began.
“Do you remember how you used to walk in your sleep?”
Will shook his head. “I only remembers Mother telling me about it. I think the last time was when I was eight or nine, but I got no recollection of it. She says I used to wake up down in the kitchen or out in the yard and not know how I got there.”
“Did she tell you about the time Isaac’s mother found you in bed over to their place?”
Will laughed. “Yes, Aunt Nellie musta got some shock that morning – one more youngster there in the morning than what she put to bed the night before.”
It’s become a story to laugh over, but what Triffie remembers is the stark terror of that morning, the cold ground under her bare feet as she looked out at the water, the fear that gripped her as she thought of Will wandering down to the wharf in his sleep. Will’s dream of being taken by the fairies.
He put his hand over hers on the railing. “Don’t be scared, Triffie. Don’t all them prayers of yours do no good?”
“I’ll be saying them every night you’re over there,” Trif assured him. “Mornings, too,” she added as an afterthought.
The train carrying the boys to St. John’s leaves on the second Monday in October, after a farewell supper and time at the church hall Saturday night. The six recruits are Will and his two friends, along with Cyrus Snow and two other boys from Bareneed who are joining the Naval Reserves. Will’s sister Ruth has been keeping company with Cyrus all the past winter and summer, and the thought of losing both her brother and her sweetheart to the war has her in tears all night.
The day after the volunteers leave, Ruth sits at Triffie’s kitchen table, a fresh flood of tears soaking her embroidered handkerchief. “I don’t know why Pop wouldn’t let us get married,” she sobs. “Lots of couples are getting married before the boys go overseas. Kit did it!” she remembers. “If she can be a war bride, why can’t I?”
“Kit’s older than you are, she’s been to college and been out on her own teaching for years. And they were engaged anyway, her and Ben,” Triffie points out.
“Cy and me talked about getting married,” Ruth blows her nose. “Now he’ll be on the other side of the world, him and Will and all the rest.”
Jacob John, who has been stacking wood out in the shed, comes in through the back door and goes for the kettle on the stove.
“Sit down, I’ll get that,” Triffie says. Jacob John pulls his chair up to the stove and puts his boots up on the edge, rubbing his hands together near the oven door. Triffie makes him a cup of tea and tops up her own and Ruth’s.
“It’s getting late – stay here for the night, Ruthie,” she offers. “You can sleep with Katie – help keep her warm,” Trif adds.
So Ruth goes up the stairs carrying a candle, into Katie’s tiny room under the eaves. Triffie starts to clear away the teacups, but Jacob John stops her with a hand on hers.
“Cut us a slice of toast bread, missus.”
Triffie sighs, not really minding, and cuts two slices off the loaf she made this morning. She puts them on a plate and Jacob John takes one on the toasting fork and lifts the front damper lid off the stove, holding the bread above the glowing coals. Trif takes down the crock of bakeapple jam and spreads a little over the first piece of toast when he gets it nice and golden brown. She hands it to Jacob John, who is now toasting the second piece, but he passes the plate back to her.
“That one’s yours. I’m doing mine now
,” he says.
They sit together in a warm silence, eating toast with bakeapple jam, one of Trif’s great pleasures. She finds herself thinking more kindly of her husband these days, with something akin to affection. It’s as if she’s gotten used to having him around, she thinks. They have, after all, been married six years now. Katie, two years old now, is still an only child, though it’s not for lack of opportunity to have another.
Trif has to admit – to herself, not to Jacob John of course – that she is even beginning to enjoy the marital relations a bit, or at least not to mind them as much as she once did. Motherhood has eased up her mind in some ways. She is bound to Jacob John now by a tie far stronger than wedding vows; she no longer regrets having married him, or thinks how she might get out of it. She is Mrs. Russell for better or for worse, and Mr. Russell is not such a bad fellow after all, though he’s no hero of romance.
Just as well he’s no hero. It’s mostly young single fellows like Will and his buddies who’ve gone off to join up, but there’s the odd married man with children who takes it into his head to go off and volunteer. The very knowledge that Jacob John will never do anything so foolish comforts her, is probably half responsible for the warm feeling she feels now as he takes his plate and hers, lays them in the sink, banks up the fire and takes her hand to lead her upstairs to bed.
Kit
The Western Front
June, 1916
Dearest One,
All I can say of our location is that tired old cliché: Somewhere in France. You will know more of the news when you read this than I do, for reporters’ telegraphs travel far more quickly than soldiers’ letters.
I remember studying history in school, looking at maps of South Africa or the Crimea or even of ancient wars – Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul was a favourite. I loved studying those battles, soaring above the page like an eagle flying above the battlefield, seeing the great strategic movement of armies, lines of battle moving back and forth with victories and defeats.
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