by Sarah Ellis
First thing this morning, Mr. Haskin made the big announcement that the commissioners were coming. He didn’t know that we already knew about it. His nose was even thinner and whiter than usual. Agnes looked over at me and winked.
All morning we waited and I was nervous as can be. Every time somebody came into the room I almost jumped out of my skin. Then we had dinner. Agnes and I went over the details of our plan.
Shortly after we came back from dinner Fred popped his head into the spinning room and gave one of those loud whistles that some men and boys can do by putting two fingers in their mouths. (I have often tried to learn this, but I can only whistle softly in the usual way, without fingers.) That was the signal we had arranged to say that the commissioners were on their way. Mr. Haskin made the popping noise he makes when he is cross and he went to chase Fred away, but he had already disappeared. In the meantime, Agnes left her machine and ran across to the wool storage bin. She leaned over, making her back into a step.
I grabbed Ann’s hand and raced over to the bin. But then she stopped dead in her tracks. I told her to climb in but she couldn’t seem to hear me. Then Mrs. Brown’s voice boomed out. “Ann Smith, into the bin with you this minute.” Ann looked terrified and then dived into the bin headfirst. I followed on her heels. As I jumped I caught sight of Auntie Janet. Her eyes were wide as saucers.
As I lay in the wool I couldn’t hear a thing and I started to worry. What if Ann gave the game away? What if Mr. Haskin gave the game away? What if Auntie Janet gave the game away? Should we have told her about the plan? Would she be angry? Any minute I expected to see a commissioner’s face over the side of the bin.
But nothing of the sort happened. The clatter went on, wool floated in the air. Ann huddled in the corner with her eyes closed. I almost dozed off. Finally, after a good long time, a face did appear over the side of the bin. It was Auntie Janet. She was shaking her head in a chiding sort of way, but she was smiling all the same. She hauled me out and all the spinners applauded and laughed. For the first time ever I saw Ann smile. Mr. Haskin was nowhere to be seen. Agnes said, “You’ve lost an hour’s work, you girls, but I don’t think Mr. Haskin is going to mention it.”
After work I asked Agnes if she had actually talked to the commissioners about the toilets and she said she had. “I also told them that when we have to eat our dinners indoors in bad weather our food gets dusty. I thought Mr. Haskin was going to explode, but I did it anyway. The commissioners wrote it all down. They were very respectful.” I asked her if they had written down her name and she said yes. “Some of the operatives did not want to give their names,” she said, “but I’m proud to think of my name written down in a report and read by important people, maybe even far in the future.” I thought about Mr. Longfellow’s poem and distant footsteps echoing through the corridors of Time.
August 14
Dear Papa and Mama,
This morning Auntie Janet and Uncle James and I had a talk. She had told Uncle James about me hiding in the storage bin. He said that he thought it was clever what I did, but that he wanted to tell me that he hoped that I would not always have to work in the mill. I wanted to say that I did not care to go to school and that I was perfectly happy working. And the first part is the complete truth. I’ve walked by the school and I know what it would be like there. The girls would mock me. And why do I need to go to school? I already know how to read and write and even do sums.
The second part was not completely true because some days I do not want to go to work. But I don’t want to go to school instead! It is just that some days I want to just loaf around, or play. I would like to sit by the river and read, or go on outings, or ride around in a carriage, or spend the day drinking tea from a beautiful china cup and chatting and doing a little embroidery. But that is like saying that I would like to be a princess.
I did not get a chance to say any of this. Uncle had more to say. About the future. He said that there was a very good chance that he could get a job as a loom fixer, maybe next year.
“He’s been helping out Mr. Docharty,” said Auntie Janet. “Mr. Docharty says he’s a very quick study.” Auntie Janet sounded very proud when she said this and I knew why. The loom fixer is the most important job in the mill (well, except for supervisors and that). Sometimes when the operatives pass Mr. Docharty on the street they tip their hats.
And there was more. Auntie Janet said that Mr. Haskin had said that she might be able to train for a room girl in the weave room. A room girl supervises all the weaving and she’s the person you call on when there is a stoppage in the loom, when the yarn or warp breaks. Then it was Uncle James’s turn to look proud. “You’d be a great improvement on that Bessie Murphy, that’s for sure.” This must be part of being in a family, feeling part of someone else doing well.
“Then you wouldn’t have to work,” Auntie Janet said to me. “We would earn enough for the three of us and then you could go to school and then you could go to high school and learn to be really clever and then you could do something really grand, like train to be a teacher.”
A teacher! No! That would be the Home all over again. Being in charge. Trying to make people do things they didn’t want to do. I felt as if I were in the middle of a river and a strong current was pushing me toward the rest of my life.
All I could say was, “Do I have to be a teacher?”
Then they both laughed and Auntie said that I could be anything I wanted. And then Uncle James got silly and said I could be a lady hot-air balloonist or a lady prime minister. I didn’t say anything about being a princess.
August 18
Dear Papa and Mama,
Mr. Longfellow is still thinking about the humbler poet.
Who, through long days of labour,
And nights devoid of ease,
Still heard in his soul the music
Of wonderful melodies.
I wonder what the days of labour were? Maybe in a mill? And the nights devoid of ease? It makes me think of bad dreams. I don’t tell Auntie or Uncle, but it is as though those machine teeth are waiting for me every night. In the day it is far far back in my mind, but I wish I had never seen Barney’s arm with its awful pinkness.
I must not be downhearted. Now that I have eight verses of this poem by heart I can say it over and over again to the background of the spinning machine.
August 21
Dear Papa and Mama,
Today we had a great bee. Mrs. Murphy has a brother-in-law with a farm out Carp way and he brought in several baskets of apples. So she invited us to make applesauce with her. It was hot work, but a good job for three. One cored and trimmed. One minded the sauce kettle and one minded the canning kettle. The apples were rosy and we left the skins on while we sauced them, so the applesauce was a golden pink.
Mrs. Murphy is quiet at work, but a comical person at home. She seems to have a life of many trials, but she makes them all into funny stories. One of her stories was about the time she was attacked by a turkey. She was coming out of church, wearing a new hat with red ribbons. Seems that the minister had a very ill-tempered turkey that he kept penned up, but that morning it escaped. Mrs. Murphy said, “One minute I’m standing making polite Sunday conversation and the next minute this huge gobbler, every feather bristling with rage, is coming right at my head.” The turkey knocked off the hat and then when Mrs. Murphy went to pick it up, it flew at her again and knocked her right over. Then she tried to fight it off with her parasol. Then Mr. Houghton (“twice as old as Methuselah, but very gallant”) came to her rescue, but as he tried to pull her up, the turkey turned its attention to him and he ended up falling down as well. “Then the turkey, delighted with a double victory, proceeded to walk all over us, pecking.”
The way Mrs. Murphy told the story it was like you were there. We nearly burnt a batch of applesauce, we were laughing so hard. Then later, in the middle of another conversation altogether, she said, in a sad sort of way, “I don’t know why that turkey objected so st
rongly to my hat. I thought it was a very nice one,” and that set Auntie and me off again.
The second-best moment of making applesauce is when you peek in the pot and all the apple pieces have exploded, like flowers coming into bloom. The first-best moment of applesauce making is when you are done and all the jars are lined up and you wash the stickiness off your hands and sit and have a cup of tea and a dish of warm applesauce. Then you feel happy and virtuous — two feelings that do not always go together, no matter what they say in church.
Before we went home we sat on the front step to catch the evening breeze. In the distance there was the sound of a band practising but Mrs. Murphy could not hear it.
“Left my hearing at the mill,” she said, “like all the hands. Ten years of that racket and you lose the small sounds. Funny, it’s not the birds I miss so much as the peepers. That little froggy squeaking sound always meant spring to me.”
I said that was sad but she just said, “Ah, well. It’s a noisy place, the mill. There’s no help for that.”
August 25
Dear Papa and Mama,
Ever since the commissioners came something has been different at the mill. I can’t quite say what, except that it feels like a thunderstorm is about to happen. Today it rained. “Showers from the clouds of summer,” as Mr. Longfellow would say. So we all stayed in to eat our dinners. Rain was lashing against the windows and Agnes said, “Look at that grey misery. Let’s have a treat. I’ll give you a song.” Agnes is such a jolly person and she has a grand big voice. She just opens her mouth and out it comes. So she sang us a comic song about a man with a runaway pig.
It was like we had laughter just bottled up inside us and it came gushing out, like water over a millrace. We were all laughing (well, except Ann, who hasn’t a laugh in her anywhere) when Mr. Haskin came in. He said something, but we didn’t hear him because the ends of laughing were still in us. So then he tried to clap to get us to be quiet, but his hands just went right by each other. This happens to me when I try to catch a ball and don’t. Anyway, I know this is naughty, but then we really could not control our laughter. Mr. Haskin turned bright red and said in a stern way, “There is to be no laughing in the spinning room!”
We all went quiet after that. Then Agnes said, “But sir, are we not allowed to laugh in our dinner hour?”
Mr. Haskin just sputtered like a too-full teakettle and repeated himself. “There is to be no laughing in the spinning room.” Then he turned to go and that’s when Agnes started clapping, very slowly. I don’t know why this was so shocking, but it was.
Mr. Haskin just stood and stared at Agnes, and she stared right back and kept clapping. Mr. Haskin looked like the mean ginger dog on Albert Street, who stares at you and growls. Instead of growling he said, “Miss Bamford, this is a gross impertinence.” Then he whirled around and left.
I don’t know about the others, but I felt as though I’d had the stuffing knocked out of me. Not Agnes though. She just tossed her head and said, “What we do in our dinner hour is not the business of Mr. Haskin. Back to work, girls!”
Auntie Janet says that Agnes Bamford should watch herself and look to her job. But I couldn’t help thinking that in the Bible it says that there is a time to weep and a time to laugh and isn’t our dinner hour a time to laugh? But perhaps this is impertinent, even to think.
August 26
Dear Papa and Mama,
This morning, right after we started work, Mr. Haskin said that Agnes was to turn off her machine and come with him to the office. She did not return. Nobody knows why. When Mr. Haskin came back he said that Auntie Janet was to run Agnes’s machine as well as her own.
Auntie was very tired at the end of the day. I tried to help with chores more than usual.
August 27
Dear Papa and Mama,
Something must be really wrong because Agnes was not at work again today and it is payday. How will she manage without collecting her pay? Murdo and I walked by her house on the way home from work, but we did not see anybody to ask.
August 28
Dear Papa and Mama,
Today Kathleen and I went blackberry picking. She knows the best places. We picked and ate and picked and ate and ate and ate and ate. Then Auntie made a summer pudding. You take slices of bread and line a pudding basin. Then you fill it with blackberries and put a plate on top and a heavy pot on top of the plate. When you turn it out the blackberry juice has soaked into the bread and it is a lovely purple colour. We ate it for supper with some top cream. If Cook at the Home knew about summer pudding, she kept it a secret.
August 29
Dear Papa and Mama,
This morning Mr. Haskin told us that Agnes is not working for the mill any more. He did not even have the courage to say that she had lost her job until Mrs. Brown came right out and asked him. Then he admitted it and then he disappeared for the rest of the morning.
At dinnertime everyone, from all the parts of the mill, was talking about it. People were angry. They said it was unfair. Some of the women said what a good spinner Agnes was. Fred Armstrong said that the commissioners should hear about this, but nobody knew how to find them. Some other people said that Agnes brought it on herself, being so cheeky with Mr. Haskin and speaking up to the commissioners. But nobody defended Mr. Haskin.
I did not say anything because I’m just a girl and I don’t know about these things. But I do know that Agnes was a kind and jolly person, who made our work fun whenever she could and was welcoming to a new doffer girl.
In the afternoon none of us worked very hard and it was very gloomy.
I took the paste-up of “The Day is Done” off Agnes’s machine and put it in my pocket.
August 30
Dear Papa and Mama,
Such songs have power to quiet
The restless pulse of care,
And come like the benediction
That follows after prayer.
September 1887
September 1
Dear Papa and Mama,
This is not a good week. I miss Agnes. Somebody said that she has gone to an older sister in Toronto. I hope she likes the big city. What I liked about Agnes was that she was not always obedient. In the Home I tried to be always obedient. This was not because I am such a good person, but because there was no choice. The disobedient ones just had a miserable time. But coming here to Almonte, living with Auntie and Uncle, I saw that they did not think very much about being obedient, and I started to think that when I was grown up I would not have to be so obedient. But now I think that there will always be a Mr. Haskin, someone to be obedient to.
I know that Auntie does not agree with me about Agnes, so I have nobody to tell, except Mungo.
September 3
Dear Papa and Mama,
One game that Mungo loves is to chase the end of a piece of wool. I drag the wool on the floor in front of him and he stares at it very intently and then he gives a great leap and grabs the end. Sometimes he slides along the floor and sometimes he flips right over, but he never gives up. Uncle says he is going to be a champion mouser.
Today when we got home from work and shopping we discovered that he had gotten into Auntie’s knitting basket and pulled out a ball of wool and unwound it all over the kitchen. It was around chair legs and table legs and under the stove. One ball of wool is very long when Mungo gets hold of it. When we opened the door I felt scared for a second, thinking that Mungo and I would get into trouble. But Auntie and Uncle just laughed and Uncle called Mungo a scallywag and Auntie said it was like stepping into a spider’s web. Thank goodness kittens get to be disobedient.
September 6
Dear Papa and Mama,
Today was a perfect warm day with a breeze, so Murdo and Kathleen and I gobbled our dinners and went for a fast ramble around town. We went past the high school and the students were on their break.
Some boys were playing baseball. The girls were sitting talking. I thought about Auntie and Uncle’s plans
for me to go to school. Perhaps I do want to. Truth: I don’t know if I want to be a scholar, but I would like to sleep later in the morning and have nice schoolgirl clothes. I don’t think these are proper reasons for going to high school. But nothing will change until next year so there’s no point fretting about that.
September 10
Dear Papa and Mama,
Auntie and I have been in a flurry of cleaning. Uncle says that Auntie gets her spring cleaning urge in the fall. Every evening after work we’ve been hard at it. We’ve scrubbed and mopped and washed and dusted and polished and blacked the stove. Uncle has taken to going out. Mungo has taken to hiding under my bed.
September 11
Dear Papa and Mama,
Today was topsy-turvy. Murdo and Kathleen came up this afternoon and said that Mrs. Murphy had asked them to take some applesauce to Miss Steele and Miss Steele, and would I like to come. I didn’t know at first who the Miss Steeles were, but then Murdo said, “You know. They wear dead squirrels around their necks.” Kathleen boxed his ears for being disrespectful, but she was smiling nonetheless. And it did make me place who he meant.
Miss Steele and Miss Steele are two very old ladies at church. They are tall and thin as can be and their clothes are threadbare and sometimes not too clean. One has grey hair and one has white hair. But the most remarkable thing about them are these fur tippets that they wear, even in the summer. They are like a fur scarf with a tail on one end and a little head with beady glass eyes on the other. The mouth is a clip that bites the tail. The fur has worn thin, but the beady eyes are very bright and lifelike. Those animals and I have exchanged many stares during the Rev. Parfitt’s sermons.
Auntie Janet said I could go. We walked out past the Cameronian Church and along the river. I kept looking for cottages but it just seemed to be countryside.
Then we came to a large stone house on a hill overlooking the river. I asked Kathleen if Miss Steele and Miss Steele were servants in the house and she said that it was their own house. I was flabbergasted. It was a grand house. They must be rich. Why did they look so poor?