She dawdled on her way home those September days, her lunch box swinging in one hand, her tartan schoolbag in the other. She didn’t feel like riding her bike with the others. Walking, she could think her own thoughts. She could look closely at houses and the store at the corner of May and Moss, figuring out which ones she needed to include on her map. If she walked over the Moss Rocks on the trail, she could pause and look behind her to Juan de Fuca Strait shimmering in the morning sunlight, a few freighters far out in the blue water. And it was an easy thing to stop and make a quick note in her little book, fishing it out of the pouch on the front of her schoolbag when she had a thought she wanted to record or a view of the cemetery from the high point on the rocks.
One night, when she was lying in her bed, waiting for sleep, Tessa heard her parents talking in the living room. They were discussing Miss Oakden.
“There is some connection, I think, with the Alexander family. Someone mentioned a son who died and was the father of her child. A hard thing for her, to have been an unwed mother in those years. Even now it would be difficult.” This was Tessa’s mother.
Her father’s voice: “She has dignity, though, in spades. She told me once that she worked during the first war at a brick works, making tiles. And that she had been left the house by a friend who died just after the war. All those years in that house. What changes she’ll have seen.”
“She was something of a suffragette, I’ve heard. A group of them performed a play that had the city talking! When you think of it, though, there must be many of these old-timers with stories to tell. Old men working in their gardens who probably fought in the Great War. The old Hungarian woman, Eva Gurack’s mother . . . her husband was executed in the revolt, I understand. And yet we all live these domestic lives, raising our children, paying our taxes. I suppose what I really should be doing is sewing patches on the boys’ jeans. I’ve never known children so hard on their clothes.”
Her father must’ve switched on the television then because Tessa couldn’t hear their voices, just Jackie Gleason yelling at his friend Art and anyone else who got in his way.
Classroom activities centred on seasonal events. Bright turkeys were crowned with wattles made by tracing your hand onto brown construction paper and the straw cornucopia was filled with offerings from home—Tessa brought four bright apples from Miss Oakden’s tree and some walnuts she found on her way to school. Then it was time to start thinking about Halloween. This involved long-term planning for costumes. Most children knew what they would wear a month ahead of the actual day. Most worked out a route well in advance that would include the houses known to be most generous. Word of these spread. There was one legendary address to which trick-or-treaters flocked each year for the ten-cent chocolate bars given to each child along with a bag containing a popcorn ball and a lollipop ghost, made by tying a Kleenex over the top part of the sucker and drawing on a scary face.
• • •
It was not as though her brother Mick had never had firecrackers. But this was the first year they were sold legally to minors, and he had spent his own savings on fifty firecrackers and a punkstick to light them. He’d been told to save them for Halloween night itself but couldn’t resist lighting just one or two for the loud blast and the smell. He found it intoxicating!
Arriving home from school that day, excited about trick-or-treating that evening in her pirate costume (Teddy’s striped T-shirt, an eyepatch of old black sock, a front tooth blacked out with special wax, and a big dotted handkerchief of her father’s tied over her hair, one of her mother’s hoop earring fastened to it), Tessa was idly walking up the path to the front porch when she heard Mick call out, “Watch this!” as he threw a lit firecracker up into the air. It exploded, causing Tessa’s heart to catch briefly—she didn’t like the noise or the smell. But then her brother suddenly shrieked, a horrifying sound, and he was down, he was screaming and rolling on the porch as the sound of many firecrackers exploding at once filled Tessa’s ears. And her mother’s too, for there she was at the front door, in a panic, shouting, “What’s wrong, Mick? Oh, dear God, what’s wrong?” Teddy was behind her and the two of them rushed to Mick, who was still bellowing and moaning. This was not Mick’s voice, not the boy who shouted and yelled and only sometimes cried. This was guttural, like the sound animals made on the nature shows they sometimes watched on television. The smell was terrible—firecracker powder and something else, a burning meaty smell. Mick’s trousers were smouldering, smoke rising from his legs as he moved in anguish, trying to stop the firecrackers that were still popping and flashing from his pockets.
“Run and ask the Godwins to call an ambulance. Quick, Tessa! Run!”
And she did, knocking wildly on the neighbours’ door, gasping out her mother’s request that they call for an ambulance. Mrs. Godwin ran to do that as Mr. Godwin rushed to her house to see if he might help.
“Roll him in the doormat!” he cried as he took the stairs two at a time. “Roll him in the mat and then bundle him tight. It will starve the fire.”
Mr. Godwin gently but quickly moved her brother’s body onto the mat that her mother pulled from the doorway. Between the two of them, they managed to roll Mick up and then they embraced the bundle to extinguish the smouldering. Mick had stopped screaming and was lying white-faced inside his wrapping, small moans coming from his throat.
“He’s in shock,” said Mrs. Godwin, who had come immediately after calling the ambulance. (She had been a nurse in her younger years, had nursed during the First World War; she had told the family this when they’d introduced themselves over the fence on the day they’d moved to Eberts Street.) “I hear the ambulance now, though. It won’t be long. Can you hear me, Mick?” She was leaning down to the boy, trying to catch his eyes, which were full of darkness, staring off. He was far away. Tessa worried he’d gone too far away to ever come home to them.
“Do you have a drop of brandy, Katherine? I think he could do with a little.”
The elderly woman gently spooned a tiny bit of brandy into Mick’s mouth. Most of it dribbled down his chin. But Tessa saw his throat gulp a little.
The sirens were close, closer, and then the ambulance men were bringing a stretcher to the porch and they were carefully lifting Mick from the mat. His trousers were in ashy shreds. They spoke to him quietly. One man began to take his blood pressure while the others removed his shoes and arranged his blackened legs on the white stretcher. The smell was awful, burned meat and sulphur. He was draped with a clean white sheet and a strap was fastened over his chest. A small crowd of neighbourhood children stood on the sidewalk, watching.
“Go with him, Katherine,” Mrs. Godwin was saying to Tessa’s mother. “We will care for Tessa and Teddy. Don’t worry about them. Your place is with Mick.”
Tessa and her brother went to the Godwins, where they sat at the kitchen table while Mrs. Godwin made them a drink of hot chocolate and put shortbread fingers on a plate for them. Then, remembering, she went to a cupboard and brought out small bags of chocolate-covered raisins, bought for trick-or-treaters. But they couldn’t eat, couldn’t take more than a sip or two of the chocolate.
“Will he die?” Tessa was finally asking the question that clutched at her heart like a claw.
Mrs. Godwin came to her and gave her shoulders a little squeeze. “No, my dear. I think he will be fine. From what I could see, the injury is to his legs. He will be in pain, yes, and probably there will be scarring, but I am quite sure he will be home in no time. It was a terrible thing, though. For him, and for the two of you who saw it.”
The phone rang and Mr. Godwin answered it. “Yes,” he said. Then, “Oh, good. That’s good to know. Thank you, Katherine. We’ll expect him when we see him then.”
• • •
It was the worst Halloween ever. Tessa’s father came home from work, shaken by the phone call he had received from the hospital. He knocked on the Godwin door and gathered his children in his arms, patting their backs as they so
bbed. He thanked his neighbours and assured them that yes, he would certainly call on them if he needed their help in the next little while. Then he helped his younger children into their costumes, insisting they go trick-or-treating, for Mick’s sake as much as theirs.
“He will be disappointed, you know, if no one in this family gets a pillowcase of candy! And you can take him a share to the hospital. He’ll be glad to get it in a few days.”
Trudging from door to door, a pirate and a skeleton, Tessa and her brother collected their bags of candy. The night was punctuated by the snap of firecrackers. Tessa thought she might be sick at the smell of them. She could not eat a single piece of her candy, not even the ten-cent Dairy Milk from the special house. When she went to bed, she lay awake for hours, thinking of Mick. Every time she tried to close her eyes, she heard his terrible screaming. The phone rang several times. Very late, she heard a car door slam and then footfall on the porch steps. She recognized her mother’s voice, low and urgent, and she went out to the kitchen.
“Oh, Tessa, you should be asleep by now. It’s very late, sweetie. And a school night too!”
“I can’t sleep, Mum. Will Mick die?”
Her mother hugged her close. “Absolutely not. But he is badly burned and will need to be in hospital for some time yet. We’ll talk about it in the morning. ”
Lying in her bed, hearing the murmur of her parents’ talk in the warm kitchen, Tessa tried to bring happy images into her head: the tiny frog in Miss Oakden’s pool; the pleasure of Saturday afternoon at the library when the children would be set loose and told to meet back at the entrance in one hour; walking with her mother to Gonzales Bay along Hollywood Crescent with the anticipation of a swim in cool water followed by a Popsicle for the long walk home; finding the mysterious egg cases on the Moss Rocks. She tried to dream her way into the long golden grass on the other side of St. Mary’s Lake, eating green apples in the sunlight. But the smell, she could not get the smell of burning leg and sulphur out of her nose. It filled her, made her want to throw up. She rushed to the bathroom just in time.
TWENTY-SEVEN
1920
Elizabeth Washburn had been a teacher in a public school in England before marrying and coming to Canada with her school-master husband. Ann asked her if she would act as the play’s dramaturge, the person who would do some background research on the history and geography of The Trojan Women and then share her research with the cast.
“I think,” said Ann, “that it would help us immensely if we could all have more information on the background of the Trojan War, for example, so that we know exactly who these women are and what their circumstances were before they ended up being the spoils of the Greeks.”
Elizabeth was happy to find out what she could. She came to a rehearsal with a carton of materials to share with the other women. First she put a map of the Mediterranean Sea and surrounding lands on the wall and used her knitting needle as a pointer to indicate the locations—Greece, the various areas where the Greek princes and kings had come from.
“Here is Sparta,” she pointed. “Sparta, where Menelaus was king, and Mycenae, where Agamemnon ruled. Odysseus, to whom Hecuba was given, came from way over here . . .” (knitting needle tapping) “. . . a little island called Ithaka.”
“And Troy itself?” asked Flora. “Was it a real place?”
“Oh, yes,” replied Elizabeth. “In fact, archaeologists have uncovered many layers of cities upon the site where Ilium, the other name for Troy, stood, right here, in Turkey, just across the Dardanelles from the Gallipoli Peninsula where so many of our army perished in those middle years of the war.” Her pointer was tracing a line on the map from a little dot marked Troy to a long finger of land immediately above it.
At the sound of that place name, Flora caught her breath sharply and looked more closely. There it was. Near Troy. Gallipoli, where Henry had been killed and where he now lay in a cemetery called Twelve Tree Copse. He left no wife to mourn him, though two parents sat in an empty house for months with the loss of him hanging in the air like dust. And no child to take his name forward into the future, though he’d been loved by a young man with a forelock of dark hair and a sweet smile.
Others saw the terrible irony too. Caroline was first to comment on it. “For Heaven’s sake, Elizabeth! The naval attempt on the Dardanelles—it was the same area!”
Elizabeth showed them Cape Helles and where the anzacs landed beyond Suvla. What had happened all those centuries ago had happened again in the recent past, and would happen again, in the future, near or far: was this the lesson that history was teaching? Flora hadn’t paid enough attention to history. Walking the Roman roads, she had listened to poetry and collected a few flints, never realizing that both had been products of conflict. The elephant umbrella stand at Watermeadows was an invitation to high-minded discussions about the white man’s burden and the treachery of the Boers; it had been easy to ignore as she went from dress fitting to dress fitting or else rode Seraphim down leafy lanes. Now she found herself listening and reading with a voracious hunger that surprised her. Ann’s family in England sent copies of The New Age and Flora read them cover to cover. The writing on credit power and democracy was hard going, but Flora followed the lively arguments on art and women’s suffrage with great interest. There was not a single opinion promulgated by the journal but rather many views, all eloquently and often provocatively presented.
And she took to visiting the library regularly to seek out books that attempted to come to terms with what had happened during the 1914–1918 conflict. A book called The New Elizabethans offered short memoirs of various poets, scholars, and athletes who had died on the battlefields of Europe. There were pictorial histories of Mons and the Somme, which broke Flora’s heart over and over again. And a long strange essay caught her attention: Aristodemocracy by Sir Charles Waldstein looked at the ethics of conflict, taking the reader on an archaeological tour of history from Moses to Christ to Plato and the modern autocrats.
“Ann, I am reading this, well, it is called a ‘sketch,’ but it is rather more than that, by Hillaire Belloc. It was clearly written near the beginning of the war and he’s talking about the nature of aggression, German of course, and Prussian, Austro-Hungarian . . .”
“Ah, portray them as demons and the rest will be taken care of?”
“Something like that, I suppose. What is shocking to me is how ready we were—and I count myself among those! At least in 1914—to believe this. Most still are. Belloc was a man my parents greatly admired, I believe. But listen to this: ‘Germany must, in fulfilment of a duty to herself, obtain colonial possessions at the expense of France, obtain both colonial possessions and sea-power at the expense of England, and put an end, by campaigns perhaps defensive, but at any rate vigorous, to the menace of Slav barbarism upon the East. She was potentially, by her strength and her culture, the mistress of the modern world, the chief influence in it, and the rightful determinant of its destinies. She must by war pass from a potential position of this kind to an actual position of domination.’”
Flora paused and tried to find a way to articulate her thoughts. “He is characterizing the German position as this. But surely the other nations might say the same of themselves? Mistress of the modern world—surely that is England’s goal? And what of the Belgian colonies in Africa? The Dutch?”
Ann was quiet for a moment. “It is always sobering to read this sort of thing, Flora. It determines me all the more to find a route that is mindful of the similarities of nations rather than the differences. My grandmother was a Quaker. Her notion of loving kindness towards aggressors rather than punishment, which seemed so naive when I was a girl, has much to commend it now, I think.”
“Yet there is this other kind of pacifism too, Ann, which I read about in The New Age and other places. One that suggests that force is occasionally necessary as a defensive measure but never in an offensive context. What do you think of that?”
It surprised Ann
a little to hear Flora asking such questions. She remembered the young woman who had come to Hollyhock Cottage and who had been taken aback when Ann spoke of the war as unnecessary, the machinations of its leaders vile. But she approved of Flora’s attempts to understand the dimensions of pacifism. “Oh, I think that might be Gilbert Murray’s own position. That peace-loving nations might band together in a collectively secure way against violators of peace. And maybe this is where the League of Nations will take us. We can hope, can’t we?”
• • •
Ann clutched her copy of the Iliad to her chest and crossed her ankles. The women were sitting in a circle. They took time before their rehearsals to hear what Ann had to say about their progress, or to listen to tidbits from Elizabeth about the play, or simply to catch up on their lives. It was cold in the hall and all of them wore layers of woollen clothing topped by shawls. A few knitted while they sat. Ann opened the book.
“This is the Iliad, ladies, the poem that details one period in the ten-year duration of the Trojan War, part of the tenth and final year, to be precise. I would say that it really encapsulates the war as a whole. And its awful concluding event, the death of the Trojan prince, Hector, who is of course a child of Hecuba, sets a whole other cycle of events into motion—Odysseus heads home and the Iliad’s companion poem, the Odyssey, follows him on that journey. Another hero, Aeneas, heads off and ends up founding Rome. Now, let me see . . .”
Ann found the place she wanted in the book. “This translation is by Samuel Butler. It’s prose, really. Not poetry. But it does have a kind of music, I think. So there’s the appeal to the Muses, which is usual in epic poetry, and then the narrator says, ‘I will tell the leaders of the ships and all the fleet together.’”
The Age of Water Lilies Page 22