by Jean Little
Monday, December 5
Victoria’s being so busy has even little Rosie feeling neglected, and every time any one of us sits down, Victoria’s pug dog Snortle is up on our laps with a leap. Usually Victoria’s lap is ready and waiting, but not just now.
Something exciting did happen today. Emily Rose Cope said my name. Well, she meant it to be my name. “Mawina” was what she actually said. She calls Victoria “Bicky” as though she is a gingersnap. Mawina and Bicky don’t mind. Rosie has no word for David yet, even though he is sweet as pie to her. I should not be pleased about this, but he was so nasty to me and Jasper when we first arrived that I cannot help gloating. He is decent to us now, but I doubt he has ever said good morning to any of the other Barnardo children who have been settled in Guelph. Tom has always been friendly. It is strange how different two brothers can be.
Snortle attacked the neighbour’s Pekingese. He came off the winner but that little dog stuck up for herself. They did look so funny with their little black faces glaring. Until I came here, I never knew a pug dog and I think I looked down my nose at the idea of such pets, but Victoria’s Snortle persuaded me that pugs are the best canines going.
Time to peel the potatoes for dinner. Victoria is a poor potato peeler. She digs out half the potato along with the eye. I have wondered, now and then, if she does this on purpose so the job will be passed on to me, Marianna Wilson, champion potato peeler. But I do not really believe she is quite that much of a schemer. Her conscience would not allow her to keep it up even if she has done it now and then. I am proud of my potato peelings. You can practically see through them. And Aunt Lily taught me to peel one long apple peeling and let it tell my fortune. It is supposed to tell you the initial of the man you will marry someday. But if the apples know something, I’m going to marry a crowd.
Uncle Alastair is planning something nasty and I do not like the sound of it. I was not supposed to hear. He told Aunt Lily that something came today and he will do Rosie and me and Jasper tomorrow. She asked if we’d be better by Christmas and he said, “Of course!” What on earth can he be talking about? I cannot think of any one thing that you would give a girl of fourteen, a boy of nine and a baby of one and a half. It does not sound pleasant. I asked Victoria and she thought it was some sort of special treat and began by being jealous. Then she said she would try to find out.
Later the same night
Uncle A. is going to vaccinate us against the smallpox! I don’t want to have it done but I don’t want to get the smallpox either. The vaccine gives you a disease. Cowpox, my mam said once. She thought it was dangerous. “No child of mine is being given a dangerous illness on purpose,” she told the matron.
But I know right now that Uncle A. won’t listen to what she said. I am afraid.
Victoria showed me her vaccination scar. It looks like a white circle, a bit bumpy, and ugly, but it is hidden under her sleeve most of the time.
Nessie Smye had the smallpox and her face was so pockmarked that people looked away when she passed. I don’t want that. I have also known children to die of smallpox. And adults too. In the poorhouse, seven of the inmates died shortly before we left and Mam heard the matron say, “Good riddance.” (The whole saying is “Good riddance to bad rubbish,” but even Matron did not go that far in speaking of human beings.)
I snuggled Rosie especially close tonight when I put her to bed. She has not one scar on her beautiful little body. And she is such a cheerful baby. Hardly ever ailing. I wonder how her father can bear to hurt her. No wonder women don’t become doctors. Some actually want to. I have decided I might be a nurse, though. Dr. Graham told me I would make a good one when I helped care for Victoria’s Great-Aunt Lib before she died, and also when I helped out at Rosie’s birth.
Wednesday afternoon, December 7
He did it. I planned to tell him what Mam said, but he did not let me finish. He told me he knew my mother would want me to have it done. He started with me so Jasper could see what would happen. Uncle A. scratched my arm with something sharp. I didn’t look until he finished that bit. Then he swabbed the scratch with this vaccine. Then I had to wait, holding out my arm, until the stuff dried. I wanted to ask if he had given me cowpox, but Jasper’s eyes were enormous and he had gone white as buttermilk, so I decided to hold my whisht and be utterly brave.
Jasper was brave but he did come close to swooning.
“Buck up,” I told him. “Think of the Spartans.” He likes that boy who let a fox eat his “vitals” without complaining. I can’t imagine anyone really could do this. But it helped Jasper. He looked daggers at me and bit his lip hard and held his arm out steady as a rock.
Then Aunt Lily fetched Emily Rose Cope. She was laughing and so sweet. I saw, all at once, that Aunt Lily was about to faint, so I reached out and took the baby and held her all through the procedure. Aunt Lily ran out of the room. She must have been ashamed of herself, I think, because as soon as Rosie began howling, she came running back. How that poor baby did howl!
Uncle A. looked at me and said, so seriously, “Marianna, I’ve thought before that you would make a fine nurse, and this convinces me. You think it over.”
So I am thinking. I know that you have to go and live in a nurses’ residence next to the hospital and you work for your board and room while you study. But I am used to that sort of work, washing floors and dumping chamber pots and cleaning up messes and carrying trays. I have done that sort of work ever since I was a little thing and, after Jasper was born and our mother was so sick, I did nearly everything even though I was still only six years old. Then, when our sister Emily Rose was born and we went into the poorhouse, I never had five minutes free.
Sadie may think her life here in Canada is hard, but I know it is better than the one she had in the poorhouse.
Thursday, December 8
My arm is all hot and swollen and it throbs. They say “it took” when it gets like mine. A big scab has formed over the place where I was vaccinated and I cannot sleep. I tiptoed down the hall to the boys’ room to check on Jasper, but he is sleeping like a baby. His arm was on top of the covers, and although it is a bit warmer than usual, it is not like mine. Maybe it didn’t “take.” If it is to guard you against the smallpox, you have to have a reaction showing you really got a dose of cowpox. I got one for sure. I must go back to bed, I suppose, but I don’t know how I can bear this through all the hours until morning.
I was back in my room when I heard Rosie begin to cry. She is so sick. I went creeping down to her crib and I found Aunt Lily trying to soothe her. But you just have to look at her baby cheeks, so flushed and burning to touch. Her eyes are wide and she did not know me. Aunt Lily looked sick herself. I went and brewed up some camomile tea for the two of us and when I brought it, I made Aunt Lily hand her over.
“I can’t sleep either,” I said and I showed her my arm.
She actually began to cry over us. She is so tired. I wonder if she is in the family way again. I hope not. Rosie’s birth was hard on her and she has four children now plus that baby who died long ago.
Anyway, I walked up and down and sang to Rosie until she slept, but her rest is fretful and she needs watching. My mother used to sing to us a song called “All through the night,” which talked about “I, my loving vigil keeping.” Aunt Lily woke Uncle Alastair and he gave me some laudanum and sent me to bed. But I am writing in here because I still can’t sleep. He looked at my arm and seemed to think it was fine! I can feel my heart thumping away, but maybe the laudanum is beginning to work because everything is growing a bit fuzzy.
Wednesday, December 14
We have all recovered, even Rosie. Jasper’s vaccination did not bother him nearly as much as ours, but Uncle Alastair thinks it was enough to protect him if we have an outbreak of smallpox. I hope he is right. Jasper has freckles. He does not need to add pockmarks to his spotty little face.
Now that Dr. Cope thinks I can train as a nurse someday, he takes time to explain medical thing
s to me. It is nice to be treated respectfully, as though I am another adult.
Monday, December 19
I have not had time to write in here because we are so busy doing Christmas baking. We made the puddings today. Such a performance! When night comes, I fall onto my bed and sleep instantly.
Friday, December 23
Last night, we all went to the school and saw the tableaux. Victoria was Florence Nightingale and Molly was Laura Secord. I thought there should be a live cow for Molly to lead through the enemy lines, but I knew better than to say so. Victoria looked clean and neat and spiritual even though she let her lamp wobble a couple of times. The audience gasped. But she grinned and steadied it again. But I’ll bet Miss Nightingale, when she nursed soldiers during the Crimean War, was not so spick and span. Those hospitals were terrible places!
Sadie was going on and on about Florence Nightingale being English like us. I’m proud of our British heroine too. Yet I believe I am starting to feel more Canadian. Sadie makes me squirm with her boasting about the “Motherland.” It was not so wonderfully mothering to me and Jasper.
Sadie is going to be leaving right at New Year’s. She told us after the concert. She looked paler than pastry dough and she actually had tears in her eyes. The old woman she was helping to care for died and the family do not need her any longer. I hoped she would go somewhere genteel, but she has been told she is being packed off to a farm north of Arthur.
I do wish her luck. Maybe she will discover she loves the country, but most Home Children do not. They have to work so hard and nobody understands what a shock a farm is when you have spent all your life in London. It is dirty enough in the slums, but it is not at all like farm dirt. It smells human. Before coming out here, most Home Children have never seen a cow, let alone milked one, or ridden a farm horse or brought in the new-laid eggs. And people here make fun of them. I was so lucky being sent to a doctor’s family.
Saturday, December 24
Christmas is nearly here. Victoria is acting funny. She has some big secret she is bursting to tell me and she has finally begun to stay away from me in case she lets it slip. I know she is getting a lovely new dress of sprigged muslin with a lace collar. It is to wear to church and parties. She will dance about in it and make the full skirt stand out.
I got Victoria a secondhand copy of Rose in Bloom by Louisa May Alcott, partly because Vic’s second name is Josephine after Jo March in Little Women. I would have bought her her very own copy of that book, but she had taken over the family one and keeps it in her own bookcase. She has Eight Cousins there too, and I remember how she loved it. The one I am giving her is the sequel to Eight Cousins. It is not as good as the first one, but Victoria will be pleased. She loves reading. I like it but I have always had to work too hard to get the habit of it, the way Vic has. If she is not doing something else, she goes straight to a book and she weeps over the characters and laughs aloud when they do something funny.
Uncle A. measured me up against the door today and put a pencil mark to show how tall I am now. I have grown two whole inches since I came. I was such a little squib in those days. Victoria says she will have to stop calling me Sparrow and call me Heron instead. But I am still my father’s Sparrow Wilson inside.
Christmas Day
I got an envelope and inside it was a note saying they have hired Miss Hope to teach me to play the piano! It seems Victoria heard me playing in secret when I thought the family was away. She says she thinks the teacher will really have “high hopes” of me. (They sometimes call her Miss Low Hope because of her struggles with Victoria.) I have my first lesson this very week and Victoria says I am to play so the whole house can hear me. I never guessed she was listening when I just barely touched the keys, picking out tunes so softly.
Victoria gave me a jar of cream to rub on my hands at bedtime so they will be softer and look beautiful on the keys. Jasper snorted rudely, but I think it was very kind. Oh, Mam would be so proud!
Vic was thrilled with her book. She spent all Christmas afternoon rereading it. I had to set the table for dinner without any help from her. Then, just as I finished, Victoria Josephine Cope arrives at the dining room door, red-eyed from crying, to ask if there’s anything she could do. I just laughed at her. But inside I was pleased that she loved my present so much.
I won’t have as much time for writing in my notebook after Christmas. I will have to practise the piano. But now that Sadie is gone and no longer jeering at my feeling that I belong here, I can be comfortable knowing that I am the Copes’ Home Girl. This really is my home. Jasper’s too.
I am going to start saving any money that comes my way, so that when I am grown and working as a nurse, I will be able to make a home for Jasper and buy myself a second-hand piano. I probably will never get enough. But I can try. Mam always said, “Marianna Wilson, you must always dream big dreams if you want to have joy in your life.”
Late in the afternoon, when Uncle A. and the three older children went out to pay a Christmas call and Aunt Lily and Rosie were napping, I tried to play the piano right out loud, the way you are supposed to. I didn’t pound the keys but I didn’t barely touch them the way I had done before. I was playing “O Come, All Ye Faithful” with one finger and it was as easy as anything. Then Aunt Lily’s voice, from behind me, said, “Oh, Marianna, I had no idea you could play by ear!” I had no idea I could either.
She showed me some chords and taught me how. And now I can play it with both hands! I said I was sorry if I had wakened her, but she said I hadn’t and it was time she began getting our supper of leftovers started. I went to help, of course, but I felt as though my feet had wings.
Merry Christmas, Marianna Wilson, Home Girl and famous pianist!
Having done her best to reunite her family — her father in Vancouver, her mother and brother in China — Mei turns her attention to her studies, and the hope that she will one day become a doctor.
An Unexpected Gift
Tuesday, December 21, 1926
Dundas, Ontario
It feels very strange to be writing a diary again, especially as I vowed to leave the last pages empty in my beautiful red diary. Is this a betrayal? No, this is not really a diary, but a little book that Miss MacDonald gave me to write about our trip.
If anyone had told me that I would be in Ontario this Christmas, with Miss MacDonald’s family, I would have thought them very foolish. There were many reasons why this could not be: school; my baba would not allow it; we do not have money to waste on a pleasure trip. None mattered in the end. Miss MacDonald made it happen. If I am to study to be a doctor then I have to come to Toronto, as it is not possible to do this in Vancouver. She made the trip happen, the same way she convinced the people in her church here to pay for my studies and even to pay for me to come now so they could meet me. I do not know how she convinced my baba — they are still not comfortable when they talk with each other — but she did, and promised that I would be looked after by her own family. As to school, although I missed the last few days, I probably worked more than those who stayed. Miss MacDonald is a hard taskmaster and as our train travelled across the prairies, I did not have time to admire the snowy scenery. It was all work! Now it is done, and until we go to Toronto for our meeting, I am just a guest. This will be peculiar, as I have never been a guest.
I thought I would be excited but I’m not. This house is too big, with so many rooms and people that I find it very scary. The MacDonalds must be very rich to live in such a place. I had thought that Miss MacDonald’s brother would live simply like she does, as he and his wife are missionaries, but she laughed and told me that we are staying with her older brother, the rich one, who inherited the family business. The missionary brother has gone back to China.
When I look around my bedroom, it’s so pretty that it makes me feel very shabby. The driver who picked us up in Hamilton and drove us to the MacDonalds’ house sniffed when he felt how light my valise was. There are other servants here, too — a c
ook, a cleaner, and a maid. It will feel wrong for me to be waited on by them, when this is what my baba does at home for the Baldwins. I miss him so much already. It does not seem fair that I am sitting idle, while he and the others work so hard. As I sit here enjoying my evening, I think of him finishing his long day at the Baldwins’ and still having to work in our restaurant, which is always busy over Christmas.
There were many greetings when we arrived and I found this a trial. Mr. and Mrs. MacDonald are kind, taking me into their home, but they make me nervous. They are very formal and when they speak to me, my words jumble in my mouth. I know I sound foolish. I was glad to escape to my room “to rest and get my bearings,” as Miss MacDonald put it. How will I remember everyone’s name — there are so many already and more to come. Tomorrow, I will meet the young people of the house — Miss MacDonald’s niece and nephew who are returning from Toronto. Over the four years that Miss MacDonald has tutored me, I have heard so much about them that they feel like friends. I hope that they will like me.
My head is drooping and my hand aches. I am out of practice when it comes to writing a diary!
Thursday, December 23, 1926
I am not writing every day. Too many new things are happening all the time. Instead I will write about the main events and Helen and Robert MacDonald (although he says I am to call him Robbie), Miss MacDonald’s niece and nephew. I no longer feel so scared and out of place, as they make sure that I am included in all their activities.