CHAPTER 9

 SPRING 1915

 After the Christmas holiday, we had still snow to contend with on our journeys, but it didn’t stop us going we had fur muffs for our hands, Alice and I. I was thinking I was pleased Fred hadn’t started school as boys didn’t have muffs only girls, and it was so easy to lose a glove or both gloves, and Fred felt the cold and he had chilblains on his toes, even keeping indoors, and even the little lambs didn’t like the cold, with wool all over them.

When we got home from School Fred would tell us how he had been helping mother with the little new born lambs that were brought in by the kitchen fire as soon as they could stand up. He said we gave them some milk from a bottle, and they would be ready to go out to their mothers again. He made me feel I was missing something going to school. At least he was learning about little lambs, and how to save their lives, and I wasn’t. But as time went on there was all kinds of things happening to the animals, and I got quite used to things going wrong. A horse walked into a broken gate, most times when the vet came it was too late to save their lives. A cow was given some medicine from a long bottle, which went on its lungs, or choked it. I cannot quite remember which, but I can remember the fox coming to the chickens in broad day light, and mother shooting at it as it ran away over the bank. Mother kept a gun by the side of her bed, but the time she shot at the fox was the only time I heard her shoot it. That second year at our school must have been the worst one. In March it was still snowing, Fred was really seeing a lot more lambs brought in to get over the cold. The shepherd was digging them out of the drifting show, but in spite of that Alice and I were still going 1½ miles to school in that sort of weather.

How I remember that was because we went to stay with a friend for two weeks and went from school from her house. She used to pack us up dainty thin sandwiches which I shall never forget, because they were made with strawberry jam and it was the first time I had tasted strawberry jam, and we didn’t have butter in our sandwiches at home only just the jam. This lady also would sit us on her knee, and each evening do our finger nails. Push back my quicks until it hurt, to find my half moons she would say, when we went back home, Alice and I found our father had gone, and our oldest sister told us our father had died.  But said: “We don’t talk about it”, and that’s all we heard about it at the time. But afterwards we had new grey dresses with black silk sleeves made for us, Alice and I. Grace, Hylda and Annie, and that was because father had died with the flu.

Fred didn’t go to school either, that summer, as he wasn’t well enough - he had pleurisy I believe, and was not strong enough, and Leonard who was 18, the oldest went for a soldier. I remember I was called a cry baby by everyone, and when I was asked what I was crying for, I used to say I wanted Len to come home. It couldn’t have been that, since I have looked back I wonder if that my mother was so very unhappy, that it was rubbing off on me, and making me miserable, for although there was things I did know poor mother was going through, there probably were many more that I didn’t know of. I didn’t know really very much about the war, as apart from my oldest brother being a soldier it didn’t show until the next year in our little village until the Canadian soldiers came to be living in the neighbourhood by the hundreds in our barns, in our village church, and on the march from time to time, out mother was so sympathetic to them, putting big pans of milk on the low walls by the gateways when they went through to have either to refresh them. At the time, or fill up their drinking bottles for later, and hoping that the French were being kind to her son who was somewhere in France. That’s all she knew.