introduced our new minister this morning and he delivered the sermon. All fire and brimstone! He sounds more like a Baptist preacher than a United Church man. His name is Jackson and he preached here for two or three Sundays in July. I didn’t like him then and I don’t like him now. Zealots just get my back up; I suppose I just don’t like being reminded of my many spiritual imperfections every Sunday morning. Jackson would certainly not have been my choice, but many appear to like his old-fashioned evangelical style. His wife is a shy, pretty little woman and was sitting with the Atkins. I can see her being bullied by the likes of Ida Atkins and Cora Macfarlane.
After a mild spell, it’s cold again up here and thank goodness I have mastered the art of keeping “the monster in the cellar” happy. I know now just how much to feed him and when to leave him alone to grumble away and digest his coals and keep me warm. That is our bargain: my labour for his heat. As I go about all this, I can’t help thinking of those who are unable to afford a ton of good coal and who will have to make do this winter with green wood or lumberyard scraps. Many families are really up against it and I see it more and more every day now that the weather has turned around. This week a number of the children came to school wearing only light dresses and without coats or leggings. The Kray brothers are always half-dressed, though I suppose they would be in the best of times. Others are evidently without the means to clothe themselves. On Friday Clayton Tunney arrived, late as usual, in a pelting rain, wearing only a sweater and short pants. His hands were so chapped he could barely
turn the pages of his reader. It’s all very worrying and yesterday’s Herald had a story about a man over in Linden who hanged himself in a railway shed last Sunday morning, leaving a wife and six children. Apparently he’d been laid off by the railway and couldn’t bear the thought of going onrelief. According to the paper, there was thirty-five cents in the house on the day he died. I keep wondering what was going through the poor fellow’s mind as he fastened the rope around his neck and kicked away the bench. Or however he did it. They are taking up a collection for the family and I’m going to send a couple of dollars. I imagine there must be many such stories in that city of yours. I sometimes wonder if the politicians will ever sort out this problem of getting men back to work.
At least the Christmas concert can take people’s minds off things, though I’m glad it’s over for another year. On Saturday night as I played “Away in a Manger” for perhaps the hundredth time, I wondered if I would still be doing this in twenty years. In my mind’s eye I could see a spare, dry woman of fifty-one in a black dress playing the piano while she watched the children of these children in bathrobes gathering by the doll in the crib. Behind the curtain on the stepladder, a spry sixty-year-old Alice Campbell was still throwing handfuls of confetti onto the sacred scene. I have always wondered about that “snow” in Palestine. It’s startling, however, to realize that I’ve been playing for these concerts since I was sixteen. Do you remember when I took over from Mrs. Hamilton? You were in your entrance year and played one of the ghosts in a scene from A Christmas Carol . George Martin played Scrooge and forgot practically all his lines. This year his little
boy Donald was one of the shepherds. Who says time isn’t fleeting?
Last week I sent a little Christmas package, which I hope will reach you before the holiday. Please don’t bother with anything for me. I’m sure that you are busy these days and of course money can’t be all that plentiful. So nothing, please. I mean that, Nora.
All the best, Clara
P.S. Henry Hill and Father’s overcoat are perfectly good subjects for a poem. The “niceness” of something, whatever that means, has nothing to do