Ingleside,
Glen St Mary,
September, 1936
Jo,
We tried sending Miss Abby to school. She stuck it about three weeks, with Joanie as bosom friend, before we called it a day.
The first day was terrible; She clung to Anne's arm at the gate and refused to go into the building. Then the head teacher rang Di and said Abby did nothing but stare fixedly out the window until the final bell sounded. There's no teaching her anything.
She's always been a homebody, ever since Di and Alastair went to Singapore when she was so young. It got worse when Di was so ill and we sent the grandchildren away. Retrospectively, I see that was a mistake. But you do what you think you must in the moment, don't you?
We didn't send her away when Susan died, and I guess that was another mistake. Well, we didn't know Susan would die.
I realized these errors plainly this evening. I was on the bedtime rota, so took the opportunity to make Miss Abby cocoa and do a bit of poking and prodding about why school was so awful.
She crinkled those green-grey eyes at me and looked at me like I'd said something funny, or was perhaps quite a stupid old person.
'School isn't bad,' said Miss Abby. 'I have lots of friends there, you know.'
She rattled them off – all members of the Glen St Mary Cricket Club.
'The problem,' said my favourite eleven-year-old redhead, 'is that everyone keeps going away. And it happens when I'm not there, Grandad. Sometimes it happens when I am. So, I can't go to school, because I might come home and you and Granny won't be here, either. I don't want you to be dead. It's Not Allowed.'
How does one argue logic like that? How does one eat an elephant? So, Anne's brushed off her BA and teaches Miss Abby at the kitchen table instead, where she's positively thriving. We'll give school another go next year, and hope fewer people die on us in the interim.
Love ever,
Gil
New Manse,
Glen St Mary,
September, 1936
Jo,
I just left Ingleside engaged in Mathematics by Board Game. Anne's idea by way of Ken Ford, whose family returned from America armed with what I can only describe as a game of properties. The young people love it. I'm afraid I don't follow the rules, but I'm sure Gil can elaborate. Anne and Abby make him play all the time.
I'm far more interested in your plans for the Manse. Faith says you want to convert part of it into a proper meeting room for your Kitchen Kirk. Though between trying to save a casserole and parse Sophy's Latin homework, she wasn't terribly cogent. I came away with the impression that deponent verbs were somehow implicated, and prone to boiling over – though that last might have been the casserole. Please send clarification. And if you have any light to shed on the readings slotted for Harvest Festival, send that, too. The decision to revise Common Worship has defeated me.
Love and blessings,
J.M.
Martyrs' Manse,
Kingsport,
October, 1936
John,
You are ahead of me in your sermonizing. And in your Latin. What is a deponent verb? Please explain how they cause casseroles to boil over. Also explain casserole. I should get to grips with this cooking thing. My daughter-in-law shouldn't have to cook for me, and neither should my congregants. I'm not completely hopeless – mission outreach armed me with many hearty recipes – but somehow that wasn't one of them. In my defence, the stove doesn't always condescend to start, and that is how I realized I forgot to ask Phil for the trick of turning it on. The hob is marginally more benevolent, but one cannot live on boiled eggs alone.
I keep thinking about Phil. Her will – in true Gordon fashion – made it remarkably clear what she wanted to go to who, but that still left her clothes. Naomi and Ellie boxed them up this weekend. Almost everything was consigned to the jumble for our Advent Appeal. I think she'd like that. That left Phil's jewellery box and jewellery – a locket that has ever gone mother to daughter, her engagement ring, other things in that vein. More sentimental than expensive as pieces go. There was a singer sewing machine that Phil detested. Ellie took that away. Phil's ghost whispers in my ear she should have taken it fifteen years ago.
While sorting, we unearthed Phil's university trunk. It's full of her old essays and mathematical proofs. I lost these last few days to reading them, though I can't make top, tail or middle of most of it. I should probably hoard them for the fire; Shirley predicts a long winter. I can't do it, John. It's only paper, but it sounds so like my Phil. All right, not my Phil. They sound like the Phil I used to listen debate and postulate among her peers. She was different with them, you know. More obviously clever – is that what I mean? It doesn't sound quite right. Perhaps not afraid of being intelligent – but that's not it, either. I never knew Phil to be afraid of anything. It was more…like electricity. What I mean is, set her between Gil, Anne and all the university crowd and she shone bright as any star, was fierce with it. For all her indecision, she never doubted that. She knew she had brains – and she used them! But then – and I remember seeing this in her and falling in love with it deeply – she could turn on a dime and redirect that same energy, the same brains, towards the price of eggs, how to filet a fish and what to do with a girning baby as we talked with the Martyrs' congregation of a Sunday morning. Anyone could do that, I suppose, but it was the sincerity of it, John. As if the price of eggs mattered every bit as much as the square root of the derivative of whatever formula she was wrangling. Because, of course, to Martyrs, it did matter, and to that end it mattered to Phil too.
I'm afraid I've quite lost what I set out to say. That I miss her, I suppose. That I have lost the most agreeable, but also painful, interval to reading over her handwriting – a thing her mother always lamented for its unruliness – and remembering the woman I courted. You were talking about time travel not long ago, and I guess this is the closest I'm likely to get to it. Yellowy paper with spidery handwriting arguing the merits of 'The Franklin's Tale' (she does not appear to have found many) and the best way to measure a circle – or something.
But – for all that, I don't know if I'd go back. Not to say it wasn't lovely – there are times I look back and think it must have been idyllic – but then I would not have this life lived, the experiences that wove us ever closer, the children and their children. Oh, I want more time with Phil. But I don't want to lose what I have, either. The rickety manse, the recalcitrant oven, our family…What I want is the impossible. Not time travel, but Phil back. I want her to haul her grandsons back from Spain by the ear, and to explain about the mathematics of a circle, and to let me tell her how much I love her.
A dangerous thing, memory. We must have argued like everyone else. There may even have been nights when old injunction notwithstanding, the sun set on that anger. I've blotted them all out. The trouble is, it's all slippery, like water. I keep losing pieces – did you, with Cecilia? I cannot quite see Phil's smile, only an imperfect facsimile. The sound of her laugh gets thinner. Sometimes I hear a clock, or a peel of church bells and mistake them for it, and sometimes it's only the wind. I remember the shape of Phil's hands, but not the feel of them. I was walking with Emma the other day, and when I looked over her arms were crossed across her chest, just as Phil used to do – as she did at Prospect Point, where we first met. I forgot how innately Philian that was. And then I looked at little Emma and wanted to weep for having forgotten and remembered again, but that wasn't fair on her.
Strange to say, I think she understood, because she uncrossed her arms, got up on her toes and kissed my ear, which was as close as she could get to me without me bending over.
'It won't be the same ever again, will it?' she said as snuggled against me. Then she tucked her little hand into mine, and crooked my arm so that she was resting on it, and that was Phil to the letter too. Not the same, but then, not altogether lost, either.
Maybe that's why I'm converting the manse. No casseroles or Latin conjugations in my current endeavour. Remember I said we were worshipping down at the harbour? Well, it's not at all practical for winter, and guess what Phil's ghost says is round the corner? My scheme is to knock the parlour and dining room together. My Kitchen Kirk – that name's stuck – keeps growing, and no one's said anything about a return to Hope Park and Martyrs'. I refuse to make them freeze down by the water just because the snow's coming. And since we've established time can't go backwards, I might as well go forwards doing good.
I'm afraid after all that I haven't advanced you at all on Matthew 15. Forgive me; A sound synoptics interpretation was always your territory. And forgive the length. With no one to talk over the day with, you are getting the brunt of it this afternoon.
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.
Jo
Ingleside,
Glen St Mary,
October, 1936
Jo,
I'm afraid I don't understand the board game at all. All I know is that it is called Monopoly, was invented by a Yankee, and takes many hundred years to play. It's best done of a rainy afternoon, and then only when confident that twenty other rainy days are ensuing. Don't tell on me, please. Anne likes it for teaching, because Abby's much keener on sums when trying to buy and place the houses. (Don't ask.) The children like it because it takes many hundreds of years to play. You wouldn't guess it, though, because there is always a pitched battle over who gets the rocking horse token.
I didn't mention the tokens? There's six. A rocking horse, a shoe, a thimble, an iron, and…I forget. Picture me spending my retirement trying to carve a Dulce-style dog and failing incredibly. My father was the one with the gift for carving, and Shirley the one to inherit the gift. What are the chances I can get him away from renovating your parlour and set him to work? Though, Iain would probably persuade him to do up a cat instead, and that wouldn't do at all.
An idea to run past you, while I've got you; What do you think The Echo would say to my taking out a column formally announcing my retirement? I know I confessed my inept carving, but that doesn't mean I want to spend afternoons convincing Giblertina Drew that young Bertie won't die, Dr. Meredith was absolutely right about the non-fatality of the common cold, either. Thoughts? Opinions?
Love ever,
Gil
P.S. Another opinion. This one for Anne, subject, Cards on the Table. She says the bridge hand doesn't make sense. I haven't read it (her fault) so am a highly unsuitable conversationalist.
P.P.S. Anne again, objecting to that last sentence and further asking for your opinion on something she calls Burnt Norton (sp?). It comes from the same place as that weird theological poem you sent John years ago, and neither she nor he can decipher it. Please offer insight and save Rosemary and me having to read it. We don't want to. We're also holding you personally accountable if John sermonizes on the Norton thing, too. I'm still not over his Ash Wednesday series.
Martyrs' Manse,
Kingsport,
November, 1936
Gil,
Tell Anne and John that I tried with the Eliot, but couldn't get on at all. It kept putting me to sleep, and then there were several babies to christen, and Maddie Connover's marriage, so I never got to the end. My limited opinion is that it was extremely dense, probably very intelligent, and odds favour Phil being equally vexed and fascinated, were she alive to read it. I gave my copy to Larkrise, where someone is bound to do better than I did. Probably Christopher, who just finished The Nine Tailors, and now wants to be a campanologist.
I did much better with Cards on the Table. I hope you pointed out to Anne she was querying a Presbyterian Minister on a game of Bridge. Don't tell Susan! (She knows anyway. What do you think she says about it, way up there in Heaven?) I understood about as much of those scenes as you do the children's Gaelic. Fox Corner are experts, however, and no one there was grievously offended by the hands in play. Nor were the Carlisles, when I happened upon them at Larkrise. Faith just blinked at me and said I'd better ask the children if I wanted an intelligent answer – she's never understood Bridge. She joins me in asking exactly what was Anne's objection? We're all intrigued. (Another question; Who taught Anne?! never Marilla Cuthbert.)
You knew Jake's boys were in Spain? One got clipped round the head and got sent back to England for his trouble. Jake sent him to a Harley St doctor, and the doctor sent him home after saying he'd had a lucky escape. I could have told him that for no charge. When I think what could have happened…But it didn't. He's safe. He's coming home. By Christmas. Oh, God, Gil the irony.
The manse refurbishment progresses apace. Sam says forget about second chimneys and put in a stove pipe and a good pot-bellied stove instead. It doesn't sound very modern, but I'm taking his word for it. We also have to refinish the floor. A safety thing, apparently.
Shirley's extremely helpful. We're both the type to pray by doing, and he often calls in after a veterinary round to offer help. I guess neither of us wants to rattle around in our memories with Christmas approaching, and refinishing floors makes a good diversion.
I'm unsure what we'll do about the furniture that with the manse. It's not practical for hosting large gatherings. Phil loathed it, and we always said we'd get rid of it when occasion warranted. It finally does. Sam has no room for it, and Jake doesn't like it. Naomi claimed a battered chair that used to be her study place, but won't have the rest. What about your children? The non-Kingsport ones, I mean. Jem, Faith and Shirley keep diplomatically refusing my offers. Would Nan like a new dining room set? Would Kitty like some Victorian cast-offs for the Cabbage town flat? I imagine Ken's kitted Jims out with more "brown stuff" as they say, than any university student dare hope for, but if he fancies something, tell him to ask. There's a hideous old writing desk that Phil said was vintage Poe and his raven. Would Anne like that? What about Abby? If no one wants anything, it's the parish and then Good Will for the lot.
Faith says if you don't take out that column, she'll write it for you. Think long and hard about how that would read, Gil, and then publish the thing yourself. Then enjoy your retirement.
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.
Jo
P.S. Find enclosed an old brooch of Phil's in the shape of a dog. It was to commemorate some beloved Gordon animal, but she'd love knowing the Cricket Club were using it for Monopoly.
Ingleside,
Glen St Mary,
November, 1936
Jo,
What have you done?! That brooch is now everyone's favourite token, and they squabble over that. The poor rocking horse feels shunned. Shunned, I tell you. Anne's at her wits' end, as is Di. Naomi's far more placid. Very much your daughter. It cheers me that at least one kindred spirit cannot get exercised about this game. I thought it was just me.
I can safely say Nan won't want the furniture. She's an expert at shedding unnecessary impedimenta after years of moving. If it's old, she doubly doesn't want it – and if it's the furniture I remember from Martyrs, she trebly doesn't want it. With the best will in the world, Jo, that parlour set was awful. Of course Phil hated it. In your secret soul, you hate it. I say burn it and spare the parishioners. Do them a hearty bonfire with potatoes in the coals and dance around its ruination in Phil's honour. Much the best policy.
Also in Phil's honour, give that grandson of yours a good thwack upside the head with the closest herring. He deserves it, scaring everyone like that. If he wants to fight communists, he can at least take care not to get killed!
Jims takes entirely the other line – he wants nothing to do with war. He sounds just like old Whiskers-on-the-Moon used to. You can imagine how that goes over with Ken and Liam.
Be sure and send a faithful report of your Kitchen Kirk. Alastair says Shirley's absolutely right about the floors, and he'd know. So keep on doing what you're doing, Jo.
Love ever,
Gil