Sisters in the Wilderness (14 page)

Hamilton Township remains today, 170 years later, an inviting landscape of rich pastures, gentle hills and bubbling streams, with a view of the distant lake from the high points. The land John had acquired was cleared, not just of bush, but even of stumps. Its two log houses and frame barn were already built. Although the purchase of Melsetter took a big bite out of his limited capital, in theory John Moodie had made a sound investment. In practice, however, the deal was a disastrous, because John hadn't known enough to ensure that he had both immediate occupancy and title to the farm. He quickly discovered that the log house was still occupied by the previous owner, Joseph Harris, who had gone bankrupt but refused to move himself, his wife and eight children out. John agreed to rent, sight-unseen, another, smaller dwelling on the property.

Susanna, her baby and Hannah the maidservant cheerfully waved goodbye to the Steamboat Hotel and set off in a covered carriage to take possession of their new home. But her spirits sank as the carriage bounced along the uneven road, a steady rain began to fall and Hannah launched into a non-stop grumble about the dark woods that menaced them on all sides. Finally the carriage rocked to a halt as they crested a steep hill, and the driver pointed out a miserable hut below them. Susanna gazed at the tumbledown shanty with horror and insisted that it couldn't be their future home—it was no better than a pigsty. “You were raised in the old country, I guess,” the driver sneered at her. “You have much to learn, and more, perhaps, than you'll like to know, before the winter is over.”

When John Moodie arrived a few minutes later, with their luggage in two wagons, Susanna was perched on the edge of an abandoned trough, ashen with horror. But with John's encouragement, she pulled herself together. She was soon helping sort out their home, while the rain beat down on the roof and blew through the open doorway. She found the door buried under some debris at the back of the house, and John got it back on its hinges. Hannah swept out a year's worth of animal droppings and old straw. James, their manservant, and Tom Wales, who had accompanied them, unloaded the wagon, stored their trunks in the loft and lit a fire in the fireplace. All the while, little Katie lay in the feeding trough, yelling her lungs out. For all the bustle and progress, it was a grim beginning to life in Upper Canada.

The Moodies were still sorting out their new home when their first visitor arrived. The door was flung open, and there appeared a young woman with “sharp, knowing-looking features, a forward, impudent carriage, and a pert, flippant voice,” according to Susanna. “The creature was dressed in a ragged, dirty purple stuff gown, cut very low in the neck, with an old red cotton handkerchief tied over her head: her uncombed, tangled locks falling over her thin inquisitive face, in a state of perfect nature.” The visitor was Emily Seaton, daughter of Roswell Seaton (or “Old Satan,” as Susanna called him), a local reprobate who
had nothing but contempt for inexperienced British settlers. Susanna quickly discovered that the “Yankee damsel” had come to “borrow” a decanter of whisky. In the next few weeks, the visitor returned to “borrow” tea, sugar, candles, starch, blueing, irons, pots, the new plough, a spade and trowel—on the false assumption that, as the young woman pointed out, “You old country folks … have
stacks
of money.” The items were either never repaid or returned in such poor condition that they were useless. Susanna had no idea how to deter the “Yankee savages” from purloining her supplies and implements. Her neighbours' borrowing habits reduced her to tears of frustration.

The Moodies' maidservant, Hannah, did not stay long, nor did any of her successors. It was a hard life, and there were plenty of homes crying out for servants that could offer a more comfortable situation. Susanna's insistence that she was not going to compromise her standards, and that master and servant must eat separately even though they now lived in a one-room cabin rather than Reydon Hall, didn't help. Without a servant, Susanna was regularly faced with menial tasks that she had never performed at home and now had to master. On her first attempt at laundry, she scrubbed the skin off her wrists without getting the clothes clean. On her first attempt at baking bread, she produced a leaden, burnt lump. “Oh Mrs. Moodie,” Tom Wales snickered. “I hope you make better books than bread.” The days seemed endless as she sat by a crackling fire and tried to ignore the snow falling steadily. Tom Wales left, desperate to return to England even though his pockets were empty and his health broken. Homesickness triggered uncontrollable bouts of tears in the early weeks. On one occasion, when John was away in Cobourg or Peterborough, Susanna faced the terror of being left overnight, alone but for her baby, while wolves howled and her last candle spluttered into darkness: “Cold, heart-weary and faint, I sat and cried.”

After a wretched winter, first in the hut and then in another small cabin nearby, the Moodies finally took possession of their farmhouse the following June. They found it overrun by mice (they trapped fourteen the first night), fleas and large black ants. “Old Joe,” as the Moodies
called Joseph Harris, and his brood had left a dead skunk in a cupboard as a farewell gift. But no sooner had the Moodies cleaned up the mess than gullible John made another miscalculation.

Acknowledging his own ignorance of farming methods, John adopted a well-known pioneer strategy and agreed to “share” the farm with another couple. The Moodies would provide the land, implements, livestock and seed, while the other couple would do all the manual work and share the produce. But the couple cheated the Moodies ruthlessly, stealing their potatoes, apples, seed corn and even their rooster and ruining their implements. “All the money we expended on the farm was entirely for these people's benefit, for by the joint contrivances very little of the crops fell to our share; and when any division was made, it was always when Moodie was absent from home and there was no person present to see fair play,” Susanna wrote. Even more upsetting for Susanna was the wife's wagging tongue. “We no longer had any privacy,” Susanna complained. “Our servants were cross-questioned, and our family affairs canvassed by these gossiping people, who spread about a thousand falsehoods regarding us. I was so much disgusted with this shareship, that I would gladly have given them all the proceeds of the farm to get rid of them.”

Throughout these trials, Susanna began to get a sense of herself as a woman of fortitude. In England, after their father's death, the Strickland sisters had realized that they would have to live by their wits. They couldn't afford to comport themselves in the manner of the helpless creatures they wrote about for the London annuals. And yet each had tried to radiate the delicate femininity common to fashionable ladies. To abandon the appearance of sweet vulnerability would have been to risk social censure. In Canada, however, delicate femininity was worse than useless when a wolf threatened the chicken coop, or when a cow's udder was swollen with milk. When Susanna finally overcame her own fear and milked the Moodies' red heifer, she was overwhelmed with a sense of achievement. She insisted that she was “prouder of that milk than many an author of the best thing he ever wrote, whether in verse or prose.” It was, she acknowledged, “a useful lesson of independence.”

In letters filled with closely-woven handwriting, Susanna recorded her first impressions of British North America.

In her day-to-day existence, Susanna had little time to miss the pleasures of literary London. She was even busier after June 1833, when her second daughter, Agnes, was born. Susanna was far too gritty a woman to let adversity overcome her. Although she downplayed her achievements in the self-deprecating manner of middle-class Englishwomen, Susanna was young and strong and capable. Day to day, she organized her little household, sewed clothes for her family, made sure there was food on the table and took an interest in even those neighbours she came to dislike intensely: “I tried to conceal my blue stockings beneath the long conventional robes of the tamest commonplace.”

Yet all this time, Susanna never stopped thinking of herself as a writer, first and foremost. With baby Aggie in her arms and little Katie crawling around her feet, she would sharpen her goose-quill pen and write long letters to her family in England, just as Catharine was doing
thirty-two miles away. Postage, which was paid by the recipient not the sender, was charged by the number of sheets used, so when Susanna had covered one side of the paper, like most correspondents of the time, she would turn it and write across her own writing. Occasionally, she would even turn it to write diagonally across the two layers she had already composed. In some letters, she described their circumstances with grim realism. In response to one outpouring of misery, her sister Agnes replied, “I grieve that you should be the tenants of a comfortless hut and exposed to so many hardships and privations.” At other times, Susanna adopted a more jaunty tone: “We were quite charmed [with] your pretty letter,” Agnes wrote approvingly.

Susanna's chief preoccupation was to transform her life into literature. On scraps of paper she jotted down sketches of her neighbours and poems that expressed her emotions. Her creativity was fuelled by rage and impatience. Into the edgy, amusing tales of the uncouth settlers amongst whom she found herself she poured her contempt for the illiterate. On other occasions, she would try to capture in verse her impressions and experiences of her new life:

Oh! land of waters, how my spirit tires,

In the dark prison of thy boundless woods …

Though vast the features that compose thy frame,

Turn where we will, the landscape's still the same.

Susanna was too much of a professional to lock her outpourings away—she wanted to be published. As soon as she arrived in Cobourg, she wrote to editors in York, Montreal and New York, with examples of her verse. Introducing herself as Susanna Strickland to the editor of the
Albion,
published in New York, she offered two of the poems she had written since she'd arrived in Canada. One described the sound of sleigh bells in winter; the second, more doleful, dealt with an emigrant's nostalgia for “the music of our native shore.” Susanna made it clear to the editor that, in her opinion, Canada was a living death for writers.

There was, as yet, no Canadian literature, and there were precious few publishers in Upper Canada. Everybody was far too busy struggling to feed their families and cheating their neighbours “to pay much attention to the cultivation of literature.” But she insisted that the demands of family life in a log cabin had not dampened her own poetic inspirations, “which in my own beautiful and beloved land were a never failing source of amusement and delight.”

The
Albion
's editor published several poems. Susanna's morale soared to see her name in print again (although she was never paid). Publication in a New York paper, then as now, meant that Canadians noticed the talent in their own backyard. R.D. Chatterton, editor of the Cobourg
Star
, suddenly decided that he wanted to reprint her poems. Alongside the “chaste and beautiful Songs,” Chatterton extolled the “racy, and pure English style of the fair authoress.” But he bristled at Susanna's disparaging comments about Canadians and complaints that her muse had received “little respect … in the wilds of Canada.” The editor of Cobourg's main newspaper was not prepared to admit that his town lacked class. “This apathy must arise from other causes than those she somewhat captiously alludes to, for our experience has convinced us that a want of taste can by no means be imputed to the inhabitants of this province.” There was, however, a grim truth in Susanna's complaint. She had found no soul-mates amongst the vulgar “Yankees” or monosyllabic hunters of Hamilton Township. She hungered for the kind of female companionship that she had enjoyed with her own sisters, particularly Catharine. She was suffering an emigrant's most bitter complaint: the only kind of readers with whom she felt in tune were in the land she had left behind.

It was her sister Agnes who, with her usual bluntness, brought Susanna's predicament home to her. Early in the summer of 1833 a long letter arrived from London, in Agnes's sloping, rapid scrawl, which began: “You would like to hear my literary news, you say.” Agnes then proceeded to reel off various triumphs. “I had a poem in the
Souvenirs
: ‘Uncle Gregory's Will' and the ‘Insect Travellers' were in the
Offering,
and I had a religious poem in the [journal of the] Missionary Council.” Agnes's cheerful bragging reminded Susanna of everything she had once enjoyed, now so far away—new books, intellectual gossip, the company of fellow writers. The titles of all those annuals, eagerly publishing Agnes's stories, made Susanna's practical achievements in the bush look like hard slog for little reward. Susanna knew that Agnes would dismiss all her newfound pioneer skills as “servants' work.” Agnes was obviously well on her way to high eminence in the literary world, while Susanna had spun into oblivion. Agnes was winning their sisterly competition for recognition.