Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [10]
Thomas’s affection gave his beloved Katie a psychological cushion against misfortune. It also nourished an interest in natural history that was at the same time an intellectual stimulus, a distraction from setbacks and a confirmation of her deep and simple Christian faith. “It is fortunate for me that my love of natural history enables me to draw amusement from objects that are deemed by many unworthy of attention,” she wrote. “The simplest weed that grows in my path, or the fly that flutters about me, are subjects for reflection, admiration and delight.” Catharine’s love of natural history was an extension of her belief in a benevolent and omnipotent God. Her mind was steeped in religion in a way that is difficult to grasp today. Her religious beliefs were quintessentially early-nineteenth-century—romantic, rather sentimental and absolutely trusting. In future years, Catharine would rely on her love of nature, the beauties of which she saw as the expression of God’s will, to carry her through one disaster after another. “Strength was always given to me when it was needed,” she noted at the end of her life. “In great troubles and losses, God is very Good.”
It must have been hard for Susanna to watch her father and sister disappear together. As the youngest daughter, she might have expected to occupy the niche of family favourite. Instead, she felt like the runt of the female litter, excluded from one of the most important relationships in her small world. She reacted to this exclusion with defiance rather than submission. While Catharine played with dolls and learned to identify birds and press flowers, Susanna collected frogs, toads and lizards. She spun impossible tales of seeing snakes and crocodiles in the Suffolk hedgerows, just to shock her father. Tired of being told, when she was naughty, that “Boney will come and catch you,” Susanna declared that she was madly in love with Napoleon Bonaparte. Thomas Strickland was horrified that his youngest daughter should admire the Corsican monster who was Britain’s mortal enemy. One night in 1815, when the Strickland family was sitting around the dining-room table, a neighbour ran in shouting, “Boney has escaped from Elba!” Susanna whooped for joy. Her enraged father immediately sent her to her bedroom.
A miniature of Susanna, painted by her cousin Thomas Cheesman when she was in her early twenties, reveals a young woman with a dimpled chin, wide grey eyes ablaze with spirit and an expression of nervous anticipation. Red-haired and short-tempered, she could be careless of others’ feelings. Her elder sisters found her “a curly-headed emotional creature, rather Keatsian in appearance.” Susanna admitted to a friend that she was “the creature of extremes, the child of impulse.” She poured much of her uncertainty and sense of being unloved into childish poems—poems that, when she was in her fifties, she described as “the overflowing of a young warm heart, keenly alive to the beauties of creation.”
All in all, the Strickland sisters enjoyed an idyllic childhood. But it came to a crashing halt in 1818. War with France had drawn to a triumphant close in 1815 with Britain’s victory at Waterloo. But in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, England lurched into a severe depression. The economic downturn menaced the kind of mercantile enterprises in which Thomas Strickland had invested. Thomas had made the mistake of guaranteeing a loan to his Norwich partner to keep a business afloat in bad times. When the business collapsed, his capital was wiped out. The shock of near-bankruptcy triggered his death at the relatively young age of sixty.