Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [139]
Catharine immediately began to plan for Westove an English country garden full of violets, scarlet geraniums, primroses and dahlias. When she focussed the same talent for organization on the lives of her children and grandchildren, she began to sound like a Strickland matriarch. Her eldest daughter Kate was commissioned to do most of the weeding in the garden. Her second son Harry fenced in the backyard so his mother could plant potatoes. Catharine’s son-in-law Clinton Atwood, now married to Annie Traill, found his sturdy horse and carriage commandeered if Catharine needed a ride to visit Frances Stewart in Peterborough or Annie at the Atwoods’ farmhouse near Gore’s Landing. An echo of Agnes’s imperiousness crept into Catharine’s manner.
Hither and thither Catharine swept between friends and relatives in Belleville, Brockville and the Peterborough region, dispensing family news, medical advice and geranium clippings to an ever-widening circle of acquaintances and relatives. She acted as a sort of human information exchange, connecting the rapidly reproducing ranks of Stricklands, Traills and Moodies. Among them, the three Strickland siblings who had left Suffolk for Canada in the early years of the century would eventually have 111 grandchildren who survived childhood. “The family being so scattered calls for longer letters,” was Catharine’s happy complaint, as she wrote to her two youngest sons, William and Walter, who were both working west of the Red River with the Hudson’s Bay Company. She was always at hand when a new addition was expected to the families of her children, nieces, nephews or friends. “Percy [Strickland’s] wife … was confined on the 12th of this month with a fine little girl,” she wrote her friend Frances Stewart in 1862. “Of course dear old Percy looked much to me to see that matters went on rightly.” working west of the Red River with the Hudson’s Bay Company. She was always at hand when a new addition was expected to the families of her children, nieces, nephews or friends. “Percy [Strickland’s] wife … was confined on the 12th of this month with a fine little girl,” she wrote her friend Frances Stewart in 1862. “Of course dear old Percy looked much to me to see that matters went on rightly.”
Catharine’s beloved Westove, at Lakefield: any Strickland relative was warmly welcomed.
Now in her sixties, Catharine beamed at the younger generation even as she cast a disapproving eye at their values. When she stayed with Agnes Fitzgibbon in Toronto in 1863, she clucked at the way that young women in the city behaved, declaring herself “rather disgusted with the way in which they dress for effect in public.” While Agnes and her Toronto friends revelled in the arrival of music halls, London fashions and racy novels, Catharine shared her disapproval with Frances Stewart: “The luxurious style of dress, amusements and idleness of the young men and women of the last few years have encouraged a greater laxity in their manners and ideas. You and I perfectly agree in our opinion, respecting the want of delicacy in the fast dances, besides the effect on the moral character.” Yet for all her busybody gregariousness and talk of the “good old days” (tales of which must have horrified her nieces and nephews), Catharine had a kind heart and was a welcome guest in many households. Her white hair neatly tucked under a starched cap, her black gown (a castoff from Agnes) frayed at the cuffs and her bright blue eyes sparkling with life, she quickly determined what needed to be done. She would sit up all night with a feverish child, teach a musical grandchild to pick out a melody on the piano, talk about old times with the dying, or help lay out a corpse. Small wonder that her shy, stay-at-home daughter Kate regularly received notes that Catharine’s return from some sociable little trip would be delayed because her