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By Root 1161 0

when her spirits were low, she would take this symbol of gentility down from a high shelf and cradle it in her arms. She would remember the way that her mother, back home at Reydon Hall, took tea at four o’clock every afternoon. Mrs. Strickland herself had given the Moodies the Coalport tea service as a wedding present. Susanna had carefully transported the teapot, plus the matching milk jug, slop bowl, sugar bowl with its own dainty lid, and six cups and deep saucers, across the ocean and over hundred of miles of mud roads and forest tracks. And now one of the few remaining links with her vanished way of life—the life of an English gentlewoman, who held translucent china cups in smooth white hands—was smashed beyond repair. There was no hope of replacing it in the wilderness.

Chapter 7

“Halcyon Days in the Bush”

T he sisters’ reunion was intensely emotional. Susanna’s arrival after such a long cold journey was like a dream: Catharine’s familiar, loving voice; the smoky warmth of the Traills’ log house; the wonderful sense of being amongst family again. After the hugs and tears, there was a chance to admire each other’s offspring. It was February 1834, and Catharine had not seen Susanna’s daughter Katie, now two, since they’d parted in Suffolk, and she was eager to fuss over eight-month-old Agnes, while Susanna immediately took to little James Traill, a plump nine-month-old who watched the new arrivals with silent curiosity.

Best of all was the joy of being with a kindred spirit—someone who shared the same values, memories, sense of humour and history. Their reunion promised a return to the companionship of their childhood. Isolated from each other, the two sisters had coped with a society foreign to everything they had known. Catharine had forged ahead, buoyed up by her motto: “Hope! Resolution! and Perseverance!”—a slogan given added force, as her husband pointed out, “because you not only recommend the maxim but practise it also.” But Susanna, who lacked her sister’s flexibility, still struggled to adapt to the manners and customs of the New World.

Now, however, each sister had a sympathetic audience. Safe in their family solidarity, and their shared assumption of a social hierarchy, they could hardly wait to compare notes on all their new experiences. They didn’t have to explain things to each other—why they found Yankees cold or Irish immigrants feckless. Peals of laughter rang out as the sisters tried to top each other’s catalogue of disasters.

Catharine giggled at the way that the Americans she had met talked: their “nasal twang,” and their habit of using the word “fix” not in the precise English sense of “mend” but as a catch-all term for doing any kind of work. Susanna regaled Catharine with tales of her neighbours and servants in Hamilton Township. Susanna was a much better raconteur than her sister; her stories always had a rhythm and a punchline. “I wish nature had not given me such a quick perception of the ridiculous,” she once admitted, “such a perverse inclination to laugh in the wrong place.” Her ear for regional and class accents made her a brilliant mimic. She replayed an argument between Bell, a Scottish maidservant who used to work for the Moodies, and John Monaghan, an Irish lad who had arrived on their doorstep. First she imitated the indignant Bell, insisting in an exaggerated Scottish accent, “I winna be fashed aboot him,” because she regarded the boy as a Papist robber. Next, Susanna switched into an Irish lilt as she imitated the pathetic John, claiming he was beaten by his former master: “Shure the marks are on my showlthers yet.”

Catharine’s gentle anecdotes reflected her inability to “read” the people in Upper Canada, as anyone in England could unconsciously “read” their fellow countrymen by their body-language, accents and attitudes. Catharine always saw the best in people and was rarely censorious. She had been warned about the “odious manners” of native-born Americans, but once she had got to know a few Yankees, she was agreeably surprised to find them “for the most part,