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By Root 1226 0

had been hard enough to make the journey from Reydon Hall to Cobourg with a baby in her arms—now she had to organize her new log house with two little girls underfoot, plus a newborn infant. She taught her family to read, but she didn’t have Catharine’s patience with their temper tantrums or squabbles. Dolls irritated her: as a child she had preferred frogs, and she thought rag dolls were a silly waste of time. She and her daughter Agnes often clashed, since little Aggie was just as willful as her mother. It didn’t take Aggie long to discover that Aunt Traill’s cabin was more convivial, and that Aunt Traill always seemed to have more time for her than her own mother did. The Moodie children scampered along the forest path to the Traill cabin whenever the opportunity arose.

There was plenty of love in the Moodie household, but most of it was the passion that still flamed between John and Susanna. As John kept reminding her, they had come to the colony for the sake of their children—to give them a future they could not afford in England. Susanna had been much too wrapped up in her love for John to question his decision to emigrate. Instead, consciously or unconsciously, all her life she resented her children for her exile—and even as small children, they knew it.

During the first few years in the backwoods, the Traill and Moodie households usually had a hired man and a maidservant apiece to help with the domestic and yard work. Nevertheless, both women had to do far more than their mother ever did at Reydon Hall. In the mornings there were stoves to stoke, chickens to feed, eggs to collect, babies to feed and dress, porridge to make (John Moodie always relished his “pouritch,” particularly if there was a little cream to pour on it). Then there was all the baking to be done—the bread, pies and cakes required to feed not just growing families but also the hired help in the fields. Kitchen gardens—with carefully tended rows of potatoes, peas, carrots, squash and onions—needed weeding and watering from late April onwards. Once a week, each woman heated iron cauldrons of water in which to do laundry; in summer, it could be rinsed in the lake. Once all the sheets and garments were washed, with caustic lye soap that took the skin off hands, they had to be hung to dry. The weather had to be very bad indeed before a pioneer wife decided to keep the wet laundry inside and drape it over cabin partitions, fogging the place with clammy humidity. Far better to hang it outside where it froze as it dried, then bring in the shirts, aprons, gowns, sheets and underwear (all stiff as boards) and fold them on the kitchen table.

Afternoons were the times to socialize. Susanna’s prickly distrust of strangers had subsided now that she was securely entrenched amongst like-minded British gentlefolk. There were two other families besides the Stricklands, Traills and Moodies who lived close to Lake Katchewanooka: Lieutenant Alexander Shairp and his wife Emilia, and Lieutenant-Colonel John Caddy and his wife Hannah. The women often gathered for tea in the afternoon. Their heads were always bent over their needlework, as they had to clothe their whole families. Boys and men wore grey flannel shirts and homespun trousers; girls and women wore long, full-skirted dresses (wool in winter, calico in summer), covered with gaily patterned cotton aprons. Since there were no paper patterns, the women would unstitch an old garment and cut the new cloth according to these pieces. As they sewed and mended, they compared notes on how to make butter and cheese from the scrawny cows most families kept, how to make candles from mutton fat, which berries made the best jam or how to bake good bread with gritty flour. They kept each other informed about who was travelling to Peterborough or across Rice Lake to Cobourg or Port Hope and might pick up supplies of tea, rice or dried fruit. They eagerly peppered visitors and newcomers with questions. Was the colonial government going to improve the roads? Had cholera struck again in Lower Canada? Were conditions in the Old