Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [57]
But there was a bleak self-justification underlying Catharine’s upbeat tone. Catharine knew that her mother and elder sisters would find Upper Canada appallingly primitive, and that they would be disgusted at the lack of regard for social status. She acknowledged that it was “a hard country for the poor gentleman, whose habits have rendered him unfit for manual labour.” She admitted to her mother how women of any class who had left England for Canada were “discontented and unhappy. They miss the little domestic comforts they had been used to enjoy; they regret the friends and relations they left in the old country; and they cannot endure the loneliness of the backwoods.” When her mother implied by return of post that she shared Catharine’s regret at her “exile,” Catharine shot back: “Let the assurance that I am not less happy than when I left my native land console you for my absence.”
There was an additional reason for Catharine’s relentless good cheer. She knew that if she allowed herself to linger on the discomforts of their new life, she would be falling in with Thomas’s pessimism. Catharine was deluding herself when she wrote that her husband was reconciling himself to the new country after the arrival of her legacy. Her husband didn’t have anything like his wife’s get-up-and-go. Thomas’s physical and psychological health were both crumbling. After a couple of years in the colony, his back was bent and his sparse hair iron grey. Wherever he looked, all he could see were more trees to be cut down, more bush to be cleared. He longed to go home. If he had to stay in Upper Canada, he would have preferred to cultivate an orchard and rear sheep. But it would be years before his land was ready for anything less demanding than potatoes, wheat and pigs. He was in his early forties, and feeling his age—but he had nobody with whom to share the workload. So he started to borrow money, digging himself into debt, in order to hire Irish labourers to help clear his land. He worked alongside the men, chopping, clearing the underbrush, making brush heaps, logging, burning the fallow ground, sowing and harrowing his first crop.
Thomas had few psychological resources to protect him from the leaden depressions into which he sank with increasing regularity. He never learned to enjoy the Canadian landscape that his wife had grown so fond of. The quiet pleasures of canoeing, fishing or contemplation of a brilliant sunset had no appeal for him. There was no time for the only pursuit he really enjoyed: reading. Daylight had gone before he dragged himself back to the log house for his dinner each evening. He was far too weary to try reading by the light of a candle or whale oil lamp. Occasionally he managed to set pen to paper and write to the two sons he had left behind in the Orkneys, with his first wife’s father. He suggested, with customary diffidence, that they might join him in Upper Canada. In 1833, Walter Traill was eighteen and John was fourteen—young lads who could have taken much of the labour from his shoulders. But neither boy was in the least interested in becoming an unpaid labourer for his father. Walter had already decided to study medicine, and didn’t even bother to reply to his father’s letters.
A hundred and fifty years ago, nobody understood the bleak reality of chronic depression. Catharine was too compassionate a woman to fix to her husband’s condition one of the derogatory diagnoses of the day—moral frailty, unmanly weakness. But she recognized that if she herself admitted feelings of defeat or failure, Thomas’s spirits