The Retrospect

by Ada Cambridge

At our farmhouse a cartload of evergreens used to come from our grandfather's woods, sometimes through the snow. Here in the town we still managed to get enough; always the Christmas tree in its largest size. Every room had to be adorned as lavishly as they now adorn the churches, whereas the churches were put off with a bough of holly stuck into each seat end. The Christmas tree was planted in a tub on the drawing-room floor—stripped of carpet and furniture for the nightly games and dances (this floor was not of stone)—and usually the top had to be cut off to get it under the ceiling. Its graduated layers of arms bore dozens upon dozens of coloured wax tapers (the little tin sconces for them were stored from year to year), and about the same number of pendent glass balls, apples of gold and silver on the dark green boughs. The substantial fruit, the presents, were in numbers sufficient to stock a small bazaar. Mother and aunts and family friends had been working on them for months. If the drawing-room could not be shut to children the tree was jealously screened, for a day or two before the great night, which was a party night. It was the young men and maidens who enjoyed themselves in this interval, while the little ones hung about passages and peepholes in burning curiosity and suspense. The enchanting moment came when the party tea was over and a succeeding half-hour of thrilling anticipation; the drawing-room door was flung wide and we rushed through in a crowd towards the splendid blazing wonder in the middle of the room, sighing forth our "Oh! oh!" of ecstasy.

The stage-managers ranged us in a circle around it, all goggle-eyed, half stunned with the suddenness of our joy, and someone came round with a bag of tickets—round and round, until each had half-a-dozen or more. Oh, who would get No.1, the great doll at the top of the tree?—or No.2, the work-box on the tub beneath (the tub hidden in green stuff, mingled with pink glazed calico)? There were great prizes amongst the many little ones, and some that I remember were quite remarkable. One was a board—very difficult to fix to the tree safely—on which a party of dolls were celebrating a wedding, the bride in her veil, with her bewreathed bridesmaids, the little men in coats and trousers, the surpliced parson, all complete. Such time and trouble were to spare for children in those days! The steps were brought in and a man mounted them to detach the articles from the upper boughs. A woman might set herself on fire—once she did, and there was a gallant rescue, and frequently a taper ignited a flimsy toy or set a green branch smoking. Doubtless there were heart-burnings also over the caprices of Fortune in the distribution of the gifts, but I cannot see blurs of that sort on the shining picture now.

Santa Claus is still much alive, so I need not describe his doings. I only hope the children of to-day enjoy shivering awake for half the night and making themselves ill with the edible contents of their stockings before daylight as much as we did. As for the delicious lurid function, snapdragon, is it obsolete in England yet? It does not come, like Santa Claus, into the scheme of child entertainment in Australia. There would be a difficulty in finding the requisite depth of darkness on Christmas evenings here. Besides, a supper of raw raisins cannot be good for the infant stomachs. I would not give it to my own children, but still I am glad that the mothers of old were in some things less faddy than we are. One of the treasures of my collection is the weird scene of the magic bowl and the spectral faces around it—the delightful terror of the little girls, the heroic courage of the little boys who seized for them the blazing morsels they dared not touch themselves. A tender memory of that boy to whom I inclined, who shot himself (by cocking a stiff-jointed gun with foot instead of finger), pictures him gallantly fighting the flames on my behalf.

The Waits, I believe, are heard in the streets of England still. But not, I fancy, on country road and garden paths, guests of the domestic hearth at midnight, a nondescript rabble under no ecclesiastical control, making their own fun, as they then did. Blue-nosed, beery, hilarious, in woollen mitts and comforters, drinking good luck to a dozen hosts in turn and thinking of nothing but how they were enjoying themselves, they are not quite adequately represented to us older folk by the better-drilled but unspontaneous choir-boy. He is like the Christmas card for which we have exchanged the valentine—a shadow replacing the substance, to our thinking.

The choir of the old times was the congregation, led by the clerk in the three-decker. We went to service on Christmas morning, as in duty bound, and sang "Praise God, from Whom all blessings flow," whether we had singing voices or not, and were likewise audible and hearty with the responses, as believing them our own; and when we came out—good, unsophisticated Christians, exchanging our "Happy Christmas" with everybody we met—the church was content to let us go for the remainder of the day. We went home to our immense dinner (with dessert that lasted through the afternoon), our festive tea, crowned with the Christmas cake, our blindman's buff and turn-the-trencher and drop-the-handkerchief in the cleared drawing-room, our snapdragons, our punch-bowl, our adventures under the mistletoe.

The drawing-room, when not cleared, could not be closed to family use, like the majority of the middle-class parlours of the past (I might almost say of the present also), being the highway to the front door, to the garden-playground, and to the music-room, which was the sitting-room. Its four doors were constantly opening and shutting, and it must have been a cave of the winds in winter, although I do not remember it. Strips of crumb-cloth marked the crossing footpaths, warning us to keep off the grass—i.e. the geometrical-patterned green and crimson carpet; they were taken up whenever it was surmised that "people might be coming," according to that curiously petty but intense concern for a genteel (however false) appearance, which was one of the things I had, mistakenly but naturally, taken for granted that England had grown out of long ago. The room was still the reception-room for callers and company, and all my mother's artistic skill, which only distinguished itself the more for having so little money at the back of it, had been expended upon its adornment.

When I think how that artistic skill was exercised, I have a foolish impulse to shudder and to smile. When I think again, I have to ask myself, "Why should I?" Further reflection convinces me that its manifestations were admirable. To say the least, they were not necessarily in bad taste then, although they would and ought to be so now. But there is far more than that to say. The handicraft of the women of the mid-Victorian era had the precious quality of finish and thoroughness, than which there is none more worthy. Careful, delicate, faithful work, no matter on what article expended, was the note of excellence, and the longer I live the more I respect and love it. Such fancy-work proper as adorned this old parlour of ours I do not wish to see reproduced, but it was appropriate to its day and a credit to her who was responsible for it.

She had a sort of settee-sofa under the window on the garden side. It was covered with many squares of finest "wool-work," joined together. There was a different design—vase of flowers, basket of flowers, wreath, bouquet—in each square, although material and ground colour were the same; and the number of them represented so many girl friends who had combined to work them and present her with the sofa on her marriage. It certainly was a graceful idea, cleverly carried out. And wool-work was really very fascinating. With a piece of canvas, a bundle of neatly-sorted Berlin wools, and a coloured pattern of flowers of every hue—the more intricate the better—I was quite happy. I also liked working out peacocks and other weird devices into antimacassars, with crochet needle and white cotton, although not so well. I must have made miles of "open-work" (the modern broderie Anglaise, only better) for underclothes, first and last. Once I made a bead basket to hang by glittering bead chains between draped netted-and-darned window-curtains. I knitted rag rugs and silk purses, and sections of a great quilt for a spare bed. I did elaborate geometrical patchwork for other quilts, and fine marking of names (learned from my baby sampler) on linen with engrained red cotton; and watchguards in black silk and gorgeous slippers and winter mitts and comforters for father; and mats for lamps and vases, and so on and so on.

But mother was really an artist, because she did not follow patterns, but designed things herself. When she needed curtain cornices for the tops of those windows, and could not afford the gilded, fender-like affairs that were correct and desirable, she nailed deal boards together, covered them with leather, and then with a design of leather flowers or grapes with vine-leaves, which, when varnished, imposed upon the spectator as a carving in wood. Now we would prefer the honest deal, no doubt—I would, at any rate—but then there was not a person of taste who would have done so. She made open wood-carving of leather-work applied to stout cardboard, cutting away the latter from the interstices of the pattern embossed. In the treatment of a pair of flower-holders that used to stand on a table under the mirror between the garden window and the garden door, she substituted a scarlet coating made of sealing-wax for the dark wood-stain; her leather-work then called itself coral. As for her wax flowers, they were truly beautiful. She was not content to make up the boxfuls of petals prepared by the trade, but must needs copy flowers out of the field and garden. I do not know how she found time for all she did, but she seemed to do everything, and always to do it right. My faith in her ingenuity and resourcefulness was as my faith in the omnipotence of God.

It was in that drawing-room of her adornment that we held festival on the afternoon of our famous wedding-day. It rained, and the amusement for the guests—after the great breakfast in the music-room and the departure of bride and bridegroom—was to practise archery upon a target in the wet garden from the shelter of the house. The arrows from door and window went wide over the garden walls, and the scared face of the rector popped up in alarm at intervals as they hurtled into his domain. It was the son of our old neighbours at T—— (the House of the Doll), who, unknown to any of us at the time, pointed a moral for the incautious parent who deposits with his (or her) infant offspring evidence upon which they will some day rise up to judge him. H. was a very smart young fellow, according to the notions of the time, and he forgathered with a pretty cousin of ours, daughter of my father's eldest brother, with whom my father was at feud over a lawsuit and not on speaking terms. Her parents forbade the match, and she came to mine—the hostile camp—for succour. Enthusiastically we took up her cause, and, having given her all facilities for courtship, gave her the finest wedding that could be compassed from our house. Not only that, but drove her many miles behind white-favoured postilions to the church of her own parish, possibly to "cheek" her family, who naturally held aloof, although it was rumoured that they watched the passing of the bridal carriages from some secret ambush. Of course, we young ones never doubted for a moment that they were wholly malignant and in the wrong; we were as sure as we were of night and day that our father and mother could not possibly make mistakes.