Mother

I shall call this story “Mother” because it’s all about Father. What Father did and said was the only thing that mattered to Mother. I wish I had known Mother before she was Mrs. Father. I cannot ever imagine her as Mrs. Mother because she died two years before Father, so we never knew her apart from him. An Auntie, who was not an aunt all all, cam e out from England a bride with her husband when Mother came out from England a bride with Father. They came all the way around the Horn. 

This mock aunt said Mother was the sweetest little girl bridge, eighteen years old. She had dark hair and bright blue eyes and pink cheeks She was small and Father was a tall, strong man. He had a beard when I knew them, but that was no ’til long after, for I was number eight of his nine children. 

Father did not like babies They were little and red and he ignored them as being beneath his notice, so they were mother’s babies only until we toddled around and look with queer fright up into those grey eyes under straight dark brows and Mother primed us gently to say “Father.” No Dada short cuts. Then Father accepted us. 

Only once did Father accept one of his children in the cradle. It was Lizzie, number six. Edith and Clara, numbers one and two, were succeeded by three little boys, about a year apart, who each up and died after a few weeks or months.  Mother’s heart nearly broke. Those babes of hers meant so much, and she had to double parent because Father did not help. And then another baby came, and Mother was so happy to have it snuggling in her arms., she did not mind that it was a girl. To Father, the new little gird was just “another,” ever thoughtless of the squirming pink bundle because it was not a Richard or Henry or Thomas come to carry the Carr tribe name. 

“She’s like your family, Richard. That nose!” But Emily had grown so frail after her little boys died, to please her he bent and tweaked her nose. It got to be a habit; when he passed the cradle he tweaked the little girl’s nose. But Lizzie grew up  with an “unCarrish nose” and when Mother said it was a pity, he was frigid and ignored the next three of us that came along and left our noses alone 

When, however. we were old enough to admire him, he took us one after the other as a pet, dropping the youngster above who was by then beginning to — well understand and fear the rigid sternness with which Father ruled his household.  And the child ran back to Mother and gave her love and Father reverence. 

Father was a good bread and butter provider. Both were of the best. The baker baked him special loaves, four in one cottage loaf shaped two stories high. It looked wonderful on the table and was bigger than the breadboard. The butter came from New Zealand in sixty-pound keys and had the most delicious flavour. We had our own cows and Mother made butter, lovely butter worked  in a churning big wooden bowl with a beautiful shell print on top of each pat. But that we used for cooking, because Father fancied the New Zealand butter. People came to our house and raved about the Carr’s grand homemade bread and butter, and we children pinched each other an giggled. 

In meat, Father did his family well too. The butcher know Father and saved hi al the best and most expensive cuts. Father said a joint under twenty pounds was not worth eating. His favourite was a saddle of mutton, and we had one nearly every Saturday, roasted in front of an open fire in a tin oven on legs having a round pan to catch the drippings, and a clock thing that wound up and kept the joint turning and turning continually in front of the fire. 

There was a door in the tin oven, and Mother opened it  and ladled the father from the pan over the joint to baste it. The cooking of the saddle of mutton was quite a ritual. Mother or one of my big sisters had to attend to to it personally. It was not left to the China boy, because Father would not tolerate Chinese cooking. And Father’s stomach meant a lot to him. What he had must be the best and it must be perfectly cooked. 

He sat at the head of the table — his end was distinctly “head” — and carved expertly the saddle of mutton and fat home-grown fowl, home-grown veal, home-cured pork. Father was fond of beefsteak too. It must be a perfect steak, perfectly cooked and perfectly served, that was lying on a great pewter hot-water dish, There was a little door in the rim through which you filled the dish with boiling water and place the steak broiled over coals. There was also the pewter hot-water plate for Father to eat off. These vessels had some round the Horn with Father. If they were not filled with water absolutely boiling, Mother heard about it. 

If the steak was not tender, the butcher, Mr. Goodacre, heard about it, and the family there on each side of the table looked into our plates not daring to speak and wishing Father wouldn’t. Mother at the bottom of the table served the vegetables and pudding and pound tea and looked hurt when the stomaching God at the other end of the table raved. Only if things were exactly right did Father eat in silence. If they were superlatively right, he complimented his own growing or his butcher. Never his womenfolk.

There was a certain set of table mats made of straw or reeds, and when Father had been particularly naughty, it was my delight to put the whole mat family on the table when I was old enough to set the table. These mats enraged him. He would seize and hurl them into the fireplace. We all looked into our plates hard and kicked each other under the table. 

I don’t know when Father’s gout started, but as we grew bigger the gout got stronger and took a harder hold of Father’s temper. And that wore Mother And, by and by she was too ill to get up at all. She had mothered Father’s nine children and roasted his saddle of mutton and heated his pewter dished and nursed his gout and dragged herself after him every Sunday round to visit every apple tree and primrose root and watched and warned us children, “It is nearly time for Father to be home. Are all the gates shut?”

She wore out, and the doctor came every day and the bishop very often, and my oldest sister took on the hot dishes and saddle of mutton, any my next sister cleared out by marriage, and we four young ones began to see. Each had taken their turn at Father-her-worship and had outgrown it. We revered Father; he was an honourable, very much respected citizen, but the glamour of almightiness wore off more or less according to the disposition of each growing child. 

All the while Mother was slowly, slowly slipping away. Father grew more and more silent except when he was storming at one or the other of us. He missed Mother being about, although his daughters attended to his steaks and saddles of mutton. After he had attended to his grapevine and his garden, he went upstairs for a short while in a comfortable chair, saying little. He gave her everything that could be bought in the way of medical care, a good funeral, the best cemetery plan that could be bought. There he sat night after night, reading his paper, very stern and quiet. 

Sometimes he talked about his approaching three score years and ten. He had bad spells of gout, and a year after Mother died, he closed out his wholesale business. His desk and office were set up in the little room that had been our playroom, and he spent his time sitting at it and pottering in his garden. But he was never quite the same after Mother left. His death took place two years after hers. In his stern selfish way, he had allowed her to be the hub around which his life turned.