anything just raised up my face. I buried it in his lap and cried uncontrollably.
‘Why are you being like this, my child? Why do you hurt your father so much? What is it all about?’ He repeated this several times.
After a long time I stopped crying and said, ‘I don’t like our new mother.’
His arms stiffened and held me tighter but he did not speak. It was just then that real wickedness got the upper hand. I thought I could take it a step further. Something amazing, which sounded quite dramatic but was not from the bottom of my heart, leapt out of my lips. ‘Don’t you miss our dead mother? Probably you’ve forgotten her,’ and I cried again, a semi-dramatic weeping.
It was later in the night that the performance produced its effect. The commotion continued all through the night in the inner quarters where father and mother slept. Now and again sounds of father shouting, something being smashed, and mother crying with some words in between, were heard. ‘...a woman that dies leaving behind her brats should be punished thoroughly wherever she’s got to...Unless she’s possessed by that woman’s soul, can it be words out of her own mouth? A brat of barely ten?’
The row between father and mother went on for a few more days until finally she left.
As the days went by I silently suffered the consequence of the breakdown. My little heart was remorse-stricken with the thought that my wickedness had been the cause of my father’s unhappiness.
That year my father became the branch manager of the X Newspaper in the Ch’ung’chŏng North Province. Leaving Hyŏngsŏk in Seoul in a lodging house near his school, my family moved to Ch’ŏngju, the provincial town and into a house much bigger than the one we used to live in Seoul. There were the inner quarters where our family with grandmother, once again the mistress of the house, lived. They were joined at one side, through a corridor, to the offices, and at the other end of the office block, joined in right angle were the servants quarters where the delivery boys and two housemaids lived. Across the yard from the inner quarters were the visitors’ rooms. Father set up his study here and spent most of his spare time buried in books and papers. He was master and mentor to the paper-delivery boys.
‘Knowledge is power. Your future depends on how well you cultivate your minds now,’ he encouraged them to read and think deep. ‘A poor harvest through failing to sow the seeds in the right time can cause sorrow of one year, but if you miss your chance to learn at the right time, sorrow will follow you for the rest of your life’ he told them as he gave them personal instructions according to their individual aptitude and ability.
What with several young men and a couple of female helpers on top of our own family it must have been a large household with many mouths to feed. With food shortages and the constraints of the last years of the Second World War, these were indeed hard times for the grown-ups, but looking back they were the happiest times for me. These memories are as vivid as if they had happened but a year ago. I was doing well at school and at home the atmosphere was always warm and pleasant. Harmony reigned throughout the big household.
With the help of the menfolk in the house, father made a big, circular flower-bed in the centre of the courtyard. Exquisite flowers bloomed throughout the year and the shrubs flourished. Scattered here and there in the garden were trees that bore apricots, persimmons, dates, pomegranates and chestnuts. On the land behind the kitchen there was a vegetable plot and its produce was a great help in overcoming the shortage of food.
My younger brother, Myŏngsŏk who had been with my aunt and uncle in Seoul since mother’s death was now back with us. A darling boy amongst three elder cousins, all girls, he was used to calling their parents ‘mummy’ and ‘daddy’, and now at his own home he kept calling his own father ‘uncle’ bringing a wry smile to father’s face. With eyes sparkling like stars, and cheeks rosy and dimpled, he was a beautiful boy. He now started at the primary school for boys, and Sŏnhi and I were transferred to girls’ school. Among the country children wearing shapeless clothes and dragging rubber shoes Sŏnhi and I made an odd pair with our navy blue sailor suits with snow-white silk ties and leather shoes. Every morning father did up my tie for me.
Father often took the three of us for a walk along the embankment of the River Mushim that skirted the western side of the town. The water was clear and its banks adorned with magnificent cherry trees and weeping willows. On the grass below the embankment black and white cows grazed leisurely. He held Myŏngsŏk’s hand always, and mine as well sometimes. He made us sing songs and told us stories or sometimes walked in silence.
He took us on picnics, for which granny made us special, packed lunches. Ostensively we were going to pick wild herbs. We went beyond the town to the hills, and deep into the woods. Now and again we picked tender fern shoots or other edible leaves and wild garlic but we most enjoyed our lunch by a bubbling little stream, and splashing about in the water. Father with a boyish grin carefully turned over a flat stone, and gave a cry of delight as he lifted with his thumb and forefinger that held a crayfish. He quickly handed it to me and started chasing another one that was scurrying away. ‘Cor! It’s fast!’ We were all excited with the chase. A little way up it escaped among some dead leaves and small stones by the edge of the water. ‘That must be its den – let’s see.’ He stealthily removed the stones one by one, and there it was. When he finally caught it and held it up in the air we all let out loud cries of triumph. All that we brought home, wrapped in a handkerchief, was a handful of wild herbs and three little crayfish which all went into the soup pot of soya bean paste for supper. The crayfish added a fishy flavour above all other ingredients. We all agreed it was delicious.
When the school holidays came we could not wait for Hyŏngsŏk to come from Seoul. Meeting him at the railway station was the most exciting moment. Having probably inherited father’s weak sight he was already wearing dark-rimmed glasses. Each time he seemed to have grown a head taller. He was handsome in his school uniform. We were proud of him as we all walked home followed by a coolie carrying his bags on a jige.
My father who was gentle and delicate with his daughters had quite a different way with his son. It was quite Spartan. He sent him to classes for Karate, fencing and swimming, and punished him for the slightest wrongdoing. When Hyŏngsŏk spoke back to grandmother and upset her, father ordered him to roll up his own trousers and to stand straight, and caned him until red weals stood out all over his calves. At such times I was shaking all over as I whimpered but Hyŏngsŏk stood up to it with his lips pressed tight, never uttering so much as a groan. He looked heroic and I worshipped him.
‘An honest, honourable and manly boy’ was father’s motto in bringing him up. Probably, in this way, from his childhood any element of feebleness or cowardliness was eradicated from the formative process of his character.
At this time he was at the threshold of adolescence and yet very much a child at heart. On the way home from the station he was excited at the prospect of seeing us, his younger sisters, opening the presents he was bringing home. He could not wait until we got home.
‘Yours is a set of pretty beads,’ he whispered. ‘It’s in there.’ He pointed to one of the bags that were being carried by the porter.
‘Sŏnhi’s is a pair of stockings, long silk ones. Shh, don’t tell her until she opens them herself.’
But when he challenged the authority of grandmother he looked so grown up. ‘Your way of bringing up the children is called despotism. You should try to understand their psychology a bit, granny.’
She would be outraged at this. ‘What insolence! Is this how that useless school of yours teaches you to behave to your elders? I’ve always thought it was a waste of money that your father earns with his blood and sweat.’
‘Please
