second floor above the shop.
The father’s plan only partly came to fruition. The dreams of the elder of the twins were haunted by his mother, who in his nightmares forced him to watch her sew. He realized that he could not leave the mansion. He agreed to stay on to carefully dispose of the draperies his father could not. But the nightmares did not abate. In his attempt to satisfy the mother that haunted him, he was driven to one act of depravity after another, initially abducting an eight-year-old girl from outside the local Anglican Christ Church and forcing her day after day to sew for him in the Alderlea attic. After a year of this torture, she killed herself with the large sewing sheers he had inadvertently left in her unsupervised space. Attempting to replicate the heinous exploit, his second victim died before being delivered to the attic. He was found out, captured, and jailed. In the process his clothes were torn. After confessing the intimate details of his life and his deeds to the Governor and announcing that his twin brother would take up the cause he was forced to abandon, he asked to be provided with some thread, pins, and needles in order that he could repair his clothes before facing the gallows. When the Governor next came upon him, his prisoner was dead, the straight pins puncturing his heart, like pins in a cushion.
The account would merely have been the subject of my nightmares had I not been personally acquainted with one of the surviving subjects. Although the Governor did not identify his prisoner or the prisoner’s family members by name, I had no doubt who they were and where the father and surviving son lived.
Suffice it to say that I made no great contribution to the war efforts at the two cutting-out parties I attended. My hands were too shaky to hold the pattern in place, my fingers too clammy to push the pins through the pattern and fabric, my breathing too frantic to hear the instructions, and when my skin turned more shades of green than my Aunt Lil had in her entire wardrobe, I was on each occasion sent home. My contribution to the war effort would have to take a different form.
* * *
While my mother was an excellent seamstress, she was merely a fair knitter. In our family, we never had more sweaters, scarves, hats, or mittens than we strictly required, and the workmanship of those we had would never have been awarded prizes at the annual fairs. My mother’s fingers, so precise at the keys of the piano and organ, failed her when it came to manipulating knitting needles, where they seldom followed the knit, pearl, skip, yarn over patterns she tried to follow. Her tension was not even. Her colour choice was poor. Frequently, our sweaters had one sleeve wider than another, were too baggy at the bottom, and too tight at the top. Dropped stitches that could barely be discerned when the garment was worked on became gaping holes with repeated wearing and washings.
Nonetheless, determined that none of our boys should have cold feet on her account, Mother began to knit socks. She was not alone in this. Whereas prior to the commencement of the war, a Brampton woman could happily sit in a parlour, a sitting room, or a veranda holding only a cup of tea or glass of lemonade, that became seemingly impossible by September 1914. Unless one was at a fancy soirée or at a dining room table, nearly every woman seen sitting would be seen knitting—usually socks, in various stages of completeness, supported by three short double-ended needles and a fourth one working its way into the position of one of the other three. For four years, the click-click-click sound of working needles accompanied nearly all of our conversations.
As for me, I recognized the difficulty one would have puncturing one’s epidermis with a knitting needle—even the small knitting needles that produced socks. There was not, to my knowledge, a cushion that would support protruding knitting needles. I had never heard or read about the death of a man by knitting needles. Nonetheless, I was no more inclined to knit for the sake of our men than I was to sew.
I was not the only woman in our family who refused to knit or sew for this great cause. It was an aversion shared by my Aunt Rose, father’s youngest sister, although for entirely different reasons. She had become a widow four years earlier on the death of James Darling, her much older husband, a successful businessman, local politician, and active community member. He left her and their two children, Hannah and John, well provided for.
Though Aunt Rose wore the black widow’s weeds that were to be her uniform for the remaining years of her life, in most other ways she defied the stereotypical image attributed to widows of the time. In part this was due to her relatively young age. She was but forty-three when the sad status befell her. As a child, that age seemed quite advanced to me, but there were few among her peer group who claimed a similar situation.
She was also distinguished by her intelligence, particularly concerning financial matters. People about the town frequently spoke of it, although, again, as a child I did not see it. In fact, my perception was just the opposite. My earliest memories of my aunt were of her arriving at our house carrying an extra joint of meat, an extra basket of apples, an extra bolt of fabric, all purportedly delivered to relieve her from the errors she had made in her own purchases.
Most atypical about her persona was her strength of character. She refused to be dependent on others. She rarely sought their opinions, and when they were provided without solicitation, she was only occasionally guided by them.
Following Uncle James’s death, my father briefly and happily assumed the role as the male head of her household. Father was confident that the death of James Darling would leave Rose dependent on him for guidance on matters financial, political, and familial—a position he desired to hold. In this, he was severely disappointed. Within days of the commencement of her widowhood, it became clear that while Aunt Rose was prepared to receive her brother’s advice and opinions, she felt no compunction to accept or agree with them. The improvement in my father’s humour and the more generous approach to life he assumed on his brother-in-law’s demise were dissipated measure for measure with each step my aunt took toward her own independence.
Aunt Rose’s intelligence and self-confidence that proved a disappointment to my father were a marvel to her husband’s executors. They proposed that Aunt Rose sell the large house on Wellington Street in which she and her two young children resided, his bakery business, and the numerous investment properties her husband held in and around Brampton. The family home was large and its upkeep prohibitively expensive, to their way of thinking. As for the businesses and investments, the revenue that could be garnered by more passive investments could, in their view, generate a more stable income from which she could support herself and her children. Aunt Rose would hear nothing of it. She and the children would remain in the large home. She would keep the bakery business and the farms just outside of Brampton, trusting them all to competent management.
In fact, those businesses produced enough income not only to support Aunt Rose and my cousins, John and Hannah, but also enough to allow her to make additional investments. As the years went on, Aunt Rose developed quite the reputation as a buyer, seller, and mortgagee of Brampton real estate.
“Rose, don’t you want to join the other members of the Women’s Institute in their efforts to bring comfort to our men?” Mother asked. We were sitting on the lawn side of the L-shaped verandah of Aunt Rose’s home. Hannah and John were playing tennis in front of us. As usual, Hannah was winning.
“No, I am not!” Aunt Rose said with great conviction. This was not the first time the two sisters-in-law had had this conversation. “With my resources, I feel I should be making a greater contribution to the war effort. I know many women have only time to devote to the cause, but I have been blessed with other resources, and I think I would be of more use to the war effort if I properly employed them.”
Any talk of her greater resources—which my father took to mean the money and capital that had once been her husband’s—made my father uncomfortable. “What the deuce do you plan on doing, Rose?” Father asked. “You can’t buy an army.”
“No. I can’t do that. But I can help create the things that an army needs.”
