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The Voice of Elia Wilkinson Peattie. Illinois State U, Lanier Library Association Annual Meeting. Tryon, NC, 14 April The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. By Charlotte Perkins Gilman. U of Wisconsin P, Ed Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck. The Road of a Naturalist. Letters to Kate Cleary.
Lent by Mark R. Edited and Annotated by Mark R. Literary Guild of America, Autobiographies in American Studies. A Collection of Critical Essays. The New American Library, Martine Watson Brownley and Allison B. The Example of Harriet Ann Jacobs. The Cultural Work of American Fiction, From Working Girl to Working Mother: U of North Carolina P, The Story of Working Women in America. The boys want their father and myself to write our memoirs. They are sensible men in other regards, but in this they seem foolish enough, and anyway, "memoirs" is too impressive a word. I can recall many episodes in my life, but the years and months, the weeks and days stretch away illimitable, little blue-grey waves, with sun here and shadow there, and wind blowing, and are lost on the shores of forgetfulness.
I was born in Kalamazoo, January 15th, of a beautiful and docile young mother whose husband was at the front in that War Between the States which now seems so incredible. I have an ambrotype of myself at two, a smiling, round-faced mite with straight hair on a rotund head beside my luscious-looking mother, and with gold armlets looping back the sleeves of my frock. The first thing I remember is a red wagon. It was a tiny one and I was drawing it and feeling as if I were floating. My mother, when I told her this, said she did not remember that I ever had a red wagon. Perhaps it wasn't mine. Maybe it belonged to some other child and I had it only for that floating moment.
Anyway, it is the first thing I remember. While my father was at the war, mother and I lived with my grandmother. Grandmother Cahill used to tell me some interesting stories about our relatives. Her father, John P. Marsh, had been a merchant in Burlington, Vermont, and had owned a share in some importing ships. One of his brothers, having caught the migratory germ, decided to go West; he thought of settling in Ohio. Along with him went a young nephew who was recuperating from typhoid fever. This convalescent had a way of falling asleep at odd times and in queer places, and it happened that when his uncle was ready to go ashore at Cleveland, the boy was nowhere to be found.
Passengers and crew united in an unavailing search for him. The uncle could not proceed without his charge. Luggage was thrown back on board and the ship went on its way. Later, the unconscious boy was found inside a coil of cable, enjoying one of his naps, and that is how it happened that the Marshes settled in Michigan. My grandmother, Maria Marsh, was a girl of twelve when she, in course of time, stepped off the boat at Detroit, and as she tripped down the gangplank—she always had an eager step—a grave young Virginian who had but recently come to the Midwest, remarked to a friend: This lady died, and after a proper interval, he presented himself to Miss Maria Marsh.
He had a frightful temper and regarded himself with exaggerated respect. Once, when the young bride with experimental fingers, touched his forehead and said: Maria addressed her husband as "Mr. Cahill," even in the intimacy of their chamber. Or perhaps there was no intimacy. There were six children, it is true, and Mr. Cahill was a stern, yet self-complacent father. Grandmother told me a story of how he once came to the house for a midday meal, found it not yet ready, and going into her bedroom snatched from a bureau drawer the baby clothes she had made, washed and ironed for an expected arrival, and throwing them on the floor trampled them with his muddy boots.
To my passionate protests that I would have left him then and there and forever, she smiled with a patient pride. His son, my beloved Uncle Edward, had a touch of this temper, but he learned to hold it well into hand. He could not be unjust long, and he had a spirited wife who saw no reason why she should be railed at. Her respect and admiration for her relatives was great. She was one of a family of seven and some of them had made their mark, personally, or by means of marriage.
Her next younger sister, Mrs. Adams Allen, wife of the distinguished physician of that name, for more than a generation, President of Rush Medical College, was an imposing woman with no little savoir faire , who held a high place in Chicago society at that time. George Marsh and his East Indian born wife, daughter of the celebrated missionaries, [the] Barkers, were also well-known and admired. Then there was Dr. Wells Marsh and Professor Fletcher Marsh and their families. I had one ancestress who came to Michigan at the time of the migration of the Ransoms and Marshes.
Her husband took up a government claim and settled in the wilderness, made a clearing, built a house and expected to become a successful farmer. Then he fell victim to pneumonia and died leaving his wife with eleven children. He bore the impressive name of Epaphroditus. My grandmother used, on occasion, to act as hostess at the Executive Mansion during the administration of Epaphroditus and she had told me how, at a certain dinner party, wine was served, to her surprise and outrage.
When her glass was filled, she lifted it and said: Even at a very young age, I was unable to think of this as an exhibition of good manners. Charles Marsh, as brother of my grandmother, was one of the early physicians of Michigan, practicing chiefly among country folk. He was much in favor with the Dutch at Holland Prairie where my grandfather Cahill had had his farm [ Music ran in the family.
Grandmother and great-grandmother were singers themselves and had singing families. Many a harsh and jangling moment was dissipated by song; even the most sullen child, it appeared, had to yield to its influence. My mother had a rich and lovely mezzo-soprano [voice], but not one of her children could sing.
They were tuneless and none of them, save myself, has been interested in fine music. One of my grandmother's finest virtues was her active interest in the education of the young [ Abram Cahill, a widow with six children, and of New England descent. My mother, however, had little education. Her heart and mind were bound up in her mother's heavy domestic burdens. She was maternal to the core of her [being] and literally could not concentrate upon anything so abstract as lessons while the concrete in life was demanding her attention.
So she was her mother's "dear, good daughter," and she became a dear good mother. My mother was the eldest child of her mother and was named Amanda Maria Cahill. She called me Elia after her mother's youngest sister. My Father was Frederick Wilkinson, [4] born in Birmingham, England but brought to this country at the age of six and an American by passionate conviction.
My father also had a passion for education, at least in his youth, but he made no effort to give his five daugthers anything more than a primary education. But as a youth, he had an aspring and eager outlook. He worked in a foundry, sawed wood, cared for yards, and swept out stores to pay his way at the University of Michigan. Finally his elder brother, William, left him money enough to continue his studies. This William recieved from the Wilkinson family the admiration and preference which the English accord to the eldest son, and father, who was constitutionally democratic in his convictions, was outraged by this discrimination.
The former became Mrs. Robert Price, the latter, Mrs. All of these people lived in Ann Arbor. The hills, the woods, the fields and river were integral parts of father's youth. He and his sister Hannah conducted their juvenile explorations there and loved it and each other.
Freddie and I had played out in the delusive March sunshine and he had taken his fatal cold. I liked the attics with their hams and herbs, their strings of quartered apples hanging from the rafters and piles of unhusked corn in the corners. Wilson—who was a maker of carriage bodies, replied with magnanimity: A specific example of loose coupling occurs when she digresses from her first meeting with Willa Cather, then a graduate student at the University of Nebraska, to tell a story about her son. Elia fell in love with Shakespeare, whose works she discovered in her uncle's home, and took elocution lessons—until those payments, too, stopped.
He had attended the University of Michigan for two years and [went] to Kalamazoo to study at the Law School. As a stump speaker, he won a local reputation, and he began well at the bar. While he was at Law School, he met my mother. She was engaged at that time to a Canadian gentleman named Wilson but there leaped up a flame of love between Frederick and Amanda and she wrote to the other man asking his release. Wilson—who was a maker of carriage bodies, replied with magnanimity: The finding of gold at Pike's Peak delayed the marriage of Frederick and Amanda.
He was a poor man and wanted money; also, he was a restless man and wanted adventure. He joined a prairie caravan and traveled three months across the plains, sleeping at night with his musket at his hand, riding by day on his horse, and performing his share of the labors of march and camp. At no time, as it happened, did they encounter any hostile Indians; buffalo they saw by the thousand. He told of being wakened early in the morning by the pounding of hoofs, of springing to his feet and catching sight of the Pony Express as horse and rider thundered by.
I do not know how many months father remained at Pike's Peak, but it was long enough for his vivid personality to make an impression upon his associates; he was sent as one of the delegates to Denver from the territorial legislature. He made no dramatic lucky strike at the diggings, but he was a couple of thousand dollars to the good when Old Abe's first call for troops drove all idea of personal gain out of his head. With a company of men, he started back across the plains. Women and children did not accompany this train. Oxen, which had set the pace for the outgoing company, were left behind.
It was a company of great-hearted gentlemen in rough clothes, fired with a determination to live in a country guiltless of slavery, and free from an idle and arrogant aristocracy, that sent them hastening back to the states that had nurtured them, to enlist for war. There were goodbyes to father's mother and sisters, then, the visit to his sweetheart, the sudden, almost unpremeditated marriage, three weeks of fitful, emotional happiness at the recruiting station at Detroit, and then away to the hard campaign, to more than three years of bitter home-longing, of danger, sickness, wounds, hardship.
So we had as souvenirs only his cartridge belt and his cap with the company letter K shot way. Father had what we have now learned to call "shell shock" and for three months hardly slept at all but lay and sobbed: They said he had been a red-cheeked, eager young man, more apt to be running than walking, but he came back from the war tense, nervous, often irritable and given to argument.
In some ways, a bitter man, often a tender one; yet, on slight provocation, an irritable one. Then there was Uncle Edward Cahill, my mother's elder brother, who also had been through the war, and came back from the war slender and gay. He snatched me up and tossed my in the air. He called me E. Wick to the end of his days.
yelled their patriotic throats dry with excitement and a sentimental devotion to their sovereign, sure, he hoped, that Reuters would be number one with the sad story. off in our wooden office chairs, while Johnny 85 Memoirs of Another Time. of my Personal Brushes with Greatness: Memoirs of Another Time H., My Memories of Berlin: A Young Boy's Amazing Survival Story (Xlibris.
Father and Uncle Edward Cahill, who also had been admitted to the bar, moved to St. Johns, Michigan, a little town surrounded by heavy forests, with nothing particular to recommend it. Father bought a block of land and, in the midst of it, built a modest wooden house which was to be, eventually, an adjunct to a grand, square brick mansion.
The Lombardy poplars he set out on each side of the driveway grew rapidly and, to my childish eyes, looked very imposing. There were ornamental trees over half the property and fruit trees over the rest, with a kitchen garden, and wheat or corn or buckwheat were planted in among the trees. We had a cow and hogs and chickens, drew our water from a well and a cistern, and had a woodshed full of odorous pine and oak firewood.
Mother's kitchen had a rag rug on the floor for which she had sewed the rags. There were Boston rockers by the windows and blossoming plants on the window ledges and gay covers on the tables. The sitting room had a what-not with shells, coral and some knickknacks a Missionary named Rose had brought back from India.
There was an organ there, and a three-ply capet and lace curtains. Mother's bedroom had a rosewood set in it and looked out on the orchard. The years when I was growing from babyhood to twelve years of age [] are rather blurred. Two boys were born into the family and both died, one soon after birth, the other at twenty-four months. I can still remember this little brother quite well. He was named for father and was a blue-eyed child, smiling and friendly.
Father was away on business when the child died and I remember his homecoming—so heart-broken—and mother's broken explanations. Freddie and I had played out in the delusive March sunshine and he had taken his fatal cold. They buried all that was left of this little laughing boy at the western extremity of our place. The sorrel grew thick there, and I thought it was "sorrow" and was glad it grew there. Two little sisters came along in time, Gertrude, [8] seven years younger than myself, and Kate [9] two years younger than Gertrude.
Father adored Gertrude, partly because she had come after Freddie's death to help heal his grief, and partly because she was so extraordinarily pretty. These sisters were so much younger than myself that, save as responsibilities, they did not much enter into my life for the next few years. They couldn't go berrying in Emmons' woods, or chase butterflies, or go after the cow in the twilight down on the Commons or share my satisfaction in going to Sunday School.
Father was superintendent of the Baptist Sunday School and I was the abhorrent pupil who learned the most verses. I would stand up in my figured delaine [10] frock with my copper-toed shoes and speak out loud and clear and feel like a Good Child. Sometimes my mother's sisters lived with us for a time. There were Jennie and Mary, both with beautiful singing voices and long curls, and there was Lizzie, dark and perverse, who wrung her mother's heart.
Charles Fitch and died young of tuberculosis; Mary became Mrs. John Royce and died of the same disease, leaving three children. Lizzie died unmarried, a wild hawk of a girl with her own sultry secrets. She was the first dead person I ever saw. I hadn't many friends. We were rather remote on our square of land. Near at hand was a girl older than myself named Edna Bridgman. She had pimples and an aptitude for decoration and she and I loved to make "bowers" of vines and flowers and dress ourselves up. I couldn't think why she was so white—white as the buckwheat blossoms.
I admired this pallor very much. We had a great deal to say to each other though I don't know what it was about. She graduated at the head of grammar school and died a month later of anemia and was buried in a bright green dress she had worn on Commencement Day. Then I had another friend, Della Williams. Della's mother hadn't a very good reputation. She lived in a large square house on the edge of Emmons' woods, and her husband went about the state selling jewelry to retail dealers.
Williams rouged when nobody else in town was guilty of that cheerful hypocrisy. She and Della were much alone, and there was something clandestine about our acquaintance. Della and I would run through our orchards and meet and chat and giggle, looking about to see that we were not discovered. I think we had an idea my people disapproved of our comradeship. Once she invited me to her house to hear her uncle, who had come to pay his relatives a visit, play on the violin. I had never heard a violin and knew nothing about music save the church songs and the war-time ballads.
Williams' brother was a large man, a little past middle age, with a heavy head that drooped something as Beethoven's must have done. We sat out on a sort of roofless porch in the twilight and had lemonade and little cakes and then the musician brought out his "fiddle" as he called it, and began to play.
What he played I do not know. It was nothing I knew about. The stars were coming out, brighter than I ever had seen them; the crickets were calling from the grass, but with a new magic. My heart went dancing after the fireflies that lighted the long slope to the road. I was lifted up, near to tears, near to crying out to the player to stop, that I could stand no more.
I felt as if I had never been quite born, as if I were really living for the first time. It was another of those marvelous floating moments, like the one when I had drawn the little red wagon. I trembled all over I thought I should have to run home to hide it from my friends.
And then I glimpsed a lantern down the long path. But I knew she wouldn't. Mother wouldn't put herself under obligations to a woman who painted her cheeks and was "talked about. But he was mistaken. I cannot carry a tune. But as I went with my mother through the star-lit gloom down the long poppy-lined path, I knew that life had a majestic chamber of which I had not known before. Once the Walker girls gave a party. There were quite grand people [ Walker was a congressman [ We had a game-playing afternoon and a little girl's idea of refreshments as they are in heaven, and then, not knowing how to end our festivities decided to march through the village, dropping each girl at her home.
What if she should think I had given a party and hadn't invited her. Williams came to our gate and said, "Oh Elia, Della is crying her heart out. She thinks you've given a party and haven't asked her [ Down below us at some distance from our home, was a tract of land known as the Commons. Anyone who liked might put their cattle or horses to pasture there. The place was lush, with clumps of bushes and young trees and innumerable wild flowers. I used to go down there with my father to get our Brindle, and sometimes, as I got older, and father was out of town, I went alone.
Brindle was a pleasant cow and quite ready to come home and be milked, but she had a wandering habit and it was sometimes hard to find her. I remember one night in particular I looked and looked for her and got myself lost among the countless clumps of bushes, and the early darkness came down and the wind rose. I got in a panic, and wept, and decided I would probably die there in the night alone.
Then at the depths of my gloom, I heard Brindle browsing and called and got her answer. Her bags were too full and she groaned as we made our way miserable up the hill. She took the road home and I followed.
The owls didn't seem so fearsome with Brindle close at hand, and we reached home to find mother, lantern in hand, on the point of starting out for us. The Spring evenings on the Commons were delicious. Such odors and happy croakings, such tender skies, such a feeling of aliveness and earthiness! One of my choicest possessions was my little trunk. Father had brought it to me from Detroit. It was a minute model Saratoga, that is, it had a rounded top, a tray and a wee hat box.
I kept my doll clothes in it and when I was six and journeyed to Uncle Edward's I had my own clothes in it. I used it later for my love letters, and when I had a little daughter I gave it to her for her dolly clothes. She, too, used it for her love letters. She was going to give it to her little daughter, but no little daughter came to her.
Father was a man with periods of excessive piety. I remember one Sunday when it rained and rained. There was nothing in the house to read; I was not supposed to play with my dolls; the grownups appeared to be torpid. I slipped out into the capacious woodshed with its delicious odors and seating myself in the swing began a gentle oscillation which increased to a wide, free swirl and swish out the wide doors and into the air, where the overhang from the roof kept me dry.
At the height of my eagle-like swoopings, father appeared. Come in the house at once. There were other episodes as excessive, but I don't think he really believed in such forbiddances. He couldn't have liked himself very well when he was being so disagreeable. We had plenty of good times together. He used to take me with him sometimes when, as collecting attorney, he went about the country adjusting the claims of wholesale merchants with their retail purchasers. There would be an amenable horse, a top buggy, the old red and blue checked army blankets, a big box of luncheon, a pail of butter milk, and fodder for the horse.
We'd drive through forests and past fields and invade little villages. Nobody refused us a meal. Seldom did a villager decline to let us spend the night. Sometimes we slept in good beds, sometimes in shake-downs in the attic of a log house. I liked the attics with their hams and herbs, their strings of quartered apples hanging from the rafters and piles of unhusked corn in the corners. Woodpeckers used to wake me, or squirrels running over the roof, or rain falling.
One night we got into a woodland which seemed to stretch to the end of the world. Night came on, and the poor horse struggled with the deep loam of a horrible road which no sun could reach for the thickness of the trees. We sank to the hubs and the horse simply could not pull us out. For a while Father sat in offish thought while the spent horse groaned and panted.
Me, he carried to safe ground. The trees were magnificent pines, swaying mightily, through which the stars shone and the clouds raced. But the wind did not trouble us down in our sheltered camping place. Father was as happy as I have ever seen him. He was bivouacking again, but now there was no foe, there was no fear of battlefields.
We built a fire and cooked our bacon and coffee; then, rolled ourselves in the old army blankets and slept on red pine needles. The sounds of the woodland were about us. I had no fear. True, I had been reared on tales of timber wolves and their wild work, but no wolf disturbed us that night. Sometimes I woke to stare up at the stars through those swaying tree-tops. Sometimes I felt father's hand on me, tucking in the blankets.
It was a long night but a beautiful one. Dawn found us up and full of determination. The stalled buggy was hauled out of the muck and we found an impromptu road through the trees and brush. I've often told my children about the time when I discovered that father was not infallible. It was a stinging winter day and father took me out for a ride on a hand-sled.
I was bundled up properly and told to "hold on. So I clung and he ran, and then the sled hit something, the root of a tree, maybe, and off I went, bumping my head and cutting my lip. Seldom have such yells and screechings been heard from a small person. They were not so much for the pain, though there was plenty of that.
Life was a ruin about me. My father could be mistaken. It was like having the sun fall out of heaven. My Mother was severe with me and demanded what I meant by making such a noise. I couldn't tell her. I knew I wouldn't have been understood. My beautiful, gentle mother worked horribly hard. Father was one of those men who seem always to have taxes or insurance to pay; or there was a piece of land that it would be positive economy for him to buy, or some public cause requires his subscription. Money spent for service seemed wasted and it was seldom indeed that appropriate garments were provided for mother's lovely form.
She did foolish, bitter work like making her own soft soap, or putting down the hogs at killing time, not to mention her own washing and ironing. Sometimes there was no sufficient stove-wood cut and she had to split some herself. She often killed the chickens for our Sunday feast, though she loathed it. Sometimes her face, naturally so gentle and so high bred, grew irascible looking. A nervous affliction assailed her and she suffered from a sort of St. Vitus' dance [12] and, at times, had terrible spasms of jerking which only an administration of chloroform could subdue.
She used to give this to herself, or if the attack were so violent she could not, I, young as I was, tipped the chloroform three times upon a handkerchief and held it to her face till she slipped into unconsciousness. She had other painful troubles too, and very, very little help. The promise of her bright and devoted girlhood faded with this toil and poverty. She seemed to make no protest.
Father could always intimidate her by walking up and down the floor and saying he didn't see anything but the poor-house ahead. Well, perhaps I ought not to write these things. In many ways, father was a fine man. He had a peculiar push and egotism and wanted to get on in the world, and he didn't realize the cost. Building houses was his particular vice. We might have been comfortable in our little wooden house and had money for "hired help" and possessed appropriate clothes, but father wanted a grand house. So he erected a brick house with sandstone decorations which he hadn't the money to complete.
People from far and near used to come to see this imposing, stark, uncompleted edifice and our family form of entertainment was to show them over the building. It stood loftily above far-reaching meadows, and I used to sit looking out of its western windows and thinking how like a princess I would feel when the house was done.
But it never was. I went to a public school in St. Johns and can still remember some of the teachers and the proud hour when advancement took me to the second floor. I remember the tornado, too, that broke down the chimneys and caved a hole in the walls, and how we all ran out of the building, and the wind got under my petticoats and carried me bodily off the high front steps and landed me in a mud-puddle and beat me down till I thought I should smother.
The fathers and mothers came running from every direction, distraught with fear, but no one was seriously hurt; though, there were some bloody heads and broken arms. It was an immensely stirring event from my point of view and I was horrified—and delighted. I understood then that when life became dangerous it was interesting. School frightened me, rather. The smell of the black-boards sickened me; I trembled at examinations, literally quivered and shook.
Not that it was difficult for me to learn my lessons. I did well enough, memorized easily and had my own ideas about things, which were not necessarily those of the text books or the teachers. I could read aloud quite beautifully and often used this to cover up deficiencies.
But only when I was reading aloud or reciting to my admiring fellow students did I feel free or mistress of the situation. At other times, I was a mildly-driven lamb as likely to miss the fold as to find it. Always within me was the idea that I could do something splendid, and though I had no idea what this splendor was to consist of, I felt as if only shyness held me back from realizing it. My little red wagon had become myself. I was exhilarated by the thought that it was bound upon some glorious journey, and though I had not heard of Emerson, I hitched this little wagon, my diffident self, to a star.
The Chicago Fire occurred in October of , and my father had an idea that our relatives in that city might be among the sufferers. So he hastened to that stricken city, leaving orders behind him for quantities of food which was to follow if he wired for it. As a matter of fact, he was greatly excited over the catastrophe and found it next to impossible to remain quiescent in his little Michigan backwater. Our relatives in Chicago were all on mother's side, and were well-placed, competent and rather satirical people. They did not approve of father and the meager life he had provided for his wife, and I dare say they thought he was ridiculous and impertinent in coming to their aid.
But they accepted his overtures politely enough, and he, carried away by the idea of the spectacular rebuilding of the city, and all the openings that would be offered to men of enterprise, decided to remove to Chicago. He came home to talk this over with mother, and she, weary of thinking about the imposing house that was never finished and of nursing her babies alone evenings in the center of a village block, while father went back to the law office, ostensibly to work, but in reality to enjoy the sociability of other bored villagers, consented readily enough.
As an initial step, father went to Chicago a second time to make arrangements, and he took me along. I had a limited, but pretty, outfit of clothes and rode away from home and my gently weeping mother with one of the sharpest pangs that has ever come to me. I had been bidden to stay with my great-aunt, Mrs. James [Elia Cahill] Walker for whom I had been named, and was taken at once to her house. This lofty, narrow, imposing mansion with its facade of veined white marble, stood on Park Row, at that time the quintessence of all that was aristocratic, solid, and socially enviable in the life of the young city.
It was late of a Sunday afternoon when we arrived, and the two long drawing rooms with their hangings of vermilion velvet, their glittering chandeliers, paintings, mirrors, and rich carpets, were things to dazzle my country eyes. My aunt was lying on a luxurious chaise lounge suffering from neuralgia, which seemed to me a singularly aristocratic complaint, and every member of the numerous company was at her service.
She was slender, tall, peculiarly stately, and looked as queens ought to look. She was kind, but at that period of her life, had more hauteur, perhaps, than affection toward all save her immediate family. Her husband was one of the leading men of the city, an austere, delicately-framed man of few words. His reticence was regarded as something admirable.
It was certainly distinctive and awe-inspiring. My three cousins were there: John Root [14] , and an incredibly brilliant girl, Wirt Dexter [ The ceremony, the servants, the elegant carriage and horses, the receiving of stately visits, myself introduced in the condescending manner which adults, particularly opulent ones, use in presenting children. If I remained silent, I seemed stupidly shy; if I spoke, I heard myself saying something a touch too clever and sounding pert. I wished a thousand times that I was safe back in the little living room at home. When I visited the home of my Uncle Edward Cahill that was another story.
There were struggling not only with poverty but with other troubles, but they always were valiant. Their hospitality was indestructible. I went by myself, half-way by train, half-way by coach and was handed off with the mail sacks. Seldom has there been a tinier house than the one these lovers lived in, but it was near the milldam and the bridge, and the coaches thundered by, and from my point of view it was wonderful. Auntie Lucy made fairy-like cakes and there were always baked apples to be had by merely popping them in the oven. What better fare could lovers or a little girl want.
I slept in the same room with my grandmother [Maria March Cahill] and she confided in me surprisingly, seeing what a mere child I was. We enjoyed talking together. They were all fine people, aspiring, confident and admiring of each other. They bore themselves like people of importance and I confessed they impressed me. I wondered if they were satisfied with what they had done or if they expected to do something yet finer.
I kept hoping for something glorious to do, but couldn't seem to find it. The little red wagon was all ready to be hitched to a star, but I could not decide on the star; or no star would hold still long enough for me to hitch to it. Father and I went back to St.
Johns and he closed out his business there, and after he had built us a house in Chicago, we all went on, father and mother and we three girls. Our furniture went along too, but the trees and sloping meadows were left behind. Little Freddie was removed from his grave amidst the "sorrow" and placed in the village cemetery. I suppose his little grave has never been visited since. Father built half of a "double house" [in Chicago] on the corner of Polk and Robey streets.
But it was ugly, transitory country. Hideous stores stood along Odgen Avenue, and the street cars ran there. There were almost no trees. Our double house stuck up in the air like a packing-box on end—two stories and basement painted brown and without any manner of grace. The rooms were high and of a good size, and furnished according to the notions of the day. Father's grandiose ideas asserted themselves in a gold and green dining room in the basement, where we had false bronze casts of great Americans—Webster, Clay, Lincoln, and Grant.
They looked down on us magnificently as we ate our more than economical meals, mother with a babe on her tired arm, little Gertrude in a high chair, bright and eager as a terrier, father in a perpetual state of worry, myself secretly sullen and dissatisfied, yet loving my people and glad to be with them.
So began for us a new life, and not at the time a particularly interesting one. One of the first pleasant things that happened to me after we were settled in our home at the corner of Polk and Robey Streets was the acquaintance I made with the Henderson girls—Bell and Lizzie Henderson who lived in a row of pleasing new cottages in the next block. We all went to the Brown School together, a long walk.
I never had any more schooling. I became my mother's helper, and worked all day in the house just as she did. I made beds, dusted, cared for the children, ran errands, did the ironing, sewing, mending, did whatever there was to do. I don't know how mother would have got on without this help. That is the only comfort to be had out of it. No books or magazine[s] w[ere] taken in the house.
Father held the idea that he could not afford them. Fortunately, he had some books left from his college days. Zimmerman gave me glimpses of scholarship and speculation that were wonderful. So far as I can remember, we were never taken to any places of amusement. Life was rather a dull business, but youth has a way of throbbing without much provocation. I was always expecting something wonderful to happen. I used to go over there with him and was interested in the foreign types I saw there, the children of Welch and English mill workers. We seldom took the street cars. Father wished to save the car fare.
Mother preferred that I should not go, for she thought the five-mile walk too far for me, but it represented some sort of adventure or experience. He became a member of the British Royal Academy later. One of the most memorable hardships of those days was the piano episode—the piano tragedy, it seemed to me. Father bought a piano "on time" and I fell upon it with a passion I can hardly understand seeing how little musical talent I had.
Someone gave me a quantity of good music and I proceeded to play it. I think I may have had a few lessons, but lessons were not needed to enable me to play that music. It was my one door of escape from the monotony of my days and the ugliness of my surroundings. Then one day I came home from school to find the piano gone.
Father had neglected to keep up the payments. It seemed incredible that it should be gone. I wept in such a manner as to incur the angry disapproval of the whole family. Father promised he would get the instrument back again, but he never did. For months afterward I would say to myself as I came from school: When I open the door of the parlor I will see it there. My Uncle Edward [Cahill] had given up the struggle in Chicago, where it was difficult for a young lawyer to make a living, and had gone to Lansing. He ran his roots in there and became a vital part of the community. Occasionally I visited his home, and no words can tell what it meant to me.
The graciousness, the hosptiality, the books and magazines, the genial conversation, and the charming atmosphere Aunt Lucy created, were an inspiration. I felt really normal there—light-hearted, pretty, well-dressed. Auntie always managed to put some touches on my clothes, the clothes my darling mother tried so hard to have right, and which at best were meager. My Uncle Frank Cahill, who lived with his brother, was an ardent student of Shakespeare and imbued me with a passion for the master. I went home from one vist determined to possess a Shakespeare and father bought me the entire works in one volume, price one dollar.
However, I read it away into the night, sometimes till dawn. Then I determined to have elocution lessons. Father gave his permission; a fine reader named Knight was employed to teach me, and then Dad neglected to keep up the payments.
Mortified beyond expression, I found a place not far distant where fascinators [16] were made by girls who were permitted to take their work home. Knight taught me, I have never forgotten. Elocution lessons are supposed to be ridiculous, but there was nothing ridiculous in what I learned from this gentleman.
Father could not have made much headway with his law business in Chicago. At any rate, he bought a printing office and took me into the shop to set type []. It didn't take me long to learn, and I had a certain satisfaction in the work. I was soon able to produce a good-looking card or folder, and the experience I had in type-setting was a little education in itself. I became devoted to the dictionary, studied definitions, punctuation and observed phrases. There was a pathetic, terrible old man who lived with us during those days.
Father had borrowed money of him and could not pay it back; so, he was taken into the house to "board it out. He was a filthy old thing and his presence in the kitchen, in the warm corner back of the stove, drove my mother almost mad. Her face used to twitch with nervous misery and exasperation.
He was with us for years and was like a curse upon the family. Father thought he was paying him by keeping in the house, but it was mother who paid. In those days I definitely hated life, and, as I look back on it, it still seems unendurably ugly. When I was fifteen years old my sister Bertha [18] was born. I must have been working at the printing office at that time. I gave it up after that and stayed at home to help mother.
I made all the little clothes, and when the babe was born took much of the care on myself—and that was another kind of education and a very important one. I taught her to walk and talk and was transported with her cunning little ways. She was a darling, freckled little thing, loving and winning. Our family saw almost nothing of the south side relatives.
Once in a great while my grandmother took me over there, but now, more than ever, there was kindly condescension and I writhed under this. My cousin Mary Walker still seemed to me the most brilliant creature living, and there was no condescension in her kindness. But she was having tutors for each branch of study in which she was interested, and was assimilating languages, science and theories of art with an avidity that was remarkable.
It was the sense of my inferiority that tormented me when I was with her, not the consciousness of my poverty or social inexperience. Grandmother was ruthless in a manner in which she drew contrasts between us Wilkinsons and the rest of the family connection. She aroused me to fierce defense of my father. It was, after all, not fair for her to eat his bread while she was trying to prejudice his children against him.
Her excuse was that she was tortured by the sight of her daughter being worked to exhaustion, given no amusement and kept in poverty and of her granddaughters growing up without education. She looked on me as a bright but perverse child and from what I heard of her she seemed a singularly interesting person, but I was told that was because I was like her. And to be like her was anathema. I went to the Centennial Baptist Church which was, perhaps, a mile and a half from our house and here I renewed my acquaintance with some of the likable young people I had known at the Brown School.
They were in high school by this time, were fashionably dressed and quite above me in many ways, but they included me in some of their pleasures, and in Sunday school I made some impression with callow arguments and memorizing. Dad and I had some hard tussles of opinion and will in those days.
For example, the Sunday School group of young people used to give parties, and if music was obtainable, they danced. I had had no dancing lessons and seldom accepted an invitation to dance, but when father learned that dancing was a feature of those mild evenings, he was outraged.
His indignation reached its height when he learned that we proposed to wear masks on one of those occasions. He said his training of me had all been in vain, that he could see I meant to go to the Devil and that if I went to that party, he would despair of ever training me in the fear of the Lord.
He said there would be no more asking of blessing at the table, no more family prayers. Indeed, he achieved a fine case of pious hysterics. I couldn't see the relation between family prayers, or rather their abolition, and this little neighborhood party. I asked mother if she could and she acknowledged that she couldn't, but she thought I'd better not do anything to displease my father.
But the whole matter seemed to me ridiculous. Dad had said something about cursing me, but my sense of humor wouldn't let me take that seriously. I couldn't attach importance to cursing and the whole thing seemed forced and more or less of a sham. So I went to the party, wore my little home-made mask, danced badly and happily and came home. My attudinizing progenitor continued to sulk for some time, and I grew into the habit of secretly smiling at him, which was bad. I don't think we had prayers again for years.
I tried to feel appropriately grieved, and failed. I knew that I was working early and late for the family, being a good daughter, and it was patent that father was posing. It was at one of these parties [] that I met a slender, dark young man who seemed from the first attracted to me. I had come with a group of young people and had had some casual youth as an escort.
But it was this new acquaintance who walked home with me, and who called a few evenings later, and continued to call once or twice a week for a long time to come. Also there followed flowers, formal baskets of roses, lilacs, forget-me-nots. They must have been horribly expensive. At least they were so by the standards of the Wilkinson family.
Mother wanted to know where the young man got money to waste in that manner. It was wasteful, but it was also marvelous. He brought me a volume of [Wilhelm Freiherr von] Humboldt's one of Herbert Spencer's, one of [Erasmus] Darwin's poetry, charming little books of fancy and wit. My bedroom began to lose its bare and meager look as books and flowers found their way there. I lived to meet this young man and to talk with him.
He enraptured me by taking me to the theatre though father objected to that, too, and sometimes forbade it. He didn't think very highly of this young man and said I'd be ashamed ot introduce him to my South Side relatives. I didn't really see what difference that made, as I seldom saw them anyway—and besides, I wasn't ashamed of him and could imagine no reason for being so. My little sisters adored him, and loved to get into his lap and sit there spell-bound while he whistled light opera tunes to them.
They called him Pete. His mother called him Burns. For a while I called him Bert, then, later, Robert. His name was Robert Burns Peattie, and six years later we were married []. The first year of our engagement []—for we were engaged tacitly, almost from the first hour we met—was, at last, life as I had imagined it.
The little star wagon was heaped and running over with a shining, iridescent cargo. It trailed its splendors on the ground, it flung them to the winds. It was not love alone, though that would have been priceless; it was that countless doors seemed to be opening into rooms of knowledge, thought, experience, amusement, creativeness. We talked of plays and operas, of stories and histories. Father continued to grump, mother to doubt. They didn't know what to make of this slender, delicate-looking young man, so tidy in his best blue diagonals, who reproduced songs and dances from Gilbert and Sullivan operas, from "The Chimes of Normandy" and "Manon".
They were bewildered by his pyrotechnic and sometimes ill-timed jokes. It was late before he could reach our house the evenings he came to call. He had to go home from his work, eat his dinner, dress, and journey by horse car the twelve miles to our house. Perhaps nine o'clock would be striking before I would see him hastening from the street car. That was official bedtime for our family, and father and mother were scandalized. He stayed too late—too late, and reached home at one or two in the morning. His parents [Elizabeth Culross and John Peattie] were angry and thought me a frightful sort of girl.
I was taken to see them and found them, an old Scotch couple, living in a workman's cottage and according to workmen's ideas. They thought me pretty and amiable, but hadn't much respect for me I think. I was not at all the sort of person they were used to. Neither were they what I was used to. I felt like the Lady of Lyons visiting the cot of Claude Helnott, the gardener. The pride of our family, based on next to nothing, but forever renewing itself like a self-seeding plant, bloomed luxuriantly at that time. But nothing could exceed my politeness to the parents and other relatives of my sweetheart.
They must have detested it and me. It took years for me to learn to appreciate them. They were stalwart and enduring souls whose honesty was rooted in inherent character, which they passed on to their descendants. They talked broad Scotch and held what might be termed broad Scotch ideas. John Peattie had been a Chartist, [20] and he was an American by conviction. He was already stricken with a fatal disease, which carried him off some time before we were married. Mother Peattie was a small woman with smooth hair, a tiny waist of which she was frankly proud, a great fund of stories, deliciously Scotch and racy of the soil and an energy which was as the four winds of heaven.
She loved John Peattie when they were both young. They were engaged and their troth was symbolized by a number of silver coins welded together with a brass heart, which John had fashioned at his forge. Robert was born when his mother was forty-two and who was astonished and dismayed at his arrival. His [three older] sisters cared for him in his babyhood.
He was never robust; he was allowed to fatigue himself too much during adolescence and was too exhausted to do well at school. He went to work early and had to carry too many responsiblities; he had depressing recollections of his childhood and acquired rather a pessimistic outlook on life, mitigated by wit, sudden, delicious gaiety, and the most generous gestures of which any gentleman could be capable.
The work-day qualities of his family were absent in him. Though he always retained some Scotch characteristics, he seemed curiously French in temperament. Here Dodge again acted as deputy to Day. En route to that camp, he escaped from the train, but was immediately seen, shot at and quickly recaptured. Here Dodge escaped with 34 others including Harry Day through a tunnel on 5 March Dodge became involved with the organisation of what became known as The Great Escape. Partly due to his large size, he did not help build the tunnels, but instead helped create diversions such as choir singing to help disguise the noise of the digging.
Dodge was given a place in tunnel 'Harry' and escaped at approximately on 25 March as part of The Great Escape. They were caught during the afternoon of the same day at Hirschberg main railway station. Dodge was the first to be removed from Hirschberg, and was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp , where he was later joined by Jimmy James, Harry Day and Flight Lieutenant Sydney Dowse.
James Wernham, together with 49 other recaptured escapers, was murdered under Hitler 's orders.
Here were housed a handful of other 'political' prisoners, including SOE agent Peter Churchill , two Russian generals, various other Russians, Poles, Italians and four British soldiers of Irish origin. Dowse and James almost immediately began another tunnel, which was kept secret from all non-British personnel. He, with the other four, who had also been recaptured, was placed in solitary confinement and chained to the floor in the death cells at the camp.
Mainly through Harry Day 's efforts all were spared execution. In February he was released from solitary, and taken to Berlin where he was asked, by two senior German officials, to act as a peace envoy to the British government, with an offer of German surrender to the British and Americans, but not to the Russians. Dodge was asked to undertake this task because of his relationship to Winston Churchill [34].
He explained his adventures and the German peace proposal. Post-war Dodge was a central figure leading the war crimes investigation to bring key Gestapo and other officials to justice who were responsible for carrying out the orders to murder 50 of the 76 escapees from Stalag Luft III. He attempted to restart his political career, but with no success, when he stood at Gillingham at the General Election but lost narrowly to the winning Labour member, Joseph Binns.
He died, aged 66, of a heart attack when hailing a taxi near Hyde Park in London in November The Untold Story From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For the American film producer, see Johnny Dodge. Tales of the Phelps-Dodge Family. New York Historical Society. The London Gazette Supplement. Retrieved 8 December Exciting Stories of my Personal Brushes with Greatness: