Emily Carr. Kate Braid
her nose as her arms could reach. Ten days earlier, Emily and Helen had found them under the boathouse, dressed them in doll’s clothes, and then forgot about them. Somehow Mrs. Crane knew instantly who had instigated the whole incident.
“Such things never enter my Helen’s head,” she said. “Your mama is better; they are coming for you tonight.”
Dosing the chicken and dressing the starfish were just another sign of Emily’s lifelong love for “creatures,” especially birds. When she went to the family cow yard, the rooster routinely sat in her lap, and she tamed ducks and chickens as well as a young crow she took from its nest. No doubt she was comforted by the fact that, if humans – adults and her older sisters – couldn’t seem to understand her, her creatures always did, and she returned their affection with her whole heart.
And then there was the cow. At the back of the Carr property, between the old and the new barns, was the cow yard. Emily’s older sister Elizabeth, called “Bigger,” found it dirty and was a little afraid of the loose-limbed, saggy cow. Sister Alice, called “Middle,” liked the cow all right but she equally liked to spend time with her huge doll family. Only Emily, who called herself “Small,” wholeheartedly loved the red and white dreaminess of the cow and its cow yard. To her, it was a warm, motherly place, especially in the spring when baby creatures – chicks and pigeons, ducks and rabbits, and once even a splendid baby calf – were born.
The other being who always gave Emily pleasure was the imaginary friend who played with her among the white currants at the end of the garden. Emily claimed that the “dance” in her feet sometimes took her there without her even trying: to the family flower garden, through the vegetable garden, past the black currant and then the red currant bushes until she came to the single bush of white currants that, as they ripened, grew so clear that she could see the juice and the seeds inside.
This corner of the garden was a quiet, private place where people dumped the garden rubbish. A wild mauvey-pink flower grew here. It wasn’t very pretty as it struggled to grow up out of the rubbish, but it smelled so wonderful that butterflies and bees were always visiting, intoxicated by the smell. On a hot, sunny day when Emily went in among the butterflies and the pink blossoms and the glorious smell, she felt a part of it.
There was a boy there, who waited for her. He had a white horse and he brought one for Emily, too, and they winged in circles on their horses until butterflies and flowers and bee hum and blue sky and the hot sweet smell of pink all became one thing with the boy and Emily and the white horses in the middle – like the seeds in the white currants around them. That is, until some grownup called, and the boy and the horses went away.
Any outdoor place was a comfort to Emily. Away from her strict family, she roamed the woods and Beacon Hill Park. One of her favourite places was the family’s lily field. This was the only one of her father’s fields that had been left wild and “Canadian” and not made to look like a groomed English garden. The lily field was surrounded by a snake fence of split cedar logs laid crisscross over each other. Inside were fir trees and a few oaks, and the cleared ground underneath was thick with wild white Canadian lilies whose perfume Emily remembered with great fondness all her life.
When she was about twelve years old, something terrible happened between Emily and her father that revolted her and made her turn against him. No one knows exactly what it was. She never spoke of it to anyone until just before her death, and then she only called it “the brutal telling,” but it had something to do with his explanation to her of sex and reproduction. It was unthinkable for a Victorian father to explain sex to his daughter. Perhaps he also touched her. Perhaps it was just the shock of the idea of sex to an extremely sensitive and protected young woman. Perhaps it was literally “a brutal telling” – blunt and explicit because of her stern father’s embarrassment over bodily functions. Whatever happened, Emily was disgusted and her love for him changed.
She began to notice how he commanded everybody, how the family used her to soothe him – sent her out to meet him like a bone tossed to a dog whenever he left the family in a temper. She decided it would be good for him to have somebody to cross his will at times, and that the somebody would be her.
At first her father laughed, but when he saw she was serious, he was furious and even crueller to her, she thought, than to the others. It made Emily feel more and more distant from her stern family, and like many teenagers, although she felt guilty about it, she couldn’t help criticizing them, finding her father and her eldest sister, in particular, to be hypocritical and cruel.
One day when she was especially angry at her father, she told her mother she wouldn’t walk home with him any more.
“Child,” her mother said, “what ails you? You have always loved to be with your father. He adores you. What is the matter?”
“He is cross, he thinks he is as important as God.”
Mrs. Carr was shocked. In England, where she was raised, children were expected instantly to obey their parents, and the men of a family were its unquestioned rulers. She couldn’t understand why Emily refused to just give in and be docile, like her sisters. But to soothe her youngest daughter, she only said, “Shall you and I have a picnic?”
“All to ourselves?”
“Just you and I.”
Emily would remember it forever: how they walked through the garden and the cow yard into the wild, sweet smells of the lily field; how her mother took a large key from her bag and opened the padlock on the gate; and how the two of them then passed through the gate into Beacon Hill Park. When they came to a grassy clearing in the park, they sat in sunshine under a sweet-smelling mock orange bush, and for the rest of the afternoon as her mother sewed tiny stitches down long white seams (because it was unheard-of for a woman to sit idle), Emily made daisy chains. They didn’t talk much – her mother was a quiet woman – but Emily was delighted for one afternoon to have her mother all to herself in this quiet, flower-scented, outdoor space.
Shortly after, when Emily was fourteen, her mother died of tuberculosis. Two years later, her father also died.
Officially, the children – except for Clara, who was married – were now put under the guardianship of lawyer James Lawson, a family friend, but their daily care was left to the eldest sister, Edith.
Edith was thirty-two years old and had never married. Now she committed herself to raising the younger Carrs, and she no doubt did so the only way she knew how: sternly, following strict Victorian rules of proper behaviour. The other children were mostly obedient: Lizzie was very religious and wanted to be a missionary; Alice was patient and took the path of least resistance; Dick was still only eleven. But Emily was a passionate, strong-willed young woman who reacted to Ediths stern “care” with anger and a growing rebelliousness. Emily and Dick often got the riding whip on their legs – mostly for “insubordination” – not being polite enough to their elders.
Emily grew increasingly angry at what she saw as the hypocrisy of her family. On the outside, the Carrs appeared all kissing and sweetness. On the inside, she felt bitterness and resentment – certainly her own. Perhaps her view was influenced by the fact that she had always been the pampered youngest girl, their father’s favourite. Now, their father had left everything to Edith, and Emily thought it wasn’t fair. The house was meant to be a home for all of them, but Emily felt she had no rights and did not exist.
One day she went with several others for a boat ride with one of Edith’s friends, a remittance man named Piddington, who was living with the Carrs for six months. In England at that time, if a family had a son who caused them difficulty, they sometimes got rid of him by giving him a one-way ticket