Читать книгу Magnolia - Agnita Tennant - Страница 13

Chapter 5

At The Threshold of a New Era – Memories of a Childhood

Following my father’s conviction that children should be ­educated in the capital, our family left the orchard village of Sapsuri and moved to Seoul when I was five. My impression of the village on the day of our departure was that of a big funeral. The whole village buzzed. Everyone in sight along the ten li road to the railway station, as we rode on a horse-cart, was weeping. Mother, holding Myŏngsŏk in her arms, was crying all the way, her face buried in her handkerchief. Father who had me on his lap sat upright with a rigid face as if he were cross, his lips tightly pressed.

Our new house in the capital was in Sajikdong, on high ground, which was reached by what seemed like more than a hundred stone steps. It was small compared to what we were used to but great fun. It was there that for the first time I saw electric light and was amazed. From the verandah, I could see below the parapet, a black dome, like a huge umbrella sitting on the top of a building. When I was told it was the roof top of the Capital Building I was amused. Everything was wonderful.

After moving to Seoul mother lost her health. I often heard her saying the water from the tap disagreed with her. She missed the country and most of all, she said, the water from the spring at the entrance to the orchard.

For me life in Seoul was full of fun. In the morning, after father had gone to work and my sister and brother to school, mother, carrying Myŏngsŏk tied on her back, often went out with me exploring the city. We went to the market, department stores and sometimes went to visit my aunt on a tram. On Sundays all the family went to the Anglican Cathedral behind the Tŏksu Palace. On summer evenings, we went out to the evening market along the pavement of the main road.

My elder brother, Hyŏngsŏk soon became the gang-leader of the kids in the alley. I was proud of him. Some evenings all the children gathered at our house for concerts. The hall was the stage, draped with bed-sheets as curtains. Under direction of Hyŏngsŏk we put on plays, sang and danced.

Mother, eight months pregnant had a still-born baby and became seriously ill. She was bedridden for a long time. My grandmother or my aunt came to give a hand. With the onset of winter came the pickling season and piles of cabbages and mooli were brought in but left for several days unattended in the garden, covered with straw mats to keep the frost out. One day Myŏngsŏk, then three, fell ill, running a high temperature. Grandmother tried to take him to the doctor’s, but he would not be separated from his mother, crying. Mother got out of bed, quickly dressed, called for a rickshaw and set off, holding him on her lap.

Our family practitioner was in Angukdong, not far off from the Capital Building. Either the rickshaw-man misheard the name of the street or he was mad. Or I suppose it was one of the trickeries of fate. My mother inside the carriage, wondering why it took so long, looked out of the peep-hole and saw that they were going in the opposite direction and had gone miles out of the way. She had been exposed too long to the severe cold. That night she became very ill unable even to turn over. The doctor called every day. The atmosphere at home was as heavy as lead.

After giving birth to me and mothering me for five years my mother departed this world. I was too young to remember much about her but the last few minutes that I was with her have meant a great deal to me throughout my life. It represents my memories of her, her love of me, and serves me as the pointer of my conscience that prompts me to be good through all my life.

As on other days, father had gone to work and my brother and sister to school. Since mother’s illness had taken a serious turn Myŏngsŏk had been taken away to be looked after by my aunt. I was alone with mother. I sat close to her. She had been very still until she stirred and called me. Her voice was weak.

‘Darling, are you there? Can you get me the chamber pot?’

I fetched it for her. As I did so, unaware of myself, tears came to my eyes and rolled down my cheeks. As she propped herself up in bed she said, ‘Are you crying, my pet?’ and gathered me into her arms. I did not mean to cry but could not help sobs rising and my whole body shaking. She embraced me tighter.

‘Don’t cry, darling. There’s a good girl. Mum’ll soon be better.’ Her voice was very gentle. ‘When I am better,’ she went on, ‘We’ll go shopping at the Hwashin Department Stores and buy some lovely shoes for you, and some nice biscuits too...’

I let myself go and cried freely and then, feeling such comfort in the warmth of her embrace, I felt drowsy.

At that moment someone came in. It must be either my grandmother or aunt. I was ashamed of myself for holding onto my sick mother as I came out of the room but once out I was sulky at being pushed out of such a bliss. Squatting in a sunny patch on the verandah and with my back against the wall I must have nodded off into the sleep that I had failed to get in mother’s arms. When I awoke, there were my father, brother and sister all weeping. I have no memories at all of the few days that followed. On the day of her burial, I am told, I was crying like one possessed. As the hearse was leaving the house I was pounding on the floor crying ‘I want my mummy’ and ‘I want to go with my mummy’ until I passed out. I often heard father telling this story to various people.

‘I can never smack her, even when she’s really naughty. When I raise my hand that scene comes back.’ Probably it was because of this that father was specially gentle and patient with me out of all his children.

In the year after her death, there came several happy events in the family. My brother entered Kyŏng-gi High school as his parents had wished, my father was promoted at his work and I started primary school. We went to visit mother’s grave. Hyŏngsŏk was wearing his school uniform with the badge. Father bought expensive sweets and biscuits besides the food for lunch. He had planned a family picnic by the grave, but no sooner had we got there than my brother broke down at the foot of the grave calling, ‘Mum, you could have waited another year and...’ The outing started and ended in tears. Being a Christian family we did not offer sacrificial food like other families did but we often visited the grave, and on the anniversaries of her death we all sat round at midnight to say prayers and sing the hymns that mother used to like.

After mother died grandmother moved in to look after us. Under her management the household became very tidy and well organized but it lacked homely comfort. A strong disciplinarian she fussed about such things as table manners and the way we addressed our father, and how girls should behave, and boys. Sometimes her iron rules were intolerable but father unconditionally obeyed her, setting an example for us to follow. She had been widowed young, and had brought up two sons, my father and his elder brother, single-handed and successfully. She was very proud and righteous.

When I was nine she arranged a second marriage for father to a woman who had been briefly married before. She was a simple-minded, good-natured woman from the country. It was obvious from the beginning that she tried hard to make a good wife and a good mother. Grandmother retreated to her elder son’s house and the stepmother loosened the household rules. Everybody seemed to be accepting the new situation and trying to adapt to it except for me. I never relaxed and felt comfortable with my stepmother. Sometimes I purposely chose to do things that would displease her. I openly showed my contempt, dislike and dissatisfaction. It is not that I really disliked her but it was rather a kind of psychological twist. She was endlessly patient with me and put up with all my wiles. If she had severely scolded me or smacked or beaten me, I think retrospectively, my childish wilfulness might have given way to docility. Or if she had been given more time, my whims would have run their course and her efforts might have been rewarded, but it was my fault that her marriage to my father came to an abrupt ending.

One evening I cried and sulked for some reason, refused to eat supper and went into the spare back room and sat squatting there for a long time. When it was getting dark my father came in and without saying 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 leave my school out of it, granny. To disgrace its honour through my deeds is unbearable.’

Being away from home meant that he had some money to spend as he chose. Now and again he took us to a baker’s shop and gave us treats with cakes and ice-creams. At such times, he was generous and happy. He seemed to be enjoying the privilege of being the eldest of the brood. He told Myŏngsŏk, ‘Don’t tell granny that we ate cakes outside, will you?’ Myŏngsŏk eagerly nodded in agreement. As soon as we got home, he ran straight up to her and said, ‘Granny, we didn’t eat any cakes outside,’ with an uncertain shake of his head. Father could not help smiling, and even granny smiled as she pretended she was cross and said to Hyŏngsŏk, ‘You think I am not feeding your brother and sisters properly, don't you, silly boy?’

Approaching fifty, father now had white hairs among the black. With his head laid on a wooden pillow in a sunny patch on the floor of the verandah, he often called and asked me to pull them out. Parting his hair this way and that I searched for them and plucked them out. I liked doing it. I thought it was like looking up at the night sky with a lot of stars and giving them names one by one. He fell into a sweet sleep while I was messing up his hair.

It was about this time that the possibility of his remarriage was being whispered among the grown-ups. The prospective bride was an elderly spinster, Miss Lee who was the head teacher at the municipal kindergarten. During one of these hair-plucking sessions, I gave my father my heartfelt advice as I fingered through his hair. ‘Father, please don’t turn her out this time, will you?’

‘Silly child.’ He gave one of his sad smiles. I might not have put it over-elegantly but it came from the bottom of my heart and with solemn resolve that for the sake of my father’s happiness I would do anything for the new stepmother.