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Growing up Small

Our family had to whiz around Father like a top round its peg.

–Emily Carr, The Book of Small

Emily Carr was born the eighth child in a family of nine. The three older boys all died, so there was a gap of almost twenty years between what she later called “the big family,” of the two oldest girls, Edith and Clara, and the “little family” that consisted of Lizzie, Alice, Emily, and the youngest child, Dick. Dick was always unhealthy and eventually he, too, would die young.

Richard Carr, their father, was born in England. When he made a small fortune as a gold prospector ²

Within a year he set up a thriving business that sold wholesale groceries and liquors on Wharf Street. Nearby, within easy walking distance, he built a splendid new house in fashionable James Bay bordering Beacon Hill Park – a beautiful piece of wild land that overlooked the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

Today, the house at 207 Government Street has been largely restored to how it was in Emily’s day, a handsome yellow two-storey clapboard structure with gracefully arched front windows and a pleasant front porch. For a house of its time it is richly trimmed. From the eaves hang what carpenters call “acorn drops” like long, elegant Christmas balls. From its roof reach up “finials,” like Christmas balls reversed so the effect is the architectural equivalent of a woman wearing her best jewels.

The area in front of the house used to be a large garden that Richard Carr planted to look as much as possible like England. Today, it is a broad drive and parking area. Modern guests are asked to enter the house by the back entrance into what was once the kitchen, but in Emily’s day, a visitor walked up the seven front steps and across the porch to a wide front door whose glass panels looked into the front hallway.

The hallway is not large but is designed to be impressive. Its floor is painted oilcloth, and the walls are wallpaper painted to look like marble. As you stand in the hallway, to your right is the dining room where Emily would later hold art classes for Victoria’s children, and to your left, the parlour where Mrs. Carr and the local ladies sat properly straight-backed for afternoon tea. Throughout the house, tall windows framed by heavy draperies reach almost to the high ceilings. There are lavish mouldings, high baseboards, and heavy mahogany-and-horsehair furniture. Although the family would later be one of the first in Victoria to have electricity installed, above your head in the hallway hangs the original pink kerosene light fixture, suspended by Mr. Carr’s tradesmen from a plaster rosette.

Now go up the stairs. At the top, to your right, is the indoor bathroom installed for Mrs. Carr when she grew sick. On your left are the children’s bedrooms. Up another four stairs and to the right is Mrs. Carr’s bedroom, the one where Emily, her youngest daughter and namesake, was born.

Emily, being “contrary from the start,” was in no hurry. When her mother went into labour it was a cold, stormy day in December. Outside, an icy wind blew, and coal was no doubt steadily poured into the bedroom’s small fireplace. All day the family waited for this stubborn child to come. Finally, at 3:00 a.m. Mr. Carr hurried into his heavy coat and out into the storm to find Nurse Randal, the midwife. The date was December 13, 1871.

Emily’s mother was small, quiet and a little shy with her own children. She had grey eyes like Emily’s, dark hair, and cheeks that Emily always remembered as pink. This was probably the effect of fever, for she was frequently ill and spent days resting in her darkened room, often struggling for breath.

Emily’s father, Richard, was fierce and cranky, and as Victorian men were expected to do, he ruled his large family with a stern eye and an iron temper. When he came home from his store at six o’clock, he strode through the house, frowning if any neighbourhood children or ladies dared still to be visiting. Then he went directly to tend his favourite plant, a huge grapevine that grew on one side of the house. He called the vine Isabella and sometimes Emily thought he doted more on the plant – pruning, pinching and petting it – than he ever did on the human beings inside.

From the time she could talk, Emily was her father’s favourite. He always said she should have been the boy, and he insisted she be with him whenever he was home working in the garden. She passed him bulbs to plant or held the cloth strips he used to tie up Isabella. Every morning Emily walked most of the way into town with him, and every evening she met him to walk him home again.

The family was very religious. There were daily prayers and Bible readings but the most important day of the week was Sunday. On that day, no one worked. By Saturday night the house was polished, Sunday’s food was cooked, and Sunday’s clean clothes pressed and hung out to be aired. All that remained was for the children to be scrubbed. After dinner the big washtub was set in the middle of the kitchen floor and – since there was no running hot water – every kettle and soup pot, including the family wash-boiler, was set to boil. When all the pots were steaming, oldest sister Edith (who the children nicknamed “Dede”) donned her thick white apron, heated the towels, and fetched the brown Windsor soap. Then Mrs. Carr presented each child in turn while Dede scrubbed.

The next morning at 7:00 a.m. precisely, their father woke the children with the announcement, “It’s Sunday, children.” But they could already tell that from the smell of Wright’s coal-tar soap and the camphor in which he stored his very best Sunday clothes.

Sunday was stuffed full of church; there were morning prayers and evening Bible readings, morning Presbyterian service at their father’s church and evening Reformed Episcopal service at their mother’s, with Sunday school (taught by Dede) squeezed in between. At noon, dinner was a cold saddle of mutton roasted the day before in the big oven Richard Carr had brought with him from England – because everything English, he believed, was better than anything Canadian. After dinner, one child was picked to recite the mornings sermon to see how much they remembered. Dede, Lizzie, and Alice always remembered the text. Emily remembered the jokes.

At the very end of the day, Emily struggled to stay awake while her father read a short chapter from Sunday at Home magazine. This was as good as it got because he believed that fairy stories were bad for children.

At school her sisters were all good students, but Emily was often in trouble for not paying attention and for endlessly drawing faces on her fingernails, pinafores, and textbooks. She loved to draw.

One day she stared at the family’s pet dog for a long time. Then she slit open a large brown paper bag, took a charred stick from the fireplace, and drew a dog. When she proudly showed it to her family, her older sister said, “Not bad.”

Her father spread it over his newspaper, put on his spectacles and said, “Urn!” and her mother said, “You are blackened with charred wood, wash!” Years later the drawing was found in her father’s papers with his comment, “By Emily, aged eight.”

Sketching and painting on porcelain or in water-colour were considered healthy for children and admirable accomplishments for genteel young ladies, and Emily’s parents encouraged all their daughters to take drawing lessons from Miss Emily Wood, who came to the house each Monday with pictures for the children to copy. Emily soon won a prize for copying a boy with a rabbit.

The next time her father pruned the cherry tree, young Emily claimed three of the straightest sticks, tied them at one end, spread them at the other and drove two big nails in to hold her drawing board. When she put this little easel under her bedroom window, she felt like a real artist.

It seemed that young Emily was always in trouble. Once when her mother was very ill, Emily and Alice were sent to stay with the neighbours, Mr. and Mrs. Crane. Emily and Mrs. Crane immediately locked horns because Mrs. Crane thought Emily was “naughty.” Once, as Mrs. Crane was reading them a very dull story, Emily entertained herself by tying the fringe of an antimacassar into dozens of beautiful pigtails.

The next morning Mrs. Crane was furious. She said Satan must have made Emily do it and humiliated her by making her confess in front of the whole family and then undo every pigtail.

Another time when Emily was feeling ill and unhappy and homesick, Mrs. Crane dosed her with castor oil. The next day while Emily and Helen, the youngest Crane, were playing in the yard, they saw a hen.

“Oh Helen,” Emily said. “Just look at that poor hen! How bad she does feel!”

“How do you know she feels bad?”

“Well, look at her shut eyes and her head and tail and wings all flopped. She feels as I did yesterday. Maybe oil…”

“I’ll pour if you’ll hold,” said Helen.

The two girls carried the hen back to the nursery and administered their medicine. But the hen, it turned out, didn’t much like castor oil. In her attempts to get away she flew much higher than Emily ever imagined a chicken could fly. She knocked over several things, spit castor oil all over the books in the bookcase, and managed to spread farmyard mud all around the room before Mrs. Crane arrived, her eyes burning and her voice like ice.

While Mrs. Crane cleaned up the mess, Emily tried to apologize: “I’m sorry, Mrs. Crane.”

No answer.

“I wanted to help your hen. She’s better. Perhaps it was only a little cuddling she wanted.”

But even as she spoke, Mrs. Crane, following her nose, hauled two reeking starfish from the cupboard and dangled them as far from 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 to Canada, together with a small allowance to keep him there. Like many Canadians, Emily thought these remittance men were parasites and intruders. She hated Piddington in particular because he teased her unmercifully. One day he humiliated her by rocking the little boat they rowed in until she was seasick in front of her friends. Emily was furious. That he called her “kid” made it even worse.

She snapped at him, “You are not a gentleman anyway! You are a sponger and a bully!” This was a great insult from a child to an adult, and Edith thrashed her for it until she fainted. But Emily refused to apologize.

It was a turning point. Emily told her sister, “I am almost sixteen now and the next time you thrash me I shall strike back.” That was her last whipping.

After this, the whip was used only after school and on Saturdays when Emily took it down from its peg to go riding on the family horse, old Johnny. On those days, after Johnny had galloped past all the houses of Victoria he would slow down, stopping occasionally to sniff the bushes as if he was looking for something. Suddenly he would push through the undergrowth, as he found a hidden path that carried both of them away from the prying eyes of people into the woods. Here in some quiet clearing, hidden among the trees where no one could tell her how to be or what to do, Emily found peace.

Later she said, “Maybe after all I owe a ‘thank you’ to the remittance ones and to the riding whip for driving me out into the woods. Certainly I do to old Johnny for finding the deep lovely places that were the very foundation on which my work as a painter was to be built.”

The more isolated Emily felt from her family, the more she clung to the idea of painting. No doubt her sisters saw it as a mere hobby, a pastime. But Emily’s dream of becoming an artist was nurtured by the French painter C.A. de L’Aubinière and his English artist-wife, Georgina, who probably taught her briefly in 1886.

She was in awe of them because they were the first “real” artists she had met – but she was oddly disappointed when she saw their pictures. Their landscapes did not seem at all Canadian to her, though Canada was so young that no one yet knew exactly what a “Canadian” painting should look like. In the European tradition, landscapes were panoramas of peaceful meadows with the odd tree, a cow perhaps, beside a quiet stream. They didn’t look at all like the British Columbia Emily knew, where, just outside the city, endless acres of trees towered above an almost impenetrable undergrowth, and the cow was in her back yard.

Nonetheless, the two Europeans sowed a seed that made Emily sling an old pair of shoes across her rafters. Now, every time she had a little money she pushed it into the shoes. She had a plan.

One day when she decided she had had enough of her family, she marched downtown to the offices of her guardian, Mr. Lawson. He had many children as wards, and it was obvious to Emily, as he stared at her over the tops of his glasses, that none of them had ever come to see him before.

“What can I do for you, Emily?” he asked.

“Please, I want to go away from home. There is an art school in San Francisco – may I go there?”

Mr. Lawson frowned and said, “San Francisco is a big and wicked city for a little girl to be alone in.”

“I am sixteen, almost.” (In fact, she was eighteen. Emily always underestimated her age.)

“You do not look it.”

“Nobody is allowed to grow up in our house.”

Mr. Lawson replied, “Your sister is an excellent woman and has been a mother to you younger children. Is this art idea just naughtiness, a passing whim?”

“No,” she assured him. “It has been growing for a long time.”

He looked at her for a long minute. “It can be arranged,” he said. And smiled.

2 . In 1871, the year of Emily Carr’s birth, B.C. became the seventh province to join Confederation.