Читать книгу Sarah’s Story: An emotional family saga that you won’t be able to put down - Lynne Francis - Страница 21

So it was that Sarah, for the first time in her life, applied herself to work in a way that she never had before. Each morning, once the basic chores were out of the way, she and Ada sat down at the table and Sarah, with a grim determination, focused on learning how to read and write. She was encouraged and delighted to find that learning her letters proved relatively easy, and that she could write and recite the alphabet with ease by the end of the first week. But when it came to putting letters together into words, and words into sentences, Sarah’s delight turned to despair.

‘I don’t think I will ever be the master of this,’ she said, flinging her slate and chalk down on the table. ‘It makes no sense to me. I can neither see nor hear how the letters are strung together into words.’ Tears of frustration sprang to her eyes. ‘And if I can’t do it that means I will never learn to be a herbalist, either. If I can’t write a label for a remedy, or note down how to make it, or record what has been prescribed for a patient …’ Sarah broke down in sobs of frustration, her head in her hands, overcome by the enormity of what lay ahead.

‘Ssh. Ssh,’ Ada soothed. ‘Don’t let difficulties over one kind of learning be a bar to another. You can learn the ways of herbalism without needing to write down a word. So much of it has been passed on over the years by word of mouth. How do you think I learnt my skills? Although it is the way today to expect that everything must be written down, why, women have known these things for generations and passed them on, mother to daughter.’

Sarah stopped crying and considered. She’d never thought about how Ada might have come by her knowledge.

‘Take your great-grandmother, Catherine Abbot, my mother. She was famous for miles around. Not just for her remedies, mind, but she was the one all the mothers turned to when their time had come. She must have delivered every baby in the area for nigh on twenty years. And she did all of this without knowing how to read or write.’

Ada must have noticed the frown that was furrowing Sarah’s brow. ‘But it’s still a skill you should have,’ she added hastily. ‘Times have changed and folk around here respect the written word even if they don’t understand it. I’m just trying to show you that you needn’t think you can’t learn one without the other. Reading and writing will come with time. You don’t need to try to hurry things.’

Sarah didn’t fully believe her. She was struggling to see how anyone could make sense of the strange combinations of letters; they clearly meant something to some people and this just confirmed her lack of self-belief. She must be stupid and incapable of learning. This was the reason, no doubt, why she had failed to learn her letters before. Sarah was forced to acknowledge to herself that her problem with reading and writing was due to her dislike of getting something wrong. Instead of resolving to learn how to get it right she became stubborn and turned away from it. If she was going to succeed, this was something she would have to learn to overcome.

Herbalism, though, proved to be another matter entirely. Sarah found herself looking forward to the afternoons; partly because it meant that the torture of the morning, the effort of forcing her unwilling brain to comprehend, was at an end. But also because she had discovered a genuine interest in what her grandmother did.

During the first week, the afternoons were spent in creating remedies for all the visitors who had called by while her grandmother was away. Ada seemed to know without needing to enquire further what they would need and, for the first time, Sarah concentrated hard on what her grandmother was doing. She asked questions about why Ada was using a particular herb, why it had to be prepared in such a way – pounded, steeped or used in combination with other herbs.

Ada had learnt her own skills over a very long period of time but Sarah’s thirst for knowledge, combined with the feeling on both their parts that this knowledge needed to be acquired quickly, required a new approach. After a period of trial and error, during which Ada based her teaching around a specific herb, then around an ailment, she settled on working with Sarah’s practical skills. They studied ointments and lotions, infusions and decoctions, powders and poultices, tinctures and tisanes. Sarah discovered that in many cases she somehow knew which parts of the plant would be efficacious, whether it was the flower, the root, the bark, the leaves or the seeds. She could only assume that it was knowledge that she had absorbed over the years spent living with her grandmother.

And, perhaps because the preparation of the herbs was a practical skill, not dissimilar to the domestic chores or food preparation that she was accustomed to doing, Sarah felt quite at ease in her work. She found herself enjoying the concentration required, the measuring and weighing of ingredients, the calm preparation and the scents that the herbs released. Absorbed, she would carry on working late into the afternoon, with lamps lit, and it would be Ada who generally called a halt to the proceedings by suggesting that it might be time for tea, or to make a start on the preparation of food for the evening meal.

As November progressed, so did Sarah’s knowledge. She was eager to absorb whatever she could about the practice of herbalism and found herself irritated that in this winter month she could only work with the herbs her grandmother had dried and prepared during the summer. She longed for the chance to learn how to work with fresh herbs but, in the meantime, there was still much to take in.

Her deftness earned her grandmother’s admiration and, to Sarah’s astonishment, she discovered Ada’s advice to allow her reading and writing to develop in their own good time to be sound. She started to recognise the words written on the labels of the jars that she was using on a daily basis, and to see the virtue of such labels. Even though she was learning to distinguish herbs by their scent, and discovering the importance of putting the bottles and jars back in their rightful place on the shelves as soon as she had used them, the possibility of making an error if she couldn’t read what was written there was only too apparent to her.

Soon, the morning lessons ceased in favour of devoting the whole day to Ada’s teachings on the nature and implementation of her remedies. Within the month, Ada trusted her to prepare the simpler remedies alone, with only basic supervision.

Each evening Sarah would retire to bed, head buzzing with what she had learnt. It would come to her then that Joe had barely entered her thoughts during the day. Indeed, her thoughts turned more often to the loss of her sisters and, if it hadn’t been for the baby growing and making its presence felt inside her, she might have started to wonder whether Joe was a figment of her imagination.