The House of All Sorts by Emily Carr

Author:Emily Carr [Carr, Emily]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction, ART015040
ISBN: 9781553650546
Publisher: D & M Publishers
Published: 1943-11-30T05:00:00+00:00

SHAM

AS THE WORLD war progressed rentals went down till it became impossible to meet living expenses without throwing in my every resource. I had no time to paint so had to rent the Studio flat and make do myself with a basement room and a tent in my back garden. Everything together only brought in what a flat and a half had before the war.

A woman came to look at the Studio flat and expressed herself delighted with it.

“Leave your pretty things, won’t you?” she begged with a half sob. “I have nothing pretty now and am a widow, a Belgian refugee with a son in the army.”

She spoke broken English. We were all feeling very tender towards the Belgians just then.

“Come and see me; I am very lonely,” she said and settled into the big studio I had built for myself. I granted her request for a substantial cut off the rental because of her widowhood, her country and her soldier son. Poor, lisping-broken-English stranger! I asked her several questions about Belgium. She evaded them. When she did not remember she talked perfect English, but when she stopped to think, the words were all mixed and broken. When she met any one new her sputterings were almost incoherent. I asked her, “How long since you left Belgium?” She hesitated, afraid of giving away her age, which I took to be fifty-five or thereabouts.

“I was born in Belgium of English parents. We left Belgium when I was four years old.”

“You have never been back since?”

“No.”

She saw me thinking.

“How the first language one hears sticks to the tongue!” she remarked. “It’s queer, isn’t it?”

“Very!”

As far as I was concerned, I let her remain the brave little Belgian widow with a son fighting on our side, but the son came back to his mother, returned without thanks from training camp, a schoolboy who had lied about his age and broken down under training. Now the widow added to her pose, “Belgian refugee widow with a war-broken son.”

Tonics and nourishing dishes to build Herb up were now her chief topic of conversation with her tenant neighbours. Daily, at a quarter to twelve, one or the other of us could expect a tap on our door and…would we lend the mother of Herb a cup of rice, or macaroni, or tapioca, an egg for his “nog” or half a loaf. The baker was always missing her, or the milkman forgot. We got sick of her borrowings and bobbed below the windows when she passed up the stair, but she was a patient knocker and kept on till something on the gas stove began to burn and the hider was obliged to come from hiding. She never dreamed of returning her borrowings. The husbands declared they had had enough. They were not going to support her. She appeared very comfortably off, took in all the shows, dressed well, though too youthfully.

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