This column first appeared in the Victoria Daily Times on Aug. 22, 1941.
I like getting ready for visitors. This is one of the times when a聽place in the country pays dividends, for there is something about your own beets and carrots, peaches from the tree that folds its arms across the top of the kitchen window, that gives a deep satisfaction.
And in our neighbourhood, it is not only what we have ourselves but what the neighbours have, which brings this feeling of abundance. We have no strawberries or loganberries or corn, and our tomatoes are not yet ripe; but that鈥檚 nothing. The neighbours make good all deficiencies, in fruits and vegetables, sleeping accommodation or transportation.
This week, my agricultural duties have been heavy upon me and are growing. These bright dry days are good for the tourist trade, but hard on the gardens. Everything has to be watered, and the pressure is low; and now we can water only on alternate days. I find it hard enough to remember that H.V. Kaltenborn speaks on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturdays, and now comes this matter of irrigation on Mondays, Wednesday and Friday. And to add to this confusion, the small brown hen died, leaving five orphans on our doorstep.
The little brown hen burned the candle at both ends, if ever a hen did. No doubt she thought she could bring out her chickens in two weeks instead of three if she sat hard enough. Every time I聽caught a glimpse of her, she looked smaller, but she brought out her chickens all right, arriving at the back door with five of them exactly like herself, and with a look on her face such as is shown on the face of a golfer who has made a hole-in-one.
We did our best to restore her to normal health by plentiful feedings, giving her olive oil and pepper on her food, but she had lived too fast, and now she鈥檚 gone. The little ones, called the 鈥淨uints,鈥� were a pathetic sight the morning we found her dead, and them standing around her wondering. We cut an old bathing suit into strips and suspended it from the hedge where the nest was, making a tent of many doors. Into it they go at night and in the daytime they do their own scratching like good little orphans, and are growing in spite of their bereavement.
We had decided to go out of bantams, but I don鈥檛 think we can ever part with these five little ones.
Bantams do a good job on the earwigs, cutworms and other garden pests, but they have their faults, too. They waken early and come up to the house in the grey dawn, full of boasts and pride at having punched the clock according to daylight-saving time. Being accustomed to agricultural sounds, we do not mind this very much, but our visitors are not so happy over those demonstrations, and with unerring instinct the bantams go under the windows of the rooms where our city friends are, or were, sleeping to make their loudest proclamations.
The first night this occurred, we descended stealthily down the stairs and drove away the bantams with stones and whispered imprecations, and even bribed them with wheat to stay in their own runway, but a woodpecker carried on their absence by doing a bit of 鈥渞ivetting鈥� on the roof over the heads of the visitors; and, coming softly up the stairs, my knees cracked like pistols.
At breakfast the next morning, one of the visitors, in a comment on Kipling鈥檚 poem The Road to Mandalay, said he understood better than ever the full significance of that phrase 鈥淲here the dawn came up like thunder.鈥�
Now, in holiday time, I have been reading a fine big linen-coloured book called Alaska Holiday. Alaska has always interested me, with its long sunshine in the summer. And now, of course, the war has brought us into closer relations with this part of our hemisphere.
However, I wanted to forget all about that, and revelled in the descriptions of the blue lupins that carpet the enchanted fields in that leisurely country where the people measure time, not by clocks, but by the ebb and flow of the tide. But I had not gone far into this delightful book until I found myself hunting out the history of the settlement of Kodiak, where the story begins.
In 1792, when Catherine the Great was ruling in Russia and George Washington was president of the United States, the Russians took possession of the island of Kodiak. There is a picture in the book of an iron bust of Alexander the First of Russia, as he looked when he ascended the throne of the czars in 1801; this bust was affixed to the roof of the staff house in Kodiak at the time of Alexander鈥檚 coronation, and is now one of the treasures shown to favoured tourists.
In Alfred Rambaud鈥檚 History of Russia, I have been reading about the expansion of the Russian empire and the great desire of the people to secure a place among the free nations of the world; and,聽in the general summary of Russia鈥檚 struggle, the writer closed with the significant sentence: 鈥淥ne does not need to probe the philosophy of history to understand the advantages belonging to a people who fight with the north wind at their back.鈥�
And now Russia is fighting again with the north wind at her back, a greater war than was ever waged before. A war for human rights against the powers of evil. And they are surprising both friend and foe with their skill and courage. Russia has had a blotted, blood-stained history, but today the Russian people are holding high the banner of freedom. So let us be glad of them and grateful to them.
When this war is over, and that may not be long, what an opportunity will be ours if we are ready for it! I do not believe in chosen people or superior races, but I do know that Christian democracy offers the only hope for world peace, and if we do not work and sacrifice to spread the gospel of the Golden Rule at this time, we do not deserve to survive.
Some of McClung鈥檚 columns from the 1930s and 1940s have been collected in a book, The Valiant Nellie McClung: Selected Writings by sa国际传媒鈥檚 Most Famous Suffragist, by Barbara Smith.
