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  “Give me a firm place on which to stand, and

  I will move the earth.”

  - Archimedes

  Far From Home

  Far From Home

  Dr. Grenfell’s Little Orphan

  NELLIE P. STROWBRIDGE

  a novel

  PENNYWELL BOOKS

  ST. JOHN’S, NL

  2006

  * * *

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Strowbridge, Nellie P., 1947-

  Far from home : Dr. Grenfell’s little orphan : a novel / Nellie P. Strowbridge.

  ISBN 1-894463-61-7

  1. Grenfell, Wilfred Thomason, Sir, 1865-1940--Fiction. I. Title.

  PS8587.T7297F37 2004 C813’.54 C2004-905027-3

  * * *

  © 2004 by Nellie P. Strowbridge

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of the work covered by the copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic or mechanical—without the written permission of the publisher. Any request for photocopying, recording, taping or information storage and retrieval systems of any part of this book shall be directed to Access Copyright, The Canadian Copyright Agency, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 800, Toronto, ON M5E 1E5. This applies to classroom use as well.

  PRINTED IN CANADA

  PENNYWELL BOOKS

  is an imprint of Flanker Press Ltd.

  Cover Design:

  Adam Freake

  FLANKER PRESS

  P.O. BOX 2522, STATION C

  ST. JOHN’S, NL, CANADA A1C 6K1

  TOLL FREE: 1-866-739-4420

  WWW.FLANKERPRESS.COM

  First Canadian edition printed September 2004

  11 10 09 08 07 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

  We acknowledge the financial support of: the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP); the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada; the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, Department of Tourism, Culture and Recreation.

  Inspired by and dedicated to

  Clarissa Dicks: to the child she was

  and to the woman she became.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter 1 — FAR FROM HOME

  Chapter 2 — TEA HOUSE HILL AND A STRANGE BOX

  Chapter 3 — A FORBIDDEN VISIT

  Chapter 4 — A NEW ORPHAN IN THE CRACKER BOX

  Chapter 5 — TREFFIE

  Chapter 6 — A MORNING FRIGHT

  Chapter 7 — SCHOOL AND A FEARED ENCOUNTER

  Chapter 8 — WINTER

  Chapter 9 — WAITING FOR CHRISTMAS

  Chapter 10 — DISAPPOINTMENT AT CHRISTMAS

  Chapter 11 — MISSUS FRANCES’S BOXING DAY VISIT

  Chapter 12 — NEWS OF CLARISSA’S FAMILY

  Chapter 13 — A CLOSE CALL

  Chapter 14 — QUARANTINED AND A SWEET LESSON

  Chapter 15 — SURPRISE FROM THE SKY

  Chapter 16 — A SPRING VISIT

  Chapter 17 — SPRING AWAKENING

  Chapter 18 — THE SCHOOL INSPECTOR

  Chapter 19 — THE GOVERNOR AND HIS LADY

  Chapter 20 — SUMMER

  Chapter 21 — SEESAW AND TRICKS

  Chapter 22 — NO PICNIC

  Chapter 23 — YOU HOP LIKE A GRASSHOPPER

  Chapter 24 — BARRED OUT

  Chapter 25 — A FALL IN SUMMER

  Chapter 26 — A SAVAGE ATTACK

  Chapter 27 — NEWS ABOUT GOING HOME

  Chapter 28 — PREPARING FOR HOME

  Chapter 29 — MYSTERY BOX ON TEA HOUSE HILL

  Chapter 30 — ON HER WAY

  Chapter 31 — A SISTER’S CONFESSION

  GLOSSARY OF TERMS

  1

  FAR FROM HOME

  “I don’t belong here; I’m not an orphan,” Clarissa murmured as she fidgeted on the damp concrete steps of the Grenfell orphanage. She eyed the other children playing lallick in the grassy field outside the building. Shouts and laughter rose in the still air while she sat silently, her elbows in her lap, the backs of her hands under her chin. I should be used to this by now, she thought, used to what the school ma’am called a heavy solitude that takes over a person’s mind when she cannot do the things she dreams.

  Clarissa knew she had been sent to the Grenfell Hospital when she was little, and that Dr. Grenfell had operated on her paralyzed legs. She didn’t know why she was sent from the hospital to the orphanage and kept there for almost as long as she could remember. She brushed aside unsettling thoughts and looked towards tall, skinny Cora playing lallick with abandonment. A magical thing it was that anyone could stand on two feet, lift them and run without toppling over. How heavy her own legs felt; how light everyone else’s looked. Running was something Clarissa knew she would do someday. She clenched her warm, full lips tight with determination.

  She picked up the wooden crutches beside her and, grasping the handgrips, leaned against them, her shoulders lifting as the wooden crosspieces slipped under her armpits. She stood up drenched in the glow of this sunny Saturday, one that had slipped away from summer and hidden in the dying leaves of fall, only to jump out like a surprise. She looked towards the bay, its waves rolling gently into St. Anthony Harbour.

  A faint sigh of satisfaction rose in Clarissa’s throat when Peter, tagged “bully-boy” by all the orphanage girls, tripped Cora. Her glare met his grin as she got up panting and rubbing her right knee. She plopped down on the fading grass of the orphanage lawn, and Clarissa called hopefully, “Are you ready to go up Tea House Hill?” They had not been up there all summer. The year before, the girls had sneaked up on the hill twice to play cobby house with seashells and chainies of broken dishes they had found along the beach.

  Cora’s mother, Mrs. Payne, the orphanage cook, was usually too busy to mind where Cora went. Rules were upheld by Missus Frances, the headmistress, but they were enforced with more vengeance by Miss Elizabeth. Once Clarissa was hooked by the younger mistress’s stern, brown eyes, she felt as if she would slide right off her long, thin nose into the wretchedness of her punishment.

  Cora had promised Clarissa that she would go up the hill today, but as soon as the girls came outside after lunch, she skipped off to play lallick. Clarissa sat idling time, tossing a big black marble into the air and catching it on the back of her hand. It was a game she soon wearied of.

  “I’m tired now,” Cora said as she stood up and scuffed her way up the steps. She sat down and opened her mouth wide, drawing in the crisp air for a good breath. She rubbed her tongue over a tooth that was turned and facing her cheek.

  “You’re tired,” Clarissa said crossly. “I should be tired, having to hobble up and down stairs and hills on wooden legs. I wish I had your perfectly good legs.”

  “No – you – wouldn’t,” Cora panted. “Some days they’re too tired; you wouldn’t want my breath either. ’Tis days when it’s heavy and hard to pull up from inside me. You know I’ve been this way ever since I had a bad cold.”

  “Let’s forget about what ails us for now.” Clarissa looked around, and then up at the high windows of the brick orphanage which had almost as many eyes as a spider. Her strong, healthy face broke into a wide grin. “There’s no staff in sight, not even Ilish and Georgia. Let’s go.”

  Cora shrugged. “We’re eleven, old enough not to have to ask to go outside the gates. Playing games is no fun with bullies like Peter around.” She scowled. “I’d like to trip him good. I will yet, even if Miss Elizabeth and Missus Frances do punish me.”

  Clarissa looked towards blond, curly-haired Peter, with his smooth, white face and large, bottle-green eyes. She decided he was nondescript. That was the word Miss Ellis, the school ma�
�am, used for anything ordinary looking. Now he was flopping his elbows at his sides, his hands pinching and pulling up pants that were always drooping like a rag moll’s. He’s so scrawny, she thought, half a bullet could shoot him into the hereafter. She wondered where he got the energy for his acrobatics: hanging upside down, doing cartwheels, scratching his poll with his toe like someone digging for head lice. She turned to Cora and giggled, “He likes you.”

  Cora shuddered as though snails had just crawled into her ears.

  Clarissa laughed. “Come on. Let’s go.” She swung herself along on her crutches. Cora pulled open the black wrought-iron gates and grinned as they clanged shut behind the girls. They were on their way up to Tea House Hill, where Clarissa could look out over the sea and beyond its smoky rim, and imagine the place she had come from, the home to which she longed to return.

  2

  TEA HOUSE HILL AND A

  STRANGE BOX

  The girls passed the few houses along the bottom road of Fox Farm Hill and the hospital Dr. Wilfred Grenfell had built. When they started up Fox Farm Hill, Cora asked anxiously, “Have you got company bread in yer pocket?”

  “You know I don’t believe in fairies,” was Clarissa’s quick retort. An uncertain look crossed her face and she added slowly, “Even if I did believe in them, I know that a bit of bread in a pocket won’t keep them away if they want us.”

  “Never mind then,” said Cora reaching into her pocket. “I’ve got some crumbs of hard tack. I’ll throw them along our path.”

  Clarissa giggled. “Maybe we should be more scared of the Norsemen ghosts Peter boasts about. He may think his ancestors were Norsemen warriors, but all his father ever did was trap rabbits and foxes – and gun kittiwakes.”

  Cora shook her head. “That thing he wears around his neck on a piece of leather – a broken piece of flint, it ’tis. He brags that it came from his grandfather, and long-gone Norsemen have the piece that matches it. He calls it a hag-stone – supposed to be lucky.”

  “He dreamed a story, or read it in that history book Miss Ellis told him he had to read,” Clarissa said scornfully.

  There was still a ways to go up the hill. Clarissa’s arms ached as she balanced herself on her crutches to climb the rocky path up to and past Dr. Grenfell’s castle to the Tea House. Her round cheeks bloomed into blushes like apples ripening whenever she was hurrying on her crutches, her green-flecked brown eyes twinkling under a forehead of dark curls.

  Fallen leaves lay scattered like gold coins among stones in a path spotted on both sides with orange crackerberries on bows of red leaves. Here and there, the cragged noses of cliffs stuck up under the girls’ feet. Brooks sang under crossing boards, their clear water alive in silvery movements. In this peaceful setting, the girls forgot the discordant noises of the orphanage.

  Clarissa stopped to take a little weight on her right toe while she knocked the cap off a mushroom, the kind Missus Frances called a chanterelle. “Here’s something for the fairies,” she said, laughing. “The devil’s bread.”

  Cora looked at her in dismay. “If you touch fairy caps and the fairies see you, they’ll get angry and take yer.”

  Clarissa scoffed. “You can’t go believing stories other people dream. You’ll be frightened to death all your livelong life.”

  The girls reached the Grenfell castle standing in a dell surrounded by trees. Clarissa slid her crutches along the rutted walk and stopped to look in through the long windows of the large, green house with a roof almost as steep as a witch’s hat. Today the windows looked like black sheets of ice. Clarissa moved closer and peered into one window hoping to see Mrs. Grenfell at her desk and her little girl playing with a china doll on the floor. It wasn’t a Children’s Home, not like the one where she and Cora lived. Dr. and Mrs. Grenfell had two boys and a girl, though there was no sign of anyone now.

  Some distant memory of her own family stirred in Clarissa each time she was by this place. The windows set in the tiny room under the peaked roof in the large house seemed familiar and she had a vague memory of sitting by a window in a house smaller than the orphanage. She wanted to be in a smaller place with people who didn’t taunt her, a place where she didn’t have to climb so many stairs. Sometimes she daydreamed about living in the castle with Dr. Grenfell and his lady. Mrs. Grenfell was big and strong and regal looking; on her visits to the orphanage she wore a dolly hat over a mass of fine, brown hair. Clarissa liked Mrs. Grenfell, even though she had an uppity air about her. She liked her because she was willing to give out a measure of kindness whenever she saw fit, and she didn’t treat the children of the orphanage as if they were lowbrow creatures. Her face looked kind most of the time.

  The girls went past the house, past Fox Farm Hill and up towards the Tea House. Cora led the way. Her blue dress and yellow wool sweater, against scarlet autumn leaves, was an image of colour and energy even if her breathing rattled sometimes.

  The wind began to freshen and leaves rustled to the ground. Clarissa watched one leaf flitter at the edge of the others like a butterfly. A snipe’s long t-werps echoed as the bird glided up the hill on a light breeze. The wind fell dead on the land and the snipe dropped to its feet. It looked around as if startled. Then it flew back into the air.

  As Cora clambered up the steep path ahead of her, Clarissa felt as if she were a little rabbit trying to escape the snare of the straight leg brace on her right leg and the short one on her left leg, her toes banging against the uneven and slippery earth. It would be difficult to climb the steep hill, but she wanted to do it before snow filled the path and kept her bound to the low land around the orphanage.

  Clarissa sniffed the tangy forest air, happy to be away from the stale porridge smells of the dingy Home. She stopped climbing to admire a leaf with a dewdrop as bright as a diamond under sunlight. She dipped her finger into the bubble just as Cora called, “What’s yer looking at?” Cora never bothered with dewdrops, so Clarissa didn’t answer. She continued her climb, noticing that the undergrowth drooped like a crinoline gone limp under a faded summer dress. Except for purple asters scattered here and there, summer’s flowers had shrivelled to raggedy muffins, their dull grey heads bending on scrawny necks.

  Cora slowed down and leaned against a mountain holly. She coughed loud and long, stopping just as Clarissa caught up with her. “Look!” She pointed to a spruce tree; its sap had rolled down the bark and stopped to form a brittle mass. The girls looked at each other and shrieked, “Frankgum!”

  Uncle Aubrey, the caretaker at the orphanage, had told the children that frankgum would help their teeth stay strong and keep consumption away. It helped Cora’s coughing. In the spring, when the older boys went to cut trees for fuel, they picked off the sticky lumps of sap that had congealed on balsam fir and spruce trees full of sap. The sap turned into a rubbery chew between their teeth. But this time of the year the frankgum was old. It broke off under the girls’ fingernails and turned cruddy in their mouths. They spat it out, but the taste of the forest lingered on their tongues.

  Clarissa leaned against white, lacy scabs patching a bearded fir and picked off black, brown and green strands of maldow hanging like hair on the trunk.

  “Our dolls won’t be bald if we can get enough of this,” Cora said, her blue eyes shining. She gathered a bunch and quickly pushed it into her pocket.

  Clarissa shook her head. “I don’t mind having a bald doll. I’m using my maldow as her diaper.”

  “Watch out your crutches don’t go through the space between the steps,” Cora cautioned Clarissa when they reached the veranda to the Tea House. Dr. Grenfell had built the cabin lookout for his nursing staff. During warm weather nurses used to stroll up from the hospital to sit on the landing. They could lean, a cup of tea in hand, on the gnarled railing that ran around the front of the Tea House. Now the place looked as if it had been ruined by bad weather or prowlers.

  Before going into the Tea House, Clarissa leaned against a large boulder and gazed out into the
harbour. Here she felt that she was on top of Newfoundland. In the St. Anthony schoolhouse, there was a map of the island: a long neck on a thick body with several short legs hanging loose. St. Anthony was at the head of the long neck. Clarissa imagined sliding down the neck to the body, and into her mother’s lap. Wind tickled her senses as she looked down at the sea and across miles and miles of it sucking at the land between her and her real home. In the distance, long, furry mountains lay against the clear sky like a dark beast between her and the people to whom she belonged. She visualized a table full of children. She could almost hear their chorus of laughter, the sounds of spoons against porcelain plates. Here in St. Anthony she wasn’t someone’s child or sister. A faint memory of her mother often tickled her mind like a feather. She felt her mother tremble against her as she quickly dressed her for the journey away from home. When she tried to tighten her hold on the memory, it drifted away.

  She stretched her hand and covered the whole place: a toy village with almost five hundred people. There was the church with a steeple, and the mission school, with an upstairs library, down the road from the orphanage. Farther up were the houses and stages of the better-off fishermen and Merchant Moore’s premises. Next to these were the cabins of people who worked for the merchant.

  From the top of Tea House Hill, Clarissa saw the orphanage as a tiny box, the houses and the merchant’s premises tidy. She couldn’t see – behind the decent houses – the rotting boards in the straggle of unpainted, black shacks where the poor lived off their own faces or in the merchant’s ear. From the Tea House, the whole place sat like a pretty photograph, without the chatter of children and grownups, the howling of dogs and the buzz of logs being sawed.