Mary Davis was Aunt Poll, but this did not make me feel better.

I sat in the shed after school each day, and read from Chapter I called ‘The Prayerless Home’ to Chapter XXVIII called ‘Rest for the Weary’. I looked at the engravings of Hannah accepting a flower, saying grace before the meagre meal, lost in the snow-storm, restored to her father. I read of the death-bed of Mrs. Owen, the aged Christian; of the miserly Miss Brownrig and the fireless hearth; of tender compassion and sweet peace the world knoweth not.

It was all very strange; I did not understand how the life I read about fitted into mine. I worried that we did not say grace at meals; that we did not go to church. I comforted myself that at least I was christened, even if it was as a Roman Catholic; that once, until a boy and a bulldog chased me home, I went to the Methodist Sunday School in George Street.

But that was not enough.

I asked Nan if I could say grace before we ate; did so, in a pious voice I did not recognize. I pinned a note to my pillow reminding myself that there were prayers to be said when I awoke. I made a list of all my past ages, and tried to recall my states of grace. I felt that my life was but a dream: saw myself reclining with God on a shirred cloud watching another who lived in Rose Street perform the pantomime of school and home. I read the Catholic books that were my father’s, gazed at the picture of the Virgin — but I could not understand, feared that books and pictures were tainted with popery. On Sundays I copied verses from the Bible that was my grandfather’s, gazed at the lemon-drop Dianas — felt bored, thought I must be truly damned.

I was happiest with my late-nineteenth-century books. I found others as well as Hannah in the shed. My favourites were The Family Friend of 1870, and Home Words for Heart and Hearth. I became immersed in an Anglicized world of curtsies and village smithies, bairnies and little maids. Mention of the great wilderness that was London, waifs and strays, scanty pittances and wretched habitations could not dispel the glamour of that bygone age.

While the sun beat on the iron roof and Nan called me to collect manure in the lane, I was with those others hastening homeward through foggy streets from the Hand and Heart Christmas dinner. I put out crumbs for the sparrows in the snow-storm, skated with Polly and little Amy on the pond. I took the excursion train westward to dear old Wales, and climbed to the top of Snowdon. I rested under the hawthorn’s shade, and watched the flowery swathes yield to the victorious scythe. I saw the bosom of the deep caress the Eddystone lighthouse; toasted muffins before the fire and heard dear pussy purring low.

I was familiar with England’s martyr bishops and the martyrdom of Polycarp, with the Temperance Question and the doctrine of the Trinity, with Flora McDonald and the stately homes of England. I read pages entitled: ‘The Bible Mine Searched’, ‘Scripture Questions’, and ‘Soul Food’; stories called: ‘ “Don’t Tell!” or, The Factory Girl’s Secret’, ‘Wise Words for the Wedded’, and ‘The Mother’s Vow’.