Canadian Artists Bundle. Kate Braid

Чтение книги онлайн.

      The Sanatorium was a hospital mainly for people with tuberculosis but there was the occasional patient, like Emily, whose complaint was entered in the hospitals “Doom Book” as “hysteria.” This was a form of illness Emily Carr_commonly diagnosed for women at the time. It was thought to be the result of women’s emotional nature and their denial of their “God-given” and socially ordained roles as sexual beings and mothers. Today, such symptoms would be recognized as a response – by both men and women – to unendurable stress. The Sanatorium, or San as it was called, was run by Dr. Jane Walker, who was experimenting with open-air treatment for tuberculosis.

      Emily arrived in the middle of a snowstorm. The front wall of her room was open from the ceiling to a foot above the floor. Above her bed, small windows opened into a corridor that was all open windows. As the wind roared through, a nurse shook the snow off the bedspread before her Canadian patient could crawl, shivering, into bed.

      The doctors’ prescription was for complete rest and freedom from worry for one year. Emily could do some sketching but no painting. Any emotional stimulation, they said, was harmful, so tears as well as laughter were discouraged. According to Emily, “Even thinking was prohibited.” Mostly, she stayed in bed and ate. Occasionally she was allowed to draw cartoons and write silly rhymes to pass the time and to get her revenge on nurses she didn’t like. “I was not always polite,” she remembered later.

      Her one joy was that she was allowed to raise birds. The beautiful songs of some English birds, she thought, were the only thing England had that Canada did not. Her plan was to take songbirds back to Canada with her and release their offspring in the wild. Today, people could tell her such experiments don’t usually work, but at the time, Emily thought it was a splendid idea.

      When spring came she stole several nests, eggs and all, from nearby bushes. Her books said that if her hand with its juicy worms was the first thing the young birds saw, they would accept her as their mother.

      When her nestlings hatched, she poked food into their mouths every two hours with a tiny pair of pincers. Other patients helped her. After their walks they left small offerings of ants and grubs, beetles and worms on Emily’s windowsill. Kitchen maids donated rhubarb and cabbage leaves that, when laid on the grass, attracted snails and other bird treats. She was christened “Birdmammy” by a doctor who found her asleep one day with five baby bullfinches cuddled under her chin. When they began to fly, the birds were put into a large aviary in the yard.

      Emily’s birds became the San darlings. If a patient was feeling bad, the nurse would ask Emily to, “Lend the soldiers!” and head off with a cage full of birds to cheer the sad one.

      Today, some would criticize her for capturing and raising wild birds, but these small creatures and their songs were the single thing that brought her – and many others in the hospital – joy. “But for birds,” Emily said later, “I doubt I could have stood it.”

      All her life she kept large numbers of animals – wild and domesticated – as a way of connecting to nature. They were also an outlet for her devotion. Emily was never a mother but she had a strong maternal instinct. If she couldn’t have her own babies, she would have these wild ones who quietly loved her and didn’t require her to sacrifice her art.