Article 15: “You should’ve drowned that thing in the piss pot!”:A Memoir about my Grandmother
Jill Burton
When she thinks back on her childhood and my grandmother utters those words sometimes, she laughs, a dry hollow laugh, like the wind blowing through a birch tree in the dead of winter.
Sometimes she’s silent and it takes my brain a few seconds to unravel the actual words and put them into context. I could never imagine her feeling so unloved.
Her Aunt had also spoken the same words whenever she told the story about her childhood and she repeated those words so many times that she couldn’t forget them even if she tried. She long ago had reached the bitter realization that she wasn’t wanted even as a young child.
My grandmother’s family was poor generation by generation, and she became a burden the moment she was born, another useless mouth to fed.
She never told us the whole story of her childhood, she kept quiet about her childhood, but whenever she revealed just a little about her life, my heart would ache with the sadness I could feel in her voice.
She said they should have drowned her in the piss pot many many years ago so that she wouldn’t have to suffer the life she was destined to live.
Her life had always been hard, so hard, she never seemed to get a break.
A child servant at the age of nine, given away to a surrogate family, one less burden for her family to bare.
No time for fun, no chance for innocence.
Up before the sun she had to fetch the water, light the fire, start the chores.
Some days, once the fire was going she would take a minute to sit by the stove and warm her frigid hands, just a minute, just to get the feeling back, if breakfast isn’t ready soon there would be hell to pay.
The surrogate family promised they would take her in and send her to school, but the closest she ever saw of a school was walking past the school building, on her away to the grocery store to fetch the groceries. She would see the other children heading into the school and she would envy them, did they know how lucky they were?
Sometimes while I sat with her, she would suddenly break the silence, the words would reach me like they were always there and I’m only just hearing them now.
“I wanted to go to school, I wanted to learn to read and write.”
A distant memory swims to the surface and frees itself from its restraint.
I could never understand her struggles.
Her voice was hard and she never cracked a smile, her eyes momentarily unfocused, lost in the past.
Her hands she always kept them busy, I would watch them as she spoke, usually she was knitting or sewing something she could sell for a little extra money, her pension was never enough to pay all the bills. Her hands were like an old catcher’s mitt, big and deep with her crooked knuckles, but things were held firmly there.
Her hands were worn out with calluses, wrinkles, sunspots and blood veins always looking older than her age, but they were so soft that I wanted to touch them, many years of work wearing away any roughness.
I wanted to touch those worn out hands, to feel their hardships and warmth, but she was not one to hug or hold us with her arms. I don’t remember if I ever heard her say “I love you” but I felt it, it was in the time we spent together, in the homemade bread she baked, in the soft sweaters she knitted and in the sad stories she told with no laughter.
Years later as a grandmother those childhood memories still haunted her.
I hear her say “I am coming and will do it.”
She was such a small girl, no more than 60 lbs soaking wet, yet she did the work of grown men. I never understood how that surrogate family could make her do all of that work when they had two grown sons who that did nothing, they were useless.
Cleaning the whole family’s dirty clothes with her small hands, mopping the floors, cleaving the wood, catching the fish, preparing the meals, how could she have time to go to school.
Those were the days when she wished they had drowned her in the piss pot.
Let me die so I won’t have to suffer from watching those other children go to school.
Then there were the days when I came home from school and she would be singing, her voice was soft and hard at the same time, never beautiful but I loved to hear her sing.
I didn’t know about the songs she was singing, I couldn’t follow the words but I could tell from her face she was singing because she was happy that I had an opportunity to go to school, which she had wished for herself but she was denied.
I listened silently, afraid that I would break the spell and jar her back to reality.
There was joy there that was more poignant because of the sadness that was there when she didn’t sing.
Some day when I come back from school there would be a silence where my grandma’s singing used to be.
She’s gone now, not from my heart or my memories, but I will never hear her singing again or hear her laughter even though it was not genuine.
When I think of my grandma, I always remember one of the few stories she had told me about her time in that house, it always makes me sad, it obviously hurt her deeply to remember it so many years later.
She was sent to do the shopping, as usual she set out for the long walk to the store, given a list and just enough money.
I was told by the shop owner many years later.
The shop keeper felt sorry for the little girl who always took this long walk, the pitiful child, hauling back groceries alone. The woman that ran the shop gave my grandmother an orange, it seemed so insignificant to think about now, but to her it meant so much. In a house where even the dog was fed before her, she could never dream of something like an orange which was just given to her, she placed it carefully in with the groceries.
She hurried back to the house, she was going to save her orange, savour it, make it last. She should have hidden it, but she was naïve to think that orange was hers to have. When the woman at the house saw the orange she beat my grandmother, she said she must have stolen it, or stolen the money to buy it. She had to return to the store and give it back. The woman that ran the shop took the orange back for fear my grandmother would receive more beatings.
I could imagine this young girl, no one to protect her, to care for her, to love her and this first act of kindness from a stranger almost destroyed her, forever tainted.
Two and a half years she worked hard, every day, sunup to sundown. She never knew if she would ever see her family again. Then one day a boat arrived on the shore, just a small boat, but she recognised it right way, her brother had come for her. They had heard back in her tiny hometown that she never was sent to school; she never had the opportunities they that promised her.
She was excited to go back home, and she ran up to the house to gather her belongings and get away from that house, ready to never look back.
She ran towards the shore and suddenly out on the step Mr. Short, the man of the house bellowed out that she wasn’t going anywhere, she had a pair of boots on her feet that she hadn’t worked off yet.
Without a moment pause she pulled the boots off and threw them for all she as worth at the house “you can keep your boots” and ran barefoot down the shore and into the boat, and true to her word she never returned to that house.
I wish I could say after all this her life was easy, but it was far from it, she never did see the inside of a school, she died illiterate, she has few opportunities and hard manual labour was all she ever knew.
I always wished I had heard all the stories of her childhood, the struggles that she overcame to provide for her family, but I never asked. I was afraid to upset her, she was so strong and I couldn’t ask her to relive a time when she was helpless and afraid.
I would just sit and listen to her sing or watch her bake, enjoying the warmth that filled the room when she was in it. I now wish I had asked more questions, encouraged her to tell more stories, now it’s too late to ask her about her childhood.
Authors Bio: Jill Burton’s family originally from Newfoundland, but she was born and raised in Thompson Manitoba and has lived here for the majority of her life. She is a mother of two children as well as a full-time student at UCN studying to become a teacher. She enjoys reading various types of literature and is excited to have this opportunity to try my hand at writing this short story about her grandmother, who grew up in Newfoundland. Unfortunately, as a young child she was given to another family. The family said my grandmother could work for them and in exchange they would send her to school. She never spent a single day of her life in school and when she died in her 80’s she was illiterate. She taught herself to knit and sew and provided for her family by running a boarding house out of her home, as well as cooking and baking for people in the community, sewing quilts, knitting mittens and sweaters, picking, and selling berries and jams. She was a breast cancer survivor and dealt with the death of two husbands as well as one son. So, Jill wrote about her grandmother’s childhood story to dedicate to her.
Instructor Remarks: Jill Burton is currently taking the first-year literature course online. Major Works and Authors of the 20th Century. It is a full year course. When we studied poetry, she was inspired by the poets we studied in this course. She tried her hand in poem writing and here is her creative piece. It would have been a long story about her grandmother, if she wrote in prose form, however, she has applied the poetic techniques she learned from this course to her poem about her grandmother. Congratulations Jill and you have done a good job!—Dr. Ying Kong.