Late afternoon, if Mother was still in the house, the smartly dressed girls would
be brought down about four or four thirty to see her, just before tea time. ‘If we
weren’t good, we didn’t get to see Mother’, Mary later told one historian. ‘That
was the greatest punishment you could have given us. ... She was our God; she
was everything to us.’ But, despite the somewhat formal relationship that
Emmeline had with her adopted daughters, when she returned from a trip the
girls would be bursting with joy to see her again and she was delighted to see
them. ‘And yet I can’t remember her ever cuddling or kissing us’, Mary said,
who was regarded as Emmeline’s favourite. ‘She never took us on her knee or
cuddled us.’^21
Kathleen remembered too that Miss Pine ‘never cuddled us and was always
careful never to show favouritism to anyone of us. I did not realise it at the
time, but Miss Pine was always on my side – because I was always being spanked
for the others she told me.’ Kathleen had been told that she was the eldest, and
so if anything went wrong, she always said she did it.^22 Such an apparent lack of
demonstrative affection by both Emmeline and Catherine Pine, a typically
Victorian trait, does not indicate that the girls were not loved or cared for. In
particular, Kathleen remembered how Auntie Kate would tuck them up in bed
at night, giving each a kiss, hear them say their prayers and, in winter, wrap
their feet in warm cloths. Early in the New Year of 1921, when Emmeline and
Catherine Pine were in New York, Miss Pine sent Kathleen a postcard of the
Statue of Liberty in New York Harbour. ‘My darling Kathleen’, the warm
greeting read. ‘We send lots of kisses & hope you are well. This statue at night
has a bright light in the torch to show the ships out at sea where they are, like
your lighthouse. Your loving Auntie Kate.’^23 In Kathleen’s view, although
Auntie Kate appeared to be strict, she was ‘in fact very lenient’ with her
charges. She remembered her with affection as the person who taught the girls
to read and write, introducing them to the Peter Rabbit series of books by
Beatrix Potter.^24
By early 1921, when Emmeline was on another tour, accompanied this time
by Catherine Pine, the little girls, who rarely stayed in one place more than
three months, were living with a Mrs. Goodman on a farm in Esquimalt, near
Victoria. Their French governess was also with them. When the girls had first
arrived at the farm, in November 1920, Emmeline had given Kathleen a doll for
her birthday, and Auntie Kate a doll’s pram. Kathleen thought the pram was
‘wonderful because I was wheeled around in it and let the others be wheeled’.
However, she hated the doll which was broken, the very same day, much to
Emmeline’s anger, when it was dropped on the stairs. Emmeline, who had never
been in favour of formal schooling for her own daughters when they were
young, fearing that it would crush originality, was of much the same view now
and was paying Mrs. Goodman, a widow with a small son, to teach the three
girls. ‘I’m afraid we were not very good scholars’, recollected Kathleen. ‘We used
to go and hide in the hayloft and have one of us down below saying she could
not find us – and that ended our lessons.’ Emmeline had hoped that the French
LECTURER IN NORTH AMERICA