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The Letters of Katherine Mansfield: Volume I

May 1918

May 1918

The Old'Un says: she has been working for this hotel these three years now. “When they get busy I go out to kitchen, but while it's quiet like, I keeps upstairs. Missus says it do be wunnerful the way I climb upstairs at my age. I'm sixty-eight gone—and my husband, he's seventy-eight. We've had eight children, but they're all away and scattered, except my youngest darter. She died when she was 25 and left a baby eight months old. So I took her and she has been my little maidy ever since then. I say sometimes she do seem the only child I ever had, the others are so away and scattered—two in Wales, two in Canada, one is a parish nurse in London, and they're all married. I have two sisters living here, they are both up and above me in years—one is 78 and one is 74, but they are two spry maidens with it all. Then my husband's brother—he's eighty-four, but he still works in garden and used to clean the lamps before this awful war. I've never had an illness except once: I had a fall in my garden and was under doctor in hospital for eight months. He said: ‘You've hurt your kidney and it's floating, but we can't do anything, for there's no fat to you, and you'll not work again.’ ‘Well,’ I told him, ‘I don't know where it has floated to, but I must work. I love work. I shan't be idle till I come to churchyard (and then my old husband says I will be getting up to tend my own flowers).’ And that's three years since. My darter from Canada sent me a parcel the other week—lard and currants and some tea they'd grown themselves. Rare beautiful flavour it had, too, so fresh and all. She's got a handsome little lad, but he can't walk. He's got infantile paralysis—like all the children get out there….”