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A Christmas Cake in Four Quarters
The Four Quarters of the Cake: England
The Four Quarters of the Cake: England
The first tale in A Christmas Cake in Four Quarters, “Christmas Day in England” begins with a description of the Christmas of the narrator of the book and of the many children with which she is spending Christmas and relating these tales to (including the Jack and George characters most certainly modelled after Lady Barker’s own sons). The English Christmas of the narration story is likely largely influenced by the Christmases spent in England after Lady Barker and Frederick’s Broome’s return from New Zealand, given the presence and ages of Jack and George. However Lady Barker had long since written journals and correspondence of her life adventures, and was no stranger to being asked for tales by children so (like the other tales in the book) it is not a straightforward account of any one particular Christmas but rather an amalgamation of her English Christmas experiences.59 After setting the scene from which the rest of the book is to be narrated, Lady Barker tells a ghost story set in an English castle, most certainly included for the fanciful desires of her son Jack (as requested as well by the fictional Jack in the book itself) for the ghostly and grim.
Interestingly this is the only story the narrator character tells to the children, which is not a tale of a Christmas past. The “English Christmas” of the section’s title is instead that of the narration story from which the four tales are told. However each of the later tales also contain a story within a story, though they differ in that they are not told from the perspective of the storyteller character (who is given the name “Mrs. Owen” in the book, but who is clearly the representation of Lady Barker herself); so it is only truly different in the content of the section in that the English Christmas is included throughout the book as part of the narration. Structurally however it differs from the way the other three quarters are arranged in the book as a whole. Jamaica, India, and New Zealand are all given their tales in the chronological order that the real Lady Barker and the fictional Mrs. Owen lived in them, however the tale of the English Christmas from which all the other tales are told would have chronologically gone last. This gives the reader a sense that the narrator (and indeed, Lady Barker herself) is recalling poignant and important memories from her life, as these are the ones that have stayed with her. Particularly the artistic license that Lady Barker uses by combining events of her travels and life into the one day she describes in each tale suggests that the details she includes are ones that are of particular interest or significance to her memory that these are the ones she remembers and chooses to share with her children and the reader.