Other formats

    Adobe Portable Document Format file (facsimile images)   TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

A Christmas Cake in Four Quarters

The Four Quarters of the Cake: Jamaica

The Four Quarters of the Cake: Jamaica

The story of “A Christmas Day in Jamaica” is the second section of the Christmas cake and begins an overarching timeline from which the three non-English Christmas are related sequentially in the order in which Lady Barker lived in the countries she describes. “A Christmas Day in Jamaica” is told from the perspective of the storyteller Mrs. Owen as a young girl, and indeed she describes it as “the first Christmas Day which I could recollect spending in Jamaica” since she and her sister had “been in England, away from our dear parents for many years, ever since we were little children in fact, both for health and education” (103), as was the case of course in Lady Barker’s own life. Aspects of the Christmas described in the story can be matched to events in Lady Barker’s own life, such as the visit of her cousin, or her comment “alas! We little knew how soon we should be scattered, never to meet again on Christmas Day” (116) both of which refer to a Christmas spent with her family in Jamaica in 1848, before world travels and deaths caused separations from the happy memories of the family gathering described in the tale.60

The Jamaican Christmas is unique in this collection in that it is the only tale told from Lady Barker’s youth – the English, Indian, and New Zealand Christmases all take place after she is grown and married. The Jamaican Christmas is the only story to include her parents and sister, and the cheerful and fondly told recollections of her mother, father, and sister become poignantly tinged with a sadness when read with the knowledge that she spent so little time with her family altogether in her life. Nor is everything in the tale cheerful and bright - in keeping with the narrative structure of the other stories of the book, “A Christmas Day in Jamaica” also includes a tale within a tale, of which a terribly sad tale of the drowning of small children is told (142-157). Such a sad tale is this that even the narration breaks up, in another unique aspect of the Jamaican Christmas section, to include a story told in the English setting of the connecting narration which is ostensibly written by Lady Barker’s son George – “copied word for word from the MS. of a seven years old author, with only a few corrections of the phonetic spelling” notes the text (137). This brief interlude adds an element of whimsy before the darker tale. The inclusion of such sad and serious stories as that of the deaths of young children is referential to the many deaths and hardships that Lady Barker faced in her own life up to the writing of this book, from the deaths of family members, to the loss of several of her own children, to the death of her first husband. Jamaica would in particular have a sad bearing on Lady Barker’s mind -both her childhood companion and beloved sister Dora and her father had died in Jamaica not long before the writing of A Christmas Cake in Four Quarters.61 The truthful though dark subject matter is also in keeping with her belief that children both desired and were capable reading stories that were truthful, even if these truths were not light-hearted in content.62