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Poetical extravagance over "pearly dew and daybreak" does not ring true when that most infernal of inventions, the alarm clock, wrenches you from sleep, rips a startled heart from your middle and tosses it on to an angry tongue, to make ugly splutterings not complimentary to the new morning; down upon you spills cold shiveriness -- a new day's responsibilities have come.
Emily Carr,The House of All Sorts, Oxford University Press, Toronto, 1944, p. 22.
PLACE: Her bedroom.
TIME: Early morning, around 1920.
CIRCUMSTANCE: Having to wake up and start her "landlady" duties.
The castor on each of the table-legs had a different screech, all four together a terrible quartette with the slap, slap of Gran's carpet slippers marking time.
Emily Carr, The House of All Sorts, Oxford University Press, Toronto, 1944, p. 98.
PLACE: Her rooming house in Victoria.
TIME: 1920 - 1930
CIRCUMSTANCE: One of her tenants, a Granny, rolling her sick grandchild back and forth across the room.
Sometimes a word or two in Mrs. Pillcrest's poems jingled. More occasionally a couple of words made sense. They flowed from her lips in a sing-song gurgle, spinning like pennies, and slapping down dead.
Emily Carr, The House of All Sorts, Oxford University Press, Toronto, 1944, p. 110.
PLACE: One of the flats in her rooming house, Victoria.
TIME: Around 1920 - 1930.
CIRCUMSTANCE: A poetical tenant.
He slumped into the biggest chair in the flat, and allowed the gravy of trickling poems to soothe his training-camp and domestic friction -- as stroking soothes a cat.
Emily Carr, The House of All Sorts, Oxford University Press, Toronto, 1944, p. 112.
PLACE: One of the suites in her rooming house.
TIME: Around 1920 - 1930
CIRCUMSTANCE: An army man tenant reacting to his poetical wife.
I hate pianos, tenants' pianos. They can make a landlady suffer so hideously. Lumbering tanks awaiting the touch (often unskilled) that will make them spill horrible noise, spitting it through their black and white teeth. First the dreadful bump, bump of arrival, cruel gasps of men with backs bent -- bruised and nicked woodwork -- screech of rollered push-boards. Radios were a new invention then but it seemed every transient lugged around an old tin kettle of a piano.
Emily Carr, The House of All Sorts, Oxford University Press, Toronto, 1944, p. 144.
PLACE: Her rooming house.
TIME: Around 1920 to 1930
CIRCUMSTANCE: Things she had to put up with while being a landlady.
"Yi ... Yi...eee... ee," wailed the violin underneath us.
I sat at my easel and began to paint. Wail, wail, wail! Every wail wound me tighter. I was an eight-day clock, overwound, taut - the key would not give another turn!
Emily Carr, The House of All Sorts, Oxford University Press, Toronto, 1944, p. 146 - 147.
PLACE: Her rooming house in Victoria.
TIME: 1920 - 1930
CIRCUMSTANCE: Her reaction to a tenant learning to play the violin.
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