Christobel

Christobel Part 3

Chapter 3: the Journal

24th July, 1895

The day before yesterday I decided to begin keeping a journal. So yesterday I went to Benningfield's the Stationers and bought a nice notebook with a beautiful marble-paper cover, and a new pen and some brown ink, and here goes! I think I might illuminate it with watercolours, to brighten it up, because I do like to do my painting too. Mrs Ackeroyd at school opined that I had quite a talent for it, which was encouraging. I would rather like to make a career as an artist, but it's a very difficult thing for a woman (yes, I'm nearly a woman!) to gain employment doing so. I'm expected to "marry well", to a respectable gentleman like a doctor or lawyer or some such, and keep a good home and provide lots of children, and not have aspirations to earn a living, like a man. But I somehow don't see that as my destiny. I suppose it's the influence of Mother's radical "Suffragist" campaigning.

Mother thinks it an excellent idea that I keep a diary. It will be something to hand down to my children and descendants, she says; the words of Christobel Farley preserved for posterity! Well, perhaps, but I'm probably destined for a very dull, unremarkable life. I don't have Mother's political zeal. Yes, I share her religious faith and want to work for the common good, for humanity, but doing what? Unless I find something really notable to do, I can't see the people coming after me, my grandchildren, or their grandchildren, being really very interested in my trivial, plodding life.

But I'll keep the journal, all the same. It will be an enjoyable thing to do, at least. I perhaps won't write every day; won't make it a relentless, day-by-day record of the minutia of daily living here in sleepy, rather dull Sleaford. I don't think that would be endlessly fascinating for the reader! So I'll write just as and when events occur which I deem worthy of note, or of expressing an opinion about.

So here goes!

Well, that's the end of my school days. I am no longer a scholar! I finished at Ackworth Quaker School last Friday when the term ended, and Father, because he still doesn't think I'm grown-up enough at the grand old age of 16 to travel alone, brought me back from Yorkshire on the train. One can travel all the way from Ackworth to Sleaford now that the railway connects the two places, although you do have to change at Doncaster and then again at Newark. But things are so modern nowadays. You can travel from anywhere to almost anywhere else in England (and a lot of places in Scotland and Wales too, they say) on the railway now.

Father thinks that in the future, the railway will probably go out of fashion because many people will have the new "horseless carriages" which are being developed. I don't know about that, really. I believe they are very much slower than locomotives, for one thing, because they have to be preceded by a man waving a red warning flag, so Father says. It would take a very long time to get anywhere, I think!

'No, you're wrong there, Great-Great-Gran,' Chris said to the faded, sepia-tinted pages lying in his lap. 'Your story will be fascinating, I'm sure.'

'Yes, it will', Frieda agreed. 'Because it is from so long ago, now. Over one hundred years. And it is also interesting for me because it is a foreign person speaking, which adds an extra dimension.'

'Yeah, and also it's interesting because it's from the time before that dreadful first war when, I suppose, Britain and Germany were completely at peace.'

'Mm; it certainly puts a different aspect on things when you consider that, doesn't it? In fact, the German and British royal families were related, of course. Queen Victoria had a German mother, Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. And then she married Prince Albert of, er, Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, I think it was. So yes, there was relative peace in Europe because most of their children married into European families, several of them German.'