Chapter 9: Margaret Cottage

Tales of Treselda Cottage (Part 9)

Margaret Cottage.

Margaret Cottage, the old family house that was presided over by Sophia Moreira, Ava's great-grandmother, was long gone. Margaret, after who the house was named, remembered a thatched version of it. Over the years, roof tiles replaced the thatch. And then, much later, after Sophia's time, it was torn down to make way for a new house, when Margaret's younger brother Terrence took over the property on his return from Africa. Margaret had moved to Treselda Cottage then. A part of Margaret had gone with the old house, literally, as the name board, "Margaret Cottage" was removed and a new one, "Lorraine's Nest" came up in its place.

Ava had visited Lorraine's Nest several times with Mama. It was considered a "grand" house, modern for the times, though it was rather modest, looking back now. It was single storeyed, with a flat concrete roof and sunshades, and had little concrete fins surrounding the windows. Above each window were small ventilators, openings at ceiling level that were filled in with concrete filigree work, specially designed with the alphabets "LN", for Lorraine's Nest. The house was powder blue outside, with the trims, the sunshades, the window fins, and ventilator filigree work painted white. 

One entered a small, square verandah enclosed with a grill to access a modest foyer space through a very large door. The foyer led to a room on the left and the living hall straight ahead. The hall was large, and was painted light green. It was rather fussily done up, compared to Margaret Cottage, with a carpet laid across the light grey mosaic floor in the sitting area, holding oversized, plush velvet sofas with embroidered chair backs, filled with overlapping tassled cushions of different sizes. Ava loved sinking into them, but noticed that Mama always sat at the edge of a sofa, bolt upright. Uncle Terrence held forth from a large single-seater across the door. Behind him on the wall, there were three small wooden birds of differing sizes, taking flight. They were arranged in order from big to small, in a diagonal line upwards and when seen at a certain angle from the sofa opposite, seemed to fly out of Uncle Terrence's head. Whenever Ava pictured the four and twenty blackbirds in the rhyme "Sing a song of sixpence", it was these birds that she saw, their wood dark, almost black against the pale green wall. Uncle Terrence was, to her, like the King in the rhyme, counting out his money. Aunty Cecily, his wife, served juice in tiny, round glasses with slices of cake or other nibbles from Mobby Bakery. Ava could easily picture her as the Queen in the parlour, eating bread and honey. Their daughter Lorraine, after who the house was named, much older than Ava, was accomplished on the piano, playing for guests at her father's behest. 

Ava liked spending time in the ornamental garden that fronted the house while Margaret visited her brother and family. There were ceramic gnomes among the plants, and two lions perched on the gate posts, staring out of ceramic eyes. The garden had a profusion of strange plants and flowers, along with the usual crotons and shoe-flowers seen in abundance in other compounds. Ava was most intrigued by the Monkey-tail plants, with long magenta flowers, drooping down from amidst large leaves, like furry monkeys had been rummaging among the leaves and left their tails behind. They matched the curling Cockscombs that stood proudly above the hedges in the same colour and velvety texture. Like cocks had left their combs behind in the garden of lost tails and combs, that seemed to perpetually carry an air of loss. 

The ornamental garden was quite different from the old tree-filled front yard of Margaret Cottage. Ava had not seen it, and had only heard of Ammachi and seen old photographs of her, but her eldest brother Conrad had vivid memories of the house and the grand old lady who presided over it, though he was very small at the time. He would spend hours on the broad verandah, overlooking the well and the trees in the yard. Inside, the house was dark. At six in the evening, the Angelus bells would peal from Church. Everyone had to be home in time for the Angelus, and the children would abandon their games and hurry in, to gather in the hall, under the Sacred Heart's picture. Ammachi led the prayers in English for her Anglicised family, though she herself had learnt them in Tamil and Latin, and read her own night prayers from a Tamil prayer book. There were no Malayalm printed versions of prayers at the time. Mass was sung in Latin in churches. Later, possibly with the advent of convents and orders of priesthood, families got prized copies of English prayer books that they kept on the wall-mounted altars under the Sacred Heart's picture, along with their rosaries. The Angelus was more widely recited than the Rosary. The children would drone automatically and rythmically, responding to Ammachi's lead, "The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary, and she conceived of the Holy Ghost... Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it done unto me according to thy word... And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us...Pray for us, O Holy Mother of God, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ", interspersed with the Hail Mary.

Sharp shadows would flit across the walls from the ranthals, glass lanterns that were lit up as darkness fell. Children found these shadows frightening as they took on strange shapes that darted and ducked in the flickering candle light. When Ammachi said "Let Us Pray", it signalled the end of the Angelus, and the drone would give way to a more eager tone, as the children would perk up, reciting the closing prayer with more gusto: "Pour forth, we beseech Thee, O Lord, Thy grace into our hearts; that, we, to whom the Incarnation of Christ, Thy Son, was made known by the message of an angel, may by His passion and cross be brought to the glory of His resurrection. Through the same Christ our Lord, Amen". After the Angelus, the children would gather around the table, under the shadows, for bread and butter washed down with hot milk. Dinner was much later and was usually kanji and payar, known to them as porridge and beans. 

Conrad, small as he was at the time, remembered one incident at Margaret Cottage quite vivdly. It was around dinner time when the shadows from the ranthals were at their mesmerising best, staging an act of their own. Margaret's younger brother Gerald, Conrad and Ava's grand-uncle, had been married for a short while then, to Josephine. Gerald was working on the estates in Africa with his eldest brother Leonard, and had come down to Trivandrum to marry Josephine. That night, the newly married couple must have had a tiff of some sort. The children heard a commotion near the well and saw the adults rushing out of the house. Conrad, scared as he was of the shadows in the house, followed them, only to freeze at the sight by the well. Aunty Jesso was standing precariously on the well wall, in a long white dress, her waist-length hair let loose. She was threatening to jump in. That image of his grand-aunt at the edge of the well, towering above them all, her white clothing almost phosphorescent in the moonlight, seared itself into the little boy's memory of the old house, probably as a more dramatic and vivid version of the original scene. He remembered that Uncle Gerald's pleas to his wife to get down from the wall were countered with her threats to jump in then and there. The pleas of others too were not heeded. It was Ammachi finally, who had to walk to the well and reach out a firm hand to her daughter-in-law to get her down from its wall. She took her in a firm embrace back into the house, ignoring her son who followed sheepishly in their wake. 

Conrad and Ava would meet Uncle Gerald and Aunty Jesso much later in life, when they returned from Africa for good. They had gone on to have a long and happy married life together. Aunty Jesso always had a ready laugh and seemed, to all purposes, a very practical lady, not given to perching on well walls. Uncle Gerald joked with the family that he made sure there were no wells in the vicinity of wherever they lived.

Although these vivid scenes defined Margaret Cottage for Conrad and Ava, it was always an auditory cue that took Ava straight back in time to the house she had never seen and to an Ammachi she could picture clearly from old, faded photographs. It was a hymn, connected to a lost practice of family members gathering together at dusk, to join in prayer. "The Bells of the Angelus calleth to pray / In sweet tones announcing the sacred Ave / Ave, Ave, Ave Maria...". She would have a lump in her throat, as she pictured her great-grandmother in front of the thatched house, and the line of women who followed, one generation to the next, from Sophie to Margaret; from Margaret to Yvette; from Yvette to her.

(To be continued...)