Daughters of the Late Colonel
The week after was one of the busiest weeks of their lives.
Katherine Mansfield’s 1920 short story, reprinted in The Garden Party and other stories, was written when she was in her early 30s (she died at the age of just 34). But this masterpiece is full of such wise tenderness, such empathy, that you feel it must have written by someone much older.
Mansfield presents us with Josephine and Constantia, and the immediate aftermath of the death of their hectoring, bullying father, Colonel Pinner, presumably in their late middle years. Despite their age, they are still merely child-like ‘daughters’, infantilised even in the nicknames ‘Jug’ and ‘Con’. We see them in their house only, as if trapped in an airless prison; late in the story they panic when the sound of a barrel-organ on the street comes into the room before they realise their father isn’t there any more to object. Constantia is like a 6 year-old, thinking of the mouse she sees which might be hungry:
A spasm of pity squeezed her heart. Poor little thing! She wished she’d left a tiny piece of biscuit on the dressing table. It was awful to think of it not finding anything. What would it do?
Approaching a set of drawers in their father’s room she pleads to her sister for them to be ‘weak for once in our lives’ and then
she did one of those amazingly bold things that she’d done about twice before in their lives: she marched over to the wardrobe, turned the key and took it out of the lock.
Indeed little in this story is going to be opened up.
Though (like the previous story in this series, A Manual for Cleaning Women) this is ostensibly about grief, the rawness of that emotion is pushed well below the surface for the most part as the sisters go through the socially-expected rituals: the opening sentence sets the tone. The story is often touchingly funny, such as in Con’s imagining of her father’s watch being transported to Ceylon, to their brother Benny, in a cardboard corset-box.
Other characters are brilliantly and lightly sketched: their nephew Cyril, pretentious Nurse Andrews, the smooth clergyman Mr Farolles, the intimidating maid Kate who they consider letting go.
It is a beautiful and memorable story, and a great reading-aloud opportunity for a teacher.