A Chance to Die

envied the farmers’ children, whose station in life was clearly very different from hers. The farmers’ wives, on their part, may have pitied the mill owner’s children, and sometimes offered them peppermints as they went into church. They v/ere instructed to refuse politely—to smile and say, “Thank you very much, but my mother would rather I didn’t.” It was one thing to go to church with village folk. It was something else to do all the things village folk did. Their children snuggled down during the long service (never less than two hours) and sucked on pink and white lozenges. The smell reached the Carmichael pew—“but such solace was denied us.”

Only psalms were permitted to be sung on Sundays, but hymns might be used in the Wednesday evening prayer meetings. Once when the theme of the prayer meeting was “Our Departure from this World,” Amy amused herself by counting up all the various things hymn writers said you were supposed to do at the precise moment of departure. How a dying person could manage them all she was at a loss to know, but was pleased with the prospect of shouting, “while passing through the air, ‘Farewell, farewell, sweet hour of prayer!’” What else could it mean but that very prayer meeting?

Amy had an extreme sensitivity to others’ pain. When her mother told her the story of Calvary for the first time, she rushed out into the garden to try to forget “thoughts too dreadful to be borne, for how could anybody hurt another so, specially One who was so good? And there on the lawn stood a boy cousin, and he had fastened a frog to a monkey-puzzle tree. It looked like a crucified thing . . . I was frantic. In a passion of pity I tried to get it off the horrid spikes, but I could not reach up to it. So I tore into the house to call someone, and as I ran, suddenly the thought came, Now all the frogs will go to heaven.’”

A lesson in the mysteries of prayer—a tough one for any adult—came when Amy was three years old. Taught by her mother that God was a hearer and an answerer of prayer, One who could change water into wine, she determined to test His powers. Kneeling by her bed that night she asked for the one thing she most passionately longed for: blue eyes. Surely there would be no difficulty for the Lord in this. The little girl went to bed with perfect confidence. She jumped out of bed at dawn, pushed a chair to the chest of drawers, climbed up and looked in the mirror—into the same brown eyes. She never forgot the bewilderment she felt until, somehow, an explanation was given (did the Lord Himself speak to her, or did someone else?): Isn’t NO an answer? So prayer was not magic. Like her earthly father who loved her, her heavenly Father might also say no.

Given a dollhouse complete with lovely furniture and properly dressed dolls, Amy displeased her old nurse, Bessie, by emptying the house and filling it instead with moss, stones, beetles, and earwigs—things she found far more interesting than the toys nice children were supposed to like.

Their father took them for walks even on Sundays (Sunday walks were frowned on by Presbyterians in those days), through fields of pink clover or blue flax, to the ponds to see swans and, on weekdays, to watch the great black dripping wheel of the scutch mill where the woody fiber was beaten from the flax to make linen.

They had books—all the children’s books that could be had then—and toys, which included a toy telephone soon after the telephone was invented. There were always pets—Daisy, the yellow and white cat, Gildo, the collie, Fanny and Charlie, the ponies. David and Catherine Carmichael loved beauty and tried to surround their children with beautiful things, keeping far from them, when possible, all that was not beautiful. They gave them a microscope and lenses to encourage them to study and observe, taught them capillary action by pointing out how water climbed from grain to grain in a lump of sugar, demonstrated electricity by rubbing a piece of amber on a coat sleeve till tiny scraps of paper flew up to it.

Amy’s grandmother lived in a small house close to Strangford Lough (Gaelic for lake or sea), in a place called Portaferry. The tide there was said to be the second strongest in the world. The children were allowed to go rowing within certain limits. One evening Amy and her brothers passed the limits, were caught in a swift current, and swept toward the bar. “I was steering, my brothers were rowing hard, but they were powerless against the current. ‘Sing!’ they shouted to me, and I sang at the top of my voice the first thing that came into my head:

‘He leadeth me, O blessed thought,

O words with heavenly comfort fraught;

Whate’er I do, where’er I be,

Still ’tis God’s hand that leadeth me.’”

J.H. GILMORE

The children did not attend school in the early years, but were taught by a succession of governesses. One of them, “an unfortunate Englishwoman,” did not stick it out for long, and when she departed they all trooped down to see her off—“We wanted to be sure she went!” Her replacement, Eleanor Milne, was much beloved, like an older sister to the children. She taught them poetry, told them stories of the great martyrs of Scotland and England. The last words of Ridley to Latimer stuck in Amy’s mind: “Be of good cheer, brother, for God will either assuage the fury of the flame, or else strengthen us to abide it.” When he and Latimer were chained and the fire kindled, Latimer said, “Be of good comfort, brother Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle by God’s grace in England as I trust shall never be put out.”

As the sternness of an Irish winter, with its gloom and wetness