Crossroads and Characters

29. BRING JUST THE POTS AND PANS, LIZZIE.

In 1892, Alexander Souter and Elizabeth Marshall pose after their wedding in St. Serf's. She was from a Dunning weaving family, he was a signalman at the railway station.

He had a restless nature, always seeking something better, and with it a contrary pride in adversity, always choosing the hard way to do anything. He had come originally from near Kintore in Aberdeenshire. Now, as the number of his and Elizabeth's children grew (the author's mother among them), he took railway jobs in Stirling and Glasgow. Then the family returned to Dunning, for he had decided to emigrate. Leaving his wife to care for the children, he travelled to western Canada.

Months later, he wrote from Winnipeg: 'Come soon. Don't bring dishes or linen, just the iron pots and pans'.

Encumbered with five children, not to mention the cast-iron pots and pans, she set out for Canada in 1906.

In Canada they had the usual struggle of immigrants, compounded by Grandad's fondness for hardship. He tried to farm on a salt flat in Saskatchewan, ran a grocery store in Winnipeg, and homesteaded on marginal land in rural Manitoba.

However, the family survived and multiplied. Of course the cast-iron pots Elizabeth had brought with her had been readily obtainable in Canada, and it took ages to replace the linen and dishes left in Scotland. Grandmother was good-natured and easily accepted her husband's obstinate ways. But I'm not sure she ever quite forgave him for those pots and pans.