Forget Magazine. Remember, Remember, Remember.

When CJ died we children were allowed into his great, private parlor. I sat for a long time at his desk and ran my hands over all his things. I lifted his old black pen-his father's pen-and wrote my name on the desk-cover. Cilla sat at the piano and pretended to play "Camptown Races." I was nearly asleep in CJ's chair when Mary Francis came into the room and said in her softest voice—and her voice was soft naturally and was a great strain to hear at the best of times—okay girls it's time to see your father off.

When CJ left the General Store—his feet couldn't take it— he decided to get in to the mining business, as an owner this time rather than an employee. In the years immediately following the First World War, he gradually bought a controlling interest in the Springhill Mine.

CJ had been unable to fight in the war to do his condition; one I would not understand until fifty years later, one particular to the Kents. The mine was full of coal in those days and my most vivid memories as a young girl are watching my father, the great Charles Jeptha Kent, glancing at himself one last time in the hallway mirror before he would depart for the working day. His office looked over our school ground and many times during the day I would see him staring, worried as ever, out the great window behind his oak desk at us, me really, in the playground.

Where Priscilla was passive and uniquely feminine I began life as more tomboy than anything else. I was the playground knifey champion; a game my parents hated but that I could do better than any of the boys, even my brother Sam. It involved taking the blade end of a pocketknife in one's mouth and then throwing one's head backwards to send the knife as far as possible, while, at the same time, landing it with the blade piercing the ground. I am sure CJ recoiled at horror in seeing one of his daughters with a sharp knife in her mouth encircled by a group of dirty mine-town boys goading her on. He tolerated this for awhile—-right up until he decided to run for Mayor of Joggins—at which point I was told, in certain terms, that my knifey days were over.

But I was good at it then and I am sure that even now, even if this pale orderly rolling me and changing my ill-smelling sheets has no idea, that lying here 70 years later, I could still beat any man in the place if I had a sharp knife, ten feet to work with, and my father peering out of his great window; secretly cheering me on.

Kent Bruyneel is paranoid.