Ebooks and Funding

 

Tighsolas in 1910 era

 

This is Tighsolas, or House of Light in Gaelic, the Queen Anne Revival Style Home that Norman Nicholson, my husband’s great grandfather built in 1896, the year Sir Wilfrid Laurier came to power.

 

I discovered letters belonging to this family in 2003, transcribed them and posted a website in 2005 Tighsolas with the letters in raw form and background about the Laurier Era.

 

And then I decided to write a digital trilogy around the letters, featuring each of the three Nicholson ‘girls’, Flora, 18 in 1910, Edith, 27 in 1910 and my husband’s grandmother Marion, 25 in 1910.

 

All of the young women were teachers in the era, not a ‘sexy’ profession, but, alas, the profession most well-educated middle class women went into in 1910 (despite the going belief that women had ‘made it’ and could enter any profession, although housewifing was the most desirable profession.

 

 

 

Threshold Girl   is the first book in the trilogy and it is available for free online. It tells the story of Flora Nicholson’s year at Macdonald Teachers College in Ste Anne de Bellevue during the ‘in their proper place’ era.

 

Marion and Edith figure incidentally in the story.

 

I am writing Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, Edith’s story, and it is almost complete.  It tells the story of Edith’s job at a Missionary School in Westmount, where Catholics, mostly French Canadians were educated and oft times converted to Protestantism. Not a slice of history normally discussed today.

 

It also tells the story of her stormy courtship with one Charlie Gagne, a former Roman Catholic for all I can see, who died in a hotel fire in Cornwall in 1910, the Rossmore.

 

In Flora’s story, I include a child labour theme; in Edith’s a eugenics theme. The suffragette movement is included in both books.

 

The trick is, I am being faithful to the 300 letters I have, but filling in the gaps with invented stories. I call this a ‘re-imagining’ of their lives.

 

Marion

Edith

 

It took me a long time to figure out what was going on in the letters with respect to Charlie Gagne, but once I did, I noticed gaps.

 

I have turned his story into a murder/mystery, which probably didn’t happen, but certainly could have. And then I can cover the drug issue for 1900. Opiates in medicines.

 

I haven’t been able to type out Edith’s story, as I have a neck injury, but once I do I will embark on Marion’s story, yet to be titled. Marion was already a teacher at the Montreal Board in 1910, at Royal Arthur School.  She was also helping out her family the most, especially financially. And from 1911 and 1913 she was courted by Hugh Blair, whom she married. She was also the most dynamic of the young women, later becoming President of the PAPT Teachers Union.

 

When all three books are written, they will complement each other, and also fill in gaps in each other’s story. For instance, Flora had no idea what was going on with her brother, she was protected. Edith had some idea, but since she had lost her love in a fire in May 1910, she too didn’t know it all. Marion, however, knew it all!

 

The social issue I am tackling with Marion’s story, possibly called The Push Pull of Biology and Ambition, or maybe just Biology and Ambition (yes!) is the Jewish Problem in schools. Jewish teachers were not allowed to work in the Montreal Board, however qualified.

 

Maybe one day I’ll be invited to the Blue Metropolis, the big ‘non-profit’ event in Montreal supported, of course, by Heritage Canada. People from Heritage Canada occasionally come to my website, (even downloading the ebook Threshold Girl)  but my project doesn’t fit into a comfortable niche, not with respect to Canadian politics. I’m guessing, anyway.

 

I’m discussing eugenics and suffrage in ways that only scholars have done in the past. Even the Two Solitudes issue. It’s shades of grey I like exploring.

 

Anyway, basically EVERY Anglo-Quebec initiative is funded by Heritage Canada, so what does that say? That it’s the only funding available, sure, but also, that they control the message. That’s what I think. How could they not, if  they are the only funding? I’ve worked with many non profits, I know how hard it is to get funding as a Quebec Anglophone Project, even for innocuous projects like literacy. (Whoops, that’s political here too.) We are a minority within a minority, that’s how the government sees us.

 

I’ve also written Milk and Water about Montreal in 1927, using my own grandfather, Jules Crepeau as a character.  This story is more of interest to French Canadians, I can already tell, but I must polish it before I can get it translated. In this eplay, I put a new twist on the infamous Laurier Palace Theatre Fire.

 

Teacher’s Little Helpers

Well, as I write Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, the follow up to Threshold Girl I wonder if I am being too harsh on Edith Nicholson, the heroine of  the Spinster story, as I make her an opium addict.

My husband’s great Aunt Edie was a prim and proper Presbyterian, after all, a tee-totaller, in her youth at least.

But then I have a 1911 Na-Dru-Co Atlas to prove my point.

Na-Dru-Co was the National Drug Company of Canada and they sent around a thick promotional brochure in 1911, the time of both my ebooks. I found this brochure in the Nicholson collection.

Most of the products they are pushing remind me of medicines “Granny Clampett” used, sarsaparilla, or parilleeee as she said.

The cough syrup contains licorice, linseed and chlorodyne. I looked up chlorodyne to see that it contained opium and cannabis. Bull’s Eye!

Oddly on a testimonials page someone claims they give it to a baby of 8 months. Another person says she knows someone who got cured of a cough and only used one bottle.

Edith had tonnes of colds and she was always on some medicine. Everyone was afraid of dying from pneumonia or TB!

And then came the horrible tragedy that took the life of her fiance and the Principal of the School where she worked, who was also a medical doctor, fixed her up with ‘heart medicine.’

There’s a product called Nervozone advertised in this brochure with the following blurb:“In the strenuous rush of commerce, the severe strains of depressing social conditions, overstudy, changes of female life, or impending attacks of disease, the nerves become impaired. Irritability, brain worry, Sleeplessness ensue, accompanied by lack of Energy, Emissions, Impotency, Nervous Dyspepsia, Partial paralysis, palpitations of the heart,incontinence…NA-DRU-CO nervozone is specially prepared to cover all such cases…”

I wonder what this concoction contained?

Another blurb about it in the book says “Teachers and especially women teachers are the most fit subject for rest and vacation than any other workers in the country.  One day of worry in the school room is more trying than  a month of hard labour… The best advice we can give teachers is to keep a box of Nervozone in their desks…Tsk Tsk.

I have to have Edith read this..

Ironically, in a 1909 letter, Edith says the doctor has told her – once again – to give up tea. LOL

Family Life by the Numbers

The Nicholsons 1892. Edith standing.

 

I finally saw the movie Withnail and I, after seeing it on some many Best of British Cinema lists. Didn’t  recognize any of the actors, but I did liked the movie a lot. Small budget movie with big budget acting, rambling script (that parallels the lives of the protagonists) a sink  most students or ex students can relate to. And the two lead actors, although playing down and outs, have beautiful faces to contemplate.

I’ll recommend it to both my sons. I don’t think it came out in Canada, and if it did, in 1987 I had a little baby and one on the way. Saw a lot of tv movies in that era; don’t recall any of them.

This is the beginning second chapter of Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, (draft 1). The first rough chapter is HERE. This ebook is the follow up to Threshold Girl

 

But let’s go back to the beginning.But which beginning?  The beginning beginning? The I AM BORN  beginning? To once again invoke  David Copperfield. (You probably now assume that is my favourite novel, but it isn’t. Middlemarch is.)

 

That’s easy, I am born January  1884. In a green clapboard rental house in Melbourne Quebec but  10 months after my parents’ marriage.

 

I know because I have been told, I was born on January 2nd. But the real proof resides in my father’s Store Books, or Household Accounts, which he kept from before his marriage in 1882 to a month before his death in 1921.

 

It could be said that  story of our family is told in these books, the practical side, the earthly side, at the very least.

 

I am born in early January, 1884 because the store book reads: Inserting baby’s birth, on the 7th. 25 cents. Under that Breast Pump 75 cents. Then Breast shield 25 cents. Along with one quart of milk, 5 cents, a loaf of bread, 10 cents. I gallon coal oil, 25. two cords of wood 8.35. 11 lbs of oatmeal, 38 cents. 1 doz herring. 20 cents. 1 1/2 pounds stake (steak) 15 cents. Oh, and rent 25.00 a month. The usual.  On February 19th, a baby cradle  is purchased for 3.00. And some flannel and some cotton for my baby clothes. Oh, and on April 28, baby’s pictures, 25 cents. I have officially arrived.

 

On June 27, 1 baby’s carriage 6.37. A year later, baby’s first shoes.1.20.  I am now, officially,  a financial burden on my parents. Children’s shoes, boots and rubbers (and the mending of same) were  a major expense for my parents all through their child-raising years. No wonder so many poor children must do without.

 

October 1884, one crib, 2.75 cents. Some wool for Edith, 2 dollars, 60 cents.

 

In 1886, June, at 2 1/2 a child’s broom is purchased, 15 cents, and I begin to pay for my keep. In those days they began early teaching young girls the womanly art of sweeping.

 

Also purchased that month, too, believe it or not, baby’s first book! (We are the Nicholsons, after all.)

 

 

 

50 years of family accounts!

 

Talk about mixed messages! But might as well start getting used to them, I was showered with mixed messages most of my female life.

 

Then it continues, with school fees, 25 cents a month,  and the occasional slate 05 cents. And bottles of cough medicine, 25 cents. (cough medicine had kick in those days.)  And later scribblers,  5 to 7 cents. 10 cents for the skating rink. 05 cents for a soda treat at Sutherland’s drug store. Soda pop had kick in those days,too!

 

And later, I got an allowance of 05 cents a week. I was doing more than sweeping by then. Oddly, my brother Herb’s allowance is put down as ‘wages for Herb.’

 

I guess boys must be taught the value of labour.

 

 

 

 

Receipt School feels 1894.

Religion and Politics and Power: 1912, 2012

Margaret Nicholson and Norman Nicholson in the garden at Tighsolas in Richmond Quebec. Norman in Masonic regalia (I have the sword!). The Presbyterians did not approve of the Masons, because they kept secrets from their wives. But not to be a Mason was social and business suicide for Norman.

Well, in a letter from 1909,Norman writes this to his wife Margaret:

You must have hit Uncle Alec hard when you mentioned about ‘milking cows and making fires’ and when you said St-Paul has been dead a long time and there have been many changes in the world since St. Paul’s time. I think women’s suffrage is one of the changes that will happen in the near future. Too absurd to think that a woman cannot exercise her franchise with as much intelligence as some of the male sex. And that they are making this so hard is so many countries when you have to drag some of these supposedly intelligent men to the polls as you would cattle. I think ladies taking an interest in politics could study out which side to take. I am giving you this speech as an extra.

It shows that Norman supported his wife (and vice versa as it happens) during hard times, even from his lonely post on the Canadian Transcontinental Railway in Northern Ontario.  But it also shows something else, that in those days,  religion was used as a tool to argue both for and against women getting the vote.

The sword. It is in my living room. (The family got it back through a strange coincidence.)

Last week I turned on the TV to a discussion on Meet the Press about religion’s place in politics. This is now an ongoing debate in the US, where once the establishment, at least, believed in the separation of church and state.

The American Right Wing is recognized as the “Religious” faction, although it appears a somewhat unholy alliance between Big Business and Evangelicals. And they are as anxious to change the social agenda as much as the political one.

As usual, it was argued that the Civil Rights Movement was a religious movement, “so if mixing religion and politics  was ‘good’ in that case, (everyone, left and right agrees) why can’t it be a good thing now?

( I think Salon had an article last year with the same argument. But I wish someone would bring up the Suffragette Movement, in this debate, because I think that movement better reflects what is going on today than the Civil Rights Movement. The Suffragette movement was an unholy alliance, too, between factions, business and social and political. And the Pankhurst’s et al handled these disparate parts with some savvy

Corset advert in April 19 Votes for Women Magazine.

Anyway, as it happens, the April 19, 1912 edition of Votes for Women has a rousing report on the debate by the National Union of Teachers, with the unfortunate acronym of NUT. For my book Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, the follow up to Threshold Girl, I will have Edith get her hands on a copy.

In Threshold Girl Edith takes sister Flora to hear a British suffragette speak, that’s  in early May.  As it also happens, right beside the article on the Teachers is a letter to the editor, from an Alberta Minister!! So perfect. Edith is thinking of quitting her job at her missionary school. The school is run by a man, Paul Villard.

Even though the Alberta Minister is living ‘near the Klondyke Trail’ he is definitely the working man’s proselytizer.

In Threshold Girl I show that some business people didn’t want women to get the vote because it was thought they’d vote for the removal of tarifs on cotton, so they could cheaper clothing. The Nicholsons were staunch Liberals, in large part because they felt their livelihood depended on it. They were sort of right.

Dear Editors of Votes for Women,

Last year, when I was working in London and occasionally had the privilege of speaking at Suffrge meetings held by the various societies, I frequently came across the view that the Bible strongly taught the subordinate position of women. St. Paul especially came in for a great deal of censure, and, as I would suggest, quite undeservedly. I always feel myself that the imperfections we notice in the Old Testament, which was written all the way through by men considerably in advance of their respective generations, show us more clearly than anything else the need for the higher conceptions in the New, and the careful student of the Bible may notice that the higher the revelation man received of God’s character the higher the honor paid to women hood.

In Christ people recognise that the ideal was reached in the matter, but it is often felt that St. Paul was somewhat retrograde. This is probably due to the fact that some of his letters to definite communities, written in reply to certain particular questions from those communities, contain advice which he thought suited to the particular occasions. To say that these statements that he sanctioned the subordinate position of women is scarcely fair. Another test I have often heard quoted against St. Paul is 1 Cor. Xi.2: “The head of a woman is the man.” I confess that at first sight these words seem to have hav only one possibly  significance, but ‘authority’ is beginning at the present time to have a meaning which our grandfathers were not familiar, but meaning which Christ and St. Paul both understood very clearly.

To our grandfathers, the word ‘authority’ almost implied the arbitrary right of one individual to treat another as he pleased. To Christ, to St. Paul, to some in authority in the governments of the present time, and to all, it can be hoped, in governments of the future, the word implies the obligation and privilege of one individual to do all in his power for those over whom he may be placed.

The difference is enormous.

I would now point out that the words ‘the head of the women is the man’ immediately follow the words “the head of every man is Christ.”

If these two sentences are taken together in this context, it would be clear, that Man in his attitude to women is to emulate Christ’s attitude to Man. Surely this is no base ideal.

I suppose it is gradually becoming recognised, that the three things that hinder the human race are race and colour prejudice, the inequality of sex and the differences between capital and labour.

In St. Paul’s day the prejudices between Jew and Gentile correspond with colour and race prejudices of the day,the struggle between bond and force correspond to our struggles between capital and labour.

The question of male and female has never come up asa practical question, but St. Paul was idealist enough to see that these prejudices and inequalities were never part of the divine scheme for the world.

And at the end of Galatiana number 3, he made this statement,which one could not but admire if it had been  made in the 20^th century, but when we realise that it was written about 48 AD we cannot but be astounded. The words are these: There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.

To remove these artificial divisions is the object of those who are now working for International Peace and for the Emancipation of Womanhood and for the welfare of all the labouring classes – St Paul’s Programme.

I have been today reading a little book which has just reached me in my log shack a few miles fro the Klondyke Trail. It is entitled Christ and Labour and in it eleven Labour members, whose speeches were delivered in Browning Hall during the second Labour Week, all avow that they intend to use their ‘authority: to give statutory effect to principles  of Christ’s teaching; and I believe it would be fair to St. Paul to say he has sketched out the lines of which this may be effective than to regard him as one who would lend his sanction to old customs out of which are rapidly growing, such as the subordinate position of women.

(Rev) W. L Seymour Dallas MA. Paddle River, Alberta, N.W. Canada.

(I checked. He doesn’t appear to have gone down in history.)

Edith’s Story: Chapter 1, Draft 1

June 20^th.

HBC has arrived.

He is sitting on the green corduroy chesterfield in our casual parlour, the back parlour, off the kitchen, just three feet from where I myself recline in the sturdy cherry wood rocking chair my Mother usually sits in. When she has time to do so.

She has draped it, I notice, to cover the threadbare cushion, in the canary yellow afghan I crocheted for her at Christmas.

HBC is staring at me with a look of confusion more than compassion, patiently, maybe anxiously, waiting for me to say something. This boyish man is politely allowing the shock of it all to sink in.

With his head of  straight sandy hair and the beige cardigan he is sporting over boney, broad shoulders, HBC, indeed, looks just like a school boy.

And he is so informally dressed, when compared to me, we are quite the ridiculous pairing.

But as he explained, he was heading out to a summer camp near Potton Springs with some Montreal friends, when he decided to hop off the train at Richmond. And I had invited him to drop by at the first chance, so he did.

There’s no one to bear witness as we sit so close together in the family room of Tighsolas. An awkward couple, despite our age-appropriateness. Both 27, you see. In another universe we could have become suitors.

HCB, the bank clerk, in my mother’s favorite rocking chair. Me, the school marm, in my father’s world-weary leather wingback.

HBC  in his casual summer country-outing attire and me in my formal white dress. I look like quite the eccentric, even Miss Havisham-like. Not a look I previously had aspired to, but quite fitting, these days.

When he first arrived, and I immediately invited him to come into the house to sit and talk privately in our parlour, I told him to spare me nothing.

I wanted to know all. All about the ‘mercy’ trip to Mexico. All about the job transfer t to Cornwall. All about everything leading up to and after the fire. That horrific fatal, fateful fire. The conflagration that converted me, in the space of one week,  from a blushing bride-to be to be, perhaps a little on the ripe side, to a opiate-addled spinster-in-training.

As he began, the small, subtle muscles on HBC’s smooth-shaven face, the one’s around his mouth and especially on his temples, pulled taut, so I knew there was more to this sad sad story than even I had guessed.  So much much more – as it happens.

I wanted to know, I had to know. Still, I wished on some level that he hadn’t dropped in this particular morning, despite his standing invitation to do so, despite his obligation to do so as Charlie’s closest friend. My dear fiance’s partner at work and leisure at the Bank of Montreal in Danville, Quebec.

Because as he ambled up the street, we were all in our white dresses, standing in front of the house, having our picture taken my Mr. Montgomery, our neighbour. Me, Mother, Marion and Flora.

We were all wearing our new spring hats, too. Well, Marion and I had brand new Easter Bonnets. Purchased at Ogilvy in Montreal on April 28, a day before the terrible event.

Mother’s hat was a year old, refurbished with a few pink silk apple blossoms and Flora’s, well I can’t recall when she got hers. It was of an ordinary sort, with no up to-date flourishes, no velvet ribbon, very a la mode in the 1910 season, just a few faded sprigs of some imaginary bloom, so likely she trimmed it herself with remainders from the basket in Mother’s sewing room.

It was Mothers’ idea to get all dressed up and have  a tea party out on the front lawn, as we had done in the past, although much later in the summer. Usually as a way to to escape the clinging heat in the house.

But it was not hot this day, in June.  Mother was desperate, that’s all: desperate to save me from my spiraling sadness.  Desperate too to forget her own escalating set of  family problems.

So after church (Mr. Carmichael’s sermon was on the Garden of Eden) we ceremoniously donned on those white dresses, a fashion from the turn of the century, white dresses being  genteel dresses, for they stained easily. And that was the point.

People with white dresses, dresses that showed the dirt so easily, had maids and washing women.

We didn’t. It took  us two days to wash, dry and press our white dresses. Our  genteel impractical white dresses.

As we sat there, teetering on kitchen chairs on the grass, my mother’s brainstorm had a negative effect on me.

I could see, through my fog of depression,  how ridiculous we looked, how pretentious, in our fashionable over-sized hat and ridiculously anachronistic white dresses. Queen Victoria, Victoria Regina,  had started the fashion, decades before, in an effort to promote British lace to the world.

I felt out of body and I could also see how pretentious we looked, from the street, and I suddenly I hoped no one was  watching.

With the card table and kitchen chairs set out on the lawn and or best china and silver, too over a fine linen tablecloth embroidered in blue, on display, like animals in a zoo.

“Step right up, ladies and gentlemen: on view The Canadian Middle Class. Of Prime Minister Laurier’s Time. Aspiring to the finest lifestyle, theatre, opera, music recitals, afraid of falling into the lower class. Working Class, really, on paper, but with an education in Latin, Botany, History and Euclid’s geometry. Tennyson. So instilled with an appreciation of beauty.

Relying on creams and potions to disguise the rough and reddened skin of their hands.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, these specimens are unique to all Canadian Society in that they WASH THEIR OWN CLOTHING.
(Sometimes it felt that way.)

But before I could feel too ashamed I saw him, HCB as I coyly referred to him in letters home, walking up from College Street and the station. “I was on my way to Kingsey Falls  to see, so I dropped by,” he said. “We’re’re off by the 3.10 to Potton Springs. A group of fellows from the bank. I am sorry, I decided right there on the train, about five minutes before the Richmond stop,there was no time for a telegram.”

“Yes, but I told you to drop in anytime. So please don’t apologize.” I said, wondering if he wanted the Oyster Canapes we had prepared for our tea or should I offer him some cold tongue.

We couldn’t ask him to join us for tea, that would have been absurd and uncomfortable.

And that wasn’t the point, anyway so we quickly went into the empty house. Straight to the parlour. The casual parlour, as there was not time to prepare the formal parlour for a visitor.

He asked only for a glass of water.

“I’m sorry to have disturbed you,” he repeated. “You are celebrating something. A happy occasion? A Birthday.”

“Quite the opposite,” I assured him.

I brought him the glass of water, in a light green glass tumbler. And then I asked him to proceed. Without further delay.To tell me all he knew of the circumstance of the death of my Charlie G,  right from the beginning, from that Trip to Mexico in November up until that dreadful night, the night Haley’s comet ominously passed directly over Cornwall, Ontario.

I wanted to know all the details of all Charlie was doing the three months since our informal engagement over Christmas, especiallywhat he was doing that he didn’t tell me in his letters.

He couldn’t have spent all his off work hours in the Presybertian Church on 2^nd street as he claimed to me.  Even I knew he wrote that just to please me. To prove his conversion to the WAY had stuck.

So HCB began, leaning back on the couch, his right elbow at right angles to his body as he combed the hair on the back of his head with his hand; his bicep was a muscular one, much more muscular than Charlie’s, I guess you call men like him wiry, deceptively strong.

But then suddenly taking on a posture and air of a much older man, possibly imitating his own father or a beloved Academy professor, he opened his mouth to speak.

About Mexico, about Cornwall, about… the circumstances of the Rossmore Hotel fire.…I think it took over an hour in all, but I can’t be sure, and then when it all began to sink in, the horrible truth, the numbing realization that I had been protected from the truth this past year, protected by Charlie and HCB as we older siblings protect our little Flora from the unpleasant truths of our own dear, devoted but deeply troubled family.

I had been protected from the real reason Charlie went to Mexcio to help out that Canadian concern after the typhoon and protected from the real reason he got transferred away from Danville to the Cornwall branch immediately upon is return. And worst of all I have been protected from knowledge about myself, my self-centeredness,  my  female narcissism. My shallow solipsistic existence.

I had spent the past year believing myself to be a woman misused, mistreated. Because I enjoyed the part of being tossed in love.  I had taken to my bed like a wealthy Victorian lady in novels and guzzled heart tonics, to elicit pity more than to recover from grief.

HCB told me in plain English, that everything Charlie had done the last few months he had done for me, for love of me. Out of a desire to marry me, and as soon as possible.

He did not get cold feet in October! We was not trying to weasel himself out of our understanding in March.

Charlie was trying to make this marriage happen – and as soon as possible.

How could HCB  look at me, now. How could I look on myself?. I wasn’t a victim. I was the victimizer.

And I knew he had to be thinking the same thing.

This handsome man of the middle class, son of a farmer, nowa bank clerk, like Charlie, (although not as handsome as Charlie, nor as charming) stuck in a respectable but decidedly dead end job.

A well educated man with no serious connections, so no real hope. A young man thinking of moving out West, to Alberta or Saskatchewan, like just about everyone else around, including my own father.

And what he didn’t say was even more hurtful. (If it hadn’t been for YOU,  Charlie would still be alive!

He’d still be alive._ And through wall of my pitch black state of mind, my depression, I still felt sick to my stomach. Because the truth was truly shocking. The appallingness of it. The Uncleanliness..

So that’s why Charlie spent his off hours in the Presbyterian church.

Not to please me or to impress me, but to hide from those who would harm him?

So HBC just sat there, letting it sink in. Not knowing what more to say. Perhaps trying to stave off his growing repulsion for me. He examined the dark oak moulding around the doors and windows of the parlour, the Moulding my father had installed himself in 1896, with such pride for decoration like this added greatly to the cost of a house.

Then he spoke. “You must  know. He wasn’t doing anything illegal.  He’d want you to know that. Opium is legal to buy opium in Mexico.  I’m telling you this because he wouldn’t want you to think ill of him.

And with that HBC sprang up to leave.

Think ill  of Him? How could I?  I was the villainess in all piece. Not dear Charlie, dear dead Charlie.

Burned beyond recognition. Immolated.They identified his body by his tie pin, found nearby. In that stairwell. Half of  his body, anyway

“I have to catch the next train,” he said. He actually had a full hour and it was only a 15 minutes walk to the station, but I merely nodded.

“Are your sure you  don’t want us to make a pulled pork sandwich for your trip.”

No, we’re planning on getting an early supper at the Hotel in Potton Springs..

And as this  was getting set to walk out the door, I knew I  had to ask him one more question. It was loathsome, but there was no keeping me from it.

He was  turning toward the door, pirouetting elegantly on his lithe legs. Athletic young man.

” I’ll see myself out.”

I could tell he was dreading passing my family out on the lawn.

So, I stopped him, extending my arm.  ”Henry?”

“Yes.”

“I have something more to ask you….Do you know where I can get any, for myself. The opium.,  For my own use? My own medicinal use.”

And now it was his turn to be shocked.

I continued.

” It’s not like in Montreal where it’s easy to get prescription medicine. This is a small town and everyone knows me. The drug store is owned by Mr. Sutherland, and Dr. Moffatt is related to me by marriage….You say it isn’t illegal for us, only the Chinese.”

“No, I’m sorry, I don’t,” he replied, stuttering. “Edith. I’m sorry.”

He folded his straw boater in his hand. And then he rushed out the front door. And right by my silly-looking sisters and Mother taking tea on the front lawn.

Without so much as tipping his hat to them. Well he couldn’t possibly as he had twisted it like a dirty rag between his pale fists.

End of First Chapter

Edith’s Story is the follow up to Threshold Girl and is based on the The Nicholson Family Letters

Victorian Facebook?

They didn’t have Facebook in 1977, let alone 1877. But in 1877 they had something else, autograph books! Here’s a poem,embellished with a Corel Frame. “railroad strife of life.” They thought it was all going too fast back then. Imagine!

I have the Masonic Autograph book of Margaret Mcleod of Richmond, Quebec. (or Kingsbury.)

Margaret was in her twenties when she kept this book, which has entries from 1877 to 1884. She got married in 1883 to Normal Nicholson. In 1881 he signed the book, a very little entry, “From a friend” – in shaky handwriting. The family story is told her in my ebook: Threshold Girl

Here’s another one:

and some others, unframed:

\

The More Things Change..

Jules Crepeau, Director of City Services.

Today, I saw that Montreal’s Police Force was coming under fire for being soft on organized crime.  It came up on my Google News as it is set for “Quebec” (automatically I guess) but it’s a Vancouver Sun article reprint of a Postmedia article by Henry Aubin. According to Aubin Montreal has a huge police force that is very ineffective, against all crime.

Hmm. That’s what they said in 1927 with the Coderre Report. It’s all in my play MIlk and Water  -about Montreal in the Jazz Age, where I have my grandfather, Jules Crepeau, Director of City Services have a talk with my husband’s grandfather, Thomas Wells, Westmount Businessman.

Anyway, another article in the same box is from the Montreal Gazette: Best Treated Minority? Think Again. Apparently, an economic think tank has come out with figures showing that Angl0-Quebeckers are underfunded. Surprise! I have written before how virtually all projects focusing on Anglo Arts are funded by ONE government agency, Heritage Canada that also funds French outside of Quebec and since we’re ‘a minority within a minority’ we get short shrift. I’ve given up on ever getting any funding for my projects, which don’t fit the bill anyway. They are big into funding projects to do with the Military these days.  It’s all a scam, let’s face it. It’s all about Control.

But this article, by Don MacPherson discusses a report that compared Provincial funding across Canada for minorities and apparently, Quebec came out dead last for funding for minority language by far.

How is this a surprise, tho?

It’s sad that Anglo schools are poorly funded though. As I have written elsewhere, in the 1960′s the Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal was the best performing in North America.

And so many of these students went on to brilliant careers, mostly in Ontario.

I was thinking of this last night. Sometimes I play this game, where I try to invoke a ‘new’ childhood memory… It seldom works.. But last night I remembered my grade six play. I won the lead, the Princess.  I recalled going to the audition, wearing this old purple sweater I had.  We wore tunics in those days, uniforms, but there were still opportunities to show off nice clothes. I had none. (My mother had grown up rich as my play Milk and Water shows, and didn’t know how  to manage a family on a middle class budget.

Anyway, I went to the audition after school and the director was not a school teacher, but some ‘older’ woman who looked like Agnes Moorehead – who we knew as Samatha’s mother on Bewitched. Everyone made fun of that, and then they made fun of my sweater (can’t recall the context, I think because it was “royal” purple and our play as about Royalty. It had a Prince Charming. A spinning wheel. I guess it was Cinderella/Rapunzel.

So, as I said, I won the lead, perhaps because of my sad sweater (maybe Agnes Moorehead was sorry for me)… Then again, at the performance, (I recall being scared to death and HATING being on stage), my Dad said I was the only one who articulated properly.

Anyway, Prince Charming was a guy called Lorne Abugov and he refused to kiss me, (as 11 years olds tend to do) which was traumatizing enough. I think (although not 100 percent sure) that Lorne’s brother is Jeff, a man who went on to write for Hollywood, and on top shows. Cheers the Golden Girls, producer Roseanne and now he’s producer of Two and a Half Men.

Well,  maybe not a typical career of a former ango-Montrealer, but an example.

 

As it happens, I’m getting to work on Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, about two teachers in 1910, (Edith and Marion Nicholson) the follow up to Threshold Girl and I am contemplating that angle, wondering exactly how classrooms ran in those days. Probably not unlike the way they ran in my day. Marion left behind a diary during her first year of teaching, but it’s all about her boyfriends and her activities at the skating rink. No shop talk. (Well, I guess diaries for teachers are considered an invasion of privacy. Tell that to What’s his name, Gervais Gervase Phinn, the guy who writes his experiences about North Yorkshire schools.) Or maybe they don’t have time to keep work diaries. Marion didn’t have time with her 50 ‘very bad’ students. Or maybe teachers, as a rule, are ‘action=oriented’ not introspective. Marion was totally action-oriented. That’s why she became a union leader during the War.)

I know a diary exists at Harvard, of a more serious girl who did no dating….

Apparently teachers who were interested in getting boyfriends (the majority) didn’t mention that they were teachers. A teacher was not a profession that attracted the boys. So it goes. Marion was an exception and this makes Edith jealous (in my story).

White Wedding Dresses?

Here’s the ‘iconic’ pic from my website TIGHSOLAS, www.tighsolas.ca that contains the Nicholson family letters from the 1910 era. It is a detail of a ‘tea party’ on the grass in front of their comfortable brick-encased Queen Anne style home in Richmond, Quebec.
I like the picture because it is pretty, but it really does embody the hopes and dreams of the middle class in Canada in 1910.

I watched the show Sunday Morning, yesterday, taped and the comedic editorialist (I don’t know her name) talked about her upcoming marriage and the high cost of weddings and wedding gowns. She setttled on a off white number, floor model.

She mentioned that white wedding dresses didn’t originally signify purity; that Queen Victoria got married in white to promote the lace industry in her country

I suspect white came to signify purity around 1910, as we had the Purity Movement, which I have written about extensively on this blog.

The comedienne also mentioned that white was worn by some women because white cloth was more expensive, and hard to wear (stains) and hard to wash, hence wearing it was a sign of prosperity. Bingo!

That’s what these white dresses meant to the Nicholson Women, who did their own clothes washing most of the time, despite aspring to a genteen lifestyle. In 1911, it takes Flora Nicholson, 19, TWO days to wash and iron her white dresses on a weekend she returns from Macdonald Teaching College.

So this all underscores the points I want to make with my ebook Threshold Girl, about Flora at School in 1911/12 and based on the Nicholson letters.

Threshold Girl is about a lot of things pertaining to Laurier Era History, but it’s mostly about women and clothes and what these clothes mean to them and what their clothes lust means to other less fortunate working women in the textile trade.

http://www.tighsolas.ca/page10.pdf.pdf

The picture above is deceptive. It is of Marion Nicholson, my husband’s grandmother, who went on to lead the Teachers’ Union in Montreal. She was no slacker: she had tonnes of energy and directed it in many useful ways. I will write about her later, in another book, which will deal with the Jewish question in Montreal schools.. Edith Nicholson, the subject of my next novellette was more of a dreamer, although she could could be a woman of action, if necessary. I’m turning her into an opium addict for in my next book, The Diary of a Confirmed Spinster.

A Toy for All: The Automobile 1911

Edith’s Sister Flo (second on right) on an all girl trip in the twenties, I suspect.

One sunny afternoon, back in June, my husband and I took a car trip from our home near Hudson, Quebec to Richmond, in the Eastern Townships.

Nothing new: we drive to Richmond at least once a year to pay our respects to my husband’s  dearly departed laid to rest in St. Andrew’s  Presbyterian cemetery up on the hill, the place with the view pictured on the old orange Canadian two dollar bill.

This year, though, we tried something different.

We attempted to follow the same route my husband’s great aunt Edith took EXACTLY 100 years  before, which she enthusiastically described in an June, 1911 letter to her father.

“As you will see by the address, I am in Montreal. I came in with Dr. and Mrs. Skinner (next door neighbours) in the motor Friday. Left home at 10 am and got to Waterloo at 12.30. Had dinner.  Saw all we could of the town and left at 2pm for Montreal. Got here at quarter past six. Without one break down. It was a beautiful day and we enjoyed every minute of it.

I will name the places we passed through so you will know the country we passed through. Melbourne, Flodden, Racine, Sawyerville, Warden, Waterloo, Granby, Abbotsford, St Caesar, Rougemont, Marieville, Chambly, Longueil, St. Lambert, Pointe St Charles.

Don’t you think I was a very fortunate girl to have such a trip?..PS I just loved driving on the smooth roads in the city.”

So I plotted the route out on Google Maps and my husband programmed the same route into his trusty GPS, and off we went, in our comfy Malibu and comfier modern stretchy clothing. But still, this was going to be a HISTORY lesson. I was determined.

I think it’s been decades since I took the Victoria (Jubilee) Bridge and I found it kind of scary, noisy and rickety-looking and all rusted to boot. But to get onto that venerable span (inaugurated in 1860 by the future King Edward VII who lent his name to the era that birthed the motorcar) we had to pass through remnants of industrial Montreal near the Lachine Canal and for that I was grateful. It got me into a Laurier Era mindset.

But within a few minutes the GPS landed us in bustling, box-store-pocked St. Hubert (right in front of, UGH, a HOOTERS).

So, after a short, heated ‘argument’ over how to proceed, we decided to forget the GPS and follow the silver church spires. Because they would be in the towns, right?  The strategy worked, for a time.  For instance, we saw a slew of charming waterfront heritage homes in old Chambly.

You know the song, “You take the high road and I’ll take the low road?” Well, after Chambly we had trouble telling which is which. So we just drove East on any road that wasn’t a superhighway.

Downer! Not much of a history lesson at all! The most interesting part of the drive was near the end, where we drove by FLODDEN (a field?) where my husband’s people, the Isle of Lewis Nicholsons, settled after landing in Quebec in 1851.

And where we passed a sign for Kingsbury, where my husband’s other people, the Isle of Lewis McLeod’s, settled in 1848.

Even in 1911, these farming villages weren’t  exactly bustling metropoli. They were losing all their young citizens to the towns, which, in turn, were losing many of their youth to the Big City or the West.

That’s why I have so many letters from the 1910 era – and due to the favourable date, the automobile figures largely in all these letters. You see, 1910 is when many middle class men, especially in the towns, decided they couldn’t live without a motorcar.

In an April 1909 letter, Margaret Macleod Nicholson, my husband’s great grandmother, remarks that  her  neighbour on the other side is going to buy a car.

“Mr. Montgomery is going to buy an auto. Nothing will satisfy now. He is going to sell his horse. Mrs. Montgomery does not want to buy one. Too bad he is so foolish, don’t you think?  

How strange, how restless men are. I suppose at one time he would think, if he only had a house in Richmond and could live comfortable, he would be happy (SIC).

Poor man, putting himself and everyone else in danger. I would have lots of money before I would want an auto.”

But soon Margaret learns that neighbours who have autos, or motors, or motorcars, are very useful, especially to take her down to the mail in rainy weather.

Margaret misses her husband and 3 grown children, who are all far away working and she longs for daily news of them.

Later in the summer of 1910, Margaret  loses her vehicular virginity. Edith refers to it in a letter. “I can just see you sitting in state waiting for your first ever car ride!”  No mention of who is taking her but it might very well be good family friend Mr. Wales.

The Richmond County Historical Society, in their book The Tread of Pioneers claims that Mr. Wales, the town tycoon, was the first to own an automobile in the era, obviously sometime before 1909.

But by 1911, the Delineator Magazine was slyly proclaiming “There are only two social classes these days, people who own an auto and people who do not.”

A linen duster coat, the magazine said, was now an essential piece of female apparel. An advertisement in the Richmond Times of 1911 reveals that the Wales general store sold motor suiting for coats and skirts in helio and navy stripe.

Car rides were a definite form of entertainment in the late Laurier era, for all the Nicholson women – and for most of the upper-middle class.  In 1910, Technical World Magazine declared the automobile “Our Billion Dollar Toy.”

Theatre owners blamed the auto for declining attendance.

The speed limit in Quebec, in the country, was 14 miles an hour, so I can  imagine how much fun Edith had in the back seat of, say, a Daimler,  flying up and down the picturesque green hills of Quebec’s Eastern Townships, holding onto her big BIG hat. Despite her tight corset. Despite the bumpy roads. Weeeee.

And imagine is all I can do, really, because I’ve discovered, you can’t  go back. Blame it on spandex  and independent front suspension.

Dorothy Nixon is a Vaudreuil-Dorion writer. Her latest word is Threshold Girl, www.tighsolas.ca/page10.pdf.pdf

Yes, Old Aunt Edie was zonked a lot of the time

Nadruco products. national drug company of Canada. I think this stuff was ‘over the counter’

Anyway, I am reaching a point in Edith’s Story, the follow up to Threshold Girl www.tighsolas.ca/page10.pdf.pdf where Edith gets zonked on prescription medicine, given to her so she can cope with the death of her boyfriend, beau, sort of fiance.

Am I overdramatizing?  I wondered, so I looked deeper into what she might have been getting in her nerve and heart tonics, let alone the drugs for La Grippe (FlU?) and those colds. Cough medicines, even for kids, contained these products.

Codeine, heroine, cocaine, cannabis, and alcohol, Yep -the whole shooting match.

These non-drinking temperance types were blottoed  a good part of the time. So,  if I have her getting an extra strong medicine from Dr. Villard upon the death of her beau, it probably happened. I mean, he gave her a heart and nerve tonic a few months before when the same man merely moved away to work in another town. They actually believed (from what I read in the letters) that events caused ‘heart troubles.’… They gave her heart medicine, which probably contained a good dose of heroine or even morphine.

And if she takes ‘a double dose’ of this whatver on her Saturday Afternoon off, the day of the King’s Death, well, I think it isn’t unfair at all.

In 191o, people (especially women who were always being given things for their delicate constitutions)  were going around zonked. And just like now, it was the middle class taking the drugs, because they could afford them. Not the poor.

Oh and I found the entry for Dr. Henry Watters, class of 05 Boston Medical School. He was a gyno. He must have been a nice one as he appeared to have an empathy with women. (And I’m guessing, most were HORRIBLE).. His mom Christie, was always ailing.

There’s a William H. Watters listed, class of 00.. President of a lot of societies. Likely a close relation..

Also in the 1911/12 letters many many deaths were mentioned. So many that Margaret’s sister remarked upon it. Weird. Some kind of epidemic? And of course, they only mentioned deaths in the Anglo community as the French Community appeared of no interest to them.