Edie and Flo 1912
All Rights Reserved 2011. Educators and students may download and distribute with attribution. This novel is a ‘re-imagining’ of events that took place in 1911, using the Nicholson Family Letters as a template. The chronology followed is that of the letters, and not of the historical events woven into the letters for the purpose of this story. Where real historical personages are described there is a very real attempt to have them speak their own words as recorded in historical documents and newspaper accounts.
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Give us a healthy home full of intellectual activity where the homely virtues prevail. Where complete honesty and frankness have free expression. Where the lungs expand with pure air, and the brain quivers with wholesome aspiration and sincere inquiry. Where souls bask in contentment and the sunshine of purity and peace. From Food and Cookery Magazine, July 1911
April 2nd.
A ‘threshold girl’ of 18, her thin, light brown hair still tied back in a ponytail, sits curled up in a weathered reed rocker on the veranda of her family home and reads a poem out loud. Or at least she tries to read it.
Ou vont tous ces enfants dont pas un seul ne rit
Ces doux êtres pensifs que la fievre mai-GRIT?
You see, the poem is a French one and the young woman is an Anglo-Quebecker.
The vines have yet to fill in on the verandah, as it is early Spring, so the girl’s long, pale, but not entirely unpleasant-looking face is being sweetly caressed by soft fingers of April sunlight.
Indeed, the same waning afternoon sunshine flickers playfully over the entire Western face of her comfortable Queen Anne Revival style house, a brick-encased 2 and 1/2 storey mini-castle, with the trademark corner tower and irregular roof and, unlike many of the surrounding Queen Anne’s, only a modest amount of gingerbread.
The threshold girl’s expression, though, is intensifying.
Ces filles de huit ans qu’on voit che-mi-ner seules?
Che – Mi- Ner?
Ils s’en vont travailler quinze heures sous des meules.
Meules?
The heels of the young female’s sensible shoes, laced knock-about boots in pebble calf, are dug into the edge of the seat cushion. Her boney knees, blanketed by the blue wool serge cloth of her school jumper, are but two inches from the tip of her nose. She can almost smell the page as she balances the French textbook on said knobby knees, and stares at the mystifying stanzas through wire-rimmed reading glasses.
MEULES??????
So, sad, she suddenly thinks, that she didn’t bother to bring a French/English dictionary from school.
The 18 year old slams shut her textbook, with a whack, and makes a very unladylike sound with her mouth, something like Pooaffffssttt.
Renouf’s Progressive French Reader 11. Poooafffssttt.
She eyes said title set in dark green sans serif typeface on the unsoiled, unprotected cover of the textbook. True enough, muses the young woman, she has indeed progressed – to the point where she hardly understands a word of her assigned French text.
This crazy old poem by Victor Hugo.
Since September she’d been dreading this very day. At the start of the school year, 6 long months ago, she had opened the same light-green text (bought second hand off her cousin, May) and quickly flipped to the back of it, to see what was in store for her, like a fortune teller looking to read her own future. And what she saw for herself in the cards, back then, were some seriously-difficult assignments.
It was self-fulfilling prophesy. You see, this same girl, this high school student, had failed the French and Composition exam for both Model 111 and Academy I and (having to make it up in the summer school) and now she was well on her way to failing French in Academy II.
Only it couldn’t happen. This was the girl’s crunch year at school, her final year, and she simply could not fail, not any subject, not French, no Latin, not algebra, not botany. Not English composition or Canadian history.
Summer school was out of the question this year, not if she wanted to be admitted to Macdonald College and keep alive any hope of getting a good paying job as a teacher on the City Board, like her older sister Marion, who was making 600 a year. Six hundred dollars year. Imagine!
If she failed any subject, she’d have to think of something else to do with her life. She’d have to find another career, for the moment, anyway, until she married. If she could even find a husband. But what else? The idea simply sent her head reeling.
So, she directed her attention back to the matter at hand: the Hugo poem so aptly titled Melancholia.
She timidly re-opened the textbook to the appropriate page. Ever so slowly. As if hoping the print on the page had magically transformed itself into something more decodable.
Ou sont les enfants dont pas un seul rit?
Ces doux êtres pensifs que la fieve maigrit.
Rit? Maigrit?
Ces filled de huit ans qu’on voit CHE MI NER seules?
Ils s’en vont travailler quinze heures sous les meules.
“Oh, what is “rit” again. Such a little word, she should know it. Rice?
“No,” the girl/woman mumbled to herself and then she bit down on her lower lip. All she had to do was memorize the poem. But how could she memorize a poem without understanding it?
Ah, if only one of her sisters was on hand to help her. Either one would do. Both Edith and Marion had a better command of the French language than she. Which wasn’t such a difficult thing, after all.
Ils vont, de l’aube au soir, faire eternellement
Dans la meme prison le meme movement
In the same prison the same movement.
Well, that particular line was easy.
But both older sisters were 70 miles away at their jobs in the big city of Montreal. Marion at Royal Arthur School, in Little Burgundy, teaching her rag-tag group of 50 mostly very poor children, and Edith, around the corner from Marion but a world away, really, in elegant Westmount, at French Methodist Missionary School, helping wayward Catholics, mostly French Canadian, find the Protestant path.
And the girl’s mother, Margaret, who was quick with an opinion on most any modern topic, especially woman suffrage, and who especially liked Canadian history, wasn’t at home either, to offer sympathy, if not support, as she spoke little French. Margaret was next door, attending a tea given by Mrs. Montgomery.
She was getting the week’s gossip from all the other matronly drop-ins. No doubt there were many of them, possibly 10 or even 15 women. It was Mrs. Montgomery’s day at home and it was common knowledge that no one dissected ‘the local news’ with more acuity than their own nosy, neighbour-lady.
No doubt all the nosy ladies were asking after the girl, and her plans for the next year. “Any beaus yet?” they were probably enquiring as they leaned over the trays of devilled eggs and lettuce sandwiches.
L’aube. Lobe. That must come from Latin. How could she pass Latin, a useless language no one spoke anymore and fail French, the mother tongue of more than half the people who lived in her province?
Her teacher said most French words came from Latin, and she could see it, A BIT, but that only confused her more.
Oh, why had she been so stupid not to borrow a translation dictionary from school? “That’s what they are there for, young lady” Mr. Maxwell, her teacher, had intoned, sarcastically when she admitted to not owning one herself.
That was last week, when she had messed up yet another French assignment. When she proffered an excuse that her sisters weren’t at home to help, the funny-looking little man, with curly red hair, had glared down at her and sputtered, “Then, Miss Nicholson, you must try to be more resourceful.”
Today, upon returning home from school at mid-afternoon she found some freshly baked baking powder biscuits, called scones, on the kitchen table and a note from her mother, explaining that her father, Norman, had taken the morning train to Quebec City on IMPORTANT business, with the word “Important” in capital letters.
“So, Flora,” continued her mother in the note (for that was her name, Flora Sophia Nicholson)”Please pick up the afternoon mail. But only AFTER you have finished studying. I’m expecting a letter from Herbert.”
Herbert was Flora’s only brother, the second oldest child in the family, who was far away in Saskatchewan, working.
Flora’s mother, it seemed, was always expecting a letter from her beloved Herb, her one and only son, who had left in a hurry for the West over a year ago. But these letters came few and far between. In one year, Flora herself had received just one postcard from her brother, who described the dizzying mix of races out there, Old Country Scots, Germans, Swedes, Hebrews, Poles and those Ruthenians in their brightly coloured costumes, and claimed that no one out West could understand how he was from Quebec and spoke only English. So he was as strange as all the rest.
Should she go to the mail now, or study some more, Flora wondered.
Continued next post or read entire story at www.tighsolas.ca.page10.pdf.pdf
