100 years ago a girl ponders her career path

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 2^nd

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 veranda, as it is early Spring, so the girl’s long, pale but not entirely unpleasant-looking
face is being sweetly caressed by fine 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 Annes, only a modest amount of gingerbread. TIGHSOLAS.

Unlike the sun, the threshold girl’s expression  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 gold 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 a dark
and unadorned sans serif typeface on the unsullied 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.

Ever since September she’s been
dreading this very day.  At the start of
the school year, 6 long months ago, she opened the same clean light green textbook
(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 written between the lines, back then, were some serious
hard work ahead for her.

It was self-fulfilling prophesy.
This same girl, this same high school student,  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 feels well on her way to
failing French in Academy II.

Only it can’t happen. This is the
girl’s crunch year at school, her final year, and she simply cannot fail, not
any subject, not French, not Latin, not Algebra, not Botany. Not English
composition or Canadian history.

Summer school is out of the
question this year, not if she wants 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 is making 600 a year. Six hundred dollars
year. Imagine!

If she fails any subject, she’ll
have to think of something else to do with her life. She’ll have to find
another career, for the moment, anyway, until she marries. If she can ever find
a husband. But what else? The idea simply sends her head reeling.

 

THE REST www.tighsolas.ca/page10.pdf.pdf

 

Odds and Ends..

My mother in law, the flapper in the thirties. Dead something around her neck.

Hmm. I just discovered a very cool video on YouTube… with 3 million views.  A quickie fashion survey covering the entire century in a few minutes, featuring a couple dancing, starting in 1911…the year of my Threshold Girl Story.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JxfgId3XTs

www.tighsolas.ca/page10.pdf.pdf

The very interesting and fun and clever video was produced for an East London Fashion event. My ebook is about a college student in 1911 and is based on real letters.

Yesterday,  I watched a bit of The Age of Innocence with Gillian Anderson on the satellite. I’ve seen it before and didn’t hate it (I liked the book). But this time I found the movie depressing and the dialogue delivered in such a stilted manner… Americans (also Laura Linney and Elizabeth McGovern) trying to do what the Brits do best. Yes, I know it’s about New Yorkers, but it’s a period piece.

Don’t get me wrong: I like Gillian Anderson a lot, and she’s compelling in the role.  And I like Laura Linney and Elizabeth McGovern (who was the most natural of the lead actors in this flic) and who played a similar part to her role in Downton Abbey. (Wasn’t she also in Ragtime, a movie I’d love to see again.. I just LOVED that book.)

Anyway, Lily Bart, Anderson’s character is a drug addict of sorts… and so will be Edith Nicholson, my character in the Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, based the the real life story of my husband’s great aunt.   I must make sure my story isn’t that depressing. I’m trying to make it a bit funny: she is viewing her world through an opium haze, after all.

Poor Edith, she took a few tonics, probably more than was good for her, and a few cough syrups, well every time she had a sniffle, but she was no giver-upper like Lily Bart. She soldiered on, through diversity, like a good Presybterian. Always enjoying life. Two wars and plenty of hard work at low pay and a life of genteel poverty. Any money she made went to pay her medical bills. There was no Medicare back then in Canada. But she had family, and that makes her different from Lily in the story.

And yesterday, I did something else. I pre-ordered the British DVD of Downton Abbey on Amazon.co.uk. I can’t wait for Masterpiece Theatre. (There’s a countdown on the PBS website.. 88 days as of yesterday.)

I have the first set also on UK  DVD which I play through my puter plugged into the big screen. Works well. 17 pounds. What’s that?. 34 dollars ish. By UK standards that’s expensive, but by Canadian standards it is free. We Canadians pay through the nose for everything. Our Internet, our DVDs our satellite TV. Our books. Especially our books. I wanted to buy a book I saw promoted on Jon Stuart, in digital form, but it was TWICE the price to download to a Canadian Kindle. It’s digital. Why twice the price? I didn’t buy it.

A while back I  wrote a post on this blog, saying how I liked to visit London Restaurants online, check out their menus,  and then make their signature dishes, but for soooo much less because food in Montreal is much cheaper than in London.

Well, not any more. Food prices have soared here in Montreal. I think we’re tied with London, now. Today I even went shopping at the discount grocer, UGH, where they sell brown meat in huge freezer bags, not an appealing store.

I had just spent the weekend in Ogunquit Maine and we shopped for groceries - and the prices are so low there, about half the price for chicken breasts, it made me mad.  I couldn’t face the ridiculous prices in our local grocery stores  like Loblaw’s or IGA and I didn’t want to drive all the way into the West Island to Adonis, the ethnic store with good prices…And Ogunquit is an upscale tourist town, so no doubt the prices in their local grocery stores are way way more than in other Maine locations. OK. So Americans don’t have any social safety net like we do…

I am thinking of becoming vegetarian…again. I mean, why not? Meat is so expensive and a drag on the planetary food supply. It’s bad for you, causes cancer and what else, and veggies are very good for you. And I like veggies. One of my sons already is a vegetarian (he saw a film of an abattoir inJr. College and became a vegetarian that day). But he doesn’t live with us. I have to convince my husband…

Oh, and on my surfing expedition, I was looking up Rupert Everett, I think, on IMDB, I saw that the Brits are producing a Ford Maddox Ford story, from WWI.. What’s it called? Parade’s End. A book I have not read, although I read Good Soldier. That’s by Ford M Ford, isn’t it? I imagine this is to take advantage of the Downton Abbey Mania. I would like to read the book now. I wonder if I can get in on Kindle for a reasonable price? Or maybe free on Gutenberg.

So, another WWI story being produced, because the past, horrible war and all, seems better than the present… I think they put a halt on Testament of Youth, which I read but a year or two ago and looked up and saw it was ’in development’  in the UK. But there’s no info on  IMDB. The economic downturn may have killed it.. but gee, considering the popularity of Downton Abbey. Oh well, so it goes. I thought Gemma Atherton would be good in the lead role.

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

Norman Nicholson, 1900. Fuzzy, but it’s a blow up of a picture of him standing in front of his house. And it is the only photo of him with long white whiskers. There’s a family portrait, taken in 1896 showing him with long dark whiskers. And later on, he cut them off.

This fashion was on the wane in 1910. Herb mentions he doesn’t recognize someone because he has cut off his whiskers. Herb and other men in their twenties all appear clean shaven. I wonder if this is because of safety razors being invented. Must check.

I have Norman’s expenses before he married and a ‘shave and a haircut’ cost money.

Women didn’t spend anything on their hair. Hair salons were few and far between in North America. I saw an advert for a hair sculpting salon in Toronto. I guess society women went there when they wanted a fancy do like the Pompadour.

Of course, the hair industry is huge today. I think it got rolling after the WWII. And then hats slowly fell out of fashion.

Of course, as I recently discovered, a Toronto woman, Elizabeth Arden, moved to New York in 1909 and started a beauty salon based on the French fashion, but it was more about skin.

Arden wasn’t a beauty like Coco Chanel, but she did have a gorgeous complexion, apparently. She rose to become the richest woman in the world, supposedly. (Richer than royalty?) Chanel did pretty good herself, I suspect.

Below: Norman’s expenses as a bachelor: 15 for a haircut, once a month.

Qu’appelle Snapshot

Winnipeg, 1910. Herbert’s favourite Western City.

Why did I assume Herbert Nicholon wasn’t enumerated on the 1911 Census? He was.

I instantly found him in a Qu’appelle Saskatchewan boarding house.

There are at least 8 other boarders in this place, 7 men, one woman, all in their mid to late twenties, with one guy 32.

The woman is a stenographer at a law office. Like Herbert, she is a Canadian born Scotch Canadian Presbyterian. 3 of the other men are Canadian born, one of these in an English Anglican.

Four of the men are ‘new Canadians’ arriving around 1905. Two from England, one from Scotland and one from Germany. He’s a Lutheran.

Herbert lists himself as an accountant. Four other boarders are salesman, but they work in stores, 3 general stores one drug store..and the other boarder is a ledger something, which sounds like a clerk. And one of the men is a bartender!

The owner of the place is Welsh Canadian and he is a teacher at a public school. He and his wife are Baptists.

Wow!!!

On the same page, there is a Hungarian Canadian waitress, she has been in Canada since 1903. Also a German Russian waitress, who has been in Canada since 1908. 3 other Hungarians working as Cook and Waitresses.

All the rest are Canadians of UK Origin.

The Stenographer is making 500 a year. Two of the salespeople 850. and the other one making 1000! A huge salary by Eastern standards, but everything is so expensive there, as Herb writes.

Herb lists his salary as 800. (I have to check what he told his parents he was making. Hmmm. Let’s see if I catch him in a lie! No he didn’t. But he soon quit his accountant job at the bank to work on commission for Massey Harris. In this job, he devised schemes to rip off the farmers – to make extra money. What a nice guy!)

The teacher, a man, makes 1300.

Double WOW!

Now, I have to wonder why the Montreal Council of Women told the Royal Commission that stenography was high paying and that some stenographers make up to 1200. a year. (A stenographer was a catch all phrase for office worker with typing skills. ) I have just found two stenographers, one in MOntreal, one out West and they make about $500, less than a newly graduated teacher with diploma.

Bubble Speak and Stuttering.

1910 aeroplanes and blimps

Today I was working on a Nicholson Family Saga letter from June 1911 where Flora Nicholson fails French in her last year of Academy, but still gets into Macdonald Teaching School. That’s because, as I explain in the footnotes, they desperatedly needed teachers in Quebec in 1911.

That was a big relief for the Nicholsons, who were struggling financially.

Then I went out shopping with a friend of mine, Lise, who is French Canadian- but one of those French Canadians who is fluently bilingual and who has floated effortless all her life between Quebec’s ‘two solitudes’.

Lise was telling me about her mother, who is 92 and who has advanced dementia. Her mom, she says, can’t remember much of anything, but she can still understand both languages and beat her daughter at cards, Hearts or Cribbage.

The brain is a funny thing.

Anyway, my friend was also telling me that she went to see the movie the King’s Speech this week. I was surprised. I hadn’t bothered to ask her to go with me, assuming she would not like it. (And I would like to see it again.)

She went with a group of French friends, two of whom had already seen the movie once. “You have a rival,” she told me. “Rita can’t get over how handsome Colin Firth is. Maybe you should go to her house and play her my favorite DVD.”

Lise was being ironic. One Saturday evening a few years ago I brought my copy of Pride and Prejudice over and we watched it in lieu of the hockey game. Wet shirt or not, she wasn’t impressed. She has called Colin Firth “That guy who doesn’t smile,” ever since.

Yet everytime she sees Paul Gross on TV she remarks, “Quel bel homme.”

Lise enjoyed the King’s Speech, despite the fact Colin doesn’t smile here either. But she was really surprised how much her French Canadian friends liked the movie. One other friend was seeing it for the second time because “she cried all through it the first time.”

Now, I didn’t cry through the King’s Speech. I thought it was a funny film, for the most part. (Lise remarked, “OK, they had it bad, but that’s their job.”)

And I think I know why I chose not to cry. Because when I got home from my shopping excursion my husband was watching the CBS magazine Sunday Morning on tape and, as it is topical, that show had a feature on stuttering that showcased kids.

And THAT feature made me very sad, in a big punch to the stomach kind of way, because I ‘suddenly’ remembered that my twin brother used to stutter and that my father sometimes used to make fun of him.

I had repressed that in my memory, I guess, while watching the movie the King’s Speech and focused instead on the history and elegant period piece elements.

The brain is a funny thing.

My father, who was born in 1922, the year that Bertie and Elizabeth got married, had had a cruel Edwardian upbringing himself. His own father, a Malayan planter, used to lock him in a cupboard when he was bad.

That had once been a common Victorian practice, I have since learned.

Anyway, my father was sent away from Kuala Lumpur to Cumberland at 5 and hardly saw his mom and dad again. (He may never have seen his father again, although I’m not exactly sure.) That, of course, was a typical British practice among the upper classes and those in the middle classes who aspired to more.

He went to a public school, St. Bees in County Durham and lucky for him, he excelled at sports. He was Captain of all the teams. He told me that one day another student came up to him and said admiringly “It must be wonderful being you.”

“Yea, right,” he thought at the time.

Anyway, Sunday Morning also had a bit with fun visuals on the Wright Brothers that explained that Wilbur died in 1912 of typhoid fever.

Yesterday, I edited a letter from 1911 where Norman is worried for his wife Margaret, who is tending a relation with typhoid.

And then that same Sunday Morning show had a piece on Geoffrey Rush, who is going to be bringing Gogol’s Diary of a Madman to New York. That’s one of my favorite books, or stories, as it is very short. I love Gogol. He’s my favorite Russian writer.

A few years ago, I recommended Diary of a Madman to my bookclub and another person in the club, the widest read of all of us, objected passionately to its theme. She had a schitzophrenic sister and said that she found nothing funny about mental illness.

I don’t quite see this story that way, despite the fact that my twin brother, the one who stuttered as a child, also has severe mental health issues.

Anway, the final bit on Sunday Morning was the most interesting of all. It was a seemingly glib little animation describing how the brain works with respect to FEAR. In short, it showed that if a scary belief, however erroneous, gets into someone’s brain, it is next to impossible to remove it.

The brain is a funny thing.

The animation used the recently debunked autism/vaccination connection as an example, but I know it was really addressing the entire culture of fear in the US.

I’ve written extensively on that topic. And in this Flo in the City blog I’ve discussed all the fears rampant in Western Society at the turn of the last century: the white peril (tainted milk); the yellow peril of malaria; the social evil (prostitution); the evils of the Nickelodeon!! Aeroplane deaths. The Housefly. Typhoid. Immigrants. It was a true age of anxiety.

Fear is the key emotion underscoring the Nicholson Family Saga and it is in all the letters, either written flat out or lurking between the lines: the fear of destitution, primarily. The middle class generally lives in fear and flux as it is positioned between the poor and the rich. In good times, the middle class feels it can have it all. In bad times (or times of severe flux) it fears falling into the abyss.

In 1910, The Nicholsons were a middle class family on the bubble.

Today, 100 years later, most middle class families are on the bubble, whether they feel it or not.

So we go to see movies about rich, privileged people who are miserable, because it makes us feel better.