Everything is Point of View

Flo and Marion in their big hats 1911 circa

You know, when I first found these Nicholson letters and decided to write a YA book, I contacted Canada’s top author of historical fiction for young people and she told me point blank: forget about the history, go for the story.

I didn’t want to do that, so it’s taken me 7 years to complete enough background research to make sense of the letters.

I was also invited early on to turn my website http://www.tigsolas.ca/, with its letters, into a social studies book (on the condition that I won a certain humanities grant from the government.)I didn’t want to do that: these books are priced too high and are read only by scholars.

Since then I stumbled upon Nella Last and the three wonderful books based on her diary and I realized I wanted to do something similar with the Nicholson Letters.

Nella Last’s “War” and “Peace” and “in the 1950′s” are all highly compelling as a narrative and character study and also true to history, although they were ‘edited which means the editors added their point of view, by virtue of what they left in AND what they left out. So, I’m going in that direction.

I read an article the other day, in the Guardian, (originally in Slate) criticizing the movie the King’s Speech because it rewrites history: Churchill was on Edward VII’s side; the Royals were appeasers.

Imagine that! A movie that rewrites history. I’m floored.

I think some message board commentators got it right: The story of the King’s Speech isn’t about George VI’s (Colin Firth) politics in the 1930′s but about his character, his struggles and the inspiration he provided to the British public at the onset of the War. (Here in the colonies, too, I suspect.) As it was pointed out, Churchill was voted the Greatest Briton and he was a bastard, but, as it happens, the right bastard at the right time.

Any critical thinker must know already that movies re-write history. Even if what they put into a movie is mostly ‘good’ history – there’s always what they leave out. Even documentaries are ‘point of view.” (I recall a National Film Board Director telling me that in the 80′s… That they were going to call all their critically-acclaimed docs “point-of-view documentaries”.)

Even news reports are point-of-view and these days these news reports mostly re-write history while the digital ink and pixels are still drying (they call it ‘spin’ ) and that’s much more worrying, I think. Because these revisionist versions get out so early, they get ‘etched’ into people’s brains as the definitive version. (As in WMD and Saddam.)

That’s why I like letters in general, and especially my Nicholson letters, because they are as close to the ‘truth’ as you get. And they still leave a great deal up to interpretation.

Anyway, the other day my husband saved a Turner Classic Movie for me, So Long at the Fair, from 1950 with Dirk Bogarde and Jean Simmons that takes place at the 1889 Paris Exposition. He knows I like watching the 1900 the French Exposition videos on YouTube. I’m glad he did, because it was entertaining in an Hitchcock (ian)? way. A brother and sister from England visit Paris for the Exhibition, check into a busy hotel, and over night the brother goes missing. Indeed, all trace of his existence are erased.

Scary.

The odd thing about this movie, it was bilingual. (Now, that’s fine for me but how about everyone else? Here in Quebec they can make bilingual movies ( Bon Cop Bad Cop) was a funny movie only Quebeckers get. They are coming out with another one, Funkytown, about the disco scene in the 70′s in Montreal. The movie centers around a place called the Limelight, Montreal’s Moulin Rouge in the era. (Or is that Club Super Sexe?) I never went to the Limelight (I think) but some of my weirder friends did – and often. I guess that’s why I didn’t go there. (I was at college in the 70′s.)

Anyway, this So Long at the Fair movie wasn’t true to life either. I mean the lead characters go to the Moulin Rouge for a night out. It is hardly likely that a respectable young girl touring Europe would be taken there by her brother in 1886. The place was a kind of brothel, after all.

There’s a Moulin Rouge act in Montreal during the Tighsolas era. I can pretty well guarantee Marion, Flora and Edith didn’t go. (Herb, maybe.)

The ending made no sense either. But, then, IT’S A MOVIE!

Domesticity. Who Really Wants it?

Fou Fou takes a break. (Besides, it is getting cold.)

I’m about finished Nella Last in the 1950′s, and I greatly enjoyed it, as I did the other two Nella Last books. I identified more with Nella in this volume, too, because in the 1950′s Nella was an empty nester.

It’s hard for me as a boomer to identify with the blitz or austerity. But being 55 with two sons out of the house…

And as it happened, my own 25 year old showed up for a short time, just as Nella’s son, Cliff showed up.

And I had a similar mixed experience, because 25 year old boys, whoops, men, war-veterans or not, gay or not, behave the same towards their moms and don’t like being back at home, for any length of time.

In the Nicholon letters, Marion, my husband’s grandmother, describes how antsy her brother Herb gets when he is visiting Tighsolas. That’s 1907. Nella Last is 1955 and this is 2010. And so it goes.

My other son, who is going to uni in Ottawa, was back for a few days, but that’s more typical.

So the two brothers did what young men, these days, do to unwind, they played some violent video game on the Big Screen TV and whooped and hollered and I went to bed, remembering HOW NOISY my home was when the kids were at home.(My husband works nights.)

An hour or so later, I had a knock at the door. My youngest son had a question. ( I was needed!) “Mom? What should I do? The cat has caught a mouse and he is playing with it in the living room?”

Well, I had no answer for him. “Ah, throw a bowl over it,” was all I could come up with. So,he closed back the door.

Fou Fou had caught a mouse. At this time of the year we get a few furry invaders. Fou Fou had been my mother’s cat. My mother died of bone cancer last year in September, and while she was in palliative care, her main fear seemed to be for her cats: who was to take them? She had Fou Fou, a large long haired yellow cat and Sookie, a tiny Burmese with serious sinus issues. So I took them in, despite the fact my eldest son is highly allergic to cats. (But he had moved out, remember?)

We have 3 dogs too, so the first month, Fou Fou, the “timid one” hid in the downstairs sitting room for a full month. 5 pound Sookie, undaunted by my pack of slobbering canines, came upstairs immediately and installed herself on the Satelite Receiver, where she has camped ever since.

These were apartment cats, and hadn’t had their shots, so I did not let them go outside, not that they wanted to venture out. The window was all they were used to.

But this spring, Fou Fou started escaping out doors with the dogs. But with the slightest sound, a car or a neighbour’s dog bark, he would madly scramble back towards the house and (with a crazed look in his dazzling emerald eyes) cling onto the screen (like a cartoon character) until I let him back in. Some days, I would escort him outside as he explored our large garden. Then one day, as I watched him from the terrace, I caught him stalking a chipmunk way back near the woodpile, just like an old pro. I said OH OH, and brought him to the vet, got him his shots and, from that moment on, he’s been an outdoor cat.

Well, with in that first week, he stayed out all night. “That’s it. He’s dead,” I fatalistically told my husband. But no, in the morning I looked out and there was Fou Fou, happily sleeping on a patio chair. He saw me, mewed, and brushed my ankle as he whisked in for his breakfast.

We’ve had a lovely summer and Fou Fou has spent most of it outside. Our large property is fenced in, but he’s taken to squeezing under said barrier and exploring other gardens in our area. (I’ve seen him crossing the street half a kilometer away.)

He’s taken to the outdoors like a fish to water… or a feline to the forest.

My husband and I attribute this late-life transformation to the fact that he was acclimatized to the outdoors as a tiny kitten – and obviously taught to hunt by his mother.

(In 2000, my own mother and I rescued him from my father’s country home. A neighbour had given the kitten to my dad, not realizing my Dad had advanced Alzheimer’s. Fou Fou was sick and close to death as he met us at the porch steps, and about 3 months old.)

My mother took him in at my insistence. (I was emotional over my father’s illness.)My son was at home in 2000, so I couldn’t keep a cat,myself.

So there you go. The wisdom is that cats do better indoors, that they are safer too. And for ten years Fou Fou seemed to be proof of this. He was a shy but friendly cat who experienced life from a two bedroom 8th floor apartment in West End Montreal, with occasional outings in the hallway.

And now he is a bona fide outdoor cat, living in a rural suburb, in danger of being run over by a car, or poisoned by whatever, or beaten by an irate neighbour as he pisses in the petunia bed, but he clearly LOVES it. (I can’t keep him indoors.)The other day he coughed up something on the front stoop that looked like a pheasant’s neck.

Domestication. Does any living creature really like it?

In the 1910′s it was the wisdom that women (well, middle class women) thrived in small spaces, mentally and physically, that a home and male protection (and children) was all a woman wanted. But then came the “restless” women with their odd ideas, wanting to have it all, and, with it, this widespread misconception that a woman in the 1910 era had the opportunity to do whatever she wanted, enter whatever field she wanted, If she wanted, but of course, few women wanted THAT. It wasn’t natural… Then came the war, the roaring twenties and the suffrage, finally, but no men left to marry; the thirties and the Depression; the forties, war again; (liberating women again) then the 50′s, where women were re-domesticated but with a difference, they could finally spend, Spend SPEND. And then the 60′s…. when once again we wanted it all. And now, in 2010, perhaps it IS finally true, women can enter most any field they want (except high tech or movie directing) and work AND marry and have kids, if they choose. (And they can burn out too, because they still do the lioness’s share of the homemaking, for some reason.)

Yes, I know a woman won Best Director last year, but that’s like in 1910, when they said ANY WOMAN could become a lawyer, because ONE woman had ..see my next blog. (Digression: 10 of the most exhilarating hours I have ever spent was when I got to be a floor manager at a live television event (a charity event). I loved it. People remarked on how good I was at it, what a natural I was. But there wasn’t a chance in hell I could get into that field, although I was working for a radio/television station. Because of union rules and gender discrimination. I also remember loving working as a PA on live TV news, back when it wasn’t automated. (A job most PA’s hated.)

Yes, I’ve almost finished reading Nella Last’s 1950′s, where a woman who deserved much better was confined to a small space, emotionally and physically, with only her cats for comfort and only her words to set her free, with occasional trips out to Conosten Lake for good behavior and I meditate on it all. (I am doubly intrigued as my father grew up in Carlisle, close by. My grandmother, a British expat who made friends with Sultans in Malaya, was born in Teesdale, Durham.) It’s an old story, the war was a perilous time for everyone in England, but it did give some women some freedom, for a short time. (Except for my grandmother, who was interned in a POW camp in Singapore, but that’s another story. www.tighsolas.ca/page745.html

Above: Part of Fou Fou’s new territory. Below. The 8th floor apartment he lived in for 10 years.