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).

Black Houses and Houses of Light

The porch at Tighsolas. (I don’t know why this picture turned out soooo small.)

Anyway, I finally got the Kindle and I purchased a book right away, the Edwardians by Paul Thompson (I didn’t buy the book with the same title by Vita Sackville West and Juliet Nicolson).

I started to read it without learning how to do anything beforehand. I found that you can get a computer voice to read it outloud. (I think THE WORLD should hire Patrick Stewart to do all voices in it; the men would like it, they’d feel like personnel on the Enterprise and the women would like it, well, because, you know.) Anyway, the voice on the Kindle sounds generic, although the pronunciation is not half-bad. The computer voice on my husband’s Tom Tom GPS is much more natural, though.

But that’s not the point!

I was disappointed right away when clouds came out and my living room, already a gloomy place, because darker. I expected the Kindle screen to be adjustable, but it isn’t. In that respect it is no better than a paper book. Except, that’s the point, I guess. It’s hard to read off a screen because of the back lighting. This has no backlighting. (Not the 6 inch screen I have. ) Well, I must do with it. I hope when you turn on a light that there is no glare. (You’d think a contraption called Kindle would have some light.)

Anyway, this book, the Edwardians was of interest to me right from the start. It provided more background to the Tighsolas era. Yes, it was England, but the gap between rich and poor was, well, gaping. And, remember, the slums of Montreal were second to none for their horrible conditions.

Also, when describing the contrast of housing between the wealthy 1 percent and the teeming masses, the author mentioned the worse housing in the British Isles, in the Hebrides. The crofts! ‘Black houses’ they were called.

These were the houses that belonged to the grandparents of Marion and Flo and Edith, my husband’s ancestors. The ones they were forced to give up.

And even though these places were poor excuses for homes, (water poured into them so they were soaked) the environment in the Hebrides, which was bleak and barren, was still not as bad as the slums of London or the other industrial areas in England.

Yes, the more I read, the more I understand the Nicholsons, the struggling middle class ancestors of my husband. (The more I understand my late mother in law, who was influenced by these people.) The Nicholson saga, described in Flo in the City, reveals a family that simply REFUSES to give up their lovely, solid, comfortable home in Richmond, Quebec.

Tighsolas means House of Light in Gaelic. So the Nicholsons went from Black Houses to a House of Light. That’s a symbol I must use in Flo in the City, my book about a young girl coming of age in the Pivotal 1908-1913 era.

I wonder where I will put it.