J.B. Priestly and Me

Yesterday I listened to the Saturday Drama on BBC Radio 4. It was An Inspector Calls with  Toby Jones, who I just saw in Titanic and Tinker Tailor, in the lead.
The play takes place in a factory town in the UK in 1912, and covers the same territory as my digital trilogy about the real life Nicholsons of Richmond, Quebec. Read Threshold Girl.

Now, I hadn’t ever heard of this play, which shows there is a gap in my education. I studied Drama and Theatre in Junior College or CEGEP as they call it in Quebec.

According to its Wikipedia entry, An Inspector Calls is a classic play by J. B. Priestley, that is requisite reading in English and Welsh schools.

The play has what some might describe as a socialist point of view, telling the story of a bright and pretty factory girl who ends up killing herself due to a series of unhappy events, all perpetrated my members of the same prominent family.

Funny, the Priestley  girl is a bit like the fictional character I created for my trilogy, Miss Gouin! (And I hadn’t read this play, really I hadn’t.) Miss Gouin is a milliner’s assistant in Richmond in 1911.

My ebook is based on REAL letters, real people, real events, so it shouldn’t have any point of view, right? Well, good question.

My play also features middle class women. Middle class women with high aspirations and not much in their purse.

I am now writing Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, the follow up to Threshold Girl. In fact, I have the ebook totally plotted out and I’ve written all the key scenes.

What I haven’t done is stick Miss Gouin in the story. But I think I should. When I last left her at the end of Threshold Girl, things don’t look good: she is marching in a labour parade and  working at Dominion Textile. This is June 1912.

I suppose I can have her at at Montreal Council of Women meeting in Spring 1912, the one Edith attends where Carrie Derick talks about eugenics (and says inferior people have big families) possibly brought as an ‘exhibit’ by a social advocate society lady, as an example of something or other. Or I can have her in Boston in 1912, working in a big department store, pretending she is French from France. That is her dream.

Then she could marry Henry, the Boston doctor, who in real life never married. Happy ending for her.

Scene from An Inspector Calls. Shiela Burling, Brian Worth, getting engaged at the beginning of the play. They both play a part in the demise of a working class girl. IMDB gives the move, with Alistair Sim as the Inspector, 7.3. It’s on YouTube.

In An Inspector calls, the girl in question is a factory worker who gets fired for union activities, but who gets a decent job in a Department Store, but is let go for no good reason and who goes to work in a      cabaret-brothel, who ends up pregnant and kills herself.

From everything I have read about the 1910 era, this is pretty much the trajectory of working class women who have bad luck.  (Coco Chanel would be the working class girl with good luck.) So Priestley’s Point of View is based on reality. He makes no bones about it. He has his main character say out loud “This is what happens to millions  upon million of women.”

The Social Evil…Prostitution, it looms large in the life of EVERY woman in 1910, poor, middle class, and rich (who aim to eradicate it without empowering the lower class women involved- quite a trick) – and it is a raison d’etre of the Suffrage Movement in the UK, US and Canada.

Christobel Pankhurst wrote a pamphlet claiming that prostitution would be eradicated should women get the vote.

Men, she claimed, should be as chaste as women.  You see, as long as young men feel they need a sexual education before marriage, they will need rubbish women to practice on.

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

Love and Loss Story 1910 Montreal.

Edith Nicholson 1884-1977 and her ‘unofficial fiance’ Charles Gagne 1883(?) – 1910. This picture is likely 1909.

Edith Nicholson, my husband’s great Aunt, never married. She told her nieces and nephews and great nieces and great nephews that she lost her ‘great’ love in a hotel fire. They weren’t ‘officially engaged’ but they had ‘an understanding’.

In 2004, I found the Nicholson letters and in a letter dated May 3 1910, Edith writes of the loss to her Mother, Margaret in Richmond Quebec.

Your letter received this am. It was so good to hear your voice over the phone. It was quite natural. Oh, how I wish I could talk over everything with you. It seems terribly hard to think it all for the best, when there are so many that are of no use living on and others that are held in esteem cut off in a moment. One thing, I am very thankful for that he wrote me. No doubt one of the last things that he did. I can’t express my feelings. I never felt so badly in my life. But I suppose there are few who have had so pleasant a one as I have, and trouble comes to all.

It took me a while to figure out, but her beau was a Charlie Gagne. (She mentions many young men in her letters, sometimes only with initials.) It seems Edith and Charlie had an on-again off-again type relationship through 1908-1909. In the summer of 1909 I have  proof that he spent time stepping out with Edith as I have a few pictures of the couple on outings in the Eastern Townships.

In September 1909 her mother Margaret writes her father Norman and says “Charlie has gone to Mexico. So that flirtation is over.”

In October 1909, Edith writes her Mom saying she hasn’t heard from Charlie G and that she has no intention of trying to contact him. “He could still be in Mexico, for all I know.”

Then there’s NOTHING but the May 3 letter. Edith writes that she is looking at his picture in the Montreal Star and that “it does not do him justice.”

About 5 years ago, I tripped over to the McGill Library to check out the May 1910 Star. I found a story about a Cornwall fire, where a Charlie Gagne, bank clerk, perished.

No picture though – so I was confused.

I found the Nicholson family album a little later and saw these pictures. Could this man be the Charlie of the letters? I wondered. But, again, I couldn’t prove for certain.

Then Google News archives came online and I saw that the Rossmore Fire happened on April 29!

Yesterday, I ventured down to Concordia’s Webster Library to check out the January-April Reel of the 1910 Montreal Star. Sure enough, the Cornwall fire was front page news on April 29 as the Star was an afternoon paper. The next day’s issue had a back of the newspaper follow up article on the fire with a picture of Charlie Gagne, Levis born bank teller at the Bank of Montreal.

The picture was of a sober-faced Charlie, but it was without a doubt the man of the family album. (I didn’t have a library card so could not buy a photocopy of the picture.)

Mystery over.

Right now I am heavy into writing Milk and Water, my story of 1927 Montreal… but I’ve already plotted out Edith’s Story, “The Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, Militant Suffragette Sympathizer and Inadvertent Opium Addict.”

It’s told from the future (from today perhaps by her spirit..or from 1976 the year before she died.)

She starts with hearing the news of the death, on the Saturday, April 30. (She won’t have heard of it the day before.)

She is at Westmount Methodiste Institute – a boarding school, where everyone has Saturday afternoon off.

She is planning to go to see an art exhibit at Phillip’s Square.

She is going to wear her new hat, she just purchased on the 19th of April for 7.50 (a huge amount of money for a teacher making 200 a year) a big black shape with pink flowers and a black velvet bow.

Dr. Villard, the principal tells her of the death. She takes to her bed, in the boarding school.

She is given strong medicine.  She sleeps for a few days and then wanders around the school in a fog for a few days.

The Next Saturday she awakes and takes double or triple the amount of tonic she is supposed to. She puts on her white dress (not appropriate for street wear) and new hat and drifts out down the stairs of the boarding school on her way  to the Art Exhibit.

Edith on Opium

But before she gets out the door of Westmount Methodist, a young male student tells her the big news:The KING is Dead.

She wanders out the door up Greene Avenue to Saint Catherine

to the streetcar

 

that takes her past Peel and Ste. Catherine

to Phillip’s Square and the Montreal Art Association Building and the exhibit of modern Canadian artists.

The Streetcar is abuzz with talk of the King’s death and new King, George V.  She is confused. Why is everyone talking about her beau’s death?

Edith is keen on seeing a painting by  F. S. Coburn, the Eastern Townships artist from Melbourne, the town adjacent Richmond.  A painting of a red sleigh in winter being pulled by a happy white horse. She is homesick for the E.T.

She wanders into the next room and sees, front and center,  the painting Maternity by Mary Riter-Hamilton – of a woman breastfeeding, and it occurs to her, all of a sudden, that she will NEVER MARRY and never have children. So, she faints.

Dr. Villard’s daughter rouses her and takes her home. She has been with Edith all along,  following her, knowing something is not right.  But Edith hasn’t been aware of it….(That’s my first chapter.)

In Levis, in 1901, according to the Canadian Census, there is only one Charles Gagne, 17. A French Canadian Catholic. He has not father, but a mom who is a seamstress, a high end one.

If this is the Charlie, and I think it is, he must have converted. Edith works at a school where French Catholics are ‘brought up to the light’ as Dr. Villard says in a book he writes a decade later.

Phillip’s Square in 1910 was considered a very proper place for women. The park had no benches, so no place for leering old men to sit and no place for women to rest and ‘invite’ men’s attention.

Morgan’s Department Store was on one corner (and department stores were considered safe havens for women), the Art Association building at another, Birk’s Jewellers at yet another and there was a church at the other corner.

Coincidentally, a statue of Edward VII was soon erected at this square and so remains.

In 1910, PROPER young women were allowed to be good consumers, but not ‘a product’ to be consumed by society, especially by men. That would smack of the Social Evil, prostitution. This “Social Evil” or “the world’s oldest profession” (as Kipling coined it) informed the life of every era woman, upper, middle and lower class, especially in the Big City.

And yet, every young woman was “on the market” and in the business of selling herself to a man, if the father didn’t have the money to ‘buy’ her a man with a dowry. Edith Nicholson, 27, in this story, effectively takes herself ‘off the market’ at this moment.  I will play with history and have a very sad story to tell: about a young couple in love  and wanting to marry, but without the money to do so. I will have her Beau make a desperate attempt to earn cash (as bank clerks made little money) by going to Mexico – and eventually be murdered for it!

They never did identify the body of Charlie Gagne. All the bodies in the stairwell, (where the fire started, allegedly by a cigarette)were incinerated. They identified his body because a tie pin he owned was nearby.  As you can see, Charlie was a natty dresser, and that likely impressed Edith, who liked to dress just so herself.

Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence (among a billion other classic novels of the period) centers on this issue in this time.

 

Phillip’s Square, Birks at Left, Church at right.

Morgan’s from Phillip’s Sqaure

Edith in the Sky with Diamonds

Yesterday I read that the Province of Alberta has four times the amount of prescriptions drug abuse as Quebec. They don’t know why.

I can hazard a guess…:)

When I was in my 20′s I had a close friend who was hooked on some prescription pain killer. She had an important job and few noticed she was in la la land most of the time.

Can’t recall which drug it was. A powerful one. She had multiple prescriptions and one day she overdosed and I had to bring her to emergency where they let her writhe in pain on her gurney for hours.

I had an inkling they were doing this on purpose, but maybe not. I vividly recall that day I spent in ER because I wasn’t sick, so I got to watch all the human drama unfolding around, and that day ER I recall was like an episode of ER the TV show, I tell you.

A man died and his two kids (youths) were reacting in opposite ways:the daughter wailing and the son with his head in a textbook.

I heard a doctor tell another that the same man had presented the day before with a paralyzed finger and they had sent him home… and then he presented again…. anyway, it sounded like the doctor was describing how his case had been mismanaged, like Mrs. Haufnagel on St. Elsewhere.

Anyway, I took a Tylenol blue pill yesterday, just one, to see if it helped my blocked ears, which are acting up. I’m using a homeopathic remedy.. I don’t like taking drugs of any kind. (Except the one that pours from a bottle and comes from grapes.)

I am clearly a rarity today. And the modern doctor loves to give pills. (A recent Salon.com article claimed that in the old days doctors did everything they could not to give a pill, now they do the opposite. No time. Easier. They really are “pill pushers.”)

When my husband goes for a checkup, his doctor now always offers him Viagra, just out of the blue. My husband is totally healthy, but he is asked if he wants this ‘recreational’ drug, so the doctor must ask all the older guys. (Last time I told my husband to say that he didn’t need Viagra, but he could sure use Angelina Jolie. Viagra is not an aphrodesiac, as far as I know, but it is treated as one. Ps. and the ads say that 40 percent of men over a certain age have this condition on occasion. Then it isn’t a condition, is it? It’s normal.

The same goes for Prozac. If a huge proportion of the population is depressed (and the prescribing statistics for these anti-depression drugs seem to suggest it is.. One fifth of the population of Glasgow is on some sort of anti-depressant apparently) then depression is normal – especially in Scots.. So these drugs are merely mood enhancers. The same Salon article says that depression in now something to be ‘managed’ and not be ‘cured’. Managing makes more money than curing, you see. Almost 9 percent of Americans are on the drugs,and the figure is ever rising, but not African Americans, oddly, who have something to be sad about if the recent NYT article, saying that MLK is weeping in his grave is true.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/26/opinion/martin-luther-king-jr-would-want-a-revolution-not-a-memorial.htm

(But managing your mood with marijuana is bad, very bad. Well, were it legal, it couldn’t make money for Big Pharma, so better that it make money for Big Crime, and provide an excuse to abritrarily incarcerate certain racial groups. That’s the logic anyway.)

They don’t talk about this on the News, because were it not for advertising from Big Pharma, the mainstream media would be dead as nail in door. An awful lot has changed since they allowed Pharmaceutical Companies to sell directly to civilians and not just to doctors. And the way the announcers race through the list of possible side effects at the end of these drug ads, makes it sound funny, like a joke. Indeed, the side effect of Viagra have reached iconic joke status in TV sitcoms and movies.

The prescription drugs Alberta’s citizens are abusing are opiods. Probably akin to the drugs found in ‘tonics’ in 1900.

I am writing Edith’s Story, the follow up to Threshold Girl www.tighsolas.ca/page10.pdf.pdf

 

and I have her stoned on some tonic as she goes to the Art Show.

I know for a fact her principal, who was also medical doctor, gave her tonics for ‘heart’ conditions. So he probably really dosed her here after the death of her fiance. And there were always those medicines for La Grippe.

So has it really changed that much? People in those days, women mostly, were going out stoned too. (It’s only coincidental that she was a Canadian Scot.) They were just outlawing opiates in every day products.. In the US, especially, which is why the Patent Medicine People all moved to Brockville, Ontario.

I read an ad for a baby medicine that proudly claimed Contains no Opiates. Imagine.

Of course they famously sedated housewives in the 50′s with Valium.

Newswatch: Anglo-Quebec style

I spend a lot of time  reading the news on the web, reading US, UK and Canadian sources (the sensible ones  so so I thought I’d check out the Google News ‘favorite search’ list for today, 20th of August – to see what the hoi polloi is curious about.

I started with the letter A for Canada (English). Amy Winehouse is first, then Ayano Tokumasu,the poor girl who fell over fence at the Niagara Falls, apple, air canada and aecl which is a story related to Fukishuma, some rod provided by Canada, whereas in the UK, although Amy Winehouse is top search subject, Arsenal comes in second, Andy Murray, Amir Khan, aston villa, Amy Childs are also on the list. Hmm. Arsenal is a soccer team. I’ve read Fever Pitch. Andy Murry, wasn’t he on one of those Extras episodes?  Hmm. I spend a lot of time on the Guardian website, but I know none of these names. Wait, Andy Murray is a tennis player. (I didn’t watch the Rogers Canadian Open last week; too busy watching my savings go down, down down, up, down, UP UP, down down down. Who needs tennis. (The next thing you know, my cat will be watching the Financial Channel.)Amy Childs is a person on Big Brother. So entertainment issues were tops here in the UK.  I guess they need a break from the week or two of heavy duty news they just endured.

( In the US for the letter Amy Winehouse, apple, Anderson Cooper, android, Amanda Knox,Antoinette Stephen, amateur radio,amazon and yes, Arsenal. Was the team bought by US concern? I wonder….. No. Hmm.  Well, I know who Anderson Cooper is, and I know amazon, but why amateur radio? Checked, can’t see why it comes up so high. Amanda Knox is involved in a murder trial. and Anoinette Stephen is another murder story. Very taboid interests!

Oh, and since I live in French Canada, I checked their 10 ten news searches. Yes, Amy Winehouse first. Algerie, apple, ashton kutcher (who according to headline, forgets the details of his investments, and Angelina Jolie who is buying a house with Brad Pitt in England. At least they can afford it but how is this news? So what? Like I fed the cat this morning.

 The fact that I just had to check the spelling of these two pretty folks’s names, says something about me. Then Android. What is Android? I ask, sounding like one of the bubble-headed beauties in the  original Star Trek..Oh, something to to with Google.

burundi, bombardier, barak obama,bute, bell, bourse, black keys, britney spears, beyonce.. (I’m using this as a memory exercise, since I can’t keep both windows open together. I  am NOT good at this. I can keep three items in my brain at best. I keep having to go back. Scary, since I think this is similar to a test they give for Alzheimer’s. Note to self: Must practice more memory games!)

That’s the B’s for French Canada. Bourse is the Stock Market. It’s also the word for purse,as in “Je n’ai rien dans ma bourse.”I bet that’s been one the the favourites in all Western Countries all week.

English Canada: blue jays, big brother  Blackberry, brad richards.bluesfest, brad griffith, bombardier

UK: big brother, bbc sport, big brother 2011, bbc, bbcnews, (and they are cutting funds for teh BBC?)beyonce, beckham, british open, borders, black ops, boeing.beyonce bachman, breaking bad and then, funny enough, betty ford, brett favre

US: bank of america, booton shooting, burger king

and a random letter for fun: (I close my eyes and touch the keyboard)…mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

memphis 3, murdoch, machbook air, mumbai, mexico, memphis three, mobile, that’s the US for M.

The UK..man utd, that’s Manchester United for cool people,  mata, manchester united ,for boring people, madeline mccann (another alleged sighting) murdoch, metsut ozil, man city, modric (whaaa?)Manchester City, Michael Jackson

Canada Anglais: Montreal, Maple Leafs, Murdoch, mac book air, Mayor Rob Ford, Mumbai.. why Montreal? Did something happen here? OH, our major cities all show up tops in their letter.

Canada French:maroc, martine obry, monaco, meteo, mylene farmer,  messi, marseilles, mercato,mesut ozil (who is a footballer.)

Oh, and I noticed, these ‘favorites’ change pretty fast.

I don’t know what this proves… a sliver of a sample…..My top news searches would not fall into any of these catagories.. but that’s because I am an English Canadian living in Quebec. We just don’t fit in anywhere.

I guess I’ll get back to living in the past, 100 years ago as I write Edith’s Story, about a young woman and the suffragettes in 1910, which is a follow up to Threshold Girl www.tighsolas.ca/page10.pdf.pdf  about a college student in 1910. L. P. Hartley wrote that the Past in a Foreign Country, but he’s wrong, I think. It’s familiar territory as human nature  is very predictable.

I’ve spent a lot of time reading era newspapers, especially the Montreal Gazette. People’s interests, when it comes to the news, has really not changed much. The big difference, Minister’s Sermons and lectures aren’t reported on in the newspaper any more. (I’m glad they were, for this is very useful to me as I write this book about Presbyterian women, after all.

 The Home Secretary, in 1910, (I think it was Winston Churchill) sure came down on the suffragettes, in much the same way Prime Minister David Cameron (who was No. 4 on the news list, after David Haye, David Tennant, and NO. 1 the Duchess of Cambridge, has come down on this year’s rioters in England, the education-fee protesters and the unemployed youth looters of last week.

I think Mr. Churchill used the same confrontation rhetoric against any threat: women who rallied  for the vote and broke a window or two;  skinny Indians who promoted peaceful resistance; and the Third Reich. Churchill’s tone was appropriate for the war years, at least, and he was voted The Greatest Briton of the Century for it.

 Yes, no reporter has to sit through a sermon anymore, thank GOODNESS..The clergy has no clout today… but then, with Perry prayer vigils and the Tea Party people, maybe it’s deja vu all over again..

Women’s Options, 1910

Coco Before Chanel still. This is the scene at the racetrack where she trashes the society women’s fashions while walking with her sister.

As I wrote in the previous blog, some 1910 era movie period pieces are meticulous when it comes to costume and some aren’t.

Coco Before Chanel is, because, well, that’s the material point.. (pun).

And where’s my Miss Potter. I love that movie. But someone stole my copy. Must get another.

Anyway, I’ve been reading over some of my old blogs (because I MUST get down to writing Flo in the City) when I stumbled upon an important one that I forgot all about.

I wrote about a letter in the Nicholson stash, (but not a Nicholson letter) from someone writing down the names of all the Lewis relations in the US.

It is mentioned in the letter that an Aunt Flora (which one I can’t tell) is living in the poor house is Sarnia with her invalid husband, where they pay 1.50 a week to stay.

It also mentions that another relative, a niece is working as a high school teacher in Chicago and earning 180 a month, three times what Marion is making.

Two sides of the coin, I guess. Or two extremes of the middle class.

This I MUST put in Flo in the City. I’m sure visions of the poor house danced in Margaret’s head when she read this. It must have terrified her, or comforted her, as her daughter Marion was a teacher.

(I saw in one of my era magazines a profile of the Superintendant of Education in Chicago who was a woman and whose salary was 10,000 a year, a huge salary.)

Watching Coca after Chanel, up to this scene and seeing how Coco had to ‘ingratiate herself’ with her first rich boyfriend, indeed foisting herself on him because she needed a place to stay,well, it’s something.

I have a bio of Coco, but years ago. I’m not certain if this was EXACTLY the case. But she was a ‘courtesan’ of sorts.. No choice, she had no connections.

But as many great works of literature have shown, courtesans had it better than most women. And this courtesan was the right woman in the right place at the right time.