MY FINAL ARTICLES FOR THE CANADIAN REGISTER included a long nostalgic review of my years at St. Joseph's College School at Bay and Wellesley Streets in Toronto. When I left there in 1954 as a member of the 100th graduating class, I was the last girl ever to attend "St. Joe's" through all elementary and high school grades. I had a lot of memories to share, managed to get a site plan, and Bill assigned me a full page.
Because St. Joe's had been my second home, I wrote to either the Mother Superior or the Principal at the time of its closing, asking for some memento of it. She sent back a small oval shadow box containing a carved alabaster copy of Raphael's Madonna della Seggiola. That left me speechless, because Babcia had brought as a wedding gift a family treasure, an oil painting on copper of the same subject, the same size, in a thick, ancient wooden frame with traces of gilt and lots of tiny worm holes. Those two pieces began the only serious collection I've ever assembled. Thirty-two Madonnas in materials ranging from petit point to carved ivory are displayed in my apartment.
Another of my final articles was about The Little Brothers of the Poor.* One of Fr. Hanley's countless contacts had passed the word that this order of laymen, founded in Paris in 1946, was setting up shop in Montreal and had caught the attention of Mme Georges Vanier, wife of Canada's Governor-General. Bill's headline explains their work -- A CHAMPAGNE APOSTOLATE: Luxury and love for the poor.
Mme Vanier was popular across the country, a loving mother to all Canadians. After we published that item about one of her favourite causes, I sent her a clipping of it and of my last piece about one of mine: The Catholic children at Sunnyside. In it I detailed all the rejections** of the girl who went to Confession with me on an unforgettable Saturday. Bill headed it "The Lonely Wayfarer". Mme Vanier sent me a (typed) thank-you note, adding that the Sunnyside story was "an eye-opener to me and I will not forget, when the opportunity arises, to mention the problems you write about."
In those days, when housing was discussed in my age group it was common knowledge that one should "buy in Toronto, rent in Montreal". The latter copied the European model of well-built and affordable rentals or co-operatives big enough for people to live out their lives with children. And there were green spaces everywhere. Most Montreal landlords were private individuals and not greedy. As in Europe, owning residential buildings was a business like any other, with rents covering the costs and providing modest, steady incomes.
Charlie and I were advised to look for an apartment first on Montreal's Ridgewood Ave., a long, dead-end street snaking up the east side of Westmount Summit. After Hans Black, a pre-WWII immigrant from Germany, showed us a few units in each of three buildings he owned halfway up, we chose a one-bedroom for $125 a month. We signed the lease in his office in the smallest bedroom of his own apartment in a building across the street from "ours".
In May we'd had $500 in savings. In August there was just enough left to buy food until Charlie's first pay cheque. But someone forgot to put him on the payroll.
He phoned from the newsroom to say, as casually as he could, that he felt like walking home on such a lovely day. I'm a slow thinker but after he'd said a bit more I finally grasped that he had no money. Journalists live on gossip and he could not let the ones he'd be working with know we were flat broke. We would never live that down!
Condiments were all I had in the kitchen at that moment, so while Charlie walked I invented Plan B. I called a friend who lived near us, asked her to lend us $30 for two weeks' groceries, and walked to her house to fetch it. Two weeks later we were able to carry out Plan A: We opened a bank account with the (double) pay cheque, withdrew enough cash to function, and celebrated his new job with lunch in the Queen Elizabeth.
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GLIMPSES of how Canada worked: a writer's memoir.
Non-FictionDuring the first 30 years of my journalistic career in the second half of the 20th century, good jobs of all kinds were available all over Canada. Those of us born in the 1930s and early '40s were in great demand because our generation was very smal...
