The Jalna Saga – Deluxe Edition: All Sixteen Books of the Enduring Classic Series & The Biography of Mazo de la Roche

by de la Roche, Mazo

Finally Mazo fetched the pages she had been working on and sat down in the rocker with the pages resting on a drawing board in her lap. She began to rock.

  She rocked and rocked, but no words came.

  “What’s the use?” Mazo muttered bitterly.

  But then Mazo looked at Bunty.

  “I shall be there,” the grizzled dog seemed to say. “I am the centre of all this.”

  “You do your best to understand our life, don’t you!” exclaimed Mazo. “You give your staunch spirit to us.”

  Through twelve difficult years, Bunty had guided Mazo. Or so Mazo felt.

  Mazo stopped rocking, put her feet up on the two bulky volumes of Dr. Johnsons Dictionary, and began to scribble with a pencil in a squarish, strong handwriting.

  She was working on her fifth novel. It would be a sequel to her fourth, Jalna, which she had entered in an international competition. She didn’t have a title for the sequel yet, but the story was coming along well. It too was about a big family like the one she had grown up in, except this family was rich – at least the grandmother was.

  In the sequel to Jalna, Gran Whiteoak would die and leave her fortune to one of her sons or grandsons. Which one?

  Sometimes Mazo imagined she was Gran Whiteoak. Sometimes she imagined she was one of the sons or grandsons. Today she was Gran…

  Bunty curled up beside a radiator and sighed. She knew several hours would pass before Mazo would be ready to go for a walk through the fascinating streets of the big-city neighbourhood where they had spent the winter. Until those hours had passed, Mazo would rock, pause, write, consult the dictionary, rock, pause, and write again.

  Bunty slept.

  “Jalna has won the competition!” Mazo blurted immediately to Caroline when the latter returned home from the office. “A telegram came.”

  Mazo thrust the telegram at Caroline.

  In a daze Caroline read the words: “Have patience. Happy news awaits you.”

  “Oh,” Caroline said flatly. Then she sat down and looked blankly at Mazo. Caroline Louise Clement was past rejoicing. She had suffered suspense too long.

  Mazo’s enthusiasm evaporated. She sat down too, and both women remained silent for a long time.

  “When we do feel any emotion about this, we’ll have to dam it up,” remarked Mazo finally. “The publishers asked me not to tell anyone about my win until they notify the press. It will be about ten days. But of course I had to tell you.”

  “Perhaps we should leave town,” suggested Caroline. “It might be easier. We could rest, collect ourselves, and prepare for the publicity. Let’s go to Niagara Falls.”

  “Publicity. I’d forgotten about that,” moaned Mazo. “I think I already feel sick.”

  Caroline and Mazo were cousins, but they were as close as sisters and always worked as a team. Caroline was well aware that Mazo feared new people and situations.

  “Shall we take Bunty?” asked Caroline, changing the subject. “Travelling is so hard on her now.”

  Bunty wagged her stubby, curved tail.

  “We must,” replied Mazo. “Remember how she swam after the canoe when we tried to leave her while we went to get supplies?”

  “Remember how she jumped onto the seat of the van when we had to move again?” asked Caroline.

  “Yes,” agreed Mazo. “She was courageous then, as always.”

  “TORONTO WOMAN WINS $10,000 ATLANTIC MONTHLY NOVEL PRIZE” was the caption below the front-page photo of Mazo and Bunty in the Toronto Star of Monday, April 11, 1927. Overnight, Mazo had become a rich and famous writer. Her telephone and doorbell rang all day. Messenger boys arrived with telegrams of congratulations. Florists’ boxes arrived containing every kind of flower. Reporters arrived to interview her. Friends arrived to congratulate her. The partying went on for months.

  Novelists from all around the world had entered their work in an American competition for best novel, and a Canadian – Mazo de la Roche – had won!

  Mazo’s big win after many years of financial and personal struggle was wonderful, but it was not to be her only triumph. She would go on to write sixteen novels about a Canadian family called the Whiteoaks living in a house called Jalna, and these novels would sell in the millions in many languages and many countries. Her Jalna novels would be made into a Hollywood movie and a Broadway play. This same play, Whiteoaks, would be the first Canadian play to be mounted on a professional stage in London, England. And it was a hit!

  Mazo would write other books too, and she would win more awards. She would live in a mansion next door to the king and queen of England. She would become one of Canada’s most popular authors ever.

  Mazo de la Roche at two years.

  Mazo de la Roche and Bunty on the front page of the Toronto Star, April 1927, after winning the $10,0000 Atlantic Monthly-Little, Brown Award.

  1

  Beginnings

  I was not born where I should have been, in my father’s house, but in my grandfather’s.

  When she heard the distant whistle of the early-morning freight train, Mazo gazed down the long, terraced hill toward the railway tracks below and assumed her racer’s crouch.

  There was the train! Almost even with the edge of the lawn where she waited, the locomotive shrieked its challenge. Mazo shrieked hers. They were off!

  Her long auburn hair flying, Mazo raced the train to the opposite end of the lawn.

  She won! As always! And today the painted symbol on the boxcar just behind the locomotive was a full moon!

  “A fine day, Grandma!” shouted Mazo as she ran toward the back door of the solid, two-storey, red-brick house. “It was a full moon, so it’s going to be a fine day.”

  Inside the house a short, bright-eyed woman with wavy grey hair pulled back into a neat bun was already busy baking, despite the early hour. She smiled warmly as her cherished only grandchild entered the kitchen.

  “My, you’re a big help,” said Grandma Lundy. “And you’re just five years old, the same age as my little sister Martha was when we moved to Cherry Creek. Martha didn’t have to help Mother. But I did. Of course I was a big girl of nine. I had no time to play. I had chores to do.”

  “Chores are too much work,” commented Mazo, dancing around the room.

  “That’s just how I felt!” exclaimed Grandma Lundy. “Why, I had to help my mother in the kitchen and the garden. I fed the chickens too. And I minded little Martha and baby Mary. We were pioneering in the primeval forest. My father and big brothers, Wellington and Lambert, were chopping down trees to make fields. There was so much to do, everyone had to help.”

  “I don’t like helping,” said Mazo.

  “You may say that now,” said Grandma Lundy. “But I could not. I had to help.”

  “Tell me about how there was Willsons’ Hill and Clements’ Hill in Cherry Creek,” said Mazo. “Tell me how your little sister Martha married James Clement whose father was so rich.”

  “You go and play, Mazo,” said Grandma Lundy. “I have work to do. I must bake four loaves of bread and two rhubarb pies.”

  “There’s no one to play with,” said Mazo. “Father is in Toronto, Mother is sick in bed, Aunt Eva is dusting the sitting room so it will look nice when her gentleman-caller comes, Uncle Frank is working with Grandpa at the factory, Uncle George is working at the post office, Uncle Walter is at school, and Chub is outside barking at something.”

  “Your father will visit in a few days, and he will take you back with him to Toronto,” said Grandma Lundy.

  “I want somebody to play with now,” said Mazo.

  “Since it is going to be a fine day, you and Grandpa and I will go for a drive in the buggy this afternoon. We must go and see my brother Wellington. He and his family don’t know their neighbours very well yet because they just moved from Cherry Creek last year, so Grandpa’s going to help with some carpentry work and I’m going to bring some baking.”

  “Can we stop and see Grandpa’s Grandpa’s house?” asked Mazo.

 
; “We can if you’re good,” said Grandma Lundy. “Now go read your storybook.”

  Mazo de la Roche was born on January 15, 1879 in the village of Newmarket, York County, Ontario, in the home of her mother’s parents, Daniel and Louise Lundy. She was named Mazo Louise Roche. Her father, William Richmond Roche, gave Mazo her unusual first name. “Mazo” was supposedly the name of a girl Will Roche had once known and liked.

  A few weeks after Mazo was born, Daniel Ambrose Lundy borrowed money to buy a house on Prospect Street in Newmarket. Most of Mazo’s first nine years of life were spent in this house, which still stands today. The house looked down at the Northern Railway tracks and across at the Main Street of Newmarket, population two thousand.

  But Mazo spent summer vacations in the old Cherry Creek district at the south end of Innisfil Township, Simcoe County, about twenty kilometres north of Newmarket. Innisfil Township was where some of her Grandma Lundy’s nearest relatives lived, and where there was a nice lake to swim in: Lake Simcoe. Sometimes Mazo also visited her father’s family in Newmarket or, between 1884 and 1889, in Toronto.

  Daniel and Louise Lundy were like parents for Mazo because her real parents, William and Alberta Roche, did not have their own home. Besides, Alberta was ill and could not run a household or raise a child. Alberta, or “Bertie,” was a pretty woman with gingery light-brown hair and violet eyes, and she loved pretty clothes. Bertie had been healthy when she married the dark-haired, dark-eyed Will Roche, who was tall and handsome, and who danced and talked charmingly. But Bertie caught scarlet fever when she was about to give birth to her first and only child, Mazo, and the ravages of the disease left her an invalid for decades.

  Daniel and Louise (Willson) Lundy were the grandchildren of Quaker immigrants from the United States. These immigrants had come to Canada between about 1800 and 1810 and had cleared farms from the forest near Newmarket. Later, about 1840, Louise Lundy’s immediate family, the Willsons, had moved to Cherry Creek. When they grew up, Daniel and Louise Lundy became Methodists, as did many Quakers of their time and place.

  Grandpa Lundy was a skilled worker and a natural leader. He was foreman of the William Cane woodenware factory in Newmarket. He designed and supervised the creation of the machinery used in the factory, and he also supervised the building of Newmarket’s town hall.

  Mazo loved her Grandpa Lundy. He had thick silvery hair and blue eyes, and he was tall and strong. He was fun. He was kind and generous with his family and friends, and although he often got angry, he never got angry with Mazo.

  The Lundy home was already crowded when newborn Mazo joined it. There were Grandpa and Grandma Lundy, of course, plus four adult children and one six-year-old boy. Sometimes too Mazo’s father came and stayed with the Lundys.

  Although Mazo lived with a confusing crowd of close relatives, she was often lonely because none of these relatives were her own age. She sought companionship in stories, and she could be very affected by what she heard or read.

  Once, when Mazo was very young, a much older child who lived nearby told her a ghost story about a woman with a golden arm. According to the story, the woman died and her husband sold her arm. But the woman haunted her husband, and moaned, “Bring me back my golden arm! Bring me back my golden arm!”

  That night, Mazo lay awake in her bed with her hands over her ears and listened to the dead woman moan, “Bring me back my golden arm!” The ghost came closer and closer, past the stuffed owl on the stairs, closer and closer… Mazo jumped out of bed and fled down the stairs to the lit-up sitting room where the adults sat playing cards cheerfully. Soon she was safe in her father’s arms, and Grandpa Lundy was raging against the older child.

  Mazo created her own little imagined world. Her playmates were made-up characters. And from the very beginning she was sensitive to words. As a baby, she had refused to talk baby talk. She always spoke clearly. Later, she often invented words such as beckittybock for petticoat, gillygaws for socks, and conehat for jacket.

  At an early age she began to read. Soon she was devouring books voraciously, reading the Kate Greenaway books, Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, The Water Babies, and The Little Duke. She also read old issues of magazines for boys, like The Boys’ Own and Chum, that she found in the attic of the Lundy home.

  The well-fed, muscular horse trotted smartly along the narrow dirt road flanked by massive oak trees. The sun shone, the birds sang, and the new green leaves rustled. Mazo, wedged comfortably between Grandpa and Grandma Lundy on the driver’s seat of the buggy, was thoroughly enjoying this excursion in the country on a fine spring day.

  Finally Mazo spotted the stately, two-story, redbrick house on a hill. Mazo loved this house. This was Grandpa’s Grandpa’s house. Grandpa Lundy slowed the horse.

  “Grandpa, were you born in your Grandpa’s house like I was born in your house?” asked Mazo, gazing at the handsome house, the big wooden barn, the blossoming orchard, and the moist, dark fields.

  “I was born on the neighbouring farm where my brother Shadrack Lundy lives now,” said Grandpa Lundy. “When I was born, my Grandpa Lundy was still building the red-brick house. He finished it the next year. When I was your age, I spent many hours in this house, visiting my grandparents and playing with my cousins. It was a dark day last year when Cousin Silas Lundy sold our grandfather’s farm out of the family.”

  “Did your grandfather have a thousand acres of land, Grandpa?” asked Mazo.

  “Oh no, that was my great-great-great grandfather, Richard Lundy,” said Grandpa Lundy. “My grandfather, Enos Lundy Senior, owned only four hundred acres. And my father, Enos Lundy Junior, owned only one hundred acres. Richard Lundy received his land from the great William Penn himself. One thousand acres of primeval forest in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.”

  “Did Richard Lundy come from the States up the Walnut Trail in a wagon?” asked Mazo.

  “That was Enos Lundy Senior,” said Grandpa Lundy. “Richard Lundy came over the sea from England in a big sailing ship and founded our proud Lundy family in America. Why, the cow path where the Battle of Lundy’s Lane took place was named after my Grandpa Lundy’s first cousin, William Lundy, who owned a farm nearby. That was in the War of 1812.”

  “Having a cow path named after you is nothing to be proud of,” sniffed Grandma Lundy.

  “Another of Grandpa’s first cousins, Benjamin Lundy, was a pioneer abolitionist who wrote about the need to free the black slaves of America,” said Grandpa Lundy.

  “I thought the Lundys were knights in the olden days,” said Mazo.

  “That’s the Bostwicks,” said Grandpa Lundy. “My mother was a Bostwick. The Bostwicks were United Empire Loyalists in Nova Scotia, and knights back in old England. Now my mother’s mother – my Grandma Bostwick – was a Lardner. Grandma’s uncle, Nathaniel Lardner, was a famous biblical scholar in England. Her son, Lardner Bostwick, was one of Toronto’s first aldermen – he sat on the council with William Lyon Mackenzie. I remember when Grandma Bostwick got word that Uncle Lardner had died of the cholera plague in Toronto in 1834. She took the news awful hard. You see, Grandma Bostwick lived in Grandpa Lundy’s red-brick house too, because Uncle Isaac Lundy had married Aunt Keziah Bostwick…”

  “Families are awfully confusing, Grandpa,” said Mazo, swinging her legs.

  Mazo’s father, William Roche, worked for his brother, Danford Roche. By 1884, Danford Roche had stores in Barrie, Newmarket, Aurora, and Toronto. At the age of five, Mazo began to go by train occasionally to visit her father and his family in Toronto.

  Toronto streets were not quiet like country roads. Horses, horses, everywhere! A team of powerful draft horses pulled a dray. A skinny horse pulled a butcher’s cart. Elegant horses pulled an elegant carriage. People everywhere! Women in their long flounced skirts. Men who looked like gentlemen. An Italian boy pushed his barrow of bananas and called, “Ban-ana ripe, fifteen cents a dozen!” The bananas were red.

  The inside of Grandmother Roche’s house in do
wntown Toronto was dim and forbidding. Mazo held her father’s hand as they climbed the long, thickly carpeted stairway to Grandmother Roche’s mother’s room. Great-grandmother Bryan was ninety-two years old. She was dying! She was lying in the middle of a vast, four-poster bed.

  “My little darling!” the old woman exclaimed in a surprisingly strong voice with a thick Irish accent. She reached out her long arms for Mazo. Great-grandmother Bryan was still charming, demonstrative, and domineering – an irresistible force!

  Great-grandmother Bryan was Mazo’s father’s grandmother, and he loved his grandmother more than he loved his mother.

  Will Roche lifted Mazo up so she could kiss Great-grandmother Bryan.

  When the old woman hugged her closely, Mazo was afraid. She was grateful when her father rescued her. She clasped his neck tightly as he carried her down the stairs.

  Around the table at dinner that day were red-haired and hot-tempered Uncle Danford; prim and proper Aunty Ida; calm and peace-loving Grandmother Roche; and black-haired and studious Uncle Francis. Mazo sat beside her father, and watched and listened.

  “What was Father really like, Mother?” asked Uncle Francis. “Dan and Will were old enough to know him. But I…”

  “Your father was not a common sort of man,” said Grandmother Roche. Mazo was impressed by the dignity of Grandmother Roche’s appearance. Her long waist was encased in a black bodice with white ruching at the neck and wrists. Around her neck was a long gold chain. Great-grandmother Bryan had given her that chain for being a good daughter.

  “Mr. John Roche may have been descended from the aristocratic de la Roche clan of old France, but he was a rotter,” said Uncle Danford, who was standing at the head of the table carving a huge roast of beef. Aunty Ida was serving the potatoes, vegetables, and gravy.

  “Your father left us to find a teaching position that suited him,” said Grandmother Roche.