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

  “We had found nothing that absolutely suited us when, one lovely Autumn day, we heard of a house in the Malvern Hills that had once belonged to a famous engineer,” wrote Mazo in a magazine article about The Winnings. “We motored to it and lost our hearts to its garden. In truth, we scarcely looked at the house we were so captivated by the grounds. There were seven acres of them, all little hills and valleys. There were hundreds of trees.”

  At The Winnings, work resumed on Young Renny as well as on the play Whiteoaks. When Mazo sent the manuscript of Young Renny to her American publisher, the editors criticized the book severely and pointed out how risky it was “to turn back the clock in Jalna.” Mazo’s response to this new criticism was to show new self-confidence. She told the editors that if they didn’t like her work she would take it elsewhere. The editors responded with a soothing letter saying the book was just splendid. Mazo was a goldmine that the publisher could not afford to lose.

  In 1935, the year that Young Renny was published and work on Whiteoak Harvest begun, a Hollywood film company called RKO released a movie based on Jalna. The film starred Ian Hunter as Renny, Peggy Wood as Meg, and Jessie Ralph as Gran. Of course Mazo and Caroline went to see the movie. Their feelings about it were mixed.

  They felt that the cast was “excellent” … except for Jessie Ralph. “Not one of the attributes that made old Adeline Whiteoak notable belonged to the actress who played the part,” complained Mazo.

  They were also angry about a bedroom scene between Meg Whiteoak and Maurice Vaughan. In this scene, Maurice is drinking heavily. Maurice and Meg, sitting well apart, are discussing their past and future. This scene was in questionable taste, according to Mazo and Caroline. What’s more, it was not in the novel Jalna. Someone in the movie company had invented it!

  Not until the play Whiteoaks was mounted was Mazo happy with an adaptation of her writing to another medium.

  11

  Stage Struck and Royalty Mad

  I strained toward Windsor, toward the house I owned, from which I should never again be parted.

  “Lord, I can almost hear Gran talking!” exclaimed the lanky teenager to his lean but powerfully built older brother.

  Two Whiteoak brothers, dark-haired Finch and red-haired Renny, were standing at the open door of a dimly lit, thickly carpeted and curtained bedroom that smelled of camphor and hair oil. On the old leather bed, the head of which was painted with oriental fruit and the grinning faces of two monkeys, perched a green and red parrot. Normally the parrot would have been swearing at the intruders with Hindu curses, but now it was silent.

  Vale House near Windsor Castle in the late 1930s. Mazo, Caroline, and the children lived in this beautiful mansion during their last years in England.

  “Can’t you hear her Renny?” asked Finch. “What’s going on?’” she’s saying. “‘I won’t be left out of things!”’

  “Yes… Yes… She seems to be with us,” agreed Renny.

  “God! What courage!” croaked Finch.

  Renny studied Finch for a moment.

  “Don’t you realize, Finch, that you’ve got it too? Clever old Gran discovered it and has given you her chance… Now make the most of it. Don’t let her down.”

  With that, Renny turned his back on Finch and walked slowly away. Finch smiled – almost exultantly. He went over to the piano and sat down at it. He laid his hands on the Chinese statue of Kwan Yin. Strength entered him. He dropped his hands to the keyboard. He looked again into Gran’s room. He played.

  The curtain fell.

  The audience applauded politely.

  The curtain rose.

  There were Renny, Finch, Meg, Wakefield, Piers, Pheasant, Aunt Augusta, Uncle Nicholas, and Uncle Ernest. There was Gran, alive again, spry and vital at one-hundred-and-one years old. Boney the parrot was perched on Gran’s shoulder, rending the air with a metallic screech.

  The audience applauded more loudly. It kept on applauding through many curtain calls, including one for the author.

  The fifty-seven-year-old author of the play, Mazo de la Roche, was almost as shy and awkward as her fictional character Finch Whiteoak. But somehow she managed to get up onto the stage without stumbling and mumbled a brief speech of thanks.

  Afterwards, the cast and crew of the play and some friends and relatives – more than sixty people – crowded into the home Mazo had rented in nearby Stafford Place and partied among the many bouquets of flowers she had received that day. Mazo and Caroline didn’t get to bed until three in the morning.

  But by dawn the cousins were eating breakfast and reading the reviews. Violet the maid had rushed out into the chill damp April air to buy the newspapers. Most of the reviews were favourable. Ivor Brown in The Observer, Charles Morgan in The Times, and Littlewood in The Post were especially enthusiastic.

  Thus went the opening night of the first Canadian play to be staged in the prestigious West End theatre district of London, England. The opening took place on April 13, 1936. The play was called Whiteoaks. It was based mainly on Mazo’s second Jalna novel, Whiteoaks of Jalna. The play was a thrill for Mazo, but it took her on a roller coaster of emotions.

  Despite the enthusiastic applause and good reviews, the play’s director and lead actress, Nancy Price, soon announced that Whiteoaks was to be cancelled. It was just not successful enough. The audiences were not big enough.

  What a disappointment! After years of waiting and months of working! Rewrite after rewrite! Price had searched several years for a theatre manager who would mount the play. Mazo had written several more books before Price finally got the Little Theatre in the Adelphi!

  Then suddenly Price changed her mind about cancelling. The great George Bernard Shaw had praised Mazo’s play! Price transferred Whiteoaks to a larger theatre called the Playhouse, and she displayed Shaw’s accolade in lights.

  London theatre-goers flocked to the play for the next three years until the Second World War, when Nazi bombing made collective evening activities dangerous. People laughed uproariously whenever Gran Whiteoak was on the stage. The Dowager Queen Mary, widow of King George V, went to see the play four or five times and even requested a private meeting with Boney. The play also went to Broadway in New York City, across central Canada, and around England.

  More than any single event except the novel Jalna winning an international competition, the phenomenal success of the play Whiteoaks established Mazo’s reputation as a writer.

  Rich and famous she had become, but Mazo remained a private person difficult to know well. The English actors and crew of the London production of Whiteoaks, with whom she worked closely for months, found her a mystery.

  “I thought of her as a detached, insular sort of person,” commented Nancy Price. “I mean to say you never knew her.”

  Although Mazo was excited by the public world of the theatre, she preferred the private world of writing and family After the uncontrollable emotional ups and downs of Whiteoaks, Mazo happily retreated as soon as possible to The Winnings. There she could indulge in the quiet daily routine on which she thrived.

  In the morning Mazo had breakfast and then wrote for several hours. Before lunch she went for a walk. In the afternoon she rested for a while, ate a snack that the English called “tea,” then spent a few hours with the children. In the evening she had dinner, read aloud to Caroline, or listened while Caroline read aloud to her. The women read either from Mazo’s own writing – whatever she had been working on that morning – or from other people’s writing.

  As Mazo relaxed in this calm, orderly life, she began to think it was finally time to actually buy a house in England, instead of merely renting. Caroline agreed and the two went searching. What a house they found!

  The house had been restored by the former owner. There were lawns, a gazebo, an orchard, a lily pond, a sunken garden, greenhouses, and about eight hectares of pastures with Jersey cows grazing.

  This was Vale House, a beautiful mansion more than three hundred years old, built in
the time of Queen Elizabeth I. Vale House was almost next door to Windsor Castle, one of the royal residences of the king and queen of England. Since King Edward VIII had recently given up the throne, the neighbours were King George VI, his wife, the Queen Consort, and their two young daughters, Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret. (Of course many years later Princess Elizabeth would become Queen Elizabeth II, and her mother, the Queen Consort, would become the Queen Mother, affectionately known as the Queen Mum.)

  Almost everybody in the neighbourhood had some connection with the famous upper-class school, Eton, also located nearby, or with Windsor Castle. One friend used to arrive at the gate of Vale House on a handsome grey horse named Silver Mist, followed by two golden retrievers. Mazo and her family regularly received invitations to watch royal functions. Back in Canada her ancestors might have been “distinguished looking nobodies,” as Mazo once described them, but here in England Mazo was a somebody.

  There was always something to do in Windsor. Paxton the chauffeur would drive the family to Chobham Common, to Burnham Beeches, or to Ascot, where Mazo and Caroline could walk and the children and dogs could run free. At the time of the Ascot Races, the children liked to be taken to a spot in Windsor Great Park where they could see the royal family sweep past on the way to the races. One day they were caught in a rain shower.

  “Mummy, can’t I get out of the car and stand on the grass to see the little princesses?” asked René, who was seven.

  “But you’ll get wet and you can see the little princesses quite well from the car,” objected Mazo.

  “I know,” René answered firmly, “but they wouldn’t see me.”

  Mazo had not been in Vale House for more than two weeks before she began a new novel, Growth of a Man. This novel was a sort of vacation for Mazo. Although she was living in England, the novel was set in Canada, mostly among people and places she had known or heard about in early childhood.

  Writing Growth of a Man gave Mazo her first opportunity to write about the Children of Peace: the unique Quaker group to which Grandma Lundy’s family had belonged.

  The Children of Peace had been founded by David Willson, a great-uncle of Grandma Lundy. David Willson broke away from traditional Quaker ways. He introduced music to the silent Quaker service. He also preached.

  “David Willson gathered the pioneers about him and preached to them under the open sky,” Mazo wrote. “The autumn weather was benign, the crops had been bountiful. He stood there, dominant and strong, pouring out the noble words of the Old Testament, words of promise, of might, of peace.”

  Under David Willson’s direction, the Children of Peace built a beautiful place of worship named Sharon Temple. Grandma Lundy’s father, Hiram Willson, helped to build it, as did Grandma Lundy’s maternal grandfather, Murdoch McLeod.

  “The Temple rose in three cubes,” Mazo wrote, “one standing above the other, and on the top-most cube a golden ball was to be raised and sheltered beneath a cupola. The Temple was to be painted white for purity. It was to have light from windows on every side, typifying Reason and Truth. Inside there were twelve pillars bearing the names of the twelve apostles…”

  Mazo had seen Sharon Temple often as a child. It was located in the village of Sharon, just six or seven kilometres north of Newmarket.

  In Growth of a Man, Mazo evoked the distant and colourful past of the Willson clan in order to provide a suitable background for a story about a dynamic, modern-day Willson: Harvey Reginald MacMillan, a cousin of Mazo and Caroline. Reggie MacMillan was a grandson of Grandma Lundy’s oldest brother, Wellington Willson. He was a great-grandson of Hiram Willson. He was also a founder of the great forestry industry, MacMillan Bloedel Limited of British Columbia.

  Growth of a Man is a rags-to-riches story, very different from any of the Jalna novels.

  Shaw Manifold, the main character in Growth of a Man, begins life as a poor boy. Shaw’s father dies and his mother must leave him behind with his grandparents, the Gowers, while she works as a housekeeper to support him. Shaw endures loneliness and cruelty. He labours long hours on his grandparents’ farm. He studies hard, overcomes illness, marries his faithful childhood sweetheart, and builds a great industry.

  Shaw Manifold was Harvey Reginald MacMillan, more or less. The Gowers were the Willsons, more or less. Cousin Reggie had been raised on Wellington Willson’s farm. The fictional setting of most of the novel’s early chapters was based on the real Wellington Willson farm located about four kilometres south of Newmarket in what is the town of Aurora today.

  In Growth of a Man, Grandfather Gower is cold and mean: “The old man stood solid and imperturbable, his wide-open, china-blue eyes staring above his massive grizzled beard. His hands, leathery and thickened by hard work, hung impassively at his sides.”

  Shaw Manifold is not very charming either: “He resolutely nursed his grievance against his grandfather, keeping it as a barrier between him and the loss of his mother.” But at least Shaw acquires a fortune through his own hard work at hard jobs such as inspecting trees on horseback in bad weather in the wilderness of the Canadian West.

  Growth of a Man did not receive the Governor General’s Award in 1938, but the novel was a close contender for this prestigious annual prize, given for the first time in 1937.

  And in 1938 Mazo was awarded the Lome Pierce Medal. This gold-plated, silver medal was awarded once a year to one person. It was given by the Royal Society of Canada for an achievement of special significance and conspicuous merit in imaginative or critical literature written in either English or French.

  Today Sharon Temple is a national historic site. MacMillan Bloedel Limited became Canada’s largest forest-products company.

  In the fall of 1938, Mazo had an operation on her throat to remove a cyst. The operation was successful, but she was slow in recovering her full health.

  By the spring of 1939, Mazo, Caroline, and the children had been living at Vale House for two years. René was eight and getting difficult to manage. He needed to go to a regular school instead of being taught at home by a governess. There had been rumours of war for several years, but now gas masks were being issued, and Esmée, who was ten, was frightened by the masks. Perhaps it was time to return to Canada for a while. There the family would find sunshine and peace. They loved Vale House, and they loved England, but it was time to leave – just for a while.

  “You would think the end of the world had come!” exclaimed Mazo, bringing a cup of hot tea to Caroline, who was in bed with the flu. Today was the maid’s day off, and the children were away at school. “Here it is March, and we have not seen the bare ground since early November. And the snow is falling fast.”

  “This winter has broken a record that stood fifty years,” said Caroline, sitting up in bed to drink her tea. “Even for Canada, it is severe. I long for balmy old England.”

  “Put that blanket around your shoulders, or you’ll be sick for another week, and I can’t cope alone,” said Mazo. “You should have seen me going to the poultry house through the drifts, carrying kettles of boiling water to thaw the buckets, which were solid ice. The hens seemed not too unhappy though. They even managed a little song.”

  “We are like pioneers in the wilderness here in York Mills,” commented Caroline, between sips of her tea. “Zero weather now seems nothing to us. Thirty below is the norm.”

  “If there is anything we should be grateful for now, it is having congenial work to do that is quite outside the war,” returned Mazo.

  “We have had fun this year with The Building of Jalna” said Caroline. “The years 1853 and 1854 were so tranquil compared to 1942 and 1943!”

  “There were times when I forgot the present and lived only in those long-ago years,” said Mazo. “I wonder what the early settlers would have thought if they could have seen the Ontario of today?”

  Although Mazo complained about the severe winters in Canada, she was grateful that she and her family could live in safety during the Second World War. As sh
e wrote The Building of Jalna, about the founding of Jalna in the 1850s, she was well aware of what was happening in Europe. Often, in the evenings, she and Caroline sat tensely in front of the radio, inwardly shaken by terrible news such as the bombing of London and the fall of France. Mazo included references to the war in her novels Wakefield’s Course and Return to Jalna, written during this period also. In Europe during the Second World War, Mazo was the only known Canadian author. Actually, to some people in Germany, Mazo’s books were treasured secret possessions that represented the struggle against fascism. The Whiteoak family was English, and this fact reminded anti-Nazis of the sunshine of freedom that shone beyond the shadow of Hitler.

  When Mazo, Caroline, and the children moved to Canada in 1939, Mazo was sixty years old. She had written six Jalna novels. In the next two decades she would write ten more Jalna novels. She would also write a number of other books, including a novel, a novella, a history of Quebec City, several short children’s books, a play, and her autobiography. She did all this writing in Canada. Except for a few brief visits, she never returned to England.

  From 1939 to 1945, Mazo and her family lived successively in three houses in the Toronto area. The first was in the village of Thornhill, just north of Toronto. The second, called “Windrush Hill,” was located at the junction of Bayview Avenue and Steeles Avenue in York Mills, now part of Toronto. The third was on Russell Hill Road, right in Toronto.