There were rounds of farewells in all the different organizations, with speeches and gifts. All brought mixed feelings. Maud, who had been feeling exhausted by her endless obligations, suddenly experienced paroxysms of sorrow whenever she thought this would be the last time she worked with a particular group. When Ewan, who was still fuelled by the injustice he had felt, did so well in his final sermons that Maud felt sad that this was the last time he would be in his own pulpit. If she looked out her windows, she was overcome with “soul-sickness” and would break down in tears. She experienced attacks of claustrophobia, feeling in one moment as if she had to escape the house and the walls around her, but in another afraid of the future outside. Her nights were flooded with bad dreams and then wakefulness. She was engulfed by temporary but terrifying waves of despair, which made her feel “hungry for death.” She went to Dr. Paul for a tonic. “He does not however sell peace of mind or relief from a sore heart in bottles,” she quipped (April 4, 1935).
When moving day came—April 25, 1935—Maud got up early to take her last leave of the views she loved: “my beautiful river—silver calm with trees reflected in its sunrise water. Little mists were curling along it in the distance.” It was “a lovely warm day,” and she fought back tears as the rooms were emptied. The vans left for Toronto around 2:00 p.m. She went from room to room in a final check, saying farewell to each. “I have never felt such anguish on leaving any place, not even the old Cavendish home” (retrospective entry, dated April 24, 1935).
As Ewan took their Willys-Knight car out of the garage and they drove away, she puzzled over his absence of sentiment, remarking he “has absolutely no ‘feeling’ for places, no matter how long he has lived in them. I would not be like this for the world. I ‘love’ to love places. But at that moment I envied him his incapacity for loving any place” (April 24, 1935).
Maud had become deeply attached to every place they had lived, putting down “deep roots.” But she had been a transient sojourner in all her homes. Now she was going to a home of her own. No one could cast her out. She prayed that it would be a permanent and happy home. It would be her last “new beginning.” She would call the house “Journey’s End.”
Maud and her Norval Drama Group, around 1927.
Luella Reid Macdonald and children,
Cameron and Luella (and right).
Maud in the 1930s.
Stuart, Ewan, and Chester Macdonald, circa 1930.
Chester holding June Thompson in Norval.
Chester Macdonald in kilt.
Maud in cloche hat, probably in the early 1930s.
Joy Laird around age 16.
Scrapbook picture of “Anne Shirley,” Maud, Ewan, and O. P. Heggie (“Matthew”).
Chorley Park in Toronto, where Maud met Stanley Baldwin.
PART FOUR
——
The Toronto Years
1935–1942
CHAPTER 19
Swansea is “more a nice country village than a city,” Maud wrote a fan on March 3, 1936.1 Located at the western fringe of Toronto, Swansea had many of the features that Maud had loved about Norval: beautiful natural scenery with a small river running through it, and a relaxed village atmosphere. But Swansea also had a good public library, a movie theatre, and a drugstore for ice-cream sodas. Streetcars ran into Toronto proper, with its literary culture and shopping. Just one mile square, Swansea was a tiny, near-perfect community.2
In 1935, Riverside Drive was the primary road running down through Swansea to the Lakeshore Boulevard from north of Toronto. When Swansea was opened for development in the mid-1920s, developer Home Smith set aside locations along the cliff on Riverside Drive for the finest houses. These were built to simulate old-world elegance for the growing number of entrepreneurs and professionals with new money. Other areas of Swansea were far more modest, with a cross-section of income levels. Maud’s new home was in the expensive enclave, surrounded by mature trees and overlooking the Humber River. The front of her house, built in an impressive English Tudor style, faced east in the direction of Toronto (and ultimately her beloved Prince Edward Island); the back faced the west and the setting sun.
Over cliffs, beyond the Humber River, was countryside. Looking through her bedroom window, Maud could go to sleep watching the waving tops of pine trees, just as in Norval. She loved the sound of the wind rustling through these trees. The meandering Humber was less picturesque than the Credit River, but to compensate, Lake Ontario stretched in the distance until water met sky, like a far-away sea. Ferns, bracken, and wildflowers in the ravine reminded her of the flora of Prince Edward Island, as seen from her bedroom window (or the small second-floor balcony). And just beyond her front door was access to the many advantages of urban life.
The Macdonalds were the first to live in their new “ghostless” home, as Maud called it. She was pleased that she would not displace any previous mistress, and she envisioned introducing her own traditions. A four-level home, built on a square plan with a flagstone entrance, 210A Riverside Drive boasted a spacious basement recreation room, a ground floor with ten windows, and a second floor with three bedrooms. Maud had always loved fireplaces, and had not had one since living with her grandparents. The master bedroom, with pale apricot walls, joined to a bathroom done in turquoise and white tile; this bedroom also included its own bath (a new luxury at that time). Another bedroom, painted blue, would belong to Stuart. Off the main hallway, a second bathroom was decorated in small black and white tile. A third bedroom would be for their live-in maid. Upstairs, on the fourth level, was a private garret bedroom. Chester would claim that. Incredibly, however, Maud still had no “room of her own”—she continued to write in the bedroom that she shared with Ewan, setting off her writing area with her movable screen.
Maud decorated her house with the artwork she had brought from Norval—her own framed and coloured snapshots of favourite locations and her children, plus a few professional paintings depicting Island scenes. She particularly liked her watercolours of the Cavendish shore by Helen Haszard, and an oil of Cavendish Pond by a Mrs. Crownfield. She also hung the original cover art from Anne’s House of Dreams, and an etching by the 1911 Governor General of Canada, Earl Grey, of himself.
Although artwork made a wall “friendly,” nothing made the house “a home” more than her beloved cats. Her captain of cats, “Good Luck” (shortened to “Lucky”), moved to Toronto with them. To Maud’s grandparents and most Islanders, her house would have seemed no less than the home of British aristocracy. To any local observer, Maud had achieved the pinnacle of success when she moved to scenic Riverside Drive, dubbed by the poorer villagers “the rich street” of Swansea. She had climbed “the Alpine Path” of her youthful dreams. Her disciplined life and hard work had paid off.
Ewan found Swansea a sympathetic place, too. Riverside Drive was exclusive, but not filled with sophisticated “old money” people, with whom he would have felt out of place. Still the country parson, he made regular rounds to the neighbours, knocked on the doors, and was invited in for visits and tea. Dropping in on neighbours was part of the rural tradition Ewan knew from his upbringing (as well as being the pastor’s duty), and he continued this in Toronto. The Riverside Drive women were stay-at-home wives, many with maids or other help, and they had leisure time. Dr. Richard Lane, who became the family doctor for Ewan and Maud, lived at 219 Riverside Drive, across from the Macdonalds’ home. His daughter, Nora Lane, a university student at the time, remembered Ewan well. He was “a nice old man,” she said, “very gentle, friendly, sweet—like a great big teddy bear.… a very, very lovable person.” But, “he was clearly very lonely and, left on his own, he wandered around [the neighbourhood] for companionship.” The Lane household tried to make him feel “valued and important.” He told them that his wife worked seven hours a day on her writing and he wanted to get out of the house so he wouldn’t bother her. “He was friendly and happy at our house, surrounded by people who wanted to make him comfortable,”
recounted Nora.3
The Herbert Cowan family lived next to the Macdonalds on the south, at 208 Riverside Drive. Mr. Cowan was the manager for the new Loblaw grocery stores, which had just introduced the modern concept of “self-serve.” Mrs. Cowan took Maud shopping and showed her how this worked. The Cowans had a very pretty unmarried daughter, Margaret, who was four years older than Stuart, and who had just graduated in dentistry. A younger daughter, Elaine, was still in school, as was the only son, Gardiner (“Billy”).4
Mrs. Cowan frequently gave formal teas and other parties, both in her home and in clubs, and she ensured that her fancy affairs were written up in the “women’s pages” of all the major Toronto papers. She welcomed the Macdonalds with pleasure—Maud was “famous” and would add class and distinction to the street. Over the next few years, Mrs. Cowan often asked Maud to recite at her teas, and Maud always obliged. They went for frequent walks together in the first two years. But Maud quickly decided that Mrs. Cowan lacked the discretion and reticence needed in a friend. She was shocked when Mrs. Cowan said she hoped her daughters would “marry money”: such an outright admission seemed shockingly “déclassé” to Maud. (Although Maud was equally conscious of social class, she would never have admitted it.)5
The realtor A. E. LePage had one of the most expensive homes on the street (in the assessment of 1937, his property was valued at $7,300, compared to the Macdonalds’ $4,625). George Mowat, the head of Glidden Paints, and his wife were at 212 Riverside Drive in a house valued at $6,650.
A retired contractor named Mr. Fry lived at 217 Riverside Drive. He had built several upscale homes on the street, including the Lanes’, the LePages’, and two others. The Macdonalds soon developed casual friendships with neighbours, especially the Frys. The genial Mr. Fry introduced Ewan to the sport of lawn bowling, which Ewan took up with a passion, joining not just one but several lawn-bowling clubs in the area. Maud and Ewan set up regular evenings of card-playing with the retired couples on Riverside Drive. They fit right in as newcomers in the rich part of Riverside Drive and were well liked. Most of the people in the poorer areas, with smaller houses, on other streets had been in Swansea for a long time and all knew each other.
The Macdonalds—particularly Maud—had frequent visitors. Friends from the Women’s Missionary Society in Norval and Glen Williams dropped in on visits to Toronto. Many parishioners from Leaskdale also remembered the Macdonalds with great fondness and often stopped by. Ewan and Maud still made trips to Glen Williams to visit with Ernest and Ida Barraclough, who in turn often came to Toronto. In addition, Ephraim Weber and his wife came through in July 1935 for another visit.
Marion Webb Laird, now married and living in Norval, was like a daughter to Maud, and they visited back and forth. Marion’s sister, Anita Webb, came up for the birth of Marion’s first baby in early October 1935. Marion was very pretty, delicate, and gentle; Anita was sturdy, feisty, and independent, with a hearty laugh. Luella came to visit with little baby Luella from time to time, and Maud termed the baby a “sweet thing” in her journals. Isabel Anderson still tried to intrude on Maud’s life, but the distance between them made it easier for Maud to dismiss her by mail.
Toronto-based friends were more accessible now. Nora Lefurgey Campbell lived at 21 Wilberton Road—too far to walk, but Chester was always willing to drive his mother, and Nora herself sometimes took Maud out for drives in the Campbells’ car. Maud’s earlier friendship with Mary Gould Beal—a very good friend from the Leaskdale period who now lived in Toronto—had been cooling for some time. The talented and gracious Mary, daughter of prosperous and prominent Harvey Gould of Uxbridge, had a sophisticated polish similar to Maud’s. She had married a well-to-do Uxbridge and Toronto businessman, Norman Beal. Beal had once been mayor of Uxbridge, but his inherited leather business had begun to fail after the end of World War I. Mary borrowed substantial sums of money from Maud to maintain their standard of living, which Maud resented, given that she herself was also feeling the pinch. She was frustrated when Mary spent her second loan on a newer car without offering to pay interest on the first. Still, Maud found it hard to say no to a long-standing friend whom she saw as in her own “class.” Aside from Nora and casual friendships with neighbours, Maud’s main circle of friends now would become those in the literary world. She had wanted all her life to be part of an intellectual community of people who loved books, and now she was on the verge of attaining her wish.
The churches were the social centre of the Swansea community, as they had been in Norval. There were four major churches in Swansea—the Anglican, the Presbyterian, the Baptist, and the United—plus a Salvation Army that was particularly active in the Depression. The Macdonalds joined the Victoria-Royce Presbyterian Church, some distance away, because they liked the minister, Dr. McKerroll. The Young People’s Societies in the churches provided one way for young people to meet and socialize, and the Victoria-Royce Presbyterian Church had an especially active program for young adults.
While in many ways Swansea in the 1930s was a strongly ecumenical environment, in other ways it was not. Generally, the ministers of Swansea’s four churches knew the names of everyone in their congregations, and of many in other churches, too, and would stop and speak to them on the street. However, it was a strictly Protestant community of people primarily of English and Scottish descent. There was no Roman Catholic church in Swansea, nor would anyone have sold property to Catholics without attracting criticism. Protestant children were told never to talk to Catholics. They were also cautioned not to wander into the poorer districts south of the Swansea Public School, where there were small houses and tarpaper shacks and people might be picking over the dumps to find food. There were no known Jewish families in Swansea, either.
The local schools were the common meeting ground for younger children, and all nationalities and religions mingled there. Elementary students went to Swansea Public School and secondary students to Runnymede Collegiate. The children of the rich might be sent to a private school (as Chester and Stuart had gone to St. Andrew’s in Aurora), but generally the public schools were the great social leveller. The public library was in the local school, and everyone used it, including Maud.
Only the wealthy people on Riverside Drive owned cars. Other people walked to their destinations, stopping to chat with neighbours along the way, especially where the more common houses had front verandahs. Women usually shopped daily for food. In the days before refrigerators, iceboxes were used; a forty-pound block of ice would need replacing every two or three days. But for her own new kitchen, Maud bought a real electric refrigerator.
Shopping uptown in Toronto meant an hour’s ride on the streetcar or two to three hours of walking, but in those days people were used to walking, and their larger purchases would be delivered to them at home by horse and wagon, or increasingly by motorized vehicles. Horses and deliverymen were a common sight—delivering ice for the icebox, coal for the coal chute, fresh milk, fresh baked goods, groceries, and store purchases. (The Eaton’s department store always used distinctive grey or grey-dappled horses.)
The Swansea area was flanked on the south and north by two very different types of public entertainment. To the north, at the corner of Runnymede and Bloor, was the Runnymede Theatre. A grand establishment, the theatre boasted a ceiling painted to look like the sky, with light projecting stars onto it and shadows of airplanes flying across it (until World War II made that too frightening). In the other direction, down by the waterfront, there was a famous beach entertainment area called the Sunnyside Amusement Park. Built in the early 1920s, before the great crash of 1929, it had a massive outdoor public swimming pool and a dance hall called the Palais Royale. In the mid-1930s, at the height of its popularity, famous bands like Duke Ellington’s and the Dorsey Brothers played for up to three thousand people at a time. The beaches were public and clean and safe: during serious summer heat waves, before air-conditioning, families would take rugs or blankets down to sleep on the beach th
rough the first part of the night, until the temperature became cooler towards the morning. Maud herself did this during one heat wave in 1935.
Swansea itself was safe. Children wandered without supervision (though they were told not to go near the Humber River or Grenadier Pond, after the three-year-old son of the area’s most prominent lawyer drowned in the pond). People knew each other, watched out for others’ children, and enjoyed the sense of community.
—
Maud was delighted that her sons would be living at home again. She wanted her family to rise from the humiliating ashes of Norval and make a new start in Swansea, establishing a different—and better—life in this sophisticated setting. Having the boys at home would save the cost of room and board, and it would bring the Macdonalds together as a family once more. Luella would stay with her widowed father in Norval, keeping house for him, and Chester would take the car and visit her and the baby on weekends. At the time of their move in April 1935, Chester, who would be twenty-three in July, was into his second year of “preliminary articling” in Mr. Bogart’s law office; he would be ready to start his three years of the formal study of law in fall 1935, while still working part time at the articling firm. Stuart, who would be nineteen in October, was in his second year of Medicine (out of five years, plus a year to intern) at the University of Toronto.
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