A happy period began when Anita Webb came to live with the Macdonalds on Riverside Drive at the end of June 1939. She quickly learned to drive the Macdonalds’ new car and became Maud’s chauffeur. She replaced Chester and Mrs. Thompson as Maud’s companion for movies, for jaunts out to Norval, or for any other social event. (She recalled how “Aunt Maud” carried a little book every place with her, especially on streetcars. She wrote down snippets of conversation she overheard that she might use in books.) Steady and spunky, Anita was a hard worker, and jolly. Maud had a companion to laugh with again. Best of all, Anita was a clansman who could be trusted.
Anita enjoyed being in Toronto. She had been raised in a plain but homey Island farmhouse, and the Riverside Drive house seemed a mansion. It was also a model of organization, run on a set routine. Maud still planned all meals a week in advance, and each week, promptly at 2:00 p.m. on Thursdays, Anita and Maud went to the Loblaw store at Jane and Bloor for the next week’s groceries. Next they went to Eaton’s and bought the week’s meat, which came up fresh from Eaton’s farms in the Georgetown area. They had fish once a week, on Friday. The table was always well set, with clean linens and fine gold-banded Limoges china. There were two sets of silver, pearl-handled serving pieces, silver serving bowls, and a silver tea service. Their menu always consisted of meat, potatoes (usually scalloped), and a vegetable, served with rolls or bread and real butter (which was too expensive for most people in the Depression era), with canned fruit and tea for dessert. Anita washed up the dishes, and Maud dried them and put them away. Maud had bought a new washing machine before Anita came—an electric one—to replace the old manual, paddle-driven machine, so the laundry work was not hard.95
Ewan left pleasant memories for Anita, too. She said that he had been much liked in Cavendish when he was minister there. About the Toronto house, Ewan was as punctual as Maud. He came down dressed, ate breakfast, read for a short while in his study, took a walk, and usually went for a drive. He continued his lawn bowling. She found it surprising that Ewan never helped around the house or in the garden, especially since she was used to capable farm husbands. Anita observed that he was not as quick-witted as Maud, but she certainly did not think of him as a “mental case” in any respect. He liked a good argument or joke—particularly a practical joke. According to Anita, Ewan loosened up and became quite sociable after Chester left home.
Anita and Maud went to the movies together about once a week, leaving the dishes in the sink after supper and doing them when they got home. They loved Gone with the Wind, and Maud went to see it again and again. All this entertainment was new and exciting to Anita. She had grown up in a rural culture where people did not travel out of their area unless they moved to the Canadian mainland or the United States. Her father’s first vacation in his life, and his first and only trip off the Island, was in March 1939 when he came to visit his daughter Marion in Norval and the Macdonalds in Toronto.
Anita’s recollections show us another side of Maud during these months. Maud received many calls to speak at girls’ or women’s groups, and Anita drove her everywhere. On the drive, Maud always carried her handiwork, and her fingers never wasted a moment. Maud spoke easily, distinctly, without notes. According to Anita, Maud had a lovely “musical voice,” and she kept her audience laughing continuously. Anita said that she never tired of listening to Maud speak, even when the speeches repeated the same basic material. Anita laughed over Maud’s first encounter with a “public address system” in a school on the Hamilton mountain. Maud was astonished to find herself seated in the central office, giving her address to a machine. Later she was asked to go through the rooms and talk to students. Afterwards, Maud and Anita drove out to Hamilton’s Royal Botanical Gardens to look at the rock garden, which Maud loved.
Anita, a Baptist, attended the Morningside Baptist Church in Swansea, and Maud often accompanied her. To fundraise, the church put on a pageant in which older girls dressed up in wedding dresses once worn by their mothers, aunts, or friends, and paraded across a stage. Maud lent her own wedding dress to Olive Watson, a good friend of Anita’s.96 After the pageant, Maud praised Olive, saying that she had carried herself very well, a compliment that Olive cherished all her life. Olive remembered that although Maud was matronly, she still had “a nice shape,” and “always walked like a lady, looking corseted and in control.” Anita and Maud continued to enjoy each other’s company through the latter part of 1939 and the early part of 1940, despite rising political tensions in Europe. But as 1940 progressed, dark clouds began to appear in the horizon, at home: Chester was in trouble again.
Chester provided one of Anita’s most vivid memories from her stay with her Aunt Maud. He could be very personable and charming when he chose, she said, but was brusque, churlish, and anti-social most of the time. She observed that he “always needed cash,” and he knew that pawnshops were a quick route to that. She bristled over the memory of Chester’s asking to borrow his mother’s moving-picture camera—the expensive one she had been given for judging the Kodak contest in 1931. The next day he told his mother it had been stolen from the car. There was nothing his mother could do, and she was very upset. Anita said that they both knew he had pawned it, but of course this was not openly discussed. On matters like this, Maud kept her own counsel.
CHAPTER 23
As soon as Chester was living with Luella and their children in Aurora in July 1939, he began pressuring his mother to revise her will. She did this in August 1939, and she signed it on September 11, 1939, right after war was declared. Chester might have been a lawyer, but his mother did not make him the executor. Instead, she appointed the Toronto General Trusts Corporation her trustee and executor. She made Stuart her literary executor by virtue of specifying that all her literary papers and her ten volumes of handwritten journals would go to him, along with sole right to decide when to publish them. In fairness to both sons—now that Chester was again with Luella—she directed that any income from publication of her writing was to be divided equally between the two of them, and likewise her personal effects. But Chester was cut out of control over any aspect of her estate.97
The threat that sons would be called to fight in World War II was a growing source of great concern to many people. Maud had been so intimately involved with comforting mothers of dead sons in Leaskdale that the possibility of another war filled her with horror. She was terrified that her “one good son” Stuart might be sent to war, and she thought he would be killed if he went.
As soon as her will was signed, Maud left for a visit to the Island. The process of dealing with her will had disturbed her, and she was feeling fragile from the previous two years of stress. She travelled with Murray and Marion Laird and family. They arrived on September 16 at Cape Tormentine. Ernest and Myrtle Webb picked them all up. Marion and Murray went to Cavendish, and Maud went to visit Ewan’s family on the other end of the Island.
At Ewan’s sister Christie’s house, the family could not help noticing that Maud’s hands trembled uncontrollably from time to time, and she would wring them and move them constantly. Mary Furness, Ewan’s niece, recalled Maud’s distress over Hitler and the war, but did not think that in itself should have caused the shakiness. She made no mention of Maud taking any medications. In an autographed, presentation copy of the Canadian Pacific Railway’s 1939 book The Spirit of Canada, Maud’s signature is accompanied by the note that she regrets “her hand trembles with illness.”
While on the Island, Maud sent cards to George B. MacMillan and Nora Lefurgey Campbell. The handwriting grew markedly steadier. In the card to MacMillan, dated September 23, 1939, she writes in a fine and steady hand that she is on the Island for a month, ending in despair that the world might have to endure another nightmarish war again. Her card to Nora, sent on September 27, says she is having a good time in one sense, but fears the cloud of war. Nora’s only remaining living child of four children, her son Ebbie, would go overseas in 1940.
Maud returned hom
e from the Island in a much revived state, and she wrote long and energetic letters in free-flowing handwriting through the remainder of 1939. On November 7, she wrote Violet King that she had suffered from bronchial-pneumonia for most of July and August, and that she had gone to the Island for six weeks. She talked about blocking the sequel to Jane of Lantern Hill, to be called Jane and Jody. She described her own reading tastes as “catholic” but for “sheer amusement and relaxation I enjoy a good murder mystery with at least three corpses.” She gave Violet further advice on her writing. She tells her that she was “quite wrong in thinking Stuart ‘formidable.’ He is very approachable and is a general favourite. Chester is the blunt rather gruff one …” She mentions the King’s and Queen’s visit and is glad they came “before the ‘hour of great darkness’ fell over the world.…” Maud’s six-page letter to Violet is written in swinging high spirits. Maud exudes vigour and a clear mind, and there is no shaky handwriting.
On November 28, 1939, she penned a long, friendly note to Jack Lewis, a young correspondent who aspired to become a writer and to whom she had been writing for a number of years. She comments on the war and on her sons. She explains that Chester has graduated and moved out, and she misses him a lot, though he “gets in to see us quite often.” Stuart, she says, is living at home while in medical school, and Mr. Macdonald is better than he has been in a long time. She comments on movies being made from her books, on the Webbs’ farm being made into a new National Park in Prince Edward Island, and on the opening of the Green Gables Golf Course in Cavendish (to a crowd of over four thousand people). She tucks in the fact that Ramsay MacDonald, a prime minister of England for many years, told a friend of hers, a member of the local PEI legislature who was visiting in England, that he had “read every Montgomery book he could get his hands on two or three times over.” She ends with a comment on the visit of the King and Queen: “She was exquisite—far daintier and more beautiful than any of her photographs. We all loved her. From coast to coast their tour was one long triumph. We realized the ‘oneness’ of our Empire as never before.…”
On November 30, 1939, she wrote a long letter to Ella Campbell at Park Corner to apologize for missing the wedding of Georgie, Ella’s youngest daughter. On December 12, she wrote another very long letter to a Mrs. Townsend in PEI, gossiping genially about various joint acquaintances.
Despite this flurry of letters—all of which show Maud full of purpose and power—she wrote no more regular entries in her journals after June 30, 1939, the month of Chester’s graduation and departure. She continued keeping notes to write up in her journal, however, when she had time and inclination.
On February 15, 1940, Maud wrote a long and very upbeat letter to her long-time correspondent Ephraim Weber. On March 14, she thanked G. B. MacMillan, her other correspondent, for the “Flower Patch” book he had sent her, as well as for two packets of the British literary magazine “John O’London.” She mentioned that Chester was away in a home of his own, and that “Mr. Macdonald” had gone to Florida for the winter, something that was probably responsible for the happy flurry of writing and activity that Anita described. On March 29, she wrote Jim Campbell in Park Corner a cheerful business letter saying she had paid off the loan for the farm that she had taken out for them. On April 24, 1940, she wrote a letter to a fan telling her that Further Chronicles was out of print, and had been for fourteen years, and never should have been printed in the first place. This letter was written in a firm handwriting. Anita’s presence was steadying her, and her use of sedatives seemed on the wane.
Stuart graduated in Medicine on June 6, 1940. The picture of Stuart at his graduation shows a proud mother; she does, however, look reserved and remote under her hat, like someone who has inner anxiety. And indeed, Chester was once again becoming a very serious concern.
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Things had not been going well in Aurora with Chester. Many years later, Luella characterized their time there, describing it without rancour but with vivid details. She was home every day, all day, by herself with her two little children. There was never any money, despite Chester’s salary. When it got colder, there was no money for coal. Once the weather grew really cold, Luella kept herself and the children warm by going to a derelict barn and taking boards to break up and burn in the kitchen stove. She and the children spent all their time in the kitchen in order to keep warm. Chester was out all day and also in the evenings. She had no idea where he went, and he did not explain.
Luella served all their meals in the kitchen because it was the only heated room in the house. However, she said that Chester—who had long thought of himself as “elite”—snapped that “only peasants eat in the kitchen.” He refused to eat any meal there except breakfast. He did not come home for lunch. At dinnertime, he would eat by himself in the frigid dining room, wrapped up in a big coat, hat, and scarf, wearing gloves to keep his hands warm, while Luella and the children ate in the kitchen. Fifty years after the fact, Luella laughed as she gave a bemused account of the difficulty he had holding silverware while wearing thick gloves. She added that at the time she was deeply hurt by his treatment, but she was accustomed to her father being “difficult.”
If she tried to talk to him on any given topic, he turned surly, exploded easily, and would go “flouncing out of the house, slam the door, get into the car, and roar away.” Once, she said, after an argument he “roared out so fast” that he took off one side of the garage doors. Another time he hit a tree, knocking the bark off. She did not understand his continuous anger, given her belief that he had wanted them to get back together. (She apparently never learned about his mother’s will and the stipulation that Chester had to be living with his family to avoid being disinherited.)
Luella became increasingly frightened of his anger. She had no idea what he did with his time, but she was quite sure that he did not spend it in his office. She speculated that he spent time at “the theatre” and at “Marshall Rank’s jewellery store.” She did not think he ever had a single client during his time in Aurora. She had no one with whom she could discuss her situation—her mother was dead, and her father was not a man with whom you could discuss marital troubles. Luella knew that Chester went to Toronto at least once a month, if not more often, to get more money from his mother, but she had no idea where that money went.
Luella could heat the house with wood she gathered, but food was a different matter. Chester gave her only minimal amounts of money for that. There was no money for clothes for the children; she made them from discarded items Maud gave her. Once she made little Cameron some overalls from Ewan’s old clothes, but Ewan became agitated when he saw them, and “carried on” about “overalls” being inappropriate for his grandson. Luella thought this outburst strange and out of character, but she decided that he felt working man’s garb was not suitable for the grandson of a clergyman and the son of a lawyer. Maud tried to shush him, embarrassed at the odd scene. Luella rarely saw Maud and Ewan, however, for Chester always went to Toronto by himself; he did not offer to take her and the children.
Anita Webb told another version of the story about Chester’s visits home to see his mother. “He was always after money,” she said grimly. She described how he would enter the house abruptly and go straight to his mother’s bedroom. The door would be shut firmly. Chester’s threatening voice carried outside the room. She said the “pressure sessions” continued until Chester got what he wanted. He would then leave. Maud would not appear for a long time, and when she did she looked very distressed, sometimes as if she had been crying.
Anita was incensed that Chester upset his mother so much, but she was powerless. Maud was far too private to discuss family problems with anyone, no matter how close. She said that Maud’s spirit began to break down in 1940 when the troubles with Chester escalated. Maud apparently began to believe that she was to blame for how Chester had turned out. As her psychological state deteriorated, Maud suffered what she called “a nervous breakdown.” In light of w
hat we now know about the dangers with medications she took, we can deduce that these palliatives, taken to relieve her emotional disarray, only heightened it. Anita saw the symptoms of a disintegrating personality—the very symptoms of severe psychosis that bromide or barbiturate dependency (or excessive usage) can cause.
By Anita’s account, her “Aunt Maud” began following her around, weeping like a disturbed and frightened child. She whimpered and hung on to Anita’s arm. Anita was hard-pressed to get the housework done. Until now Anita had seen Maud only as a strong woman, and she was bewildered and shocked. Anita blamed Chester. Dr. Lane dropped in often, but Anita had no part in any medication regime Maud may have been following.
Chester’s seeming reconciliation with Luella turned sour as soon as he was back in Maud’s will. Luella apparently did not understand that Chester was trying to compel her to leave him. She knew, however, that she was breaking down mentally from his treatment. The death knell to their marriage occurred when she went to a doctor and found that he had given her a venereal disease. She was horrified. She called her father and begged him to let her come back home to recover her mental and physical health.98
The next day, both Luella’s father and Ewan arrived at the Aurora house and tried to talk her out of leaving Chester. When they saw how determined she was, and had some understanding of why, both fathers returned home. The following day her father came back and moved her out, with the children. She never lived with Chester again, nor did he ever support her or his children. She made her own way and raised her children alone, with heartbreaking difficulty.
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