by James King
Jack’s magnetic appeal was overwhelming to Peggy, who was delighted to throw over small-town trappings. At 139 Roslyn Road, she and Jack lived together openly, causing one friend—Alice Dahlquist, who was visiting from the States—some considerable shock and dismay. Her friend Mona took an instant dislike to Jack. One day in the winter of 1947, she paid a surprise visit to Peggy, who was not at home. She ran into another resident, a man, who offered to take a message. A few days later, Mona telephoned and told her old chum how much she was appalled by the “military manner” of the chap she had met. When Peggy informed her that the man was her lover, Jack, Mona was especially upset at how much older he was than Peggy. Mona cautioned her: “He is way too much like Derek.” Mona was put off by what she considered to be Jack’s condescending manner; she was also spooked by the remarkable physical resemblance between him and the Englishman. Although Peggy did not tell Mona that she was deeply offended, she broke with her for several years and did not invite her to her wedding which took place at the United Church in Neepawa on September 13, 1947.
Peggy realized Marg “must have thought I was rather young to get married” but nothing was said. Although Marg did not leave her daughter completely in the dark about sex, she found the topic a difficult one. Her solution to the problem was not successful: “Just before I was married, she and one of her friends gave me a story. It was called ‘Here We Are,’ by Dorothy Parker, about a young couple on their honeymoon who are very embarrassed about sex. I didn’t know if Mum thought this amusing, but I was upset and offended, although I never told her so.”
Marg acted under the misguided assumption that Peggy was completely inexperienced sexually. It would have been surprising if they had talked about sex openly. What Peggy is really complaining about is the hamfisted, indirect and insensitive way her mother chose to broach the topic. Even at that time, when mothers and daughters would never think of openly discussing many intimate issues, the oppressive, characteristic silences between this mother and daughter were excessive. Although Marg was particularly concerned about birth control, that was another topic she did not wish to discuss:
Why was she so frightened? I have no notion. It was a subject then, I guess, that was not to be talked about, except secretly, among women. The doctors were all male doctors, and they were certainly not sympathetic to young married women who did not want children. Mum did the best she could for me. She gave me the advice, not of the local doctor, but of his wife. There was a name of a birth control cream that I could buy without a prescription. Before Jack and I were married, I went into a drug store in Winnipeg and bought this stuff. I feel so embarrassed now, for my much younger self. I did not even know how to pronounce “vaginal.”
The wedding was a joyous event—but one into which the character of the town crept: “Mum was not a teetotaller, but she knew the community in which she had spent most of her life. For a reception of roughly thirty people, she’d bought one bottle of sherry.”
Margaret Laurence on her wedding day. (illustration credit 6.3)
Peggy was “incredibly happy” and thought she looked “quite beautiful” on her wedding day. However, she allowed a little bit of sly humour to escape when describing the outfit she wore when she and Jack departed for their honeymoon at Clear Lake: “a navy-blue suit with a tight skirt down nearly to my ankles and a cumbersome gold-braided puff-sleeved jacket that must have made my slender twenty-one-year-old body look like a dirigible. High-heeled shoes, of course. A natty little navy-blue felt hat, tri-cornered, with a huge pink ribbon bow, fashioned by Miss Phipps, the local ladies’ milliner in my home town. I thought it was just wonderful.”
Up to the time of their honeymoon, Peggy and Jack had not had sexual intercourse, even though they had lived together. Her remembrances of that time were rapturous: “Sex was never a problem for us.… Not only did we love one another, we wanted one another.… our love and our love-making were marvellous, amazing.” Throughout their entire marriage, their sex life remained on an even keel. However, like Marg, Peggy did not feel comfortable discussing birth control—even with Jack: “I don’t think my husband knew, partly because I did not tell him, of my rage and bewilderment about the whole birth control matter. We used ‘safes’ for a whole year because for that time I was scared to go … to a doctor.”
Even after her marriage, the intangible but nevertheless long reach of Neepawa haunted Peggy, who determined to rid herself of the resulting desolation. One way to do this was to avoid the place, but such a course of action was not always possible. Her response to the town is best captured in a letter written to Adele Wiseman when, after her marriage, Peggy was visiting Marg (Jack was at St. Norbert working as a surveyor): “Stranded. Neepawa, as usual, is very much like itself. Nausea, real not mental, as usual, has set in. The uncomfortable accompaniment of great mental stress and strain. However, your voyageur is making valiant attempts to control the digestive system, and so far I haven’t thrown up on anyone’s oriental rugs.” Her attempt at cheerfulness is half-hearted at best because the town cast such a long shadow on her existence. Neepawa would always remain a grim interior landscape for her, one which would only be partly purged in the creation of Manawaka.
When the Laurences returned to Winnipeg after their honeymoon, they moved to 515 Burrows Avenue, a duplex, where they rented the upstairs from Anne and Bill Ross. Peggy had heard that these rooms were available through Adele, whose family lived across the street. During the years on Burrows Avenue, Peggy and Adele’s friendship ripened. They talked at length about their desire to become writers, conversations which even extended to speculations as to which of them would first win the Governor General’s Award for fiction. At the time, these seemed to be unrealizable desires, although each woman saw in the other the drive necessary to transform fantasy into reality.
One way for Peggy to practise her skills as a writer was to become a journalist. Her first job was with The Westerner, a Communist newspaper, although at the time she started there she was not aware of its party allegiance. In 1947, she and Jack shared the same attitudes towards social and political change. Jack, deeply influenced both by the ravages of war he had seen in the Far East and by Watson Thomson’s teachings, wanted to use the practical skills he was acquiring in his engineering course to further advancement in the Third World. Very much in the manner of a teacher, he tutored Peggy in his philosophy, she being an ardent disciple.
Anne and Bill Ross noticed Peggy eagerly followed where Jack led. In her, Anne discovered a vibrant, sweet but naive friend; she did not like Jack, whom she found cold and austere. There was, however, a complicated agenda at work. Bill Ross, born Cecil Zuken in the Ukraine, had a different idea of social change from the Laurences. At the outset of the war, he had been the Secretary of the Young Communist League and a school trustee. When the Communist Party was declared illegal, he went underground, living in twenty-four different places between June 1940 and October 1942. The political beliefs of Bill and Jack were at odds, accounting in part for the disdain Bill and Anne felt for Jack.
Peggy, who may have heard of the job at The Westerner through Bill, had little or no idea of the weekly’s political agenda—“when I began I didn’t even know enough to know it was a Party paper—thought it was left-wing vaguely; why they hired me I cannot think; I did book reviews and reporting—and did I learn a lot in that year! My big break with the editor (whom I still feel enormous affection towards) was when I reviewed some novel or other and said ‘this novel stinks’, and he said, you can’t say it stinks, it’s on the right side, and I said I thought otherwise.” The offending piece was a review of a book of poems by Joe Wallace. The editor informed her: “You can’t write that kind of review about Joe’s poems. He’s a hero of the left.” She refused to budge, “They’re not good poems. That’s all I care about.” She was eventually fired—not for insubordination but for lack of funds. Years later, she realized that her then nascent political beliefs were not very different from those of her emplo
yers: “Those old-time Communists in the forties in Winnipeg were not proposing violent revolution. They were proclaiming a need for social justice in terms of our land.”
She then worked for The Winnipeg Citizen, “the only co-operative daily ever to come into existence in Canada. It lasted a year. I wrote a radio column, did book reviews, and covered the labour beat, about which, at twenty-one, I knew absolutely nothing.” After a year there, she resigned when the managing editor summoned her to his office, having been informed she was a communist. The rumour, probably generated by her association with Bill and Anne, offended her, not so much because someone accused her of being a Communist (she wasn’t) but because the editor assumed it was his right to invade her privacy.
Her next job was as the registrar at the YWCA, a hectic bustling job especially when swimming and gym classes were being enrolled. When the Japanese Canadians who had been released from the internment camps in British Columbia began to arrive in Winnipeg, the Y started a teen group. In Peggy’s opinion, this was very much a band-aid solution to the horrors that had been inflicted by the Canadian government, but at least the Y was trying to do something to rectify a tragic situation.
“North Winnipeg in the 1940s decided a lot of my life.” There, she began to become more and more aware of the possibilities life offered her. Two interests predominated: she wanted to be involved in work which bettered the conditions of others and she was certain of her destiny as a writer. She closed Neepawa off and saw Marg at increasingly long intervals. She dealt with her guilt by writing to her mother on a regular basis, often weekly. At this time, Peggy saw no connection between her past and the future that seemed to be unfolding in a potentially golden way.
By 1949, Jack, who had completed his engineering degree, wanted to put into practice the ideals he had imbibed from Watson Thomson. At one point, he considered taking a job building a railway in Bulgaria. This prospect alarmed Marg, and she may have been equally dismayed when Peggy informed her that she and Jack had decided to settle in England for a short stay, in preparation for a much longer sojourn elsewhere. At this time, London, which was the gateway for all engineering jobs in the Third World, was an ideal stopover practically and emotionally.
Peggy, who landed office work with a small employment agency (Suit-All) shortly after arriving in England in July 1949, had an exhilarating stay in London, despite the fact she and Jack were always broke. He had an engineering job, but they could only afford a bedsitter on Finchley Road. Years later, she wrote a short account of that room:
It had a gas-fire, and gas-ring on which we did all our cooking in a pressure cooker. Whatever we put in it, it came out tasting like stew. Rationing was still on, and we had to queue for our minuscule bit of beef each week. I got very friendly with a lady at the greengrocer’s who liked me because I was Canadian and she was the aunt of Abe Yanovsky, a Canadian and world chess champion. She used to give me extra oranges. Our room had a gas-meter. We used to run out of sixpences in the cold weather, and Jack would pick the lock on the meter and we would take out some sixpences. Being honest, we would mark down how many we borrowed, and return them. Cigarettes were in short supply. We used to save the butts and re-roll them. On weekends, to keep warm cheaply, we used to ride the underground.
Peggy’s ambition to write was not forestalled—she even managed to get something published, as she excitedly wrote to Adele Wiseman in January 1950:
The long-awaited day has arrived at last … the Canadian Tribune has published one of my poems … it was in the January 9 issue … In their letter they said they had just received another poem which I had sent them, but didn’t say whether or not they would print it … I rather hope they do, as it is a better poem, on the whole, and is about the revolt of the Italian peasants which began in earnest last fall.
Another stroke of luck … we have recently won £64 in the Football Pools! By the old rate of exchange, that is about $250!!!… Half of it will go towards our holiday, which we fervently hope to spend in France and Italy. The rest is being spent on concerts, theatres, ballet, clothes and books … With our Pool money, also, we are in the process of buying a few more clothes to combat the English weather.
Gleefully, the Laurences then squandered their entire take on a trip to Paris.
Peggy’s letters to Adele capture the excitement the newly married Laurences found in each other and in life. The tone is of domestic comedy, of two young people, very much in love and without much money, facing life together. Their love had the power to remove all manner of impediments, and their imaginations, as Peggy later recalled, led them in some zany directions: “We were going to make a million by writing a book on the country homes of England, or the time we were (in our minds, anyway) nearly on easy-street through writing a series of children’s books dealing with visits to the doctor and dentist (which would remove fear from the kids’ minds … the books to be distributed by the big chemical and medical companies).” There was another project, as Peggy later remembered: “When Jack and I were first in England in 1949, there was a contest for a toothpaste called ‘Gordon Moore’s Cosmetic Toothpaste’, which tinted the gums crimson. You were supposed to send in a little verse, & Jack did: ‘Cosmetic Toothpaste by Gordon Moore/ Has made many a virgin look like a whore.’ ”
Postwar London recovered slowly from the war, and evidence of the blitz confronted the Laurences every day. Despite murky weather and poor living conditions, Peggy was entranced. But she was not deceived. This can be seen in her ten-page unpublished account, “England by Me,” which she divided into five sections: “1. Scenery, History and Old Junk in General, in the Land of the Shilling Guidebook; 2. Food; 3. Manners and Morals; 4. Vultures for Culture; 5. Us.” She included a two-page advertising supplement she had come across, in which large lettering—under the photo of a young attractive woman reads—“I’D MARRY HIM AGAIN BUT …”; the quotation then continues in a much smaller typeface, “I do wish they’d teach bridegrooms about rationing!” Her commentary: “makes you gasp, until you read that last word ‘rationing’!”
Peggy’s diary-letter (augmented by Jack’s pencil sketches) is very much tongue-in-cheek: “Windsor Castle, now. There’s the place. It’s terrific. It’s colossal. It’s super-stupendous. But, having learned to be restrained (so as not to be confused with the Americans) you murmur softly, ‘Rather nice, what?’ ”
Hampton Court is another Palace. There are so many palaces you soon lose count. The interesting thing about Hampton Court is that Henry VIII lived there, and the old boy had … (dare I say it?) … baroque tastes. Not to mention Late Renaissance, with a soupçon of just plain old ordinary vulgar. Nude women (pictures, i.e.) romp around the walls.… It is a dead place, filled with memories of brawls and lovemaking and the hypocrisy common to courts, but now its day is done, and it is almost with a sense of relief that you hear a little boy running down the great hallway, and shouting “mummy, come and see the picture of the man with the funny-looking feather in his hat!”
Peggy comments on a wide variety of topics: the horribleness of English puddings (more interesting as a concept than a reality), the wealthy (“In the employment agency where I work I see a lot of rich-bitches, who can’t run a house without six servants, and who tell you that they won’t hire ‘foreigners’.”), contemporary English painting (“they still return to haunt me in dreams. Those knock-out shades of pink. That green flesh.”), and the state of the Laurence marriage (“insofar as it’s possible to be happy in this kind of a world at the present time, we’re happy here”).
“England by Me” was a Christmas gift to Adele and her family back in Winnipeg—she would never have sent such a letter to Marg, who would not have seen the humour in it. And Peggy Laurence was growing bolder. She no longer had to show just her “nice” side. Despite the privations, England was liberating her, allowing her to speak frankly and racily when she felt like it. However, her marriage was the real source of her new-found freedom. Her closeness to Jack pervaded every aspect o
f her being, allowing her to experience life intensely and joyously.
Money-making schemes and the daily rigours of English life aside, her ambition to write had been recharged, as she wrote to the Wisemans back in Winnipeg after Adele arrived in London later that year: “was over at Adele’s the other afternoon, and we read each other’s scripts and told each other that we were going to write the two great novels of the century! In actual fact, however, if she gets this novel of hers finished the way she wants it to be, it will be infinitely better than anything I shall ever write.”
Finally, the break Jack had been looking for surfaced in a newspaper advertisement placed by the British Colonial Service, which was in search of a civil engineer to supervise the building of thirty dams (ballehs—huge water catchments) in the Somaliland Protectorate: “The average maximum capacity of each dam will be 10 million gallons. The Engineer will be required to carry out all reconnaissance and detailed survey [under the supervision of the Director of Public Works], to do all calculations and designs, to be responsible for expenditure and the supervision of staff and plant.” Jack felt, as Peggy later recalled, “a need to work for once on a job that plainly needed doing.… a job in which the results of an individual’s work could be clearly perceived, as they rarely could in Europe and North America.” She also wanted to put into action many of the ideas about social action she had formed in Winnipeg. And her imagination, like Jack’s, was fuelled by the prospect of escaping the grey skies of England.