The Queen was always something of a mother figure for me. She was the same age as my own mother and her children appeared at roughly the same time as me and my siblings. I never met her, but I always admired her ability to keep her own counsel when her children were behaving badly, something all children do even when they are in the glare of the public spotlight. I asked my mother on more than one occasion “Why can’t you be more like the Queen? She never calls any of her children a silly fathead. Why can’t you be more like her?” “I’m quite sure she does,” Mum would say and dismiss the question with a wave of her ivory cigarette holder.
Just a few weeks before the Queen died, my family gathered in a small country cemetery in Mono Township north of Toronto to bury mum’s ashes, a ceremony postponed for two years by the pandemic. The cemetery was just a few miles from the 100 acre pasture farm she bought in 1955 to use as a writer’s retreat and a place to let her five children roam freely.
At the interment ceremony, we walked past a row of gravestones marked with the names of neighbors, friends and more than a few of mum’s arch-rivals. For she had a sharp tongue. She lost her job as the host of Kindergarten of the Air on CBC Radio partly because she famously snapped at an executive meeting that “the directors of the fall fair do a better job of managing things and they’ve all been drunk for two weeks before the fair!” When she put silver candlesticks on the altar of St. Luke’s a woman wrote to the Bishop denouncing her as a “Papist.”
She was indifferent to criticism. She dove into the Rosemont community with great energy and carved out a role for herself as the church organist and choir leader, a Women’s Institute member and the director of a theatre troupe of farm kids who performed plays she wrote and directed. The first plays were performed in front of the neighbors on the lawn of the farmhouse in late August after several weeks of drama classes and rehearsals. People came down to the farm with picnic hampers and folding chairs and lined up their cars with the headlights on to provide stage lighting. After three seasons we moved up to the Orange Hall where the weather was more predictable.
She battled with nearly every minster at the church over the next 30 years and was finally banned from the Orange Hall permanently when she removed King William’s portrait and nailed a crucifix in its place for a production of Maria Chapdelaine. It wasn’t until the Lodge was de-commissioned that she was allowed to resume her culture series for the community.
When I was nine and writing my first speech for a competition at the township’s center school she suggested I write about the Seventh Line. “This is a world that is slipping away,” she said. “You should pay attention to it.” At the time she was working her own novel called Margaret, about an Irish workhouse girl who finds her way to a hill farm in Mono Township in the 1840s. It was finally published in 1966.
We all attended the two room school on the highway for a couple of months in the fall before Mum moved us back to the house in the city. We returned every spring before the leaves came out and she would re-stock the farm with cows, pigs and chickens and plant a large garden. Each of us went out to work on the farms of the Seventh Line tossing hay bales, cleaning stables, doing field work and cutting firewood in the bush lots. In our spare time we sang in the choir, played our parts on stage at the Hall and attended every Strawberry and Fowl Supper until the 1990s when the old Seventh Line community finally did slip away, just as she predicted.
But I did pay attention and I have been writing about this extraordinary world of rural Canada ever since. Thanks to my mother I have no doubt about where I belong and I have never had to look more than a few miles in any direction for inspiration. For writing is a work of the imagination and the imagination works best when it involves the head and the heart and is connected to the land under our feet.