May 24th, 3525 Mountain Street, Montreal
Dearest Family,
This is probably the last letter I shall write to you from this side of the water. Isn’t that a funny thought, after all these months. Only 9 more days before I embark in the Olympic. It’s almost unbelievable.
I wish I had any idea about when I last wrote. I think it must have been quite a long time ago. Was it from Winnipeg? Yes, after some furious thought I remember writing Biddy and Mother last Saturday week from Winnipeg. It was just after we’d settled about Ruth Lomberg’s wedding, and her bridesmaids and everything. (This letter seems to be missing).
Well, it was a very hectic time. The archbishop of Manitoba which is the province Winnipeg is in, is a marvellous old man who spent the first 3 years of his married life in the Yukon – and his wife during that time didn’t see a single white woman and their eldest son was born there, surrounded by ? Indians and Eskimos. However, he said when we’d been to Winnipeg that he couldn’t point to a single man, white, Indian or Eskimo, whose life had really been changed while he was a missionary. So now he’s started doing it, and is really with us. We had 2 nights of public meetings and at the rate of four running concurrently each night, and then spent the last 2 days talking to people and getting them to come to the House Party, and each province is chartering special coaches in order to get there, so it ought to be a good show.
On our last afternoon there we went out to see Fort Garry which is one of the old Hudson Bay Co’s forts, and is the first at all old thing, apart from trees and mountains, that we’ve seen. It’s been kept just as it was in 1832, with the contemporary furniture and oak beams – and one could quite imagine all the traders and soldiers living there. At one time various artistic Canadians had decided to improve the place by covering the bare beams with embossed metal, and painting all the doors a shiny black, but that’s all been taken off now, and it’s just as it was with plain wooden doors and beams. There was a powder magazine built with double walls like a thermos flask, with the ventilation going by round about ways so that evil disposed persons couldn’t throw fire in and explode the whole place, and then there were the store rooms with all the shelves and boxes where they’d kept the things that they traded with the Indians, and a fur press for packing the furs tightly so that they could make them into small packages, and the still they used to make whiskey in, and all sorts of 1830 junk simply lying about as the traders had left it in many cases. It was great fun.
We left Winnipeg at 5 o’clock last Thursday afternoon and got to Toronto the following Saturday morning at 8.0am, and while we were in the train various ones of us concocted a pantomime for Ellie Ford’s birthday, which should be quite effective if we can find a moment to rehearse it. It’s going to be called Cinderellie, and Cinderellie is going to be changed by her fairy godmother, and go to a House Party which is being run by the Prince. We’ve written the first two scenes, and the idea is that Godfather should be one of the ugly sisters. Everyone is immensely keen about it, and we awfully hope that it will be possible to have it.
Well we got to Toronto, and most of us were billeted with different people. I was sent to some people called Gibson, where the wife was changed and the husband was quite the reverse and said nothing in the world would induce him to have anything to do with any of us. However his wife persuaded him to ask some of us in to supper on Saturday, and he fortified himself with whiskey, partly I think in self defence and partly to shock us. But Frank disarmed him by ignoring the fact that he was drunk, and simply treated him as a bosom friend, so that by the end of the evening the two of them were walking up and down the hall arm in arm, cracking jokes, Colonel Gibson explaining to Frank just where he thought our methods could be improved on, and eventually decided to come to church next morning in order to pick out any further flaws. This was a great step as he hadn’t been seen since he was married and he made it quite clear that he wouldn’t go in the evening because he said he’d had enough religion. But the end of it was that he went a tea party given for us in the afternoon at his mother-in-law’s, again to church in the evening to hear another member of the team speak, and then asked us all to go back to supper again. This time he said he’d like a meeting, so he took the chair and called on all of us to speak, and at the end said that although he was far from being converted he was prepared to back his wife in anything she did and he would love her to go to the House Party although he wouldn’t go himself.
Then the next thing was that he went to a business man’s luncheon where some of us were speaking, and at the end of it said he’d decided to go to the House Party himself with his wife, and went home and rang up all his most dissolute and tough friends and urged them to come too.
Toronto itself has gone ahead by leaps and bounds. In one church they have a group of 650. One young man and his wife have been taking small teams to the outlying districts during the weekends. There’s a group of business men that started with 6 in January, and there are now between 60 and 70. Another small team went to Ottawa and held two meetings of 2000 people each; the women have been going to schools and Home for fallen girls who listened to them without fidgetting which had never been known before; another man has a slum parish in the East of Toronto, and all the ex- convicts and Bolsheviks are beginning to be changed there. Dr. Pigeon, who is an outstanding cleric, said at one meeting, “This is by long odds the greatest spiritual movement that has ever struck Canada”.
So altogether we were frightfully braced and felt that things really were beginning. We got here yesterday – or rather the day before yesterday morning – No, it was only yesterday, and slept from after breakfast till lunch time, and then I rang up the Leslie Hasletts and went to dinner with them which was very pleasant, and they were simply sweet. There was a meeting going on in the town but I stayed with the Hasletts and talked to them instead of going to it, and this morning after going down to the hotel where the others were staying to find out what the plans were, I wrote this.
In the afternoon my host Mr. Hallward lent the Hasletts and me his car and we all went and drove round the island of Montreal which is a curiously primitive place after the splendours of the town itself. We went to the place where you drove to, Mamma, to look at the stars and I took a photograph of it to remind you of the dear old days.
May 25th
Last night we all got into the train at 11.00pm and got here early in the morning.
This is a most fascinating place and after breakfast 4 of us wandered out round the town and ended by lying on the grass in the sun, but that got too hot, and it was difficult to write or read or do anything in the position we were in. So I came indoors again and it’s now nearly lunchtime.
This evening at 5.o’clock Peter Bennett, Francis Elliston and I are supervising a rehearsal of the play, which is, according to the present plan, due to take place in the form of a matinee after lunch tomorrow before the guests start arriving.
In re my arrival home, I thought that per’aps my kind fambly would like to look out the trains from Southampton to Oxford for me, so that I could rush straight to one without wasting time interviewing officials and timetables. If, and supposing by any chance I didn’t get home till the morning of the 8th I should feel constrained to stop off at Eleanor’s wedding, which is that afternoon, but with any luck we shall get in on the 7th as billed. Isn’t it fun? I sail tomorrow week!
Your loving and homecoming daughter, Maria
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