The Life of Margaret Laurence

by James King

Verna and Bob did not marry until July 25, 1924, probably because they felt under pressure to save money and buy a house. When they did so, they purchased on the south—wrong—side of town. Not much is known about the emotional life of this young couple. Without doubt, Bob, who enjoyed manual labour, would have preferred the life of a carpenter to that of a lawyer. And, certainly, his daughter believed he had been badly shaken by his war experience. In contrast, Verna had high spirits, which even John Simpson had not been able to break. The Wemyss’s marriage was a love match, although one of opposites. Verna’s spontaneity offset her husband’s melancholia—perhaps getting him back in touch with the “hellion” side of his nature, whereas Bob’s gentleness must have been a welcome relief to Verna from her father’s harsh intrusiveness. It was to these two people that Margaret Laurence was born on July 18, 1926 at Neepawa General Hospital at 7:30 on a Sunday evening.

  “My mother’s idealization of her perfect child, me, is amusing and touching.” This was Margaret Laurence’s response to Verna’s entries in Mother’s Record of Baby from birth to five years of age, a gift from great-grandmother Harrison to the baby, who was named Jean Margaret in honour of her two grandmothers.

  Verna was the kind of mother who was attuned to every aspect of her only child. One day she was so engrossed in playing with Peggy—as the baby soon became known—she forgot to make dinner. On August 23, she was particularly gratified that her daughter’s first conscious “notice” was of music; the baby laughed on October 14 and took her first step at fifteen months. Beyond her careful attention to the baby was the mother’s obvious pride in everything her child did:

  Verna Simpson Wemyss. (illustration credit 1.6)

  At ten months, saying Mama, Dada, “bow-wow,” pretty.

  At thirteen months trying to say practically every thing.

  At sixteen months talking well, & putting 3 or 4 words together.

  At two years telling us “she was crazy about beet greens.” …

  Informed us she had “a bad little twinkle in her eye.”

  Said to her mother in speaking of a bad night she had had, “Don’t let’s mention it, mummy.” (2-1/2 yrs)

  A great imagination. Speaks a lot of her “funny house,” where “paper slim, & Mr. & Mrs. Slim live, also sister “Polly,” of whom she speaks, play “Three Bears” a lot, with herself as “Tiny,” her mummy as “Mammy Muff,” & her daddy, “Father Bruin.” Starts her stories always “once upon a time.”

  Entries under “First Confessions of Wrong-Doing” and “First Punishment” are left blank. In fact, Verna’s entries, like the ones cited above, emphasize the baby’s lively response to words and the verse and stories that can be created from them: “Very fond of listening to little rhymes at 1-1/2 yrs. At twenty-two months knew several herself. Loves looking at picture books. At 2-1/2 exceptionally fond of being read to.” Verna did not record her worry about Peggy’s constant sucking of her thumb and fingers (she was concerned about the resulting shape of her mouth). She sewed up the sleeves on her sleepers, but the toddler always found a way around this barrier. To all who encountered them, the young mother’s joy in her happy, exceptionally intelligent and talkative baby was obvious. The reader of Verna’s entries would not gather that Peggy had her sober side, but photographs taken when she was two and four show a slightly sad, certainly reflective little girl.

  Peggy Wemyss and Mona Spratt, both aged two, Neepawa. 1928. (illustration credit 1.7)

  Margaret Laurence’s memory of taking the tricycle to her mother’s bedroom was her first and last of Verna, who died at the age of thirty-four of an acute kidney infection two days after her daughter’s fourth birthday. Her single remembrance of her mother was linked to the tragedy of her death. Although Peggy was never told directly by her father or aunts that her mother was gravely ill and, later, that she had died, she had from the first intuited something was drastically wrong. As soon as her mother became ill, she went to stay with her uncle Stuart, his wife, Bertha, and their daughter, Catherine. One night, Bertha put Peggy to bed, but the little girl would not settle because “Peggy Noni,” a flannelette rag to which she was attached, could not be located. Without success, Bertha tried to find a substitute. Peggy would not calm down and, finally, Uncle Stuart walked the mile to the Wemyss house to fetch it.

  Catherine Simpson, then eighteen, looked after Peggy during the days immediately following Verna’s death. To her surprise, the four-year-old showed almost no emotion, except when a five-year-old friend confronted her with the news. Of this event, Margaret Laurence had a clear recollection:

  Peggy Wemyss, age four, Neepawa. 1930. (illustration credit 1.8)

  I am back home at the Little House and I am playing outside with my friend from across the road. We are tramping around in our rubber-boots, in a ditch that contains a few inches of rain-water. The muddy, weed-filled water is a sea. Neither of us has ever seen a sea.… My friend is a year older than I, and so of course much smarter. I follow her lead gladly, proud that she will play with a little kid like me. Suddenly she looks at me strangely, almost with a frightened expression.

  “Your mother’s dead,” she says.

  She has undoubtedly been told not to say this to me. She is five years old, and not at an age for keeping secrets.

  I stare at her. Then I get very angry.

  “She is not! You’re telling a lie! Liar! Liar!”

  I run inside the house…

  Once, over breakfast, Margaret Laurence’s friend, the writer Sylvia Fraser, having read that children who lose a parent at an early age are “ ‘blood’ children because that shocking severance of the blood tie creates a psychic wound that time never heals,” related this theory to Margaret, “who remained enigmatically silent in the face of one more crude attempt to pigeonhole her.” Yet, Sylvia Fraser noticed, she would frequently burst into tears when told of tragedy and injustice: “I wondered if the tears she so generously shed for strangers were a kind of stigmata of the soul.” Crude theory or not, she was deeply wounded by the death of her mother. Towards the end of her own life, she once again mourned the loss of that delicate young woman: “I am so much older now than she ever became. Sometimes I think of her as my long-lost child.”

  About a year after Verna’s death, Peggy accompanied Uncle Stuart, Aunt Bertha and Catherine to their cottage at Clear Lake, a wild, rustic place sixty miles north of Neepawa. As they approached the Simpson cottage, the rain beat down mercilessly, making the road impassable. Stuart and Bertha told the children they would have to walk the remaining half-mile. Peggy took the news calmly, got out of the car, but then quickly removed her new raincoat and placed it on her doll. Outraged, Bertha ordered her to place the coat back on herself. Defiantly, the little girl refused. Howling her rage at such an unjust request, she cradled the doll and ran away into the wood.

  2

  SNAPSHOTS

  (1930–1935)

  THE NEXT FIVE years of Peggy’s life passed by in a blur, but there were intense moments etched forever in her memory. The first was of Aunt Marg’s new role in her life. After Verna’s death, Marg, who had been home from Calgary for the summer holidays, decided to remain behind in Neepawa in order to look after her motherless niece. Mona Spratt, Peggy’s closest childhood friend, remembered that she heard her parents saying that the Simpson family had decided only a woman from the Simpson family could raise Peggy. For about a year, Marg lived in the little back bedroom, Bob in the bedroom he had once shared with Verna, and the little girl in her attic room. This arrangement, which hinted of scandal in a small town, lasted just over a year, at which time Marg and Bob were married in a civil ceremony. He was thirty-seven, she forty-one. Later, in her wry, detached way, Marg told Peggy she had worn a green dress and “that some of the good ladies of Neepawa had kindly informed her that green was an unlucky colour to be married in.” There was also a common belief in the town that “a man was not supposed to marry his deceased wife’s sister.” Years later, Margaret Laurence, who reali
zed her father’s second marriage was not one of youthful ardour, did not envision it simply as one of convenience: “They joined in a marriage that was marked both by mutual need and by mutual respect and deep affection.… They married not just to look after me but to look after each other.”

  In Margaret Laurence’s recollection, “Mum was never my stepmother. She was just my Mum.” This is undoubtedly true, but the stepdaughter’s memory fails to capture some of the intricacies of the past. As Dance on the Earth reveals, there were many silences —never broken—between Peggy and her new mother. For example, the girl never felt comfortable expressing any strong feeling, such as anger, to Marg. Years later, Margaret Laurence put it this way: “I can only guess at how she felt.” At about the age of five, however, Peggy, without prompting, began to call Marg “Mum”: “She told me when I was older that she and my dad were so pleased and relieved, not to say grateful” at this turn of events.

  Margaret Simpson Wemyss, age sixteen. (illustration credit 2.1)

  Catherine Milne remembered when Peggy began to call Marg “Mum,” but she also noticed the word “Mother” was reserved exclusively for Verna. In Catherine’s opinion, there was a world of difference between her two aunts. She herself venerated Marg but adored Verna. She was also of the opinion that Marg was a much more demanding mother than Verna would have been. For example, excellence in school was important to her whereas Verna, she was certain, would have paid more attention to her daughter’s feelings. Put simply and realistically, Marg was a much more reserved, withdrawn person than Verna. In surviving photographs of the two sisters, Marg has a demure, poignant and reflective countenance, whereas Verna’s face is charged with feeling. Emotionally, Peggy was—and remained—Verna’s daughter.

  Marriage had never been a real option for Marg before her younger sister’s death, but she was a woman for whom responsibility was the core issue. Without doubt, Marg’s gentle presence brought genuine comfort to Peggy. Later, Margaret Laurence commented that she appears “small and sad” in photographs taken after her mother died, whereas she is joyful in those taken after Marg had married Bob: “In those pictures, I am a perfect little poser but I’m always grinning quite self-consciously.”

  In the “Baby Book,” Margaret Laurence could plainly see the differences in her two mothers: “The entries (except for [the] fourth birthday … and the fifth birthday, when the book stops, babyhood over) are in my mother’s handwriting, so much like my own sprawling penmanship and so unlike the even and beautifully formed handwriting of her sister, my aunt and stepmother.” In this passage, written near the end of her life, she perhaps unconsciously highlights her affinity with her birth mother.

  One of the early photographs is of Peggy’s first day of school. She stands outside the Little House, shy and a bit withdrawn. She clutches a notebook to one arm, her straight hair held in by a barrette, one leg placed tentatively in front of the other. According to family memory, she had been ill the day before, having eaten some green tomatoes. Her own recollection of that day was a bit different: “I was pretty annoyed I didn’t learn how to read after one whole day.”

  Although she was—and remained—an excellent student, Margaret Laurence’s own memories of her past centred on her precociousness in reading, writing and observing. First, there was the “Blue Sky” and “Funny House” of Peggy’s imagination, the latter filled with all manner of playmates and dishes. Later, she staged her dramas in an actual playhouse built by her father. “It wasn’t a tiny little Peter-Pan-and-Wendy effort. This was the real thing. It had a sloped roof and was about the size of a largish woodshed, big enough for an adult to stand up straight in. Dad had even equipped it with windows that opened and window boxes planted with various perennials.” By Grade 3, Peggy the writer came into being, when she began writing stories down; by Grade 5 she had scribblers filled with both prose and verse. At about this time, Marg made an important suggestion to her daughter: she advised her to write of what she knew and observed rather than concocting tales of medieval lords and ladies.

  In her own recollections of her youthful coming into being as a writer, Margaret never highlighted her inquisitiveness. As a young child, she became famous for asking difficult, embarrassing questions, of defying the conventions of what could be asked and, in turn, told, especially in a small town. Somewhat obscured in her autobiography—both as girl and woman—was also her incredible sense of herself as strong and reliant, and most significantly, of being from childhood a person of ruthless determination. Margaret Laurence liked to skip over—and, if she could get away with it, hide—this side of herself, perhaps because she imagined, despite the example of Marg and Ruby, that ambition was perceived as a male attribute.

  Robert and Peggy Wemyss. (illustration credit 2.2)

  One persistent memory of Peggy’s childhood was of her father as photographer. She was particularly fond of one photograph showing her and Marg, in about 1932, beside a barnstormer plane: “Mum is holding her hair against the wind with one hand. I’m next to her, a little kid in a short dress and coat, white socks and black-buttoned shoes, who’s just had her first ride.” In another photograph from this time, a sad, shy and apprehensive Peggy seeks refuge in her genial father’s comforting arms.

  She also remembered how adept her father was with his hands. One Christmas gift was her first, tiny desk: “He had found it in the attic and had repaired and painted it turquoise-blue for me. It was possibly the most beloved desk I have ever owned. It had chains on either side that let down the writing side and pigeon-holes to hold important stuff.” In a writer’s life, this is a crucial moment, but in her memories of her father she stresses, quite accurately, the great pleasure he took in manual activities. Those who knew Bob well are certain carpentry was his real vocation. His qualities of mind did not make him happy in the profession of law, and in 1930 he had to endure the death of a dearly beloved wife.

  If he was a disappointed man, Bob made a good job of hiding it. Mona Spratt recalled how indulgent he was when she and Peggy visited his office. He actively participated in—as well as encouraged—their shenanigans, as the two little girls climbed on his desk and, in general, left his office a mess. And Bob had an instinctive way of dealing with Peggy, as when he taught her to swim: “He had taken me into the shallow water in Clear Lake, supported me with his hands for a minute or so, then removed his hands and said, ‘Okay, now swim.’ ”

  Bob Wemyss. (illustration credit 2.3)

  From May 1933, another face, that of a baby boy, makes its appearance in the family album. In Dance on the Earth, Margaret Laurence mentions her new brother was named Robert Morrison Wemyss “after our dad. I had been an only child for seven years. A baby brother! I was overjoyed. Overjoyed, that is, until I realized that a baby is a demanding creature, and that your mum has to spend a lot of time looking after this kid.… Mum might have been more nervous … than she would have been if she had been a younger mother. She was in her early forties when he was born, after all.” These sentences give the reader the totally incorrect impression Bob was born to Bob and Marg. The reality is that he was born in Winnipeg on May 21, 1933 and adopted by the Wemysses shortly thereafter. Mona’s parents told her the baby boy was adopted so Peggy would not be an only child; he was to keep his elder sister company. Although Margaret knew he was adopted, she felt Bob was as much a brother as if he were a blood brother.

  Sibling rivalry seems to have been minimal, although Peggy once remembered giving him a hard pinch. Marg came running out of the house. “ ‘What’s the matter, is Bobby all right? Peggy, what’s happened?’ I leaned nonchalantly against the wicker baby carriage. ‘Gee, I don’t know.’ She never questioned me.” In “To Set Our House in Order,” the birth of a baby boy causes disruption in the life of his sister, but he is described benignly. When the reader meets him, the “small creature” is lying in his cot, “with his tightly closed fists and his feathery black hair.”

  In 1934, the Little House, which had become too smal
l, was abandoned in favour of the Wemyss house at 483 Second Avenue. (After her husband’s death, Grandmother Wemyss moved to Winnipeg to live with her daughter, Norma.) Before that, the Wemyss home had become for Peggy a mausoleum, a grim monument to past glory and her grandmother, its custodian, a crusty matriarch, who besides having unreasonable expectations of her elder son, was tetchy to everyone she encountered. Margaret Wemyss’s bedroom, as described in her granddaughter’s story “To Set Our House in Order” was filled with “stale and old-smelling air, the dim reek of medicines and lavender sachets.” The living room “was another alien territory where I had to tread warily, for many valuable objects sat just-so on tables and mantelpiece, and dirt must not be tracked in upon the blue Chinese carpet with its birds in eternal motionless flight.” Moreover, the exterior of this big red-brick house, built in the late 1800s and in a bad state of repair, was large and imposing to the little girl. The Virginia creeper, which covered its front, added to the house’s sinister appearance. This was relieved somewhat by a round, rose-coloured window on the second storey; the front door had set into it a pane of glass with colours which also appealed to Peggy.

  The large kitchen, built to be staffed by servants, was cumbersome to use. The little girl, eyeing enviously the delicious sandwiches and cakes distributed at her mother’s afternoon teas, was a bit annoyed at being excluded from such largesse when town ladies gathered in the living room. The room of the Wemyss house she adored was her father’s study, which had bookshelves holding all of his copies of National Geographic magazine. There were some additional comforts. The family had two dogs, Jerry and Jock. Bob, a dedicated gardener, was renowned for his gladioli. For Peggy, nevertheless, the Wemyss residence remained her grandparents’ house; it never became her real home.