by James King
One other, curious aspect of Dance on the Earth is that Margaret, in re-creating her adolescence, does not emphasize her attendance at the United Church, a crucial part, she later claimed, of her ancestry. As young women, Louise Alguire and Mona Spratt were very conscious of the different denominations to which they belonged: Louise and Mona Anglican, Margie Street Presbyterian, Peggy Wemyss United. Since, in the young woman’s mind, the United Church and John Simpson may have been synonymous, she could only separate the two from each other many years later.
Peggy was also keenly aware of almost invisible class distinctions within her circle. The Depression had reduced the value of the various Simpson businesses, and Bob Wemyss’s premature death left Marg strapped for money. Not surprisingly, John Simpson was a tightwad who offered almost no financial support to his beleaguered daughter and her two children. The Alguires were a wealthy family whose fortunes were not unduly affected by the fluctuations in the economy. Mona’s father was a successful commercial traveller, a pharmaceutical representative. Although the Spratts did not have a house (they lived in a flat on Mountain Avenue in the centre of Neepawa), they had a large disposable income. Mona had beautiful clothes to compliment her film-star looks, whereas Peggy’s clothes often barely passed muster.
Her early womanhood was spent under yet a further shadow. The war in faraway Europe sucked up into its vortex all the young men of Neepawa, and many never returned. The horrors of Dunkirk and Pearl Harbor were very real to her and all her friends: “When I was in Grade Eleven, there were only two boys in our class. By Grade Twelve, there were none. They were all at war.” More than most of her contemporaries, Peggy was heavily involved in the war effort, actively espousing the sale of war stamps in her editorials and becoming an ardent saleswoman of them in the town. She even knitted three socks, wondering later if some unfortunate soldier had to settle for a single sock since she had never completed its mate.
From her slight income working at Leckie’s, she began to spend almost every cent she earned on satin underwear “never to be seen by anyone other than [her]self” and on dresses to wear at the dances at the local dance hall—which Marg permitted her to attend only in the company of girlfriends.
There is a lingering sadness in these recollections and in Peggy’s memories of the further financial deprivations brought by the war. Marg, who took in a boarder—the much-loathed “man from Miramichi”—in order to make ends meet, gave up her bedroom and moved into Bobby’s. In the shuffle, Peggy had to give up her little dressing room to her brother. Not surprisingly, John Simpson was rude to the outsider.
Peggy Wemyss and Derek Armstrong. January 1944. (illustration credit 4.1)
Another person to whom John Simpson was unfailingly unpleasant was Derek Armstrong, or, as he styled himself, “Benjamin Britten.” In the middle of the war, an RAF training base was built just outside Neepawa. Soon, a frenzy of anglophilia swept the town, and Peggy was soon caught up in it: “I fell in love with an RAF man when I was seventeen years old. He was not only handsome and ten years older, he was also well read.” For a teen-age girl with romantic and literary inclinations, this new outsider was hard to resist; like Bud, he was significantly older than herself. In the one surviving photograph of Derek and Peggy, she looks flushed with happiness as she chats with the dashing airman.
Peggy met Derek at a Saturday-night dance, occasions detested by Marg because she considered them rowdy. Of course, she was “absolutely right,” but this made these events even more enticing. According to Peggy, two types of women attended, the “brash” and the uninitiated high-school girls. Each dance that a girl did not dance became a personal failure. And the music—big band and boogie—helped to release a lot of pent-up feeling. “I had at last learned to dance very well. In those days, though, dancing with someone who also loved to dance was not just a sexual experience; it almost went beyond the sexual. The uncertainties of war meant we danced with a heightened tribal sense of being together. Dancing became a passionate affirmation of life and the desire to go on living.” Derek’s own interests, largely centred on classical music, met with Marg’s approval. She encouraged Peggy to attend the RAF camp’s musical evenings to which Derek invited her, perhaps feeling guilty about Peggy’s lack of musical education. In her turn, her daughter preferred the sound of bagpipes. “In love though I was, I was at least smart enough to realize that no Englishman would understand the Scots part of me. I dutifully sat and listened to classical music on the gritty old 78 records at the camp, pretending a warm response.”
Perhaps it was on one of these evenings that Derek revealed to Peggy his “real” name was Benjamin Britten and that he was a composer. Correctly, Derek assumed Peggy would not know of the existence of the real-life composer of that name. If he had attempted to impress a naive seventeen-year-old, he succeeded. In the autobiographical story “Jericho’s Brick Battlements” in A Bird in the House, Margaret Laurence describes how Vanessa falls in love with an airman from British Columbia.
Like me, Michael wrote stories and poems, a fact which he did not divulge to his Air Force friends. When we were together, there was never enough time, for we had everything to talk about and discover. I tried not to remember that in a few months he would be going away. I had never met anyone before who was interested in the same things as I was.
Ever xenophobic, Grandfather Connor, who despises Michael, tells his granddaughter: “You ought to know better than run around with a fellow like this … I’ll bet a nickel to a doughnut hole he’s married. That’s the sort of fellow you’ve picked up.”
One evening, John Simpson came upon the couple in the living room. He wound his watch with considerable gusto, obviously to indicate it was late and Derek should be leaving. When the hint was not taken, he ordered Peggy to bed. He did not know Derek was married, but made the accusation in order to insult and confuse. On this score, he was, as usual, remarkably successful. Peggy received only a few letters from Derek after he returned to England; ten years later she learned that her airman had been married.
Peggy was sorely tempted, but she did not go to bed with Derek. Young women of Peggy’s class did not sleep with their boyfriends. Also, they did not know much about sex, as she later recalled:
When I married, I was a technical virgin. I had, however, wanted to have sex long before, at about the ages of 14, 15, 16 and 17 and so on, but did not do so. Not because I was so moral, but because the young women of my generation were absolutely terrified of getting pregnant. And we really had no idea how to prevent it. There were many unwilling virgins in those days.
However, Derek did awaken in Peggy the considerable capacity she had for the pleasures of the body. He made her aware that sexual fulfilment—when she could finally take advantage of it—would be one of the great blessings of her life.
In the story—the last in A Bird in the House—although her mother comforts her, Vanessa hates her grandfather more than ever before: “What I could not forgive was that he had been right, unwittingly right.” The next paragraph begins: “I was frantic to get away from Manawaka and from the Brick House.”
Although the war was obviously drawing to a close, Peggy was determined to join one of the services. She wanted out of Neepawa, her mother had no financial resources, and John Simpson adamantly refused to pay a cent towards his granddaughter’s further education. Therefore, for her, the WRENS (Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service) had a glamorous ring to it, especially for someone from the prairies. After she submitted her application, she had to deal with a distraught Marg. “Since I was of an age to join up, Mum could only worry. She had just finished panicking about a seventeen-year-old daughter who might at any moment declare her intention to wed an RAF man ten years her senior. Now this. Mum and I used to quote poetry to each other while we did the dishes, taking turns line by line, but with all these tensions, Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’ no longer tripped from our lips as we performed our after-dinner tasks.”
When the WRENS call
ed to accept Peggy, she was not at home. She was secretly pleased when a letter from the navy arrived, telling her they had tried unsuccessfully a few days before to call and that they had not kept the place open. Very relieved, Peggy, who really wanted to go to university, turned her attention to fulfilling that goal: she applied for a Manitoba Scholarship and admission to United College in Winnipeg. She obtained both and thus, with a combination of bravado and fear, could leave her birthplace. Since Grade 12 in Manitoba counted as the first year of an arts degree, she would have to spend only three years working towards her bachelor’s degree.
Later in life, Margaret Laurence had a very different perspective on her departure from Neepawa:
When I left my home town Neepawa at the age of eighteen, I guess, I couldn’t wait to get out of that town. I thought, “I never ever want to live in a small town again.” At that age, a small community becomes—rather stifling. Little did I know that out of that community, most of my writing would be done. I think that by the time I got around to writing about a small prairie town, I could see it with a much better perspective, and I could see it with a great deal more compassion and understanding than I had had as a kid.
Part of that last summer in Neepawa was spent at Clear Lake with Mona, Louise Alguire and other friends. Clear Lake was a wonderful escape from Neepawa. There, the young women could stay up late into the night without worrying about parental rules, or they could walk along the edge of the immense lake, or they could venture into the majestic, forbidding woods. Years later, looking at a photograph of herself with Mona and Louise, Margaret told Louise:
That pic of the three of us has always touched me, somehow, and continues to do so when I get out all the albums to show to someone. There we are … slender beautiful teenagers, not knowing of course that we were beautiful (at that age, one thinks everyone except oneself is beautiful!) I always think of that pic as “Three Smart Girls” … remember the old Deanna Durbin film? Looking so hopefully into the camera, not at all aware of what our lives would be like.
Louise Alguire, Mona Spratt and Peggy Wemyss. July 1944. (illustration credit 4.2)
5
HALLS OF SION
(1944–1947)
Winter, and snow of many textures. Hard-packed snow on Portage Avenue and the downtown streets, dirty from the trampling boots. Deep, dry snow, creaking underfoot.… And on lawns and little-used roadsides, the drifts are three feet high, crusted and white like royal icing, and when you break through the crust, the snow underneath is light and powdery as icing sugar. Snow everywhere. Black bare tree boughs are transformed overnight into white glittering traceries, candelabra, chandeliers of trees, the sun lighting them as though from within.
IN THIS LYRICAL passage from The Diviners, Margaret Laurence provides a description of Winnipeg in winter emphasizing the beauty of the snow-clad city. She was not always so upbeat: “Oh many are the memories I have—frozen knees, in the days when I was young and too proud to wear ‘overstockings,’ a peculiarly unattractive type of heavy hose worn over the nylons in order to prevent freezing of the lower limbs. My ma used to say ‘Your pride will keep you warm,’ but unfortunately it didn’t—I froze my knees with great regularity every winter.” Despite bad weather, both Winnipeg and United College provided much-needed refuges from Neepawa to Peggy Wemyss.
The General Strike of 1919 had left the indelible mark of class struggle on Winnipeg. The intervening Depression had helped to underscore the differences between rich and poor. Twenty-five years later, when Peggy arrived there, it was still a city torn apart by class differences. By nature, she was inclined to sympathize with the underdog. In Neepawa, all of her friends had come from families that had taken knocks in the thirties. Some—like Mona Spratt’s—had more money and could dress a bit better than others. In general, the middle-class of Neepawa lived in severely reduced circumstances, real poverty being peripherally visible only in some of the farms at the edge of town. In 1944, Peggy witnessed urban squalor. Her immediate reaction is not recorded, perhaps because it took a while for the grimness of the situation to sink in.
Her first priority in September 1944 was to settle into Sparling Hall, the women’s dormitory at United College. At this time, university students in Winnipeg had a choice between science-oriented University of Manitoba and its affiliate, United College, which had a stronger programme in arts. The college had been formed in 1938 by an amalgamation of Methodist Wesley College and Presbyterian Manitoba College. In the mid-forties, United had a faculty of twenty and a student body of about five hundred, consisting of two distinct groups, those straight out of high school and soldiers returning to civilian life. Peggy was not completely isolated in Winnipeg because Mona and other Neepawa friends were at the University of Manitoba, a half-hour bus ride away.
Sparling Hall had been sober Mildred Musgrove’s home when she attended Wesley College, but in 1944, as Peggy’s friend and classmate Lois Freeman recollected, there was a different atmosphere: “I remember one occasion when several of us, Margaret included, wended our way to the windows of the third floor of the building, secreting under our arms paper bags filled with water. Our juvenile stunt was to drop the bag on some luckless individual entering the halls of learning. Water bombing it was called.” Peggy was paid back one evening when, standing on the fire escape outside one of the classrooms, she began to declaim some lines from Shelley “only to receive a water-bomb treatment from the occupants of the floor above. It cured me of public oratory.”
Residence food—often bulked up by large chunks of turnip—lingered precariously on the edge of inedibility, and the students sometimes wandered over to a “nearby hamburger joint called the Salisbury House, where,” Peggy recalled, “we spent an inordinate amount of our slender allowances.” Before arriving at Sparling, Peggy—who had been used to having her own room—was apprehensive about acquiring a roommate, but she and Helen Warkentin quickly became friends and shared a room for two years. They drew a mural of dinosaurs and jungles, working their way up, they planned, to Adam and Eve. Her wardrobe consisted of two sweaters, two skirts, two blouses, one good dress, one pair of sensible shoes and one pair of high heels. Some girls from well-off families had angora sweaters and necklaces of artificial pearls. Peggy practised reverse snobbery in condemning such girls, but, she really knew, “they were as happy as larks and furthermore, they averaged more dates.”
Peggy, who had been seeing an “older” man in Neepawa, was now in a different environment, where soldiers were less plentiful and girls thus tended to date boys their own age. But one thing remained constant: “You hoped and prayed that some guy, however gauche or buck-toothed, would ask you to one of the dances or to a film.” In her recollection of these years, Margaret Laurence referred to her glamorous friends, especially the stunningly beautiful Patricia Blondal, also an aspiring writer. “It must have upset them at times,” she reflects, “to be valued, as they were, primarily for their physical beauty.” However, she puts herself down in the next sentence: “They had to cope with things that I didn’t know about.” Peggy Wemyss may have had a subtle beauty, but it was one readily visible in her almond eyes, delicate lips and willowy figure.
She was also a young woman of independent views. Although she wanted to be an active participant in the social life of the college, she decided against joining a sorority, which would have given her instant access to a network of friends. She refused, partially because she could not afford to join, partially because of her strong—but still largely unformed—egalitarian beliefs. She told herself sorority girls were dimwitted. Then and later, she realized that her “principles, although relatively laudatory, were also a crude mask for my own uncertainties.”
At first, Peggy was at a loss. United College was a lot larger than Neepawa Collegiate, and the students from Winnipeg tended to be snobbish about those from small-town Manitoba: “Kids from the farms were lowest on the scale; kids from the very small towns, whistle stops, were next; kids from slightly larger tow
ns were next; kids from small cities, like Brandon, were next; the city kids (and Winnipeg was the only proper city) ranked as overlords.” In this particular caste system, she fitted into the uncomfortable middle. Soon, however, those in residence formed a close-knit group. At Tony’s, the college’s cramped lunchroom and coffee shop in the basement of the main building, Peggy became embroiled in long discussions about politics, religion and writing. During rousing conversations and heated arguments at Tony’s, Peggy first imbibed the doctrines of the “Winnipeg Old Left,” of J.S. Woodsworth, Stanley Knowles and Tommy Douglas, the founders of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF).
Margaret Laurence admits that, although she was an excellent student in English, her marks in other courses were “either mediocre or fairly abysmal.” In fact she was a gifted student in philosophy, but her grades in other subjects—especially history—were not exceptional. “Obviously,” she observed, “I had a one-track talent.” Her classmates agreed. Her entry in the 1947 yearbook reads: “When Peggy was a little girl, her mother inadvertently dropped onto her a volume of Robinson Jeffers on the floor. She has been writing poetry ever since.”
