Mazo de la Roche

Heather Kirk

• Publisher: Dundurn Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781770706620
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

In 1927, Mazo de la Roche was an impoverished writer in Toronto when she won a $10, 000 prize from the American magazine Atlantic Monthly for her novel Jalna. The book became an immediate bestseller. In 1929, the sequel Whiteoaks also went to the top of bestseller lists. Mazo went on to publish 16 novels in the popular series about a Canadian family named Whiteoak, living in a house called Jalna. Her success allowed her to travel the world and to live in a mansion near Windsor Castle. Mazo created unforgettable characters who come to life for her readers, but she was secretive about her own life and tried to escape the public attention her fame brought.

1

Beginnings

I was not born where I should have been, in my father’s house, but in my grandfather’s.

When she heard the distant whistle of the early-morning freight train, Mazo gazed down the long, terraced hill toward the railway tracks below and assumed her racer’s crouch.

There was the train! Almost even with the edge of the lawn where she waited, the locomotive shrieked its challenge. Mazo shrieked hers. They were off!

Her long auburn hair flying, Mazo raced the train to the opposite end of the lawn.

She won! As always! And today the painted symbol on the boxcar just behind the locomotive was a full moon!

“A fine day, Grandma!” shouted Mazo as she ran toward the back door of the solid, two-storey, red-brick house. “It was a full moon, so it’s going to be a fine day.”

Inside the house a short, bright-eyed woman with wavy grey hair pulled back into a neat bun was already busy baking, despite the early hour. She smiled warmly as her cherished only grandchild entered the kitchen.

“My, you’re a big help,” said Grandma Lundy. “And you’re just five years old, the same age as my little sister Martha was when we moved to Cherry Creek. Martha didn’t have to help Mother. But I did. Of course I was a big girl of nine. I had no time to play. I had chores to do.”

“Chores are too much work,” commented Mazo, dancing around the room.

“That’s just how I felt!” exclaimed Grandma Lundy. “Why, I had to help my mother in the kitchen and the garden. I fed the chickens too. And I minded little Martha and baby Mary. We were pioneering in the primeval forest. My father and big brothers, Wellington and Lambert, were chopping down trees to make fields. There was so much to do, everyone had to help.”

“I don’t like helping,” said Mazo.

“You may say that now,” said Grandma Lundy. “But I could not. I had to help.”

“Tell me about how there was Willsons’ Hill and Clements’ Hill in Cherry Creek,” said Mazo. “Tell me how your little sister Martha married James Clement whose father was so rich.”

“You go and play, Mazo,” said Grandma Lundy. “I have work to do. I must bake four loaves of bread and two rhubarb pies.”

“There’s no one to play with,” said Mazo. “Father is in Toronto, Mother is sick in bed, Aunt Eva is dusting the sitting room so it will look nice when her gentleman-caller comes, Uncle Frank is working with Grandpa at the factory, Uncle George is working at the post office, Uncle Walter is at school, and Chub is outside barking at something.”

“Your father will visit in a few days, and he will take you back with him to Toronto,” said Grandma Lundy.

“I want somebody to play with now,” said Mazo.

“Since it is going to be a fine day, you and Grandpa and I will go for a drive in the buggy this afternoon. We must go and see my brother Wellington. He and his family don’t know their neighbours very well yet because they just moved from Cherry Creek last year, so Grandpa’s going to help with some carpentry work and I’m going to bring some baking.”

“Can we stop and see Grandpa’s Grandpa’s house?” asked Mazo.

“We can if you’re good,” said Grandma Lundy. “Now go read your storybook.”

Mazo de la Roche was born on January 15, 1879 in the village of Newmarket, York County, Ontario, in the home of her mother’s parents, Daniel and Louise Lundy. She was named Mazo Louise Roche. Her father, William Richmond Roche, gave Mazo her unusual first name. “Mazo” was supposedly the name of a girl Will Roche had once known and liked.

A few weeks after Mazo was born, Daniel Ambrose Lundy borrowed money to buy a house on Prospect Street in Newmarket. Most of Mazo’s first nine years of life were spent in this house, which still stands today. The house looked down at the Northern Railway tracks and across at the Main Street of Newmarket, population two thousand.

But Mazo spent summer vacations in the old Cherry Creek district at the south end of Innisfil Township, Simcoe County, about twenty kilometres north of Newmarket. Innisfil Township was where some of her Grandma Lundy’s nearest relatives lived, and where there was a nice lake to swim in: Lake Simcoe. Sometimes Mazo also visited her father’s family in Newmarket or, between 1884 and 1889, in Toronto.

Daniel and Louise Lundy were like parents for Mazo because her real parents, William and Alberta Roche, did not have their own home. Besides, Alberta was ill and could not run a household or raise a child. Alberta, or “Bertie,” was a pretty woman with gingery light-brown hair and violet eyes, and she loved pretty clothes. Bertie had been healthy when she married the dark-haired, dark-eyed Will Roche, who was tall and handsome, and who danced and talked charmingly. But Bertie caught scarlet fever when she was about to give birth to her first and only child, Mazo, and the ravages of the disease left her an invalid for decades.

Daniel and Louise (Willson) Lundy were the grandchildren of Quaker immigrants from the United States. These immigrants had come to Canada between about 1800 and 1810 and had cleared farms from the forest near Newmarket. Later, about 1840, Louise Lundy’s immediate family, the Willsons, had moved to Cherry Creek. When they grew up, Daniel and Louise Lundy became Methodists, as did many Quakers of their time and place.

Grandpa Lundy was a skilled worker and a natural leader. He was foreman of the William Cane woodenware factory in Newmarket. He designed and supervised the creation of the machinery used in the factory, and he also supervised the building of Newmarket’s town hall.

Mazo loved her Grandpa Lundy. He had thick silvery hair and blue eyes, and he was tall and strong. He was fun. He was kind and generous with his family and friends, and although he often got angry, he never got angry with Mazo.

The Lundy home was already crowded when newborn Mazo joined it. There were Grandpa and Grandma Lundy, of course, plus four adult children and one six-year-old boy. Sometimes too Mazo’s father came and stayed with the Lundys.

Although Mazo lived with a confusing crowd of close relatives, she was often lonely because none of these relatives were her own age. She sought companionship in stories, and she could be very affected by what she heard or read.

Once, when Mazo was very young, a much older child who lived nearby told her a ghost story about a woman with a golden arm. According to the story, the woman died and her husband sold her arm. But the woman haunted her husband, and moaned, “Bring me back my golden arm! Bring me back my golden arm!”

That night, Mazo lay awake in her bed with her hands over her ears and listened to the dead woman moan, “Bring me back my golden arm!” The ghost came closer and closer, past the stuffed owl on the stairs, closer and closer… Mazo jumped out of bed and fled down the stairs to the lit-up sitting room where the adults sat playing cards cheerfully. Soon she was safe in her father’s arms, and Grandpa Lundy was raging against the older child.

Mazo created her own little imagined world. Her playmates were made-up characters. And from the very beginning she was sensitive to words. As a baby, she had refused to talk baby talk. She always spoke clearly. Later, she often invented words such as beckittybock for petticoat, gillygaws for socks, and conehat for jacket.

At an early age she began to read. Soon she was devouring books voraciously, reading the Kate Greenaway books, Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, The Water Babies, and The Little Duke. She also read old issues of magazines for boys, like The Boys’ Own and Chum, that she found in the attic of the Lundy home.

The well-fed, muscular horse trotted smartly along the narrow dirt road flanked by massive oak trees. The sun shone, the birds sang, and the new green leaves rustled. Mazo, wedged comfortably between Grandpa and Grandma Lundy on the driver’s seat of the buggy, was thoroughly enjoying this excursion in the country on a fine spring day.

Finally Mazo spotted the stately, two-story, redbrick house on a hill. Mazo loved this house. This was Grandpa’s Grandpa’s house. Grandpa Lundy slowed the horse.

“Grandpa, were you born in your Grandpa’s house like I was born in your house?” asked Mazo, gazing at the handsome house, the big wooden barn, the blossoming orchard, and the moist, dark fields.

“I was born on the neighbouring farm where my brother Shadrack Lundy lives now,” said Grandpa Lundy. “When I was born, my Grandpa Lundy was still building the red-brick house. He finished it the next year. When I was your age, I spent many hours in this house, visiting my grandparents and playing with my cousins. It was a dark day last year when Cousin Silas Lundy sold our grandfather’s farm out of the family.”

“Did your grandfather have a thousand acres of land, Grandpa?” asked Mazo.

“Oh no, that was my great-great-great grandfather, Richard Lundy,” said Grandpa Lundy. “My grandfather, Enos Lundy Senior, owned only four hundred acres. And my father, Enos Lundy Junior, own...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue
• 1: Beginnings
• 2: No Longer Lonely
• 3: Young Women
• 4: Breakdown
• 5: Screams
• 6: “We Two” Against the World
• 7: Possession, Thunder, and Delight
• 8: The Winner
• 9: Goodbye Canada!
• 10: Children
• 11: Stage Struck and Royalty Mad
• 12: Endings
• Epilogue
• The Jalna Novels by Mazo de la Roche
• Other Books by Mazo de la Roche
• Chronology of Mazo de la Roche (1879–1961)
• Sources Consulted
• Acknowledgments
• Index