The Jalna Saga – Deluxe Edition: All Sixteen Books of the Enduring Classic Series & The Biography of Mazo de la Roche (670 page)

Nurse threw two rusks down to the children like manna from the skies.

“Here are your rusks!” called Nurse. “Come Esmée. Take Baby his. There – on the grass – don’t you see?”

Esmée rose from her chair and stumped to the strip of grass under the nursery window. She saw the rusks but she was not sure that she would pick them up. From the row of windows just above her head came a pleasant warm smell. In there was the kitchen, but Esmée did not realize that, although once she was inside she was very much at home.

Nurse leaned out of the window, peering down at the children. René leaned over the side of the pram to see the rusks lying on the grass.

“Pick them up at once,” ordered Nurse. “And give one to Baby.”

Esmée picked up the rusks and, trotting briskly to the pram, presented René with his. They began to crunch them, staring at each other…

Mazo jotted down a description of the scene. With only a few changes, she would include it in a little book about the children titled
Beside a Norman Tower
.

Mazo finished
Lark Ascending
during the first few weeks at The Rectory. This novel, about a lazy painter named Diego Vargas and his hard-working cousin, Josie Froward, was indirectly a satire on Mazo and a tribute to Caroline.

Josie runs a bakery and sells antiques to support Diego and his equally self-centred mother, Fay. Similarly Caroline worked many years in the Ontario government to support Mazo and her mother, Bertie. Josie always finishes Diego’s paintings. Similarly Caroline always critiqued Mazo’s writing. Josie finally leaves Diego and Fay and marries a good man who appreciates her. Of course Mazo hoped Caroline would never leave her.

Immediately after completing this novel, set in New England and Sicily, Mazo began writing once again about Canada. Now Mazo’s imagination returned to the Whiteoaks and took up the story where
Finch’s Fortune
had left off.

As
The Master of Jalna
opens, Renny is forty-five years old and living at Jalna with Alayne and their first child, an eighteen-month-old girl named Adeline. Finch is in Europe becoming a famous concert pianist. He has not married yet, for Sarah Court, the woman he loves, is still married to his best friend, Arthur Leigh. But Arthur drowns and Sarah is free again. Meanwhile Wakefield Whiteoak, now seventeen, thinks he is falling in love with an impoverished girl named Pauline Lebraux, whose mother is a friend of Renny. Then the family learns that Eden is dying of tuberculosis.

The children were playing at the dining-room table. Mazo was listening to them.

“How do you do, Mr. Brown?” asked Esmée.

“Very well, thank you, Mrs. Brown,” replied Rene.

“I’m not Mrs. Brown. I’m Mrs. Jones.”

“Then I’m Mr. Jones.”

“You can’t be! You’re a visitor. “

“Oh!”

“Have you brought your children to London?”

“Oh, yes.”

“How many have you, Mr. Brown?”

“Oh, I have ninety eleven, Mrs. Brown.”

“I’m not Mrs. Brown! I’m Mrs. Jones.”

“Oh!”

“Are you going to call me Mrs. Brown again?”

“Yes”

“Then I’ll smack you!”

“I’ll fow you in the fire!”

“I’ll bite your head off!”

“Mrs. Brown! Mrs. Brown!”

“Stop it!”

Mazo, barely able to contain her laughter, rushed to her study to write down the hilarious dialogue. She would use it in
Beside a Norman Tower
.

When Mazo finished a novel, she was always restless, eager for a change of scene. Thus, after Mazo finished
The Master of Jalna
, the whole family visited London. There Mazo and Caroline met famous writers like John Galsworthy, and Nurse took the children to see the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. Then Mazo and Caroline took a brief trip to Scotland while the children stayed home with the servants. But finally, in the spring of 1933, Mazo’s restlessness was so great that only a trip to Canada would do. Mazo, Caroline, a nanny, and the children sailed from Southampton in fair weather on the twentieth of May. Back in Ontario, they moved into a large house in Erindale near Trail Cottage for the summer.

Unfortunately, while on a shopping expedition to Oakville, Caroline was in a car accident and sustained serious injuries to a wrist, a leg, her head, and her back. Then a few months later, when she was still recuperating, she fell and broke her leg again. Rather than returning to England in the autumn, as they had planned, the family moved to Toronto and settled into a large house on Castle Frank Road. Here Esmée and René saw snow for the first time. They tobogganed over the snowdrifts on their front lawn. They made snowmen. Meanwhile, Mazo worked on a new novel:
Young Renny
.

In this fifth Whiteoak novel Mazo would surprise her publishers and her readers. For the first time, she would interrupt the orderly chronological sequence established in
Jalna
and
Whiteoaks of Jalna
. She would go back to before 1924, when
Jalna
begins.
Young Renny
would be set in 1906.

Renny is just eighteen. His twenty-year-old sister Meg is engaged to marry the young man next door: Maurice Vaughan. Renny and Meg do not like their stepmother, Mary Whiteoak. They feel closer to their grandmother, Gran Whiteoak. Renny’s father, Philip Whiteoak Junior, is alive. Eden is a boy of five. Piers is a baby nicknamed “Peep” who is teething. Uncle Nick and Uncle Ernest, in their fifties, have squandered their inheritances abroad on high living and dubious speculation respectively, and now they are freeloading at Jalna. Into this situation come two outsiders who cause trouble at Jalna. A gypsy woman seduces Renny. A distant cousin from Ireland befriends Gran, moves into Jalna, and spies on the family…

Mazo’s work on
Young Renny
was interrupted when she received word that Nancy Price, a well-known English actress, needed her help in developing a play based on the first two Jalna books. The play was to be mounted very soon on the London stage, and so, in January 1934, Mazo and Caroline made a quick, cold trip by ship to England. They did what they could to help, discovered that the play actually would not be mounted any time soon, and returned to Canada. Then in the warm months they moved back to England with the children. This time they chose to live at The Winnings, a large house near Wales, set in beautiful surroundings.

“We had found nothing that absolutely suited us when, one lovely Autumn day, we heard of a house in the Malvern Hills that had once belonged to a famous engineer,” wrote Mazo in a magazine article about The Winnings. “We motored to it and lost our hearts to its garden. In truth, we scarcely looked at the house we were so captivated by the grounds. There were seven acres of them, all little hills and valleys. There were hundreds of trees.”

At The Winnings, work resumed on
Young Renny
as well as on the play
Whiteoaks
. When Mazo sent the manuscript of
Young Renny
to her American publisher, the editors criticized the book severely and pointed out how risky it was “to turn back the clock in Jalna.” Mazo’s response to this new criticism was to show new self-confidence. She told the editors that if they didn’t like her work she would take it elsewhere. The editors responded with a soothing letter saying the book was just splendid. Mazo was a goldmine that the publisher could not afford to lose.

In 1935, the year that
Young Renny
was published and work on
Whiteoak Harvest
begun, a Hollywood film company called RKO released a movie based on
Jalna
. The film starred Ian Hunter as Renny, Peggy Wood as Meg, and Jessie Ralph as Gran. Of course Mazo and Caroline went to see the movie. Their feelings about it were mixed.

They felt that the cast was “excellent” … except for Jessie Ralph. “Not one of the attributes that made old Adeline Whiteoak notable belonged to the actress who played the part,” complained Mazo.

They were also angry about a bedroom scene between Meg Whiteoak and Maurice Vaughan. In this scene, Maurice is drinking heavily. Maurice and Meg, sitting well apart, are discussing their past and future. This scene was in questionable taste, according to Mazo and Caroline. What’s more, it was not in the novel
Jalna
. Someone in the movie company had invented it!

Not until the play
Whiteoaks
was mounted was Mazo happy with an adaptation of her writing to another medium.

Stage Struck and Royalty Mad

I strained toward Windsor, toward the house I owned, from which I should never again be parted
.

“Lord, I can almost hear Gran talking!” exclaimed the lanky teenager to his lean but powerfully built older brother.