The Jalna Saga – Deluxe Edition: All Sixteen Books of the Enduring Classic Series & The Biography of Mazo de la Roche (671 page)

Two Whiteoak brothers, dark-haired Finch and red-haired Renny, were standing at the open door of a dimly lit, thickly carpeted and curtained bedroom that smelled of camphor and hair oil. On the old leather bed, the head of which was painted with oriental fruit and the grinning faces of two monkeys, perched a green and red parrot. Normally the parrot would have been swearing at the intruders with Hindu curses, but now it was silent.

Vale House near Windsor Castle in the late 1930s. Mazo, Caroline, and the children lived in this beautiful mansion during their last years in England.

“Can’t you hear her Renny?” asked Finch. “What’s going on?’” she’s saying. “‘I won’t be left out of things!”’

“Yes… Yes… She seems to be with us,” agreed Renny.

“God! What courage!” croaked Finch.

Renny studied Finch for a moment.

“Don’t you realize, Finch, that you’ve got it too? Clever old Gran discovered it and has given you her chance… Now make the most of it. Don’t let her down.”

With that, Renny turned his back on Finch and walked slowly away. Finch smiled – almost exultantly. He went over to the piano and sat down at it. He laid his hands on the Chinese statue of Kwan Yin. Strength entered him. He dropped his hands to the keyboard. He looked again into Gran’s room. He played.

The curtain fell.

The audience applauded politely.

The curtain rose.

There were Renny, Finch, Meg, Wakefield, Piers, Pheasant, Aunt Augusta, Uncle Nicholas, and Uncle Ernest. There was Gran, alive again, spry and vital at one-hundred-and-one years old. Boney the parrot was perched on Gran’s shoulder, rending the air with a metallic screech.

The audience applauded more loudly. It kept on applauding through many curtain calls, including one for the author.

The fifty-seven-year-old author of the play, Mazo de la Roche, was almost as shy and awkward as her fictional character Finch Whiteoak. But somehow she managed to get up onto the stage without stumbling and mumbled a brief speech of thanks.

Afterwards, the cast and crew of the play and some friends and relatives – more than sixty people – crowded into the home Mazo had rented in nearby Stafford Place and partied among the many bouquets of flowers she had received that day. Mazo and Caroline didn’t get to bed until three in the morning.

But by dawn the cousins were eating breakfast and reading the reviews. Violet the maid had rushed out into the chill damp April air to buy the newspapers. Most of the reviews were favourable. Ivor Brown in
The Observer
, Charles Morgan in
The Times
, and Littlewood in
The Post
were especially enthusiastic.

Thus went the opening night of the first Canadian play to be staged in the prestigious West End theatre district of London, England. The opening took place on April 13, 1936. The play was called
Whiteoaks
. It was based mainly on Mazo’s second Jalna novel,
Whiteoaks of Jalna
. The play was a thrill for Mazo, but it took her on a roller coaster of emotions.

Despite the enthusiastic applause and good reviews, the play’s director and lead actress, Nancy Price, soon announced that
Whiteoaks
was to be cancelled. It was just not successful enough. The audiences were not big enough.

What a disappointment! After years of waiting and months of working! Rewrite after rewrite! Price had searched several years for a theatre manager who would mount the play. Mazo had written several more books before Price finally got the Little Theatre in the Adelphi!

Then suddenly Price changed her mind about cancelling. The great George Bernard Shaw had praised Mazo’s play! Price transferred
Whiteoaks
to a larger theatre called the Playhouse, and she displayed Shaw’s accolade in lights.

London theatre-goers flocked to the play for the next three years until the Second World War, when Nazi bombing made collective evening activities dangerous. People laughed uproariously whenever Gran Whiteoak was on the stage. The Dowager Queen Mary, widow of King George V, went to see the play four or five times and even requested a private meeting with Boney. The play also went to Broadway in New York City, across central Canada, and around England.

More than any single event except the novel
Jalna
winning an international competition, the phenomenal success of the play
Whiteoaks
established Mazo’s reputation as a writer.

Rich and famous she had become, but Mazo remained a private person difficult to know well. The English actors and crew of the London production of
Whiteoaks
, with whom she worked closely for months, found her a mystery.

“I thought of her as a detached, insular sort of person,” commented Nancy Price. “I mean to say you never knew her.”

Although Mazo was excited by the public world of the theatre, she preferred the private world of writing and family After the uncontrollable emotional ups and downs of
Whiteoaks
, Mazo happily retreated as soon as possible to The Winnings. There she could indulge in the quiet daily routine on which she thrived.

In the morning Mazo had breakfast and then wrote for several hours. Before lunch she went for a walk. In the afternoon she rested for a while, ate a snack that the English called “tea,” then spent a few hours with the children. In the evening she had dinner, read aloud to Caroline, or listened while Caroline read aloud to her. The women read either from Mazo’s own writing – whatever she had been working on that morning – or from other people’s writing.

As Mazo relaxed in this calm, orderly life, she began to think it was finally time to actually buy a house in England, instead of merely renting. Caroline agreed and the two went searching. What a house they found!

The house had been restored by the former owner. There were lawns, a gazebo, an orchard, a lily pond, a sunken garden, greenhouses, and about eight hectares of pastures with Jersey cows grazing.

This was Vale House, a beautiful mansion more than three hundred years old, built in the time of Queen Elizabeth I. Vale House was almost next door to Windsor Castle, one of the royal residences of the king and queen of England. Since King Edward VIII had recently given up the throne, the neighbours were King George VI, his wife, the Queen Consort, and their two young daughters, Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret. (Of course many years later Princess Elizabeth would become Queen Elizabeth II, and her mother, the Queen Consort, would become the Queen Mother, affectionately known as the Queen Mum.)

Almost everybody in the neighbourhood had some connection with the famous upper-class school, Eton, also located nearby, or with Windsor Castle. One friend used to arrive at the gate of Vale House on a handsome grey horse named Silver Mist, followed by two golden retrievers. Mazo and her family regularly received invitations to watch royal functions. Back in Canada her ancestors might have been “distinguished looking nobodies,” as Mazo once described them, but here in England Mazo was a
somebody
.

There was always something to do in Windsor. Paxton the chauffeur would drive the family to Chobham Common, to Burnham Beeches, or to Ascot, where Mazo and Caroline could walk and the children and dogs could run free. At the time of the Ascot Races, the children liked to be taken to a spot in Windsor Great Park where they could see the royal family sweep past on the way to the races. One day they were caught in a rain shower.

“Mummy, can’t I get out of the car and stand on the grass to see the little princesses?” asked René, who was seven.

“But you’ll get wet and you can see the little princesses quite well from the car,” objected Mazo.

“I know,” René answered firmly, “but they wouldn’t see
me.”

Mazo had not been in Vale House for more than two weeks before she began a new novel,
Growth of a Man
. This novel was a sort of vacation for Mazo. Although she was living in England, the novel was set in Canada, mostly among people and places she had known or heard about in early childhood.

Writing
Growth of a Man
gave Mazo her first opportunity to write about the Children of Peace: the unique Quaker group to which Grandma Lundy’s family had belonged.

The Children of Peace had been founded by David Willson, a great-uncle of Grandma Lundy. David Willson broke away from traditional Quaker ways. He introduced music to the silent Quaker service. He also preached.

“David Willson gathered the pioneers about him and preached to them under the open sky,” Mazo wrote. “The autumn weather was benign, the crops had been bountiful. He stood there, dominant and strong, pouring out the noble words of the Old Testament, words of promise, of might, of peace.”

Under David Willson’s direction, the Children of Peace built a beautiful place of worship named Sharon Temple. Grandma Lundy’s father, Hiram Willson, helped to build it, as did Grandma Lundy’s maternal grandfather, Murdoch McLeod.

“The Temple rose in three cubes,” Mazo wrote, “one standing above the other, and on the top-most cube a golden ball was to be raised and sheltered beneath a cupola. The Temple was to be painted white for purity. It was to have light from windows on every side, typifying Reason and Truth. Inside there were twelve pillars bearing the names of the twelve apostles…”

Mazo had seen Sharon Temple often as a child. It was located in the village of Sharon, just six or seven kilometres north of Newmarket.

In
Growth of a Man
, Mazo evoked the distant and colourful past of the Willson clan in order to provide a suitable background for a story about a dynamic, modern-day Willson: Harvey Reginald MacMillan, a cousin of Mazo and Caroline. Reggie MacMillan was a grandson of Grandma Lundy’s oldest brother, Wellington Willson. He was a great-grandson of Hiram Willson. He was also a founder of the great forestry industry, MacMillan Bloedel Limited of British Columbia.