The Jalna Saga – Deluxe Edition: All Sixteen Books of the Enduring Classic Series & The Biography of Mazo de la Roche (672 page)

Growth of a Man
is a rags-to-riches story, very different from any of the Jalna novels.

Shaw Manifold, the main character in
Growth of a Man
, begins life as a poor boy. Shaw’s father dies and his mother must leave him behind with his grandparents, the Gowers, while she works as a housekeeper to support him. Shaw endures loneliness and cruelty. He labours long hours on his grandparents’ farm. He studies hard, overcomes illness, marries his faithful childhood sweetheart, and builds a great industry.

Shaw Manifold was Harvey Reginald MacMillan, more or less. The Gowers were the Willsons, more or less. Cousin Reggie had been raised on Wellington Willson’s farm. The fictional setting of most of the novel’s early chapters was based on the real Wellington Willson farm located about four kilometres south of Newmarket in what is the town of Aurora today.

In
Growth of a Man
, Grandfather Gower is cold and mean: “The old man stood solid and imperturbable, his wide-open, china-blue eyes staring above his massive grizzled beard. His hands, leathery and thickened by hard work, hung impassively at his sides.”

Shaw Manifold is not very charming either: “He resolutely nursed his grievance against his grandfather, keeping it as a barrier between him and the loss of his mother.” But at least Shaw acquires a fortune through his own hard work at hard jobs such as inspecting trees on horseback in bad weather in the wilderness of the Canadian West.

Growth of a Man
did not receive the Governor General’s Award in 1938, but the novel was a close contender for this prestigious annual prize, given for the first time in 1937.

And in 1938 Mazo was awarded the Lome Pierce Medal. This gold-plated, silver medal was awarded once a year to one person. It was given by the Royal Society of Canada for an achievement of special significance and conspicuous merit in imaginative or critical literature written in either English or French.

Today Sharon Temple is a national historic site. MacMillan Bloedel Limited became Canada’s largest forest-products company.

In the fall of 1938, Mazo had an operation on her throat to remove a cyst. The operation was successful, but she was slow in recovering her full health.

By the spring of 1939, Mazo, Caroline, and the children had been living at Vale House for two years. René was eight and getting difficult to manage. He needed to go to a regular school instead of being taught at home by a governess. There had been rumours of war for several years, but now gas masks were being issued, and Esmée, who was ten, was frightened by the masks. Perhaps it was time to return to Canada for a while. There the family would find sunshine and peace. They loved Vale House, and they loved England, but it was time to leave – just for a while.

“You would think the end of the world had come!” exclaimed Mazo, bringing a cup of hot tea to Caroline, who was in bed with the flu. Today was the maid’s day off, and the children were away at school. “Here it is March, and we have not seen the bare ground since early November. And the snow is falling fast.”

“This winter has broken a record that stood fifty years,” said Caroline, sitting up in bed to drink her tea. “Even for Canada, it is severe. I long for balmy old England.”

“Put that blanket around your shoulders, or you’ll be sick for another week, and I can’t cope alone,” said Mazo. “You should have seen me going to the poultry house through the drifts, carrying kettles of boiling water to thaw the buckets, which were solid ice. The hens seemed not too unhappy though. They even managed a little song.”

“We are like pioneers in the wilderness here in York Mills,” commented Caroline, between sips of her tea. “Zero weather now seems nothing to us. Thirty below is the norm.”

“If there is anything we should be grateful for now, it is having congenial work to do that is quite outside the war,” returned Mazo.

“We have had fun this year with
The Building of Jalna”
said Caroline. “The years 1853 and 1854 were so tranquil compared to 1942 and 1943!”

“There were times when I forgot the present and lived only in those long-ago years,” said Mazo. “I wonder what the early settlers would have thought if they could have seen the Ontario of today?”

Although Mazo complained about the severe winters in Canada, she was grateful that she and her family could live in safety during the Second World War. As she wrote
The Building of Jalna
, about the founding of Jalna in the 1850s, she was well aware of what was happening in Europe. Often, in the evenings, she and Caroline sat tensely in front of the radio, inwardly shaken by terrible news such as the bombing of London and the fall of France. Mazo included references to the war in her novels
Wakefield’s Course
and
Return to Jalna
, written during this period also. In Europe during the Second World War, Mazo was the only known Canadian author. Actually, to some people in Germany, Mazo’s books were treasured secret possessions that represented the struggle against fascism. The Whiteoak family was English, and this fact reminded anti-Nazis of the sunshine of freedom that shone beyond the shadow of Hitler.

When Mazo, Caroline, and the children moved to Canada in 1939, Mazo was sixty years old. She had written six Jalna novels. In the next two decades she would write ten more Jalna novels. She would also write a number of other books, including a novel, a novella, a history of Quebec City, several short children’s books, a play, and her autobiography. She did all this writing in Canada. Except for a few brief visits, she never returned to England.

From 1939 to 1945, Mazo and her family lived successively in three houses in the Toronto area. The first was in the village of Thornhill, just north of Toronto. The second, called “Windrush Hill,” was located at the junction of Bayview Avenue and Steeles Avenue in York Mills, now part of Toronto. The third was on Russell Hill Road, right in Toronto.

In 1946, the British government expropriated Vale House, Mazo’s home in England, and Mazo and Caroline sold Trail Cottage. In 1953 the family moved into 3 Ava Crescent in the posh Forest Hill district of Toronto. There Mazo and Caroline stayed until their deaths.

This last home in Forest Hill was as English as it could be. Large and rambling, with Tudor-style timbers, a panelled entrance, snug library, terrace, and deep fireplace, it had badly heated, undecorated servants’ quarters on the top floor.

Mazo de la Roche at about eighty.

Endings

This latest period of mine is mostly a record of books written, of seeing my children grow up, of seeing a different sort of world arise to my astonished view
.

“Meals at certain times,” muttered Esmée. “Have lunch. Have tea… They read out loud to each other. They go for walks. You know what time it is when they call the dogs. They go to bed at the same time every day… Of course they have a cook and a maid, so naturally the meals have to be on time, but I wonder why they can’t have some freedom.

“Mazo writes from 10 until noon every day. She isn’t a flexible person. It was her upbringing. Her grandparents were staid. Everything she knows she was taught by her grandparents. She was terribly protected.

“She doesn’t know how to cope with the outside world. She has a few friends, but not so many I feel sorry for her. She’s missing a lot of what the world is about.”