John's uncle, the poet, photographer and filmmaker
George Johnston 1913-2004
NEW
Complete List of Johnston Family Home Movies 1947-2005.
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New book of his poems. >>>
Analysis, one poem quoted in full.
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Peggy's Cove photos, some by George. >>>
His sister's paintings.
MARGARET AND
BENSON
A memoir by George Johnston, of his parents,
1998.
Copyright by the estate of George Johnston.
Part One
w/ photos! Part Two w/ family chart!
Benson and Margaret Johnston, Toronto - circa 1920
Part 2 (see Part 1, w/ photos)
Marion and I were expected to go to church and Sunday School, and we did so, more or less contentedly, 'till we were teenagers.
During our first two years in Toronto we attended Danforth Avenue United Church and its Sunday School. My first Sunday School teacher was a proselytizing fundamentalist who put banners on his bicycle, and sometimes on his back, about being born again and saved and fleeing from the wrath to come. HIs father, a fundamentalist too, was a warden in the Don Jail. The old man was no less devout with respect to his flower garden. His borders were show pieces of the neighbourhood, and he enriched their soil with horse turds that he would rush out into the street for, and sweep, steaming, into his dustpan.
The son's Sunday School lessons were full of dire warnings about the end of the world, about coming home and finding that our parents or a brother or sister or 'saved' neighbour were no longer to be found, they had vanished, for the last day had come like thief in the night and they were off to heaven. We had been left behind because we were not 'saved'.
One evening when Margaret and Benson were out near by and later than usual, I woke up and took alarm, pondering the end of the world. They came in and found me downstairs, in some distress of spirit. I explained my problem and was only partially calmed by Benson's efforts to put me straight about such talk. He saw to it that the teacher was removed, and by and by my fears moved on to something else.
After Benson's triumphant first big policy sale to the president of the McIntyre Mines, and our move to Eastbourne Avenue, he began to prosper in a steady, if less spectacular way. His salesmanship was of a serious and conscientious kind. He was wholly convinced about life insurance, but would only sell to a man what he knew he needed. That I should be a natural salesman was his firm conviction for many years, and soon after our move to Toronto, when I was eleven years old, he had me on door to door campaigns to sell small items of left-over stock from JOHNSCO. I was hardly at all successful in this. After our move to Eastbourne Avenue he persuaded me to try magazine subscriptions and finally to offer, also door to door, the sharpening of razor blades on a special little machine he had bought. I did not so much rebel about selling as simply fail. At last, when I was in high school, he gave up trying.
At about the same time he resigned himself to my smoking. There had been an earlier encounter on the same subject when I was nine. He did not argue with me then, either, but sat me down solemnly by the fireplace of our living room at Herkimer Street and fetched out a box of cigars. He was neither smoker nor drinker but he kept a box of cigars, rather good ones, for business acquaintances. Somehow the one I chose got lighted, and he watched me as I puffed and kept it going. Margaret was hovering in the next room.
It was after supper and my stomach was full. I understood the significance of his move and was almost as unprepared for the outcome as he. There he stood, watching me, as I puffed on in a leisurely manner, though without inhaling, having no notion of such a thing then. When the cigar was more than two thirds burned away he took it from me and conceded defeat.
He reasoned with me just the same, and I agreed to leave tobacco alone, at any rate 'till I was a few years older. He never did know that I had been smoking cornsilk in the summer in a corncob pipe I had made myself, down by the creek. I ate green onions from the garden to cover the smell on my breath, afterwards.
When I was thirteen or fourteen I balked about Sunday School at Eaton Memorial Church. This must have distressed Benson, but he accepted my explanation, that I was in a class of snobs who had no part in my regular life, and whose social occasions I disliked. On the other hand he knew and liked my friends at Central YMCA, and he persuaded us to meet with him and have talks there on Sunday afternoons. We did so for two years, and he was patient with views he must often have found insufferable, perhaps because he was confident that they would be outgrown. He would have guessed right, though perhaps in a way he might not have expected.
Fatherhood was an undertaking about which he meant to be serious, determined that he would achieve the sort of companionship with Marion and me that his own parents seem not to have contemplated with him. Moreover it was his nature to be friendly and adaptable. His company was good, and he was willing to put much effort -- to a degree that at times seemed heroic -- into finding common pleasures with us. Canoe trips were the most companionable of these, though he was late undertaking such an activity; nothing like them had been part of his life. He had not learned to swim till he was over forty, consequently he was not equal to anything unduly strenuous or long.
My friend, Fred Phillips, came with us twice. Benson did not wholly trust Fred, and seemed to know when he was just reining in his cheek. He does not know the score, was Benson's considered judgment. Fred was then one of my closer friends, and Benson knew him chiefly by the Sunday afternoon groups, where he took an energetic, if somewhat free-thinking, part in the discussions. He and Benson and I did a trip from Geneva Park, starting out down Lake Couchiching towards Washago in a pretty, fourteen-foot Chestnut canoe.
First leg down the lake I was in the stern. Our canoe was loaded rather heavily, and I miscalculated the effect of the waves, which by and by began to splash in over the gunwales. We had not kept out a vessel for bailing, and I chose not to hunt for one but paddle straight on instead as hard as we might. A hundred yards or so downwind of a small island the canoe simply filled with water. Out we get, keeping it upright, and begin swimming and pushing. Benson finds this fatiguing and makes for the island on his own. He had not swum so far before, nor ever with clothing and shoes on, and we had no life belts, never seemed to think of them then.
I keep a constant watch on Benson while Fred and I urge the canoe slowly onwards. He had learned a strong old-fashioned breaststroke and it was him taking steadily through the waves towards the island, his head never ceasing its up and down till, at last, to my relief, I see him seated on the shore. By and by he swims out again, without clothing now, and helps us the last bit in.
We spread our shirts and shorts, blankets and equipment on the rocks and spend the rest of the day, naked, on the island. Benson never seemed bored by our teenage company in these limited circumstances, though he did retire a few feet away for a snooze after we had eaten a lunch. By late afternoon we and our gear were dry and we paddled on to Washago for supper and the night.
Benson and I did our last trip, the two of us, across the Muldrew Lakes, down the Musquash River and back up the Severn River, four and a half days, much of it through cottage country, sparsely populated at that time and innocent of outboard motors. At the end of our third day we made for a small, unpopulated island in the middle of Gloucester Pool, hardly more than a rock, that I had camped on before. It is deep dusk when we pull up our canoe, and then, somewhat to our discomfort, we hear voices on the other side, and the crackling noise of a fire. We are not at first reassured to dis-cover that they are friends, a honeymooning couple from Geneva Park, cruising the canal system and Georgian Bay in a disappearing propellor boat. We apologize for our intrusion but, No such thing! they say. Happy coincidence! If we can enjoy sharing their supper of succotash and apple sauce.
Shortly after eating and a brief cleaning up we are all yawning. Back to our side of the rock, and a deep silence sets in.
In the stillness I can hear voices far across the water. Benson is already sleeping the sleep of the just. His breathing becomes heavy and soon it swells into a full snore. The farthest cottage must surely hear him, I think, never mind our company on the island.
Shut up Dad! I mutter. Shut up! Shut up! getting a little louder, and giving him a poke.
He saws into a knot, mutters a bit and shifts his position. His breathing is quiet again, and again there is nothing to be heard but the faraway voices across the lake. Then the first murmurs of the snore, and our drama is repeated.
By the time we were stirring next morning our hosts of the evening before had breakfasted and were about to move on. We thank them again and promise to report having seen them.
Margaret's old school principal and his wife, whom Marion and I knew as Mr. and Mrs. Ward, dropped in for tea very occasionally when they were in town. He was now a portly, baldheaded man with little to offer by way of communication beyond a constant, aggreeable smile. Mrs. Ward, on the other hand, was a rattle. She was virtually uninterruptible from the time she entered the door till, after a long series of near goodbyes, she took herself and the smiling Mr. Ward through the door, down the steps and away.
Margaret would give a rueful laugh. She had always liked Mr. Ward and never forgot his helpful patience as her principal when she began teaching.
A few years after we moved to Eastbourne Avenue Mrs. Ward fell ill with cancer and died. Not many months passed before Mr. Ward appeared at the door again at tea time, and now his tongue had been loosed. The smiling, silent man had taken up where his wife had left off, and though he did not rattle exactly, he had hardly less to say.
Laverne Dumble was a school friend whom Margaret, to her great delight, rediscovered after we had been in Toronto for a few years. She was a petite, oldfashioned body with a lively wit. Her husband was Oscar, a male equivalent in his proportions to Laverne. He had a wit too, of his own kind that, when occasion offered, might take a practical turn.
Two friends dropped in on them one hot summer afternoon, middle-age ladies on their way to a Temperance convention down town. One of them was to read out a report. They were no sooner on the verandah than Oscar was struck by a good idea.
Should he not bring them all a nice cool drink?
The ladies were enthusiastic, but Laverne knew what he was up to, and made a kind of effort to forestall it.
Oh no, no! she said, in a helpless tone. You will be late!
But Oscar was already in the kitchen, and the ladies would not be put off.
The first sips of their nice cool drink amazed them by its deliciousness. Laverne! they exclaimed. Where did you get these lemons?
Oh, says Laverne. Nowhere special. They are just ordinary lemons, you know, just a fruit store up on St. Clair.
But they were not to be put off. Laverne must give them some kind of answer, and she did so out of the telephone book. They copied down the address, thanked Laverne and Oscar and away they went to give their report.
This is Laverne's story, with a touch here and there from Oscar.
Another friend, virtually a member of the larger family, was Frank Greenhill. His story begins early, the part of it that enters our lives, during our first years in Toronto. He was an orphan who came to Canada from England in 1920 or before. We met him a few years after our move. He was then a motorman on the King streetcar line, and boarding with Margaret's Aunt Lizzie, the same who had assisited at the births of George and Myrtle.
Aunt Lizzie's life had proved to be a sad one. She had married a first cousin, Thomas Black, and their one child was the beautiful Frances, Margaret's cousin, friend and correspondent when they were teenagers. Thomas died and Aunt Lizzie moved to a house on Niagara Street where we went to see her and Frances, and Frank too, some time after we had settled in at Eastbourne Avenue. Frances was then showing the deterioration, physical and mental, of which she died a few years later, and Frank was earning part of his board by helping look after her.
Frank was carrying her up and down stairs, and the poor woman was in love with him. Aunt Lizzie may have been,too. He was a patient, strong man, with a fairly uncomplicated nature. In other words, he was a sterling chap, and he had become the manly stay of their household.
When Aunt Lizzie became a bedridden invalid with cancer, Frances had to be moved to a nursing home. Frank visited her faithfully there and listened to her stream of complaints. Her speech had become so nearly unintelligible that only he and one or two in the nursing home could understand what she was trying to say.
After Aunt Lizzie died Frank stayed on in the Niagara Street house and visited Frances regularly till she too died. Then he felt free to marry Hildred, a woman he had been courting for a few years. She was soloist in a United Church choir and probably had some private means as well. Neither she nor Frank had been married before, and everyone was pleased to see how happy they were, but it did not last long, for she predeceased him by several years.
He was well off, and always drove an expensive car. For a while he courted a daughter of Uncle Walt, but she was offered a good job as dietitian in a Pittsburg hospital, and had no notion of giving that up, even for as goodnatured and prosperous a man as Frank.
Margaret and Myrtle kept in touch with him. He seemed an amiable member of the wider family.
Myrtle and Wally moved to Toronto with their daughters Margaret and Edith and son Walter. Wally's haberdashery business in Stratford failed, as Aunt Jen had foretold from reading his tea cup.
Someone is taking money from your till, she said.
Her reading proved true. An important cause of his business failure was considered to have been the dishonesty of his one clerk, who seems to have got away with considerable money without being caught at it. So went the story, at any rate.
The Herns' new home was on Castlefield Avenue in north Toronto, a pleasant walk away from us on Eastbourne Avenue, through Pears' Park. Margaret and Myrtle rejoiced in the propinquity the move had brought them.
Wally, impressed by Benson's success, thought Life Insurance salesman would be right for him too, and Benson did not discourage him. The Sun Life was persuaded to take him on and train him. He made one small sale and then, after a long while, another. The sociability of contacting prospects gave him much pleasure, he could while away the hours chewing the fat with almost anyone, but aside from that he was no salesman. Neither did he have the necessary convictions about life insurance. Benson peptalked at him as he once had at me. Then, in a similar way, though sooner, he gave him up.
Times were becoming depressed. After he was let out of the Sun Life there seemed to be no other employment for Wally in Toronto. He settled down, uncomplaining, to reading the newspapers, for the positions vacant ads, he said, and rolling cigarettes for himself, and others who wanted them in the household, on an apparatus he had bought. Myrtle took in a boarder or two. Then Margaret and Edith began working and contributing money for their keep. They were loyal children to both parents, and seemed to accept that Wally should not contemplate employment beneath the dignity of an ex-mayor of Stratford who had also, in other respects, been one of its prominent citizens.
George Black, Margaret and Myrtle's brother, had first worked as resident engineer at the prison farm near Guelph, Ontario, a responsible job that provided a good stone house on the prison grounds. He married a local girl, Laura Dryden, and they had two daughters, Eleanor and Doris. We visited them in Guelph and they visited us at Port Nelson. Then George got a much better position with a steel firm in Pittsburg, and they moved to Sewickley, a pretty suburb, and he became an American citizen. We visited them there, taking an overnight train.
George much hoped to have a son, but their next child was Mary Lou. After two years his response was 'one more try'. This time there were twin girls, Ruth and Nan.
Eleanor and Mary Lou came to play notable parts in our family lives.
Benson was very keen, for all that my record in high school was poor, that I be given the education he had had to forego. He had to convince me. I was not eager to risk more failures and parental disappointments, but Margaret and he persuaded me to try it for a year, she perhaps less hopefully.
Neither of them knew much about higher education or they might have queried the course I chose, Philosophy and English. It has seemed to me since, that I was divinely guided or, if one prefers, lucky. In the calendar the course was given the title Philosophy and English or History, and it was one of the splendid honour courses that the University of Toronto then offered. It prepared one for no profession, though it provided a good grounding for law or theology. Four of us who remained friends till the War took out two, chose it for mere interest. Bob McRae and I, who were the survivors, became academics, he in Philosophy and I in English. The other three had a clearer notion of what the course would be than I did. Nevertheless, when the girl at the Registrar's Office noted the borderline level of my matriculation marks and asked if I understood what was involved in my choice, I replied that I did. Entrance standards since the War would have kept me out.
The four years that followed, for all the deepening of the Depression and the ominousness in Germany and Italy, were happy and virtually carefree for all four Johnstons. Benson's business held its steady level. Marion's fees were light and she and I both lived at home and took lunches or ate for fifteen or twenty-five cents. Our fellow students had little to spend and seemed to enjoy life for all that.
Margaret was glad to entertain our friends. I brought Bob McRae, with whom I had struck up an immediate friendship, and sometimes Jim Taylor, to supper. Bob was easier for her, and for Benson too. Jim Taylor had no small talk, and both she and Benson found his mutterings, with his head bent over, almost inaudible. Margaret could hardly understand what she did hear, and in most respects she found him baffling. Bob McRae, on the other hand, they both liked from the start. Otherwise neither of them knew much about my university life, nor about what Marion was learning at Central Technical School. It seemed enough for them that both went well.
During my last two years at university, George Black's eldest daughter, Eleanor, came to stay with us, to finish high school and take her first year in university. Margaret liked her. She was good company, a handsome, intelligent and bright-spirited lass, between Marion and me in age. George had separated from Laura and was living with his secretary in Pittsburg. Margaret and Benson could not look with favour on such a liaison, but nor could they blame him, they had never taken to Laura. George came from Sewickley for a consultative sort of visit about our boarding Eleanor and being family for her, and during his stay he had a friendly talk with me and put five hundred dollars in my bank account. That took me around Germany, after graduation with Jim Taylor, and paid for part of my stay in England the following winter.
The bicycle excursion was Taylor's idea. Somewhat to my surprise, Benson and Margaret agreed to it without hesitation. Benson knew a man in Montreal through whom he arranged our passages as cattlemen on the Cunard-Anchor-Donaldson ship Norwegian. Normally this was arranged through an agent in Montreal, who charged twenty dollars for the transaction, but Benson's friend got us our passages for nothing. Many male students worked passages across the Atlantic on cattle boats before the War.
Harold and Iva Crow were particular friends of Margaret and Benson in these and later years. The friendship of the two daughters, Marion Crow and our Marion, brought them together. Harold was an editor with The Globe and Mail, which the two papers, The Globe and The Mail and Empire had combined to become. He could always make Margaret and Benson laugh, and all three were often loud with laughter. His sense of the comical was extravagant and also humane, and there was a true clown's note of melancholy in it. Neither Iva nor their Marion seemed to make much of his humour, but our Marion and I thought it was great. Larry Porter, whom our Marion married, was Harold's nephew.
That summer of '36, when Taylor and I did our bicycle tour of Germany, Benson, Margaret and the two Marions drove across the midwestern United States, down the West Coast to San Francisco and then back again, Benson at the wheel except for a few stretches when our Marion took over. Benson was busy with his Leica and got many fine shots, especially of the California coast, some of which he had enlarged in sepia and framed.
He had been an amateur photographer since his travelling salesman days. He would take flash pictures of family occasions when Marion and I were in our teens. It was not a simple procedure. The flash was produced by igniting a small amount of powdered magnesium. There were several methods of doing this, and he must have tried them all. One made use of a small metal trough with a handle under it, a T-shaped apparatus. Magnesium powder was laid in the trough and ignited by means of a flint arrangement, like that of a cigarette-lighter. Then there were thin magnesium sheets, about six inches square, that would be pinned to a long stick held above and behind the camera and ignited by a match at the end of another stick. A third scheme allowed him to get into the picture himself. Tying the stick and its magnesium sheet to the tripod, he ignited it with a hanging fuse of salt-petre-coated string.
All these devices were somewhat hair-raising, and eyes in the resulting photographs were usually staring or shut.
^^^
Siblings George Johnston and Marion Porter
at 245 Rusholme Rd., Toronto, were they and
their parents Margaret & Benson lived 1936-'43.
(photo by John Porter, 1987, for his film Toronto
Homes)
After they returned from the California expedition, Benson and Margaret were involved in another real estate deal, the swapping of 220 Herkimer Street, Hamilton, and the house and lot at Port Nelson, for three properties in Toronto. One was a handsome house on Rusholme Road, as big as the Herkimer Street house, and grander. It was in a good location, though perhaps not as fashionable as it had been. What attracted them especially about the property was its spacious garden, which had a pergola with a wisteria vine on it half way between the house and the back fence. Beyond the fence was a lane. Benson tried to sell the Eastbourne Avenue house, but gave that up and found tenants for it, and he and Margaret moved to Rusholme Road. It was a happy move. The house and ambient had a pleasant, settled mood that felt like the old days on Herkimer Street.
In October of '36 Walter Hern found employment again. He was brought to London, England, as referee for ice hockey, a newly popular spectator sport there. It seemed a gift for him. He set himself up in a comfortable flat in St. John's Wood and invited me to use it sometimes as a warm location for my labours with the pen. I went one evening when he was at a practice, but found it so warm I could not stay awake. Three of us, Bob McRae, Leslie Mackay and I were then living in a rented flat above a grocery shop at 9 Lamb's Conduit Street, and we did not put much money into heating it. Uncle Wally, or U. Wally as we knew him among ourselves, invited us all three to a hockey game at which he was officiating. He urged me to make use of his flat again, and I gave it another try, with no better success.
On this second occasion, having dozed off as before, I was roused by the phone at about eleven p.m., and a man's voice asked me, in a London accent, if I knew one Walter Hern. I said I did.
Well, dont be alarmed, sir, the voice said patiently. Your mite's been it by a bus.
The calmness of the voice alarmed me from the first, but I was sufficiently alert to ask for more information.
Walter Hern is in the Outpatients' at St. Mary's Ospital, the voice told me. Being attended to.
It gave me directions for getting there, and I followed them at once.
The Outpatients' Clinic was dimly lit by a gas jet. Behind a desk in an alcove that was somewhat more brightly lit, sat a mildly authoritative-looking young woman in a white smock. A row of men and women, middle-age to elderly, all with unhappy expressions on their faces, were partly visible in the gloom, seated on a bench next to a wall, some with bandaging on a hand or foot or forehead. When they heard me tell the lady at the desk that I should like to know about Walter Hern they looked unhappier than ever.
Ow, e did look orful! they all agreed.
I joined them on the bench. After a while the desk lady gave me a sign and I stood up.
A door opened, a wheeled stretcher came through it and across the waiting room to another door and on it was U. Wally, covered by a sheet except for his head, over one corner of which was a neat bandage. Hoo! hoo! hoo! he was saying through a tube stuck in his mouth, and he stunk of anaesthetic.
For the week and half that he was in hospital I visited him regularly, and then I arranged a room for him at Thirty Doughty Street, rooming house and of the Admirable Mrs. Crichton, as we called her. Jim Taylor and I stayed there when we first arrived in London in July of that same year. U. Wally got tea and toast for himself in his room and then came to our flat in Lamb's Conduit Street and spent much of every morning sitting by our coal grate, burning our coal, as we never did during the day, and reading our copy of The London Times. He would stay for lunch and then go to the Strand Palace Hotel and write letters home on their stationery. If a flunkey eyed him he would say to himself, I dont have to care for you, you're nothing but a shit! or so he told us, at any rate.
Bob and Leslie's patience with all this must be considered supererogative, though they did find him and his ways somewhat entertaining, if unintentionally so. He would tell us about his sightseeing in London, how impressed he was by the Albert Memorial, for example. We were not to miss it, it must be one of the really great monuments in the world. He also informed us about one of our own favourite haunts, St. James' Park.
At last he ran out of money, he had completed his convalescence, he was homesick and went home.
It was the winter of Mrs. Simpson, Edward the Eighth's abdication and the accession of George the Sixth.
In the spring Margaret came and brought Myrt, and the two of them stayed in the Admirable Mrs. Crichton's best room. They proceeded to enjoy themselves in a knowledgeable way, Margaret remembering especially the Victoria and Albert Museum from her visit way back before she married Benson. They shopped in Regent and Oxford Streets and went to theatres. Many evenings they made suppers for themselves and us in our smelly, pokey kitchen, and on their last evening -- and mine -- they prepared a feast for us all.
I returned home with them from Southampton to New York on the North-German-Lloyd super-liner Europa, shortly before George the Sixth's in bur: coronation. The Hindenburg passed overhead on her ill-fated last crossing, at about mid-Atlantic. She was above the low cloud, but we could hear her engines. The Europa saluted her with many blasts of her siren.
The great liner was warped into New York harbour while a spectacular thunderstorm was breaking over Manhattan. The passengers were awe-struck by the towering sky-line, the dark cloud over it and the lightning and thunder.
Herrlich! they exclaimed, leaning against the landward rail. Wunderbar! Ausgezeichnet!
Benson and Marion were at the dock to meet us.
I had persuaded Margaret to give me my keep at home and a spending allowance of ten dollars a month, so that I might complete the novel I had begun writing in London. I would do gardening and painting and such work around the house. She complied with this and generously answered queries from her friends.
What is George doing?
Well, he is writing a novel.
My! How interesting! But I mean, what is he really doing, to earn his keep and so on?
Margaret would do her best to explain. She was not wholly convinced that novel writing was a serious occupation, and I made it no easier for her by doing it in my third floor room during four hours or so of darkness after eleven p.m. Her next door neighbour, Mrs.Weller, who seemed to have lived on Rusholme Road for much of her life, helped settle her mind in my favour. She was older than Margaret and had been a member of The Canadian Authors' Association for many years. My achievement in placing a story with The London Mercury impressed her hardly less than it had me.
You must come to our next meeting! she urged me.
It was at the Heliconian Club, and at it Joyce Marshall, my contemporary, was given one of the Association's more percipient awards. Mrs. Weller took my unwillingness to join in good part, though she thought it was mistaken.
Benson now had a garden to work in again, and he went at it with enthusiasm. There were rose beds in it, and perennial borders, all somewhat neglected. He coaxed them all back. The pergola had become tilted, and its wisteria vine was all over it. He straightened the pergola and brought the wisteria under his discipline. His drastic hand at the pruning alarmed Margaret. She was so convinced he had hacked everything to death that she could hardly believe how much more prosperous everything looked when it came into full growth and flower again next summer. He had an instinct for gardening, everything flourished for him.
He now owned four houses in Toronto, three of which he much desired to sell, but there was little movement of real estate then, and he did not have the heart to raise rents of tenants he knew to be poor. He let an Irish client, Charley McGuire, a handyman, work off what he owed by doing repairs in one of his houses, and appointed me assistant. My real duty was to keep an eye on Charley.
This was the summer that Colonel Lindberg made his trip to Germany and was so impressed by what he was shown there that he toured the United States and advocated neutrality in the war that was now surely coming. President Franklin Roosevelt expressed similar sentiments. Uncle George wrote to Margaret, after a trip to England and Germany, that his impressions of both countries were very much what Lindberg's had been. Unhappy as he was to say so, he was sure that England was doomed. The country seemed to be asleep.
He was an ailing man when he wrote this, though he too was unaware of his true condition. His doctor had assured him that his symptoms seemed to be slight. There was to be an exploratory operation, and George asked the doctor, who was a friend, to give him a candid report. In the event, the diagnosis was the worst possible, and then George bitterly regretted his insistence on knowing.
I am given six weeks, he wrote to Margaret. What kind of sentence is that? It is worse than hanging. Six weeks of painful deterioration, all a slow and certain death. I was not made for such patience. And just as I was beginning to enjoy life again!
Margaret and Myrtle went to Pittsburg and spent a week with him. He was becoming resigned, though his bitterness when they first arrived was hard to bear. They met his secretary and liked her. Not long after they had come back home again he failed rapidly and died, without undue pain, as his doctor reported, in his sleep.
He was laid out in our Rusholme Road living room, and his funeral service was conducted there. The Burrells all came, and Herns and Blacks, and with the Johnstons filled the downstairs. A funeral supper, to which they all brought something, was held in the big dining room after George had been interred, Burrells, Herns and Johnstons again. Laura and her daughters did not stay for the supper, they were on their way back home to Sewickley.
The supper was noisy and hearty, much joking and laughter, the uncles and aunts remembering Chum, as they called him, for his visits to Port Credit as a youngster, the comical things he had done and the scrapes he had got into. They had been young then too, ready for anything. Now they were established railway men and farmers and their wives, besides Aunt Jen and her Jack and Aunt Flo. They liked nothing better than eating, and sadness and jollification, and going over old times.
Marion and Larry Porter were married in February, 1939. It was a formal afternoon wedding in Timothy Eaton Memorial Church, a splash occasion. Fletcher and Wesley came from Stratford, hired dress suits and changed into them in my third floor apartment. Fletcher had the biggest suit obtainable, and Wesley and I helped wrestle him into it.
My boy! he called to me. Come here, my boy! Just see what you can do with this collar.
I had to split the shirt he had bought, down the back. Touches of sticking plaster nearly everywhere held together the persona he took to church -- or rather that Wesley took, by taxi. I drove Margaret in her matron's finery, and we stopped at a goodnatured gas station for her to relieve her nervous bladder.
At the ceremony, the guests were somewhat taken off guard when the bride entered to a Purcell march instead of the usual Wagner. I had been given charge of the music, and besides hiring an organist friend I had included a Purcell solo about nymphs and sheperds sung by Frank Greenhill's bride, Hildred.
The reception was at Rusholme Road, plenty of space for the sixty-odd guests. There was never a hint of alcohol in the punch, though Fletcher may have been the only one to feel deprived, and perhaps he had brought a flask and managed a nip or two. He and Wesley soon eased themselves out of their stiff clothing and departed.
Bob McRae stayed with us for the early summer of '39, a memorable season for its first visit of a reigning British king and his queen to Canada, George the Sixth and Queen Elizabeth. We saw them as they came out to a cheering throng after their lunch in Hart House. Most folk seemed to know that Chamberlain's Munich Pact with Hitler of the previous September was meaningless, and that the war they had been trying to keep out of their thoughts was now imminent. This was the significance of the Royal Visit. The Globe and Mail had been on the streets downtown before midnight for over a year. The first of the regular news analysts were making their specialist information waited for every day, in print and over the air. Low's brilliant political cartoons in the London Evening Standard had been known by some Torontonians since the Spanish Civil War.
Benson and Margaret shared a cottage with Harold and Iva Crow in Haliburton that summer. Bob and I drove up with them and tented for a week near by. They invited us to supper now and again, and gave us the odd pie or something else good. Then they took us to Minden, where we picked up supplies, rented a canoe, paddled back to the cottage and away. After five weeks among the almost empty lakes we came out again in September to be shaken by the first news we had heard in all that time, of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact. Next came the invasion of Poland and the outbreak of the Second World War.
Margaret and Benson were caught up in the general alarm over these events, but the promise of returning prosperity qualified their concern as it did that of many Canadians, in spite of gloomy prophesies that this war would bring civilized life as we knew it to an end. They had lived through one full-scale war time, the flu epidemic that followed it, and after that, their own economic collapse. However great this crisis might prove to be, they seemed to know that worry would not diminish it. Harold Crow admired what he took to be their apparent equanimity but could not share it.
In the fall I went with Benson on a business trip to Kirkland Lake and Timmins, doing virtually all the driving. It was a memorable excursion for me, and included a visit to the deepest level of one of the deepest gold mines. Long stretches of the road on the way up were unpaved, and much of it traversed bush and scrub country. Benson and I were good company for each other, as we had been on our canoe trips.
Bob McRae came again in the early summer of '40, and stayed with us in my third floor apartment. Benson hired us both to paint three of his four other houses. While we were on the job the War took its dramatic turn. The German troops had already occupied Denmark and Norway. In May and June they advanced through the Netherlands and Belgium into France. The British made the heroic evacuation of their expeditionary force through Dunkirk, and by the end of June France had capitulated. There were reports that the Germans were massing men, guns and landing craft along the Channel coast opposite England. We had just finished painting the third house. Bob joined the Navy and went overseas within a month or so to train. I joined the Air Force before Christmas, after an operation to repair a hernia.
Benson and Margaret seemed to take all this in their stride. They must have felt my enlistment, in some respects, as the lifting of a weight that had been bearing on us all three. Moreover, they now had a more satisfactory answer to queries as to what George might be doing. They must have been apprehensive just the same, for I was advancing into territory that was as unknown to them as it was to me.
George's daughter Mary Lou, a young teenager, was with us that summer and put up goodnaturedly with much teasing from Bob and me.
Bob wrote from England, having been through the Blitz, as the first big air attack on England was called, or otherwise, "The Battle of Britain". His mother, Susan McRae, came home from China just after he had departed for England with his draft. She was not to see him till the War in Europe was over. He took part in the Dieppe Raid as commander of three landing craft, and spent the rest of the War in Europe in the German Naval prison camp near Hamburg. Margaret was fond of his sisters, Jeanne and Betty, and she and Susan and one or both of the sisters often met. Norma Dow was with Margaret and Benson the winters of the War years.
Jeanne and I became engaged to marry. I was still training and readying to go overseas, and it was my decision that we should not marry till I came back, which proved to be two and a half years later. Jeanne too was training, to be a nurse, in Kingston General Hospital, before I left for England.
It was during this same leave that I gave Benson and Margaret their first experience of flight, in a tiny Piper Cub at Leavens' Field, north of Toronto. On his flight Benson sat beside me, perfectly self-possessed, his Homburg hat on his knee and a relaxed expression on his face. We were airborne about twenty minutes, at two thousand feet, doing a few shallow turns to give him a good view of the city and suburbs below. I began the landing approach rather near the edge of the field, but having been given a green light I decide to come in anyhow, slipping off three hundred feet, my eye on Benson as well, for any sign of uneasiness. He was both tranquil and observant, enjoying a new pleasure, and trusting my piloting as he had trusted my canoeing a few years earlier.
Margaret flew with me after I had landed with Benson. I was cautious with her, only the gentlest of turns, and a carefully planned approach to landing, sparing her less robust faith.
An Air Force comrade, Beverly Pritchard, visited at Rusholme Road for a few hours of another brief leave, just before we went overseas together. Pritch was the only friend of my training days that Margaret came to know, and she took a great liking to him. He was killed piloting a Wellington while I was in Africa, and Margaret wrote to tell me. Poor, dear, happy, carefree Pritch was killed, she wrote.
For the years that followed, two and a half for me and over a year longer for Bob, she and Benson waited for news of us, wrote letters and sent cigarettes and pipe tobacco and food parcels to us both, to him in prison. Susan and Duncan did the same. To me they sent more pipe tobacco than I could smoke or give away, even in West Africa. Margaret worried about me in'that unhealthy part of the world', especially after seeing a Humphrey Bogart film located there. I did what I could to reassure her in my answering letter, and told her truly that I was in one of the less dangerous postings. Her letters, for all their qualms, were wonderful. News, anecdotes and expressions of feeling, all in an unselfconscious, familiar style. Her tone of voice came through, her likes and dislikes firmly stated with an edge of the comical, and her feelings right at the surface. Her parcels were like her too, a splendid medley, sweets, soap, toothpaste, shortbread, brewers' yeast -- for my health's sake -- socks, khaki handkerchiefs, writing paper and envelopes. They were firmly and almost excessively wrapped and tied. One parcel had spent a long while in the weather, on a dock somewhere, Freetown most probably, and when it reached me at last it was solid, its contents quite inseparable.
She sent a cable as soon as she knew that Bob had been taken prisoner at Dieppe and not, as we had earlier been told, killed. It took three months to reach me, though that, of course, was no fault of hers, it had gone to Takoradi by mistake. Meanwhile, one of her letters assumed that I knew he was living, and told me that he had been released from fetters.
Benson established himself as an independent agent in another building, in an office of his own, where he handled accident and fire as well as life insurance. He was prospering steadily in the booming war-time economy, and maintaining a comfortable, middle-class life. He still owned four houses, besides the Rusholme Road house they lived in. War-time rents being frozen the rented houses hardly paid for their upkeep, and it was impossible to sell them. Nevertheless, he bought another, somewhat smaller, house and property on Bracondale Hill Road, and they moved there. Norma Dow was still with them, bright company for them.
They were regular attenders still at Eaton Memorial Church, and at least Benson's faith was steady and unmoved by events in the world, though he was not free of self-criticism and very occasional times of despair. His good nature was sustained by an innocence that was deep-rooted and not easy.
He made an effort to play golf. Wally Hern had nearly persuaded him, some years back, to join a club, but after several tries he concluded that it was not his game. Then he and Margaret did some lawn bowling with Harold and Iva Crow and took to it right off. It led to curling in the winter as well. The two games carried them through into Benson's eighties.
He kept on with his swimming, up and down Central YMCA pool ten times.
A young instructor taught him to dive, and he achieved a comical approximation with which he always began his swim. His dives were regularly laughed at, but he kept on with them no less regularly, in his good-natured way. After his dive and swim, off he marched to the National Club for his lunch, feeling that he had earned it.
Upon my return to Canada Jeanne and I were married by Duncan at the United Church manse in White Lake, Ontario. It was a quiet, unpublished marriage, for nurses in training at Kingston General Hospital were not to be married, on pain of expulsion, and Jeanne still had six months to graduation. White Lake was almost in the Kingston area.
Duncan had taken this and two neighbouring charges while the Japanese occupation in China had made his return there impossible. Benson and Margaret came from Toronto for the event, Susan of course was there, and Jeanne's sisters, Mary and Betty, came from Ottawa. Marion and Larry, in Moose Jaw, were too far away to come.
Next May the War in Europe came to its end. After my discharge from the Air Force, Jeanne and I visited Susan and Duncan at White Lake again, and were there when Bob came home. One evening he had his ear to the radio -- a battery set, since the Manse had no electricity -- trying to hear the news. After a moment or two he turned to us with an awestruck look.
If he had heard right, he said, an atomic bomb had been dropped on Japan.
His last days in Germany were vivid in his memory yet, and he gave us some account of them. These still belonged in a world we could imagine, if only just. Not quite self-destructive, as it had all at once become.
The guards, he told us, had simply abandoned the prison, and Bob and his fellows had walked, pushing what clothing and other articles they could take on what pushable vehicles they could find or improvise: bicycles, lawn mowers, a baby carriage or two, and childrens' wagons. They moved together in what order they might over rough terrain, and more than once suffered the bitterness of losing some of their number to strafing by low-flying Allied aircraft.
The next two years were happy ones for Margaret and Benson. Two families with three grandchildren between them were now in Toronto or near it, and Norma was still with them. Jeanne and I had returned to Toronto and I was studying for a PhD in English on my Veterans' Allowance. Our Bob was born at the beginning of my second year. Larry had been moved back east again to the British American plant at Clarkson, and he and Marion found a big old house and big lot near by.
At the end of my second year in Graduate School, Lloyd Duchemin, with whom I had done some part time teaching, having taken on the chairmanship of the English Department at Mount Allison University, offered me a position there, and I accepted. Margaret grieved again that we should be moving so far away. We were only there for two years, however, and when she and Benson drove to Sackville with Norma and a friend to visit us, she was much gratified to learn that we had decided to return to Toronto for me to complete the necessary studies for my degree and perhaps find a position there.
Back in Toronto Benson was able to put us into the Eastbourne Avenue house, and he let us have it rent free. Our occupancy helped sell it in the spring.
^^^
George and Margaret (Peggy) Johnston,
19 Churchhill Ave., Sackville, New Brunswick - 1948
in a frame from George's 8mm home movies. List
Our second child, Margaret, had been born in April of our first year in Sackville. Andrew was born on Christmas Eve while we were back in Toronto and Jeanne took him and the two of them stayed with Margaret and Benson for a week when they came out of hospital. Susan and Duncan moved in with the rest of for the time and looked after us.
Towards the end of term it became clear that there would be no opening for me in Toronto. There seemed to be no opening anywhere. Margaret had already formed a low opinion of the academic profession. Why should one want to keep on in it when its money rewards were so mean, and earned by such hard work and long hours? This was an assessment she never saw cause to change, though she half resigned herself to it this time, when I seemed to be contemplating free-lance writing again as an alternative. The dramatic rise in Canadian academic salaries came too late for her to know of it.
A vacancy did turn up at Carleton College in Ottawa, and though this too seemed unnecessarily far away, Margaret accepted it as inevitable. She was then in her mid-sixties.
Our first house in Ottawa was a small, flat-roofed structure with white stucco walls located in Lindenlea, a pretty, First-World-War development. Benson bought it for us, and took out an insurance policy on my life, himself as beneficiary, worth what the house had cost him. I was to pay the premiums. In case of his death the policy would revert to me, a generous arrangement. The house was too small for us to put them up in it, so when they visited they stayed in the Bytown Inn. We always made a long visit with them at Christmas. Duncan and Susie were now back out in China.
After three years, having outgrown the Lindenlea house, we bought much larger premises at 22 Third Avenue, in the Glebe, near the Canal.
Benson was not enthusiastic.
I like the house, he said, but not the company it keeps.
He was referring to a corner store a few doors away which, in his view, lowered the tone of the neighbourhood.
We had many a good year in it just the same, and with good neighbours. We would have accommodated Margaret and Benson in it on their visits, but they had begun to find our family somewhat strenuous to be with quite so constantly. They preferred to stay in a peaceful bed and breakfast near by.
In '54 they went to a Sun Life Convention in Rome. Benson was still healthy and able and so was Margaret, but she was now somewhat less confident of her footing. She made two ventures out while Benson was at meetings. On the second she suffered the first blackout of her life. Her return to consciousness was in a hospital, a frightening experience, not knowing where she was and not understanding the Italian that was chattering around her. When she had collected her wits she managed to tell a nurse, who knew a little English, how Benson might be reached. It seemed a while before he got to her. Their only trans-Atlantic excursion together was near its end, by then.
The summer after the Roman interlude, a year later, Jeanne and I were driving down town with the two of them, Benson at the wheel of his handsome Buick. All at once he stops, in the middle of an intersection on University Avenue, a blank look on his face. He does not know where he is or what he should be doing. As it happens, there is little traffic. He and I get out, without hurrying, and change places. The incident disturbs him very much, and he does not drive again.
Margaret took the upset calmly. There had been other lapses, less serious, that she had been willing to attribute to absent-mindedness. He had kept her waiting over an hour once, from misunderstanding an arrangement they had made about meeting, and this had made her very cross. She would not agree to another such rendezvous. But the incident on University Avenue was of a different kind. Within a matter of months he became amiably simple. He could dress and undress himself, keep himself clean and enter-tained and, for the most part, out of mischief, but he was not safe to be left alone.
Margaret's life became restricted. Trustworthy help that he would be content with was not easy to find. A girl student came two afternoons a week for a while, and she was good. Margaret liked her and was glad to leave him with her. He was blissful to be having a personable young woman for company. Then her studies became demanding. and she had to give it up.
Benson had never resigned his membership in the Hamilton lodge of the Scottish Rite, though he had not attended a meeting since the move to Toronto. One autumn afternoon, while ten-year-old Cathleen and I are on a visit, Margaret has him dress himself in his blazer and flannel trousers, and his intuition, such as it is, suggests an occasion.
Margaret tries to tell him. His half-century membership in the lodge is to be marked in some way, and two members are coming from Hamilton to see to it.
His look becomes solemn, he seems to understand, sits by the window looking out,and sometimes forgets about the visitors and thinks we must be going somewhere, and why are we waiting so long?
At last two well-dressed gentlemen come to the door, one in his thirties and the other nearing Benson's age, both friendly, handsome and urbane. Benson talks delightedly with the older man while Margaret and I entertain the younger.
Cathleen hands around tea and cakes.
At last there is a ceremony to be performed. Benson's chair is turned around for it and he is alerted. The younger man stands up and makes a brief oration, then stoops and fastens a pin on the lapel of Benson's blazer, congratulating him at the same time on his long membership.
There is an expectant silence, Benson keeping a solemn face. After what seems rather a wait, his look brightens.
This is a great moment, he says.
The men smile, and Benson continues.
They were all those wonderful years, he says. Nothing in my life has meant so much to me as my time in Central YMCA.
A tear or two come to his eyes.
Silence.
The visiting faces shift from expressions of disbelief through fleeting puzzlement to laughter. We all laugh, Benson with delight over his success.
There was nothing to be said. The younger man made an effort, then gave it up with another laugh, somewhat rueful. Then he and his confrere recovered their urbanity, thanked Margaret very much, took a charming leave, with a special compliment to Cathleen, and departed.
On one of our later visits Margaret meets us at the door. Could we drive Benson with her to the hospital before anything else. His bowels have not moved for more than three days, and he now seems to have an impacted condition. He will not let her do anything.
I offer to take him in hand, and with me it happens that he is a lamb. Soon he is duly enthroned and waiting expectantly for me to get busy. There are no rubber gloves, so I go to work without, and he leans forward on the seat and is most cooperative. It is not easy. For several minutes I probe away and nothing happens, only a bit of shifting on his part. Then all at once he makes a bigger shift.
Whoa boy! he shouts, and out it comes, a worthy achievement. It leaves the two of us limp but triumphant.
Margaret was bound she would keep him at home, however difficult he might become. After he had gone out and wandered away twice she began to lock the doors. This made him surly with her, something quite out of character. I visited when I could and took him for walks. On one of these an older lady came up and spoke to me.
It is no fun being old, she said. Not for anybody.
During the same visit the front door was somehow left unlocked. Benson took off and was out of sight before he was missed.
Margaret was very distressed, he had no coat or hat and she was in her housecoat.
I set out and walked this way and that, doubling back and looking down cross streets, and it was another several minutes before, by luck and nothing else, I caught sight of him. He was standing, irresolute, on the other side of Bathurst Street. There was some traffic between us, moving at speed. Fortunately he did not see me before I had crossed and was beside him. He came right along with me.
Margaret was not easily persuaded that he should be in a home.
If he is not, I tell her, the everlasting watching and prohibiting will put you in a home first.
Marion had been telling her the same.
She seemed convinced, but it was a few months before she found a place that satisfied her and had space for him. It was a long bus ride beyond the northern city limits on Bathurst Street, and there she visited him faithfully.
Norma had married and moved into her own home a while before all this, and Margaret had been, since Benson's move, alone. Next thing she needed persuading was to sell the house and move into an apartment. Two failed attempts to find an acceptable tenant for one of the big upstairs rooms were more persuasive than any arguments Marion and I had put forward. The first, a woman, was unfriendly and rude. The second, also a woman, was friendlier but slovenly. She would heat soup for herself on a hot plate in her room, have part of it and pour the rest from her window down the stucco wall of the house. Margaret was then moved to sell.
She did so, profitably, and acceptably to her neighbours, a consideration that was important to her. She was cannier about the sale than in some trading she did on the stock market, a game she took up in her later years. Most stocks that she left when she died were worth little or nothing.
Her last home was an apartment in what was then the north end of Yonge Street, Hog's Hollow. Good friends from many years back were on the same floor with her, and Marion and Larry and their children were no farther than a short walk away. She found life easier here. Transportation to visit Benson was more convenient,though neither did this reconcile her to his being there, for all that his enjoyment of the company was apparent.
Winters became increasingly difficult for her, her footing having become less and less confident.During the first winter she broke an ankle. Visits to Ottawa had long been out of the question. We brought our five-year-old Nora down with us on a visit in the spring of '66, and she was delighted. She never did see Mark, nor give her approval to our adopting him. She thought we already had too many children, though she liked them all.
I visited her when I could, those winters. The revelations from the Nuremberg trials shook to its depths what faith she had in humanity. She took the notion to read the New Testament, but she would need one that had large print. I bought a fine copy with soft leather binding, but she complained about the cost and had me take it back. Churchgoing had not been part of her life since Benson had begun to decline, and I do not know that she listened to services on the radio.
In the early spring of '67 Benson broke a hip. This accident reconciled her at last to his being cared for away from her, for he was now in need of constant surgical and nursing attention. I went with her to visit him, and we then had a forty-five minute wait for a bus. The time passed soon as we walked and talked. She was in as thoughtful and nearly contented mood as I had seen her. It was a mild spring afternoon. Benson's apparent serenity amid all his hospital apparatus consoled her, and she commented on she beauty of his look.
This was my last time with her. She may have had a premonition that so it was to be. We were to go to Denmark soon, for the best part of a year, and she hated to think of our being so far away for so long.
We departed on the Polish ship Batory and sailed past Expo 67 on one of its first days. Several good letters came from Margaret over the summer. She was much concerned about Andrew's working on a Faroese fishing vessel off Greenland that fall. It seemed a hard and dangerous occupation for a seventeen-year-old, still growing.
She did not live to be told of his safe, not to say prosperous, return. Norma and a friend took her to Expo in September and trundled her about in a wheel chair. This put them at the head of every queue they chose. They made a full and splendid day of it. No letter came about it from Margaret, however, for she fell ill of a cold a day or so after they got back, ne-glected it and did not report the fever it developed. When Marion saw her, which was very soon, she had her taken to hospital at once. Pneumonia had set in, and she died within a few days.
Benson was not told of her death, and though he was hardly of this world any longer, he may have missed her. He died a little over a month later, and they are both buried alongside Fletcher in the Dundurn Cemetery in Hamilton.
Return to beginning - Part 1, w/ photos
>>> New Book of George's Poems.
>>> Analysis of his poems, one quoted in full.
>>> Catalogue of George's 8mm & Super 8 Home Movies.
>>> Peggy's Cove Photos, some by George.
>>> George's sister Marion Porter's Paintings.
>>> John Porter's "Lost Porter Cousins", and Father's Physics Theory.
