This column first appeared in the Victoria Daily Times on May 12, 1939.
A man and woman outside a greengrocery looked at the window display — cauliflower, lettuce, carrots — arranged to catch the eye. Longing was in their eyes, admiration and longing.
Said she: “I would love to have a garden, but we have never felt we could afford it.”
A garden does cost something, but it pays every month of the year. Here on the Pacific coast, even in January, that month of cold, grey seas and melancholy rain. The little jasmine shoots out its golden star to remind us that when winter comes spring is not far behind.
There is no question about the value of a garden these days, when the cherry trees, powdered with blossoms, gleam against the blue of the sky. The grass below them is covered with the delicate petals, and the walks suggest the wedding march from Lohengrin.
There are bees in the blossoms and in the wallflowers, droning like a distant squadron of airplanes; the chirping sparrows are sending out their brassy notes from the fence posts, the quail in their neat black and grey dresses are running on the lawn, strangely quiet, because of the crows. Three of the sinister visitors are circling over Mr. Tower’s alfalfa, and the quail are nervous and dart back into the lavender beds at the least sound. Crows are enemy planes to the quail.
There are evidences of human activity, too. I can hear a vacuum cleaner, reminding me that spring cleaning has broken out and life holds sterner duties than loitering in the sunshine. But I choke back such thought.
Any day will do for cleaning our drawers and polishing silver. Any old day, windy day. But a day like this should be spent in the open. There are things I can do outside, too. (How hard is it for us to feel that it is right sometimes to be idle!)
I will transplant red sunflowers and make a tidy row of them. That will be a proper chore for this lovely day. When Jim Clarke gave me the sunflower seeds in Winnipeg two years ago, he told me we must cover some of the heads with muslin to save the seeds. Otherwise the birds would take them all. This was done, but evidently too late, for when we took off the muslin caps this spring to get the seed, there was not even one. Nothing remained but the castings, and grief reigned in Lantern Lane.
However, our hit-and-miss method of gardening saved us. There were a few plants in another part of the garden, and they had seeded themselves, so we still have some of Jim’s flowers.
When the whole country is throbbing with colour and busting with growth, I think we should celebrate it. We should do something. Something gay and creative. Something that would lighten people’s hearts and set them singing.
Our way of celebrating an event, even the First of July, is to bring many people together, set a table under the trees, with jellied salads and sandwiches and coffee, and have a few people speak. Which is all very well, but it does not go far enough. The speakers may have a good time, and conversational groups indulge in reminiscences of other days. But there are always people who are lonely and feel out of place because there is nothing to do.
Now a cherry-blossom festival could have, if we follow the example of some of the older countries of Europe, a pipe band to lead us into a gayer mood, and it could become a time when instruction in pipe making could be given.
Three years ago it was our good fortune to meet an English school mistress, visiting her sister at Gordon Head, and from her we heard of the pipes, made by school children in England, and the wonderful music they are able to get from them.
The secret of pipe music has always belonged to the European peasant. Shepherds and goatherds have led their flocks on the Albanian hills, and in Armenia and Russia by the sweet music of the pipes made from a reed, on the same principle as we have made whistles from a willow wand.
A traveller from England, a few years ago bought a pipe from a Sicilian goatherd, who sat on a hillside, drawing sweet music from this simple little instrument. The Englishman sent it, by post, to a friend who is a schoolmistress in the Cotswold country. The pipe from Sicily was made from the length of bamboo, and has a loud mellow voice, a wooden mouthpiece and a scale of holes round which a carved pattern meandered pleasantly. This pipe became the ancestor of many pipes.
The first batch was made from a bamboo curtain pole, forgotten in an attic, but when divided into lengths could be persuaded into yielding sweet notes. The pipes are enamelled in bright colours, and when school opened, these treasures were eagerly seized by a group of ambitious boys.
This was in 1926.
Now there is a pipers’ guild in London, and the schoolmistress who received the Sicilian goatherd’s pipes is the director. The orchestra of the pipers’ guild is unique in its inception. Each player makes his own instrument using the most simple and least costly material.
Festivals are held for pipe bands made up of school children, who come on foot or by bus, playing as they come. I have a picture before me of a dozen or more little ones, piping down a country lane in blossom time. None of them looks older than 12 years. Their young faces are aglow with happiness, as they step along to their own music.
Vancouver Island, being a little bit of England, might well become the home of the first pipe bands in Canada. And it does not take much imagination on a morning like this, when the whole countryside is mosaic of colour, to hear, blending with the song of the skylarks, the “horns of elf-land faintly blowing.”
The tendency of today is to be passive listeners, allowing someone else to entertain us. The average person is pushed out of the realm of creative music altogether, and thinks he is fortunate to be able to listen to the specialist.
And so he is. But intelligent appreciation is greatly heightened when there is s sound foundation of knowledge, and when that is not possible even a slight ability to do something ourselves opens a door to us. We are so accustomed to buying the work of machines we forget the skill of human hands.
The people who make and play their own pipes touch the magic of nature when they conjure a sweet sound from a hollow piece of wood.
