Nellie McClung, known across Canada as a member of the Famous Five who campaigned for women to be recognized as persons, wrote a column for the Victoria Daily Times. In Islander, we are reprinting a selection of her columns about life in Victoria almost 80 years ago. This column appeared on Saturday, Jan. 8, 1938.
The robins, cut off from their natural supply of food during the short time the snow was on the ground, made attacks on the holly berries and so there is a scarcity of this lovely token in our neighbourhood. But there is cedar and Oregon grape, with its shining green leaves, and red arbutus berries. It seems the robins keep holly berries and arbutus berries for their “iron rations,” with holly first and arbutus second choice. This year only the holly suffered.
Still there is an abundance of lovely things this season, on account of the open winter. The winter jasmine is covered with yellow blossoms; the marigolds are full of little yellow suns; one of our neighbours has an Oriental poppy in bloom in great flashing flowers of burnt orange, which burn against her white house. I can see them through the window as I write. Another neighbour has Canterbury bells doing their third term of blooming for 1937, which is a pretty good record. I presume the old blossoms were cut off promptly and so the new blossoms followed.
Down at the road, we planted poppy seed to make a great showing next spring, and they are up in thousands. Maybe the frost will catch them and reduce them to pulp, but at least they have had a shot at life, poor little gay adventurers! Nature is careful of the race, but careless of the single life!
The days have been warm and bright, with cirrus clouds in a blue sky and pockets of fog in the low places. The sun lies warm and amber-colored on the hilly surface of San Juan Island, and the Vancouver-Victoria boats gleam white against the blue water of the gulf. On Saturdays, we see the big Empress vessels pass, outward bound to the Orient.
A man said to me, while I was in the East, that I should not write so much about the beauties of the coast, for my readers are for the most part prairie people who are probably thawing out their radiators, shovelling snow or putting turpentine on their chilblains, and therefore in no mood to enjoy the pictures I draw of green fields and rippling seas.
My eastern friend is wrong. I know the prairie people. They are the real beauty lovers! Never have they grown cold to beauty, nor ever faltered in their devotion. They like to know that somewhere the sunlight falls on grassy meadows and skylarks are singing in January.
Life has its great compensations; and if the seasons are short on the prairie, the people’s memories are long, and their hearts responsive. They do not begrudge anyone their mead of lovely things.
The most appreciative letters I get are from the people who have seen their own gardens cut off in their very prime by a killing frost. Now they are glad to hear about other people’s flowers. They like to read of the lapping of the sea on the gravelly beach, the skimming of the gulls or even the agonized note of the foghorn. They have enough imagination to make it real.
People who are not able to go to town themselves are glad to have a description of the shops. Today, I went in on the bus, enjoying every green field we passed; the crowds of people on the side roads, waiting to be picked up — women with baskets and string bags, men with library books in shawl-straps, even the dogs that tried to enter the bus and had to be turned back. Some of the women had thoughtfully brought a child to take the dog home, lovely children, almost as red-cheeked as the apples they were eating.
In town, I saw the baskets of statice, sea lavender and everlastings, in crimson and mauve and yellow; bouquets of honesty, shining white and pure, with its strangely spiritual air of something that does not quite belong to earth.
“We are shipping many of these winter bouquets to the prairie,” one of the women told me. “That’s where they are appreciated.”
“I wish every last family there had a wreath of holly and a basket this year,” she said.
I knew, of course, that she had been one of the women who had wrapped her plants in newspapers and carried them from east to west window to catch every gleam of winter sunshine. And so she was. Transplanted just a year ago from Saskatchewan, and lonely for her old neighbours. “Every lovely thing I see, I want to send them!” she said.
I came home on the late bus, through the clear moonlight and sat with one of the neighbours who was born here and had never been away for more than a week, and loves every hill and valley.
“It’s the country that binds one’s heart,” she said. “Cities are much the same, by what I hear, just brick and mortar, and elevators and plate glass, and strange people hurrying, and no one caring about you, or anything. The city seems a cold, hard, noisy place, and a day in it is long enough for me.
“Stanley Baldwin says the country is what he thinks of when he thinks of England. He grieves, he says, to see her fields converted into towns. I feel the same. Now, take this road that is being built to the top of Mount Douglas. It will bring many strangers into our neighbourhood, foreign cars and trippers.”
Lights glittered from the windows of the houses below us as we ran along the high road at Cedar Hill. The air was mild and balmy as it is in spring, and the wide valley below us was lovely in the moonlight.
I was the last passenger on the bus, and when I was let down at Lantern Lane, I stood a while to enjoy the beauty of the night. The stars hung low, glittering in the cloudless sky, and the road running down to the sea was a ribbon of silver. There were a few throaty sounds from the night birds, and far away, the barking of a dog.
Then I turned and walked up the lane, in the mellow beam of the Lantern (which had been lighted because I was coming home) and I know that it is this light, this home-light, shining for you or for me across the world, which makes all lights brighter, all burdens lighter, sweeter, all scenes lovelier, and it does not matter whether it shines down a country lane that is bordered with cherry trees or gleams from the front window of a little apartment in a crowded, noisy city, or cuts through the dusty atmosphere of the wind-swept prairie.
