House of Dreams, Page 2

  The real-life companion of Maud’s earliest childhood was her father, Hugh John. Maud worshipped him. He was gentle and merry, and he told delightful stories — like the one about his father’s spotted china dogs coming to life at midnight. Maud’s father praised and petted her and, unlike the Macneills, expressed himself in ways that were openly affectionate. Hugh John called her his “little Maudie,” and in return she loved him unconditionally.

  Years later she wrote, “I loved my father very very deeply. He was the most lovable man I ever knew.” Hugh John Montgomery was childlike in his aversion to unpleasantness. Father and daughter clung to each other in a bewildering world. In her journal entry of May 3, 1908, she wrote,

  I think now that grandfather and grandmother resented this very love of mine for him. They saw that I did not turn to them with the outgush of affection I gave him. And it was true — I did not. But it was their own fault. I know now that they loved me after a fashion. But they never expressed or showed that love in word or action. I never thought they loved me. I felt that the only person in the world who loved me was father. Nobody else ever kissed and caressed me and called me pet names. So I gave all my love to him in those years. And my grandparents did not like it. They thought that, as they were giving me a home and food and clothes and care that I ought to have loved them best.

  Little Maud was a moody, active, clever, and excitable child. None of these qualities were valued by the stern Macneills. Maud yearned for open expressions of tenderness — as when a family friend, looking in on her one night, murmured, “dear little child,” a phrase Maud remembered and cherished all her life. Displays of overt affection like these were rare. “And I loved such expression. I craved it. I have never forgotten it.”

  There is no doubt that Maud’s grandmother loved her. Lucy Macneill was the central figure in Maud’s life. Grandmother Macneill stood up to her husband on Maud’s behalf, defied convention for her granddaughter’s sake, spent her own pocket money for Maud’s benefit, and fought to make sure the girl got a good education. She did all these things at a time when such behavior was the exception, not the rule. Lucy Macneill took excellent care of Maud materially — she was a famed housekeeper with skills at cooking, cleaning, and handicrafts — but emotionally and intellectually they remained miles apart.

  It was as difficult for Grandmother Macneill as it was natural for Hugh John to openly express affection. But while Maud easily forgave her father many failings, she judged her grandmother harshly. Only in fiction, in the much-altered character of Marilla Cuthbert, did Maud ever celebrate her grandmother’s good qualities: her reliability, self-sacrifice, her steadfast attention.

  There is a little-known episode in Maud’s early childhood, touched on in her Autobiographical Sketches, that suggests that once upon a time, Grandmother Macneill did hold a treasured place in her heart. At age five Maud burned herself with a poker, and the next day fell ill with typhoid fever. The doctor declared she would not survive the week. Grandmother Macneill was summoned at once.

  The high-strung little girl threw herself at her grandmother. In fact, Maud was “so delighted to see her that the excitement increased my fever to an alarming pitch.” In an effort to calm his daughter, Hugh John fibbed that her grandmother had gone home, and over the next feverish days Maud believed that the elderly woman hovering anxiously was not her grandmother at all, but one of the housekeepers. Only when she was well enough to sit up by herself did she see that Grandmother Lucy Macneill remained at her side. Maud wrote, “I . . . could not bear to be out of her arms. I kept stroking her face constantly and saying in amazement and delight, ‘Why you’re not Mrs. Murphy, after all; you are Grandma.’”

  Not long after Maud’s bout with typhoid fever, Grandmother Lucy Macneill became the little girl’s chief caretaker. Grandmother was stern and rule-bound. Her child-rearing techniques seemed to Maud hopelessly old-fashioned. Over the next few years all the burden of parenting fell upon Grandmother Macneill. Hugh John ventured farther and farther afield into Western Canada in search of business. The once-adoring relationship vanished without a trace.

  At first Hugh John made visits home to see his little daughter. But by the time Maud turned seven, her father had moved to far-off Saskatchewan, and the elderly Macneills had taken on the full care of their granddaughter.

  Maud hid the shock and disappointment of her father’s abandonment and redirected her rage where it could safely rest, with her ever-vigilant, elderly grandparents. Not then or later did Maud utter a word against her “darling” father, Hugh John. Quite the opposite — she created a loving portrait of the absent father that has bewildered every biographer.

  It didn’t help that prickly Grandfather Macneill openly opposed the new childcare arrangement, or that he was so often at odds with his talkative, temperamental granddaughter. Alexander Macneill shrank from the world; Maud craved sociability. He scorned her flights of imagination, scoffed at her ambitions, and insisted a woman’s place was in the home.

  Grandmother Lucy Macneill, caught between these two strong personalities, had to play the peacemaker — she worked hard to restore order and balance to her granddaughter’s life. Trying to play fair, she pleased neither.

  Maud knew that her grandmother meant well, “but her love never had the slightest saving grace of understanding,” and so, she once wrote, “had no power to draw us together.” Maud had been orphaned by one parent and abandoned by the other. Another child might have been farmed out to foster care, shuttled from house to house, or sent to an orphanage, but Maud had a secure roof over her head, plenty of good food, all the material advantages at her grandparents’ disposal.

  The Macneills’ house was one of the nicest old homes in Cavendish. Cherry and apple orchards bloomed each June, and the fruit ripened each fall. The other children brought their simple lunches to school in tin pails; Maud came home at noon and dined with her grandparents. Many children could not afford shoes even in the harsh Canadian winter; Maud wore sturdy leather boots that were the envy of all the other girls. Maud admitted, “Materially, I was well cared for . . . It was emotionally and socially that my nature was starved and restricted.”

  Maud’s relatives constantly reminded her that she should be grateful for her good fortune. She was a charity case. She should act thankful for the roof over her head. Nothing Maud did escaped public notice, and more would be expected of her than of any mere mortal.

  The Macneill farm sat just outside the limits of Cavendish, a seaside village of close-knit connections. The whole settlement was about three miles long and one mile wide. Cavendish lay on the rural north shore of Prince Edward Island, eleven miles from a railway station and twenty-four miles from Charlottetown. Maud considered Cavendish the most beautiful place on earth. In one rare case of understatement she called it “a good place in which to spend a childhood. I can think of none better.”

  In an early diary entry, Maud noted,

  Away down beyond the brown fields lay the sea, blue and sparkling, dotted by crests of foam. The walk in the fresh moist spring air was lovely and when I got down to the shore and climbed out on a big rock I just held my breath with delight. . . . To my left extended the shining curve of the sand shore; and on my right were rugged rocks with little coves, where the waves swished on the pebbles. I could have lingered there for hours and watched the sea with the gulls soaring over it.

  One can hear in the voice of the teenage Maud the stirrings of the brilliant descriptive writer that she would become.

  Maud was fiercely passionate about Cavendish, her childhood home base. However much she might privately criticize the village, she never let an outsider say a word against it. No place was harder to leave. None moved her so powerfully. “It is and ever must be hallowed ground to me,” she declared. Maud knew each field and hill, the fruit orchards, groves from which the children would gather chews of spicy spruce gum. “I was very near to a kingdom of ideal beauty,” she claimed.

  During Maud’s y
outh, Prince Edward Island was a tightly knit place, home to one hundred thousand people. It was the smallest of Canada’s provinces, an outlying region glimmering off the eastern shore of New Brunswick. As far as Maud was concerned, Prince Edward Island remained “the most beautiful place in America.”

  Very rarely as a young child did Maud ever venture beyond the outskirts of tiny Cavendish. Her grandparents were dedicated homebodies, and over the years they withdrew still more. A trip to Charlottetown, less than twenty-five miles away, “was a very rare treat, once in three years, and loomed up in about the same proportions of novelty, excitement, and delight as a trip to Europe would now.”

  It was on one such rare trip to Charlottetown that the four-year-old Maud managed to escape her grandparents for a few minutes. While Grandmother and Grandfather Macneill engaged in conversation, Maud seized her chance to explore the street alone. She was amazed to see a woman shaking out her rugs from “the top of a house.” She chatted briefly with a strange girl with black eyes and black braids and felt she had had an extraordinary adventure.

  Family visits to Maud’s uncle John’s and aunt Annie Campbell’s house at nearby Park Corner happened perhaps once or twice in a year. These visits, too, Maud treasured as a welcome escape from the dour Macneill home. Maud found her first companionship at Park Corner. Here lived a “trio of merry cousins,” including her younger cousin Frede Campbell, who later became Maud’s closest friend, “my more than sister, the woman who was nearest and dearest to me in the world!”

  There was no stiffness or formality at Park Corner, where the “heart-hungry” girl found warmth and laughter, and creature comforts — including “a famous old pantry, always stored with goodies” the cousins would raid at night, devouring “unholy snacks with sounds of riot and mirth.” The big white house charmed Maud, with its nooks and cupboards and “unexpected flights of stairs.” The Campbell cousins stayed awake till all hours, playing games, cracking nuts, telling jokes and stories. Uncle John and Aunt Annie joined in the merriment. Maud wrote, “I love the old spot better than any place on earth.”

  Maud’s joy was nourished at lively Park Corner, but her soul was forged in the quiet sobriety of the Macneill homestead in Cavendish. It remained her house of dreams, her measure for all else. “Were it not for those Cavendish years . . . I do not think Anne of Green Gables would ever have been written,” she declared. Her childhood home brought a checkered happiness, to be sure, but she clung to it passionately. “The only home my inmost soul would ever acknowledge would be that little country settlement by the gulf shore. . . .”

  Maud had a fierce determination to be happy, even as a child who had tasted tragedy young. She loved to laugh and be “merry” — one of her favorite words. She had a genius for finding the fun in every situation. When there was no human company, she invented it — in the form of her imaginary friends, and in the natural beauty all around her. She was especially fond of trees, and gifted them with names and personalities. “If I believe seriously in the doctrine of transmigration,” she once wrote to a friend, “I should think I had been a tree in some previous stage of existence.”

  “I like things to have handles,” she admitted — even something as humble as a potted geranium. Like her famous heroine Anne, Maud named every loved object from earliest childhood. She gave the trees in her grandparents’ yard fanciful names: Little Syrup, the White Lady, the Monarch of the Forest. At times her vivid imagination ran away with her: a scalloped glass vase seemed to have a terrifying expression, and Maud once fancied all the chairs in her grandmother’s dim parlor were dancing around the table making faces at her.

  Maud had cats for company as well. All her life she owned at least one. Later, she autographed her books with a drawing of a black cat underneath her signature. “You are never poor,” she declared, “as long as you’ve got something to love.” When she wasn’t busy with imaginary friends, Maud played with her kittens. Her first two cats were Pussywillow and Catkins. When Pussywillow was a kitten she ate some rat poison and died. Five-year-old Maud was heartbroken; her grandparents could not understand the little girl’s wild grief. At that moment, suffering and death became real for Maud. Maud wrote that she had been “a happy, unconscious little animal. From that time I began to have a soul.”

  By the time Maud entered the local one-room schoolhouse at age six, she had mastered two accomplishments. She could wiggle her ears, and she could read. There is no record of how the schoolmaster regarded the first trick, but he was clearly impressed by the second. He marched Maud to the front of the classroom and admonished the older children, “This little girl is much younger than you and already she can read better than any of you.”

  But her pride was quickly thrown down. On her second day of school, she arrived late and had to enter the schoolroom alone. She was keenly aware of everyone staring. “Very shyly I slipped in and sat down beside a ‘big girl.’ At once a wave of laughter rippled over the room. I had come in with my hat on.” Even writing about it forty years later, “the fearful shame and humiliation I endured at that moment rushes over me again. I felt that I was a target for the ridicule of the universe. Never, I felt certain, could I live down such a dreadful mistake. I crept out to take off my hat, a crushed morsel of humanity.”

  Nor was this the last time that Maud would feel publicly humiliated.

  I remember one winter I was sent to school wearing a new style of apron. I think still that it was rather ugly. Then I thought it was hideous. It was a long, sack-like garment, with sleeves. Nobody in school had ever worn aprons with sleeves before. . . . One of the girls sneeringly remarked that they were baby aprons. This capped all! . . . To the end of their existence, and they did wear horribly well, those “baby” aprons marked for me the extreme limit of human endurance.

  Readers of Anne of Green Gables will remember Anne’s desperate desire to look fashionable and to wear great “puffed sleeves” like the other girls. Here, as in so much of her work, Maud could draw from the details of her life, turn them upside down (from having to wear “baby sleeves” to longing for puffed sleeves), and invest them with humor and pathos. She never lost her keen sense of the pangs of childhood, later observing in Anne of Windy Poplars, “Isn’t it queer that the things we writhe over at night are seldom wicked things? Just humiliating ones.”

  The one-room Cavendish school was tiny by modern standards. Even the schoolteacher stayed the same from year to year. A newcomer provided an exciting change of pace. Maud once “bought” the rights to sit beside a new girl in school. The cost for a new seatmate was four juicy apples from her grandfather’s orchard. Maud considered this trade a bargain. It turned out that the new pupil was Amanda Macneill, a distant relation known as Mollie, who soon became Maud’s best childhood friend.

  Maud and Mollie were known as a single entity, Mollie-and-Polly. The two little girls’ personalities complemented each other. Maud was intellectual, strong-willed, and high-strung. Mollie was sweet-natured, kind, and easygoing — as gentle as Maud was fierce. Together they made mischief at school, formed clubs with other girls, shared the secrets of their first romances, and clung together through every childhood storm.

  Though Maud seldom admired her Cavendish schoolmasters, she was eager to learn, and could never get enough of books. The setting of the school was a great part of its charm for the girl who spent much of her time gazing out the window. To the west and south spread an old spruce grove, where the children wandered freely at lunchtime and picked chews of gum. “I shall always be thankful that my school was near a grove — a place with winding paths and treasure-trove of ferns and mosses and wood-flowers. It was a stronger and better educative influence in my life than the lessons learned at the desk in the school-house.”

  Teachers, Maud found, were often strict when they should have been kind, and careless when they should have been firm. If the schoolmaster thought you knew the answer, he wouldn’t call on you. If he sensed you were unprepared, he’d pounce. Maud
learned to look reluctant when she really wanted to be called on and knowledgeable when lost.

  Maud longed to bring a lunch pail to school and eat with her school chums, and to run barefoot with the poorer children. Maud felt like an outsider. An orphan — even a semi-orphan like Maud — was an object of general pity, scorn, and distrust. Sometimes she acted superior, but deep down Maud feared she must be unlikable. “I received an impression . . . that everybody disliked me and that I was a very hateful person.” She was cleverer, better fed, and better dressed than many of her school chums — and lonelier.

  Maud’s desires and ambitions seemed suspect to her neighbors and relations. What did she want? What was she up to now? There was money in the Macneill household for leather boots, but little spared for the books Maud craved. Magazines came her way now and then by way of her grandparents’ post office, and the beauty-hungry Maud would pore over those fashion magazines for hours.

  Browsing in the sparse Macneill home library, Maud devoured the Godey’s Lady’s Book and a two-volume red-clothed History of the World. Hans Christian Andersen’s tales provided “a perpetual joy.” But fiction in general was frowned upon as reading material for children. Her grandparents owned only a handful of novels, including Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers, Sir Walter Scott’s Rob Roy, and Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni. Little Maud read these precious, scant volumes so often that before she turned seven she claimed she had memorized entire chapters by heart.

  Luckily, Maud was allowed a good deal of poetry: Shakespeare, Longfellow, Tennyson, Whittier, Scott, Milton, and Burns. But on Sundays even poetry was banned. The only permissible books, besides sermons, were religious tomes.

  Maud’s favorite among these was a thin, preachy volume called A Memoir of Anzonetta R. Peters, about a sickly girl who dies young, speaking only from scriptures and hymns. To imitate her, Maud wrote “hymn after hymn” in her diary, and patterned her own style on Anzonetta’s remarks. Maud wrote that she wished she were “in Heaven now, with Mother . . . and Anzonetta R. Peters.” In fact, she “didn’t really wish it. I only thought I ought to.” Maud tried imitating Anzonetta for a while, but soon gave it up. Anzonetta was voiceless — she spoke only through sacred texts. And Maud knew early on that she longed to express herself through writing. “I cannot remember the time when I was not writing, or when I did not mean to be an author.”