19.04.1933 Qualicum Beach Hotel, Qualicum Beach, Vancouver Island
Beloved Mamma,
Your letter of the 31st of March arrived a couple of days ago, on the last day of the Easter House Party, together with all the extracts, or rather specimens of other people’s correspondence. It’s now Wednesday and everyone went away yesterday morning, including nearly all the team, but there are six of us still here for a rest and to do follow up work. Violet Grimshaw, Julia op ten Noort (Dutch)* and self, with Thompey, Don Mackay and Gerry Senior, oh and Hallan Viney. 3 of them are going to stay in Victoria for a bit and the rest of us are going back to Vancouver. Our little team has been supplemented I’m glad to say by an older woman called Mrs Sanderson, besides those extra ones mentioned above, so it won’t be quite such a one man job.
We had the most marvellous Easter. It was a wonderful day with blue sky and a wonderful view over the bay, looking across to snowy mountains and blue hills. It’s far more like England in many ways than the places we’ve been in, in that it sometimes rains, and the birds sing very like the English ones, and there are flowering currants and daffodils outside the hotel, which stands on a little hill sloping down to a golf course, with the sea beyond. There are occasional anomalies such as humming birds and Indian totem poles, but the whole effect is very calm and soothing. Well, as I was saying, Easter Sunday was a perfect day although it started with a drizzle, and we all went round to Frank’s sitting room for a team meeting to find that in his wonderfully childlike way he’d concocted a fable about the alleged visit of the Easter Rabbit, and what had passed between them, ending with the distribution of Easter eggs. Each girl had a basket with a chicken on top and each boy had an egg with his name on in icing, and to as many as possible were attached appropriate rhymes. So we sang “Happy Easter to you” as a token of our gratitude. It goes to the tune of “Good morning dear teacher” which Val can sing you any time, and then all went down to Easter Communion service.
Then at eleven we had an Easter service, prefaced by the team singing “Happy Easter to you” to the House Party as a whole. A converted Roman Catholic ex-drunken stockbroker read the first lesson, and a small boy of about 11 read the 2nd. It being the holidays there were a good many small boys there, many of whom got as changed as it’s possible for them to get. That’s to say, they started having quiet times and returning things they’d pinched from people, and apologising to their mothers, and generally grasped the principle of the whole thing at once, with the most refreshing directness. Talking of children, I was left in charge of one of 3 ½ the other day while her mother was in a meeting, and she had a pair of galoshes over her shoes which were each decorated with a bow, and she started being incredibly tiresome about making me arrange the bows so that they showed and then so that they didn’t, and then pushing them in again until finally I got bored, and said we’d stop doing that, but she was quite unimpressed and went on doing it. So I remembered being told that children of any age grasp the idea of doing what God wants them to do. So, on spec, I said, “Well, do you think God would like that bow to be in or out?” and without a moment’s hesitation she replied, “In” and pushed it in and left it in. It really was staggering because I’ve never had any religious dealings with children on this trip, and didn’t know what their reactions would be, although I’d heard innumerable stories about how naturally they realise what it’s all about, and it was tremendous fun.
At that point I went to sleep in the sun, and it’s now the next day.
On Sunday afternoon I was suddenly rushed off to speak at a meeting, and then went to tea with the parents of the child I was looking after; there were two other delightful children there too and I scrounged some of the team Easter eggs and took them to them. So we had an uproarious tea party and I only just got back in time for the evening meeting. There was a perfectly wonderful sunset, all orange, of the kind one doesn’t see at home, with the pine trees looking very black against it, and the bay looking shiny and orange and very flat. I can’t tell how glorious it was, and a very good end to Easter. Looking back, I don’t say much about the service, but it was a very good one, and tremendously impressive. So I shall go on to Monday which was nothing particular and then Tuesday when everyone left.
The Hotel is owned by a retired general called Money and he and his son run it, and they invited any of us who wanted to stay on as their guests. They were awfully nice, and incredibly sporting about putting people up because the hotel proper only has accommodation for about 50 people, as it’s quite small, but there are various annexes and houses in the villages, so when the hotel got swamped, which it did practically at once, they set to and procured every spare bed in Qualicum, had 22 young men staying in their house at the rate of 6 in the General’s study, about a dozen on the verandah, and the rest in spare beds in the house. Another house had people staying in the garage and the pantry, and people were farmed out in the little log huts used by motorists passing through on the cheap; these have 2 rooms, a living room with a stove and bedroom at the back, and other people were put up all over the village by kindly people, so that everyone managed to get fitted in, which was remarkable because hordes of them simply turned up without making any reservations, very often last thing at night, and expected accommodation. I believe 500 people passed through the house party during the weekend.
Well, as I was saying, we all stayed on as guests of the Moneys and on Wednesday morning they procured a couple of horses and Don and I rode. The horse coper turned out to be a Middlesbrough born man, we so we made great friends, and he took us all through the bush as it’s called out here – it’s really forest with enormous pine trees, and had a most glorious ride. That evening was Don’s birthday, so the kind Moneys, having heard of it at the last moment, asked us all down to dinner at their house, and produced a cake with candles and we dug up various silly presents and packed them in an enormous box, which he opened in the intervals of the meal, after which we played games, guessing and otherwise, till about 10.30.
There’s a daughter called Mary Money , who spent two years in Kendal not long ago and of course knows all the Somervells, particularly the Arnolds, which was amusing.
Today, Thursday, the General took some of us to try and see some eagles who nest quite near here, but they weren’t at home, so we went down on to the beach and looked at the seals instead. It is a beautiful bit of country here – miles and miles of smooth sand with shingle peninsular jutting out ending in lowish rounded rocks on which the seals come and sun themselves; enormous pine trees and jungly sort of growth come right down to the edge of the beach, and wherever one looked round the horizon there were blue misty mountains with snowy ones behind. The seals don’t come on to the sand at all but General Money had some binoculars and we sat on a bit of driftwood in the sun, and watched them swimming lazily about, and poking their silky heads up out of the water. Everything was quite still and there was practically no sound at all except the waves breaking very gently in the beach, and we sat and revelled in it.
But all good things come to an end, and as we were going for a picnic we had to go. The picnic party consisted of all of us – Gordon Money the son, Helen Wilson his betrothed, Mary Money his sister and two other girls, and we all went off in 2 cars to Englishman River which is about 15 miles off.
This is a very different place from rather dismal Victoria, as it’s very beautiful and practically uninhabited. Land is very cheap, about a dollar an acre, maximum, 5 dollars, and there are practically no laws. Anyone can build anything except a hotel, anywhere he likes, but the expense of clearing the ground stops most people, as one has to blast the stumps of the trees, which grow very close together. Living is cheap. £400 a year is wealth, and quite sizeable houses only cost about £600, and as everyone helps everyone else, either by barter or financially, no one starves. Nearly everyone is English born so one hardly hears a Canadian accent, and when one does it’s often very anglicised, but it’s distinctly a backwater.
Still Canada has immense possibilities when one considers that its total population is only a million more than that of London, while 2/3 of the population of British Columbia live in in Vancouver and Victoria. Parts of Canada are practically uninhabitable of course, but there’s still lots of room, and very few taxes, so when we’re pauperised we’d better come out here. It certainly has the merit of beauty, and Englishman River was no exception. We all lay on a sandy spit in the sun, and ate sandwiches, and lay about and talked most of the afternoon. The men evolved a plan of making a dam across the river, which comes straight off the mountain and is all glacier water, and there was quite a bit of quiet fun watching them fall in, either wholly or partially. Gerry Senior had to be taken home wrapped in a rug, and the others in varying degrees of wetness, but they enjoyed themselves frightfully, and the wetter they got the happier they were and the more juvenile they became.
It’s now nearly half past six and most of them have gone over to the Moneys for tea, but as we’re going to start for Vancouver at 6.0am tomorrow I thought this would probably be my last opportunity of finishing this.
Oh, I know what I forgot to say. On Tuesday Lydi de Trey, Charlie Kirkham, Eleanor Gairdner with her young man Hugh Senior (George’s brother) left for England, these latter to be married, and a youth called Cuthbert Bardsley. They’re sailing in the Berengaria in which we came over, and Hugh has my skates, which he and Eleanor are going to try to return sometime and call on you. But as they’re going to be married in the beginning of June, and haven’t yet started doing anything about it, they won’t have an awful lot of time.
Godfather and Clare are going home in May, so I shall come with them as it seemed a pity to miss the follow up work in Vancouver which I’ve never done before. The rest of the team are quite vague about their movements, and we may not even join them again at all, but it’s fearfully interesting working in such a small team as this, because the responsibility falls on everyone alike which it indeed should do on a large team, but somehow it doesn’t to the same degree.
That’s all my news for the moment. It’s awfully inadequate I’m afraid and doesn’t a bit describe half the things we’ve done and seen. We seem to go from one beautiful place to another, and each one seems to be the loveliest we’ve yet been in. Harrison seemed exquisite and yet it’s nothing to this, so I can’t begin to think what our next stopping place, if any, will be, before we get home.
What are Biddy’s bridesmaids’ clothes going to be like. ‘Evins it’s nearly her birthday. I shan’t send her a present, it’ll be too near the wedding, but I’ll try and write to her if I can hit off the right mail steamer.
Goodbye dear parents and family. Your loffing Maria
*She later left the Oxford Group and became a leading Nazi
English