The Toronto Book of Love by Adam Bunch

Author:Adam Bunch [Bunch, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Canada / General
ISBN: 9781459746695
Publisher: Dundurn
Published: 2020-12-14T00:00:00+00:00

23

THE SECRETS OF JALNA

With the jingle of sleigh bells came the first hint her life was about to change forever. Right up until that moment in the winter of 1886, Maisie had been a very lonely little girl. Her father was a travelling salesman, rarely home. Her mother was desperately ill, confined to her bed after a crippling case of scarlet fever, her chronic sickness hanging over the house like death. Even when they were all living there at her grandparents’ house in Newmarket, with plenty of adults around, little Maisie was mostly left to her own devices. She became a voracious reader, devouring books like Through the Looking Glass, Oliver Twist, and Little Women (though she liked Little Men better), and spent long hours developing her own rich fantasy world. She called it “The Play”: a fictional universe populated by pirates, explorers, and soldiers; a detailed dream world she would act out every day, bringing the characters to life all by herself, making those lonely hours a little less lonely. But that changed with the sound of the sleigh bells. A bay mare trotted up the snowy driveway pulling a big red sled, and her uncle George walked through the front door carrying something bundled up in shawls.

That something, it turned out, was another little girl. Her cousin, Caroline Clement.

“Although I did not realize it at the time,” Maisie would write decades later, “or for many years afterward, that January day was the most important day of my life.”

Clement would become her adopted sister and her best friend, welcomed into her fantasy world. “I have a secret,” Maisie told her on the first day they met. “My play I call it. But now it must be our play.”

There were six characters at first, all men and boys, but in time the dream world expanded to include more than a hundred different people, all meticulously imagined down to the smallest detail. They became a second life for the girls. “As we grew to know them better, we ceased to act them,” Maisie explained in her autobiography. “We were them. When surrounded by other people we strained toward the moment when we could be alone together. Then, at once, magic enveloped us. The outside world became unreal. The vivid reality was our Play.”

Their imaginations helped bond the two youngsters for life, even as they and their families moved around Ontario, eventually settling in Toronto. Bound together as girls, they became inseparable partners for the rest of their lives.

Maisie Roche’s imagination continued to fuel her through her teenage years. And even as adults, she and Caroline kept building upon their fictional world. Eventually, it fed into Maisie’s work. By 1927, they were living in a boarding house on Yorkville Avenue as she put the finishing touches on her latest novel. Maisie Roche had become an author, giving herself the more poetic name of Mazo de la Roche.

Her new novel was the story of the Whiteoaks, a rich Ontario family who lived on a thousand-acre estate called Jalna.

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