Mr. O’Connor’s sharp eye had seen something in the young sculptor that no one else had seen; maybe he had looked into a little heart and seen what might yet be. Or maybe he was just a nice man who was touched by the expression of loss on the girl’s face when he told her of the accident. A few days later, he arrived on Frances’s doorstep with a small package of Sovereign Potteries’ clay. The real thing! She was beyond words. This was the purest clay, used for fine porcelain.
Mr. O’Connor’s considerate gesture made a profound impression on the girl. “I did some marvellous things with that clay,” said Frances.
Her father threw them in the furnace.
“One of them was a horse’s head,” Frances said. “I was very fond of horses. It was one of the things my father threw in the furnace. I found it when I was cleaning out the clinkers. That was one of my chores, sifting the ashes to retrieve unburned coal.
“My mother used to say ‘Everything you do is so messy!’ My parents were brought up in farming communities where everything had to be tidy and have a reason. No one would ever sit down and do anything that lacked a purpose because there was always something constructive to do. You shelled peas or knitted something for the baby or tilled your soil. Because of my family’s background, it was a surprise to them that I would do something as ‘silly’ as become an artist. But I did it.”
Both of Frances’s grandmothers may have provided a genetic artistic background. Her father’s mother had wanted to be a painter but in those days farmers’ wives didn’t do what they wanted, they did what the farm, and their husbands, demanded. However, her husband died young, and she took up painting. Her work showed a certain facility, and with professional training she might easily have produced some noteworthy canvases. Frances’s grandmother on her mother’s side took the literary route, writing poetry. She wrote of her desire to walk in the woods instead of immersing herself in the unending work of the house, animals, and children.
Away from the fly-sweep, an hour let it rest,
the woods are calling me.
While memory fails where the flies are a pest,
the woods are calling me.
How could I live in the great busy town,
‘thout the breath of the wildwood and leaves fluttering down,
The great trees might miss me if I wasn’t around,
the woods are calling me.1
From early days in Hamilton the family moved to Oshawa. Here Frances attended King Street School and ultimately the Oshawa Collegiate and Vocational Institute, where her growing artistic talents were recognized and encouraged by her art teacher, Dorothy Van Luven. Frances graduated from Oshawa Collegiate in 1944, and won the award for Most Outstanding Girl of the School.
Friends indirectly fostered Frances’s own artistic inclination. Una Brown Noble, a neighbour and a painter, became a great friend. For two summers, in 1934 and 1935, she took Frances to Algonquin Park, the beautiful nature reserve 145 kilometres north of Oshawa, Ontario. “I don’t know why anybody would want to be bothered by a scruffy little kid hanging around all the time,” said Frances, “but she did.” Una Noble had a small cottage on Canoe Lake, where memories of the painter Tom Thomson’s death were still fresh. But Frances’s intimate contact with Thomson was still twenty years in the future. As an eleven-year-old girl vacationing with her friend, she spent six to eight weeks in Algonquin Park during those two wonderful summers. It was her first contact with the park, a contact she was later to renew for many years as a counsellor at a summer camp.
Una Noble died of kidney failure at the age of thirty-nine. This was the first big tragedy in Frances’s life. Her mother said, “Never mind, you’ll see her in Heaven.” This did little to relieve Frances. “Yeah, but I might be eighty and she’ll still be thirty-nine!” she wailed. “What kind of a relationship will we have?!”
Up to this point in her life, Frances felt a lack of what she called “structure.” There seemed an absence of organization in her days; all things seemed unplanned, without scope or goals. She felt, not so much a need for someone to tell her what to do and when, but rather recognizable rules to which she might willingly adhere, rules that had a sound reason behind them.
The summer of 1943, the year before she graduated, she worked at odd jobs here and there. But she sensed that nothing had changed; she was drifting, directionless. She worked for a while in the Ontario Parks and Recreation Department and found some of the structure she lacked.
Early in the war, if a young person did well in school they were allowed to work on a farm, so she worked for the Ontario Farm Service for part of that summer. Here, also, she found that structure. She was told to get up at 5:00 a.m., pack her lunch, and go out into the fields. She would return at noon and actually catch an hour’s sleep because it was such hard work, but she found it immensely satisfying. Later, she worked for E.D. Smith, grafting, planting, and filling orders for fruit trees, and not incidentally discovering a lifelong passion for trees, plants, and all growing things. She was taught to care for plants, and learned the names of trees; she felt she was learning and doing something useful, both for herself and for others. She was finding new dimensions within herself, and she loved it.
On the heels of self-discovery came a degree of confidence and determination. Germany still controlled Europe, Japanese forces were spreading across the Pacific, and the Normandy landings were still a year away. Frances celebrated her nineteenth birthday that summer, and with that milestone the future opened before her. When she graduated in 1944 she made her decision.
She joined the navy.
1 Laura Kelly Collver. Independently published, posthumously, circa 1940.
2 A SAILOR’S DAYS AND POLITICAL NIGHTS
BY THE SUMMER OF 1942, the tragedy that was the Battle of Britain had passed, at heartbreaking cost, and England was still there, though standing on the edge of the abyss. The war brought a lack of manpower in many essential areas. The WRCNS, or Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service, was formed to assume the roles men were not available to perform. While many in those years would have looked puzzled if you mentioned the WRCNS, the affectionate sobriquet “Wren” was immediately recognized. Thousands of Canadian women answered the call, and by the time the service was disbanded in August 1946, nearly 7,000 young Wrens had taken over such jobs as sick bay attendant, cook, mail sorter, truck or ambulance driver, radar operator, and, in Frances’s case, telegrapher (communications). And these were just a few of the dozens of services provided by the Wrens. The young ladies earned — and earned is the very word; they earned their pay — about one-third the money paid their fellow (male) sailors. It was felt, in those misguided days, that it took three women to do the work of one man, an assumption the Wrens quickly disproved.
The Ontario government had provided a school in Galt for the use of the new women’s naval service, and by the close of 1942, the initial contingent of Wrens had arrived. In June 1943, the training base was commissioned HMCS Conestoga, under the command of the executive officer, Lieutenant H.M. Macdonald, and quickly acquired the nickname “The Stone Frigate.”
Marjorie Jordan, one of Frances’s old friends and an officer in the Wrens, had persuaded Frances that the navy was the best of the services, and Frances was easily convinced. Marjorie was a very attractive woman, and even more so in her smart uniform.
Life in the navy gave Frances more of the structure she did not see in her life at home. She was never keen about being
