entry dates for any kind of educational institution; she still saw university as the only way to go. But she was left with a year to fill before she could try again and, not incidentally, to decide in which field she wanted to study. Her mind still jumped from art to music. Which field to pursue? How? Where? Even with the support of the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, she was, as always, concerned about money. The government didn’t pay for everything.
For the moment, she was staying with her family in Oshawa, which gave her a roof over her head but also the uncomfortable feeling of not being able to contribute. She had the loner’s passion for independence, to be able to pay her own way, to be in a financial position to make her own decisions independent of anything and anyone else.
Two of her acquaintances, Jean and Jim Stafford, had recently been blessed with twins, and Frances agreed to give the parents some help for a period of three months. The pay? Five dollars per week. For a thirteen-hour day. Almost immediately she regretted the move. “God! I felt like — and was treated like — an au pair!” After three weeks, Frances had a serious discussion with the Staffords, and a new schedule was instituted. She would have the same duties, same pay, but the hours were reduced to five hours a day starting at 8:00 a.m. “Wow,” said Frances, sarcastically, “my hourly rate more than doubled — seven cents an hour to a princely fifteen cents an hour. For heaven’s sake, I knew a fifteen-year-old office boy — a mere gofer — who was making four times that!” And the incredible thing was that the Staffords seemed surprised, even hurt, by Frances’s demands for an increase in pay.
During this period, Frances had been talking to the Oshawa YWCA. An offer of work brought the Stafford situation thankfully to an end, and by the last week in October 1946, Frances was working evenings at the YWCA.
Frances was not one to stand around waiting for someone to tell her what to do. From the outset she became involved with many of the YWCA’s activities. By January 1947, she was the instructor of the sketching class, running the teen centre, giving lectures to women’s groups, and at the same time continuing with her orchestra and choir practices and studying for her chemistry certificate.
Then, on January 20, 1947, there occurred one of those acts, prompted by an inexplicable change in mental state or chemistry, that happens perhaps once or twice in a lifetime. Or was it a rough push from Destiny’s impatient hand? On that fateful morning in January, she took a firm grip on her own bootstraps, and pulled. “Okay, that’s it. Time to cut the procrastinating and get to work.” The next day, she left for Toronto and marched into the office of the registrar of the Ontario College of Art. Later the same day, she sat down with the people from the Department of Veterans’ Affairs and made the decision that would change her life.
The following September she would enroll in the four-year program at the Ontario College of Art.
THE DECISION TO ATTEND THE Ontario College of Art (OCA) only partially solved the problem of Frances’s further education. It would be in the field of art, but as so often happened in Frances’s life, the solution to one problem simply revealed another. She would be studying art, but which branch? Art is a broad field. Her initial leanings were toward portrait painting, but her first year, Foundation Year, introduced her to the wide range of disciplines available to her: painting, yes, in all media, as well as life drawing, architecture, design, lettering, modelling, costumes, and the entire history of art.
At the beginning of 1947, some eight months before her art studies were due to start, and without consciously considering sculpture as her chosen field, Frances nevertheless followed her natural inclination. She began woodcarving, and this occupied much of whatever spare time she had. In the back of her mind there was always the knowledge that she would need every dollar for the years at OCA. The Department of Veterans’ Affairs would pay the tuition, plus a subsistence of sixty dollars a month, but she would have to live in Toronto, and there would be a thousand-and-one minor expenses, day after day, month after month.
March and April saw Frances pushing ahead with her woodcarving, getting her materials and tools together and producing four dog portraits. In May, she placed six dog portraits in Ada Mackenzie’s gallery in Toronto. These were among her first carving efforts. Later she sent six more dog portrait samples to a sales outlet in Mont Tremblant, Quebec. By the end of September 1947, Frances had seen many of her carvings selling briskly in the two outlets she’d chosen. She produced a wide variety of breeds, among which, perhaps for subtle personal public relations purposes, was a carving of the Alsatian belonging to Ada Mackenzie, the gallery owner. Frances sold the carvings for seventy-five dollars each; the sales outlets sold them for whatever the market would bear.
By the middle of August, Frances was preparing to leave home again, this time for “wild” and “sprawling” mid-century Toronto. The city was not as big and cosmopolitan as Montreal, and it was still seven years away from the inauguration of the first subway system in Canada (and even that would only run between the train station and Eglinton Avenue, a distance of less than seven kilometres). North of Eglinton wasn’t quite cattle country, but it was close. And the city was still very much “Toronto the Good.” A quarter of a century would pass before the law would allow you to have a drink on your own front porch, and all you could do on a Sunday was wait for Monday.
But to Frances it was the Big City, and she got lost half a dozen times in her house-hunting which took her all over town, without success. She and an ex-navy friend, Marion Cornett, planned to rent an apartment together. Marion had taken a job with the Telegram, a Toronto newspaper. She was more familiar with the city and quickly found a place in Rosedale, at 181 Crescent Road. “When I went home to our place in Rosedale, I’d take the streetcar,” said Frances. “This was the old streetcar that went up Yonge Street through Hog’s Hollow. In those days the streetcar was heated by a coal stove.” At some point along the way the conductor would stop and stoke up the stove, then continue up Yonge Street.
“When I went to see the rooms, I was sort of disappointed,” said Frances. “They were in the cellar.” A basement apartment was all right with Marion because she simply did not care where she lived. But Frances was different. To her a cellar was miserable — people’s legs going by the window, the atmosphere damp and unappealing. “My slippers became mouldy under the bed. Horrible.” But they had a wonderful landlord, a Mormon. “I heard him one day, hammering a nail. It must have bent or something and he cried ‘Oh! That Free Methodist nail!’ I guess Free Methodists were about the worst thing he could think of.”
The basement apartment was in one of the wonderful old Rosedale mansions which had been “renovated” to accommodate about thirty roomers. The roomers came and went. “There were a bunch of students from Ryerson, and some elderly people down on their luck. They changed all the time.
“And yet, in a way, I liked the basement apartment,” said Frances. “We had our own washroom, even though it was a laundry tub. There was a toilet down there. Beautiful old house. I got to know Rosedale very well because I rode around on a bicycle all the time. It was a bit confusing at first; there didn’t seem to be a straight street in the whole area. We used to have taxi drivers come and ask us where they were.”
Frances was in the Rosedale mansion for all four of her OCA years, first in the basement with Marion, her ex-navy friend. Shortly after moving in together, Marion left to get married, and Frances eventually took a top floor room, smaller but nicer and more convenient.
In that first year, after Marion’s departure, Frances was faced with having to carry the full cost of the basement apartment. She approached Marnie Pond, another first-year student at OCA, with the idea of sharing. “Marnie’s family came from Simcoe. They knew my relatives there, but not to speak to. Unlike the Ponds, my family was not upper class.” Marnie Pond was a strikingly beautiful young woman of
