She was the house
In the wake of Alice Munro’s departure, I was talking with some writer friends about her impact on us and our writing. I called up a line from Munro’s short story “The Office” that has stayed with me since Mr. Rankin’s grade 12 English class at ADSS:
A man moves through the house, but a woman is the house.
It turns out I’ve carried an edited version around all these years, but the meaning is the same: “She is the house; there is no separation possible.”
Lately I can’t separate my grandmother Bett from the house where she raised her children.
The house in the gap, on the 1500 block of West 8th Avenue, Vancouver.
It’s easy to forget my grandfather lived there too for a while. There isn’t a single picture of him at that house—that’s how quickly he moved through it. My mother had only one memory of him—a tall, handsome man in a uniform striding down the long boardwalk away from the house. “Father” distilled to a single image. Father equals absence. Longing. Goodbye.
My grandmother, though. She was the house.
I’m obsessed with that house. No one ever thought to take a picture of it, but fragments were captured in snapshots of the family.
A corner of it, and the long boardwalk, behind Dora and Bett. After my grandfather left, Dora moved in and helped Bett raise the children. She was a second grandmother to me.
The leaded glass at the top of the bay window on the opposite corner of the house behind Mom, on the left, and her sister Didi.
The picket fence, hipped roof and chimney a backdrop for Bob, Mom’s oldest brother, as he leans on his bike with its wide front basket that carried The Vancouver Sun newspapers he delivered each morning. Bob’s paper route earnings helped support the family after my grandfather left. I didn’t know we were poor, Mom would say.
I’ve tried to sketch the house by piecing together the fragments in the photos. I’m no artist, as you can see.
Built in 1911, the house typifies Vancouver’s early cottages. The Vancouver Heritage Foundation website describes that architectural style like this:
The Early Cottage (1890-1925) is a slightly more substantial version of Vancouver’s earliest cabins and shacks. Small but practical, most early cottages are single storey with eaves that flare at the ends (known as bell-cast eaves) and a relatively low roof pitch.
In most cases the attic space is so cramped as to be useless, but a few have steeper-pitched roofs that shelter narrow upstairs rooms lit dimly by the dormers. The front edge of the roof is supported typically by four square posts, although sometimes even small houses have more ornate grouped turned columns.
Vancouver examples almost invariably have a bay window on one side of the front façade with the front door offset a little from the centre. Some have a cutaway front porch occupying only half the facade’s width, providing more enclosed living space behind the bay window. Inside, a parlour, kitchen and eating area occupy the bay-window side of the main hallway, while bedrooms and a bathroom occupy the other.
These homes are simple and unassuming from the street, with very little ornamentation. However, the common clapboard siding and the occasional presence of dentil molding gives them added levels of charm.
A few years before Mom died I asked her to draw the 8th Avenue house so I could have a clearer picture of it in my mind. I recorded her voice as she sketched a front view and a floor plan. This is not to scale, obviously. Self-conscious about her clumsy lines, she kept scribbling them out and drawing over them.
The boardwalk went all the way from the street to the back of the house. In the fall, when Mom would have a load of firewood delivered, I’d help Bob and Walter carry it from the curb, and we’d stack it in the crawlspace amongst all the bloody spiders.
She remembered every corner. The shelf in the back of the closet where she crouched behind my grandmother’s dresses playing hide-and-seek with Didi. Her brother Walter’s sweaty sneakers on the back porch next to the icebox. But she couldn’t get the picture on the paper to align with the one that was still so vivid in her mind.
I know the pictures in my mind don’t align with the reality of the house on 8th, or my grandmother’s life. And it’s her life I am truly obsessed with.
She left England alone in 1926, at 19. Her mother’s sister Gladys, who had married a Canadian soldier and emigrated to Canada, sponsored her through an immigration program under the Empire Settlement Act. On paper, Bett was to be a domestic servant. I’d give anything to know her plans and dreams. She went to live with Gladys and her husband Percy in the tiny community of Arrow Park in the BC interior, where he taught all grades in a one-room school. Was she their domestic servant, or did she get a job with a family in Arrow Park? I don’t know. Eight months later, she was pregnant—a situation Percy and his schoolteacher reputation couldn’t tolerate. Gladys accompanied Bett to Vancouver and “dumped her” there, in my mother’s words. I believe she stayed at the Salvation Army Rescue Home for unwed mothers—which coincidentally was just a few blocks from the house Bett eventually lived in on 8th Avenue. I think the rescue home is where she met Dora, but I haven’t been able to prove that yet. I may never be able to prove it.
Dora’s baby was born in December 1927. A few weeks later, on February 11, 1928, Bett’s baby was born at the Salvation Army’s brand new Grace Hospital.
In my imagination, Bett and Dora—who became friends instantly in part because they were born about 30 miles from each other, in Staffordshire, which would likely mean a lot to two young women an ocean away from home and desperately alone—are out for a walk while staying at the rescue home. They pass a cottage on the 1500 block of West 8th, tucked away at the back of the lot.
“Look at that sweet little house,” one of them might have said to the other. “We could rent that place and raise our babies there.”
But they didn’t raise their babies, not the ones they were pregnant with in 1927. Those babies were lost.
Eventually they raised four children together in that house. The house in the gap.
That house, to me, is a portal. If I could stand inside it and listen to the stories its walls could tell, I know they would tell me about my grandmother Bett.
She was the house.
14 Responses to “She was the house”
I love how you are rewriting this story with the yearning of Bett and Dora raising thier two lost children together. My heart aches for those children, and for those women, all of them, who were stigmatized and had to give up their babies. heartbreaking…and yet what a beautiful healing to eventually live together and support each other. Life is full of mystery and wonder. I can see why you would be obsessed.
And yes Alice nailed it.
Life certainly is full of mystery and wonder! Thanks, Joan.
The fragments you’ve put together… both in words and pictures, from memories and photos, of a house and lives. So beautiful. I loved reading this. What a tribute.
Thanks, Carin!
This is so vivid and remarkable, Leslie. On its way to being something larger, I hope. A chapter? A section?
Thank you, Theresa. Yes, it’s definitely part of something bigger. Just what that something is I’m not sure yet, but I’ll write my way into knowing.
So beautifully written and utterly captivating. You have the beginning of something wonderful here. I wish you success both in your writing and in your quest to find your aunt or uncle.
Thanks so much, Sandi.
Thanks so much for sharing such a beautiful, touching tribute to your grandmother. She had so much courage. Please continue to write about her and her family. Stories like hers should never be lost and it is so captivating.
Thanks so much, Sue. I’ll definitely continue writing about her.
I pray for your quest to find your loved ones !!
love always
Thank you!
Oh my gosh, what a fascinating story. I lived on West 8th Ave while I was going to uni in Vancouver. Not far from St. Augustine’s, but long enough ago that I cannot remember the address. What you’re doing here is keeping your grandmother’s spirit alive. I just love that. I wish you all the best.❤️
Thanks so much, Bev.