Sharing our stories WELCOME We each have cast back to the writings of some ancients. He to the myths of Greece, me to several writer’s articulations. In each of our education, we have lived within ethos and feelings. To my understanding, David picks up his views through lines in history and then the world of deep skepticism. I cut to flight as I viewed the light, the dark and some spaces. We, the products of structures, and memories …….and the loving. Here are our two texts. Steph

All here because of the sun

Stephanie Robinson. California. 1970. Photograph by Lewis Quinby

four writing areas everywoman. everyman


The writing is set into four areas. Life stories for Stephanie and David each introduced via the Everyman/Everywoman David Stephanie Then CHAPTERS ONE & TWO Stephanie THREE David : work and life family, work philosophy and a few yarns APPENDICES Stephanie ancestral echoes
Read Leacock excerpt from left to right column layout
DAVID
David’s family is English Canadian. His father, Harold, an engineer, graduated from McGill, had a job in Waterville as senior engineer of an American rubber product factory. During family trips to the city (Montreal ) , the family would visit downtown and go to the island, Île Bazard, where his sister Madeline had inherited a farm from their father. I went out there in 1972 ( David, many times in his childhood ) when I met his Aunt. In the property cottage she had old French Canadian pine furnishings and a spinning wheel. On her wall I noted that she had a display of tapa cloth. David grew up one hundred miles from Montreal. His father and aunt grew up on Montrose Avenue on a hill within Montreal town. Mount Royale. Both of those children had their education in London between 1904 to 1913. Their father worked in London and Montreal. William Robinson was a commercial agent in the pulp, industry. He was a ‘ mid Atlantic man’.
We host our Canada family. Sheila Clarke ( nee Robinson) and David and Sheila's mother Laura Robinson ( nee mcCann) with Tom. R. 1989
We were both born in the 1940's. I hear the two of us in our conversations, each sharing some insights. For writing the idea of Individuation is the broad thesis. Both of us are children were born to straddle the transition of time we now know as upheaval, that of all of the living universe having shifted. Post World War II there was no upheaval for us then. We each have chosen to sit down and write about some moments of chronology and some about chance, so we took a few deep breaths in order to hold some stasis and to get lines to pages.
So, this to each of us as solipsists. Life is the mind. The love of life is its relationships. Life is living with contradictions. It is as much, living with consciousness. and the feedings of the unconscious are broad and capable of giving rein.
Madeline Robinson 1904 - 1988
Madeline and Harold Robinson. British Museum steps 1904 Madeline Robinson (1904 - 1988) Harold Forrest Robinson (1901 - 1963)
Right. Harold. ( 1901 - 1963) England, c 1906 Photographs by Stephanie Beth. 1972
David remembers his dad describing to him a wonderful image that Harold had of his father William and author Stephen Leacock, walking arm in arm up Cote de Neiges in Montreal together on a winter's day. Leacock was a humorist and essayist, also a Math teacher. ( Harold described that Stephen often recited his latest short story to the class rather than doing math) He lived 1869- 1944. (2 ) A significant cultural tomb was his description of Montreal:
‘In the heart of the English residential district of Montreal there is, or was till yesterday, a beautiful open space of trees and meadows, some three quarters of a mile across, like an oasis of verdure in a desert of brick and stone. It was called by the attractive old-time name of the Priests' Farm. Through the gateways of the tall stone wall which hemmed a large part of its circuit one caught a glimpse of old grey stone buildings, of wide orchards, gardens neat as Normandy, and pleasant avenues of trees….
Higher up the slope of the Priests' Farm stands the more modern building of the Seminary of Philosophy, the training college of the priests. About it are still many of the old trees, the quiet walks, the gardens, and the long pond of years gone by. Yet midway between the Seminary of Philosophy and the College of Montreal below, on land sold to save them, the handsome premises of the Badminton Club mock with the merriment of battledore and shuttlecock antiquity on the right and philosophy on the left. But for the land that is left the title deeds are still the grant in the name of Louis XIV to the Messieurs de saint sulpice whose history at the period we now reach becomes the history of Montreal itself.’ (3) .
Montreal. Robinsons. William, Alice and children depart for England to work in 1904
Madeline and her nanny. Northern Quebec 1905 Harold with his father. Westmount. Montreal 1903
Montreal Museum. 2016. Photograph by Stephanie Beth.
William Forest Robinson, Montrose Avenue Westmount. Montreal. ( 1867 - 1947)c 1940
Much of the Priests' Farm is gone now. Its outward glory has departed. Necessity compelled the commercial sale of ground coveted as real estate. Apartment houses sprawl upon its higher slopes and cover the "sites" that once were meadows framed in old willow trees. Its bygone silence is lost in the traffic of new streets and driveways that pierce its very heart. Commodious villas rise, neat with new grass and nodding tulips, to blend a strange novelty with what still remains antique. Their beauty is all too new—the rich inheritance of broken fortune. Yet not all is gone. There still stands at the foot of the slope in the angle of Sherbrooke Street and the Côte des Neiges Road, the widespread school and dormitory buildings of the famous Grand Séminaire, the Collège de Montréal, where generations of Canadian youth have had their training. One sees through the main gate two old stone towers, built in 1694, that stand well inside the present wall. These are said to be among the oldest, if not actually the very oldest, surviving buildings in Montreal. They are in reality two adjacent towers remaining out of the four that marked the corners of the great wall that surrounded the original building that stood here. This was the fort, a sort of outlying protection for Ville Marie de Montreal, called Le Fort des Messieurs. Inside stood a stone château built out of his own personal fortune by a priest of St. Sulpice. The towers were for protection but were used also as schoolrooms where the children of the converted Indians were taught by the saintly Marguerite Bourgeois', who was attached as an extern to the Sisters of the Congregation of Troyes and whose name is second only to that of Jeanne Mance in the record of good works at Ville Marie.' ( Stephen Leacock)

Madeline studied at Montreal Girls High School. She taught Art there for forty years. (4) It was intriguing to note her training for a life in the Arts, post Picasso, and his study of African Art - this is what went through my head - that and how she had furnished her summer room. Artists open their eyes to the structures of visual design in indigenous cultures. Every summer she travelled with friends. She made photographs with a Leica.
A Montreal apartment interior. Montreal. c 1993 Madeline at her farm cottage on Île Bazard with Laura Robinson. 1972 (5)
Above.street view. Montreal. 2019. By Stephanie
--------------------------- An observation At the British Museum, when the reading room was first opened to the public in 1857, an applicant had to buy a ticket : “Among those granted tickets were: Karl Marx, Lenin ( who signed under the name Jacob Richter) and novelists such as Bram Stoker and Arthur Conan Doyle.” ---------------------------- AN HISTORICL INTRODUCTOIN TO THE MARPRELATE TRACTS William Pearce. Constable. London. 1908. The marprelate papers Some of David's father's books we shipped home from Montreal. They were lost for years in E Shed, Christchurch. One book, this one, from the 1960's , still requires a paper knife to slit open the mint pages. (6) The E Shed story is endearing. A staff member there once saw neglected box. He spotted a Bishops University 1962 year book inside. He wrote to the Registry. 12 year later we had a message from Bishops that the box was found and can be delivered. The man, a booklover, had looked after the books in his Christchurch garage for years. We gave him a ring.

lake louise hotel. David's summer job for six seasonS

Steph and David, the above William's grandson, municipal Gardens. Napier. New Zealand. 1982.
Photographs in 1972 in British Colombia. 1993 and in in Ontario, Australia, USA, NZ
Canadian Lakes Steph. Rideau Canal. Ontario. 1993 Caltrain. On a lunch visit Visit to Google. 2016. David, Tom Campground North Sydney. 1998. Rideau Canal. Leila Garvie and I go with David McCallum, ( Captain ), up through the Rideau locks. Ontario 1989 Tom stays with Maureen for a few hours.
Tom, ready to take command of West Van, but, he has mumps! 1993.
References
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