Sharing our stories WELCOME OUR WRITING. 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
IMAGES
GEORGE D MONTEITH, STEPHANIE BETH, FRANK TIFFEN, PHYLLIS TIFFEN, PRISCILLA FEICKERT, LEWIS QUINBY, MARJA POLE, DAVID ROBINSON, MAUREEN GARVIE, Lovell-Smith Photography, Wrigglesworth & Binns studio, wellington OTHER STUDIO. OTHER FAMILY. A FEW FROM ONLINE.

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
CHAPTER FOUR. Stephanie in the LIKELY NEW ZEALAND SUMMER of 2027
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 Sheila Clarke (nee Robinson) and Laura Robinson (nee McCann) with Tom Robinson. Christchurch. 1989
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. William becomes a ' mid Atlantic Man '- Liverpool to Montreal, then train down to his wife and children in London. *
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 to Europe or Asia 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.
* The Atlantic voyage (Liverpool/Montreal ) brought thousands of individuals and families to the New World. ‘ In the late 1800’s the service had become somewhat of an Atlantic ferry - fast, efficient, luxurious for those who could pay for luxuries, comfortable for all. Most of the people travelling had crossed the ocean before, many of them several times. All expected to cross the ocean again. There was nothing left of the farewells to England of the departing emigrant, no falling tears as the green shores of Ireland, soft with rain and dotted with sunlight on the yellow gorse, faded out of sight.’ So wrote Stephen Leacock in his book on Montreal published in 1942 and referenced elsewhere in these scribblings.
Grandfather William was an established Transatlantic man by the 1890’s. When he took the family there in 1905 he had sufficient business to warrant some permanence and had the First World War not broken out in 1914 one could speculate that the family might have remained there for a longer period of time and possibly forever. Was there fanfare when the family boarded the ship in 1905? When I boarded in 1965 sixty years later about thirty friends and family members came to the docks to see us off ‘, by then the North Atlantic route was a highway, however the winter sailings were less frequent due to fierce winter gales in the ocean just south of the Arctic circle. David.

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.
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