The Noir Years: A Quebec Memoir

By Joan M. Baril

I don’t know why I am thinking about the house on Rue Dee in Montreal today, or rather the apartment building, three small apartments one on top of the other with my husband’s parents living in the middle one and his brother and sister-in-law at the top. I never saw the people who lived in the bottom apartment but I knew the lower suite was considered less desirable becasue it did not have an outside balcony. The two upper apartments had balconies but, strangely, they were not connected to the sidewalk by a curving staircase, the usual arrangement in the East End of Montréal. Curvy outside staircases, which give such character to the streets, elegantly solve a space problem in that crowded island city by eliminating interior stairs. The Leclair apartment building, however, possessed not only a balcony and an interior staircase, but also a front door and once inside, one headed straight to the second and third floors.

In 1956, when I first saw Guy’s parents’ apartment, I was astonished at its small size, a tiny living room filled with a heavy couch and chair flanked by marble topped end-tables, a kitchen with a large table in the middle and modern appliances all around; and, off the kitchen, a bedroom with a large double bed and two heavy dark dressers taking up most of the room. There were no books or newspapers or any other sign of human activity save the television.

I knew my father-in-law, Claude Leclair, owned the building and worked part-time at the stock exchange, a job he had held for only a few years. He had been a bank manager in his younger life, but a series of massive heart attacks confined him at home and in bed for ten years, so the stock exchange job was a second career for him. I surmised he lived on his salary, his investments and the rent from this building and, perhaps, from other buildings as well.

He was a short, stocky man with a wide kindly smile,and excellent English without an accent. It was conveyed to me later, by my husband Guy and others, that his friendly acceptance of me, his Anglophone daughter-in-law, was a gift of some sort, and Guy was grateful for it. His warm welcome reflected a liberal and tolerant disposition; but it took a long time for me to understand this point of view—the gulf between English and French (or Anglophone and Francophone as they are called now) meant nothing to me who had grown up in a completely multicultural Ontario town where race was noted but not considered very significant unless one were talking about wedding or funeral customs or food preferences. Nor was I aware, for a long time, of the political situation where les Anglais were presented by the Quebec politicians as the monsters at the gates, constantly threatening the French language, religion and culture, and I was only dimly aware of the long history of Quebec’s resistance to assimilation.

But the effect was insularity almost unbelievable. For example, I heard of the strange situation in some country villages where the priests warned their flock to avoid the Anglophone residents. In particular, the women were advised not to become friendly with the local Anglophone women. For one thing, the church worried they might pick up knowledge about birth control, information difficult to get anywhere in the 50’s in Quebec but doubly so in a small francophone town.. But it was more than the desire to conceal information about birth control. The church saw the non-francophones—even Catholic non-francophones—as people not enrolled in the great ideal—the ideal to create in North America a true Catholic state. French influence from France was as suspect as that from English Canada. Gerald Peltier, the eminent Quebec politician, recounts, in his autobiography, an incident that occurred at the end of a public lecture given by a visiting professor from France The provincial premier, Maurice Duplessis, stood up and told the astounded man that French influence and thought was unimportant to the great future of Quebec. “We do not need France,” he had intoned.

This was the attitude and the pride–brave French-speaking Quebec, standing alone against the secular world, creating an island of Catholic morality in a hostile Protestant and English-speaking continent.

I could see that my father-in-law was not in the best of health and often had to lie down when he came home from work. His skin was pale and stretched about the eyes; and Guy’s stepmother, Irene, often spoke about the attention she paid to his diet. He must have been in his fifties, but I thought he was very old with his grey hair surrounding a bald forehead and a slow stooped walk. After dinner, we watched television or, in summer, sat out on the tiny balcony on narrow wooden rocking-chairs.

I cannot remember now all we talked about as we sat on the cramped balcony, but I remember he told me about the Quebec Eastern Townships in the Great Depression where he had been a bank manager. In that place, cash money was seldom seen for the economic situation was so bad people had reverted to barter and paid bills with farm produce or other goods. A cheque, for instance, was not cashed. It was considered just another object of barter and was endorsed and passed on to the next person who endorsed it in turn and used it to pay a bill or buy something. My father-in-law showed me a cheque he had kept as a souvenir. The reverse side and the front around the margins were covered with signatures. It had been passed around until it ended up at the bank having gone through dozens of hands.

He also had kept his registration card from the Second World War and his tone showed he resented having to register, as all Canadian citizens were required to do at the time; but, beyond that, he never spoke of those days, the Conscription Crisis which had so angered French Canada, or any other political event involving the federal government.

He recounted how, as a teen-ager, he had run away from his expensive boarding school on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River and crossed the ice on the river in order to get home—a very dangerous and foolish course of action. The family had immediately sent him back, but by train this time.

The family lived in a mansion in those days, a house now a heritage property; but the money was lost in the 1929 crash. This was the second family fortune lost. The first occurred after the English Conquest in 1759 when the currency of New France became worthless and the family import/export business with France died. Claude’s heart attack in the late 1940’s and his ten-year lay-off from work depleted the third fortune.

In the provincial election, he had been asked by Premier Duplessis’s campaign committee to allow a huge sign to be painted on the side of the apartment building and, even though he did not want to do it, he felt he had to or there would be repercussions. He was not a Duplessis supporter but one had to go along with the party or—or what? At the time, I could not think of the sort of punishment which could have been meted, but now, I imagine a rise in property taxes or some sort of anti-apartment regulation would have appeared. Duplessis held the province in an iron grip and maintained his popularity by promising to fight the English threat to the French Canadian language, religion and culture, a threat so exaggerated it was laughable. Corruption was endemic and accepted and even laughed at or approved as clever dealing.

When Guy told me how, in a past provincial election, he and his friend Pierre had made extra cash telegraphing votes—that is going from poll to poll and voting over and over again, I was shocked to the core, but he thought it was amusing and my protests naïve. But when I heard the church openly supported Duplessis, not only to protect their religion, which they falsely claimed was under threat from the “Protestants”, but also to fend off modernism which they saw as contrary to French Canadian values, I felt sad.

The church touted the rural village as the ideal: the large patriarchal family gathered round to say the rosary every day, the communal help of neighbours, the spiritual benefits of honest farm work, the absence of city dissipations all watched over by the local priest as arbitrator of Catholic values and leader in all things. It was a pre-industrial view that had gone out thirty years before but foolishly clung to as the basis of government policy while the rest of the continent hurtled past riding a post-war economic boom of urbanization, scientific progress and television. Even I, at nineteen years of age and incredibly naïve, could see a huge disconnect between French Canadian reality and the myths promulgated by church and state.

The enemies of this grand religious project were not only the outsiders but also the city dwellers. Guy and his family, like most Montrealais, had no interest in rural life; but they were helpless to change the government policies based on it. Money was poured into foolish colonization schemes to move people to the north shore of the Saint Lawrence River and give them farm land. Later, when I drove into this region on holiday and saw the pitiful small and stony fields and the abandoned shacks, I was seeing the results of these schemes which must have ruined so many lives.

On our first visit to Rue Dee, in 1957, shortly before Guy and I were married, my future father-in-law took me aside and said, in his opinion, it was not right that a wife use sex as a weapon to get what she wanted from her husband. This shocked me so much I was speechless. The word sex had never passed my lips, and certainly I had never heard it spoken by an adult, much less a relation. He must have seen my shock because he changed the subject. Thinking it over later, I wondered briefly if his wife made use of this method, but I dismissed the thought; they were obviously too old for sex. Nor could I imagine using sex in this way. It seemed immoral and blackmailing.

It was certainly an odd topic for a father-in-law to bring up with his new daughter-in-law and more so because, in general, Quebec was imbued with an anti-sex/anti-body obsession as strong as the anti-alcohol obsessions of Ontario where I was born. At Valentine’s Day, the cupid cut-outs wore skirts. I saw a parade in Quebec City where the majorettes twirled their batons wearing long dresses half way down their calves and, in Ste. Agathe, where Guy and I spent our honeymoon, official notices on the street spoke of the illegality of short shorts for women. There would be a fine, we were told, if the shorts were higher than two inches above the knee.

Guy’s stepmother only joined us on the balcony at the end of the evening. As long as I knew her, her entire time was taken up with constant cleaning and preparing enormous meals: roasted meat or chicken for both lunch and supper with boiled potatoes and vegetables—the sort of meal we had in my family home only on Sundays. To have a heavy meal twice a day seemed excessive to me, a lot of work and extremely expensive. Afterwards, it took her two hours or more to do the dishes so particular was she with excessive cleanliness, washing each item slowly and scrubbing every available surface in the kitchen several times a day. I often helped dry the dishes—the men never helped in any way—and observed first-hand the time-consuming focus on absolute cleanliness. The kitchen was her domain, and no one in the family could so much as open the fridge nor would they ever do so. I remember one evening I asked Guy for a glass of milk, and he looked so stricken that I had to settle for water. Even then she bustled out, handed me the glass, waited until I drank it, then washed it carefully and put it away.

It also surprised me that no coffee or any food was ever served to visitors and, in the evening, no snacks or any sort of food was brought out. Once the dishes were done and the kitchen was cleaned, it was almost as if it was padlocked for the night.

Both Guy and his brother often joked with each other about their step-mother’s rural accent, her poor education and her poor French. The brothers had had a good education; and spoke excellent French. Eventually, I learned that the general low level of educational funding in Quebec combined with the cultural isolation of a French enclave deliberately cut off from France had given rise to the widespread use of local colloquialisms, slang and the “low French” called joual.

We naturally spent time visiting upstairs with Guy’s brother and his wife whose apartment was as clean and empty of all signs of activity as the one below. My sister-in-law seemed to use her leisure time entirely in shopping, mainly shopping for clothes. When she took me along, it was evident this was supposed to be a treat, to show me the big stores of the big city but I had never cared for shopping, a fact I did not mention out of politeness. I found it tedious and also pointless because I had no money to buy anything. I found everything very expensive, and the emphasis on clothes and acquiring clothes was depressing to me. I felt I could never dress as fashionably as my sister-in-law or her friends, never own so many shoes, belts, purses, scarves, hats and matching outfits for summer and winter and furthermore, the long parades through the stores, pulling apart the racks of dresses and skirts, turning over numerous sweaters and blouses, only made me feel there must be some point in the constant focus on clothes and appearance, but I was missing it. Even today, the people of Quebec spend more money on clothes than the people of other provinces. Being fashionably turned out at all times is still a priority.

On the other hand, I would have preferred to spend the afternoon at the provincial museum or the art gallery but, when I mentioned it, the family’s surprise was evident. I took a visit on my own. No one, not even Guy, would go with me. It turned out to be a strange place, full of unusual and lovely objects from colonial days but all covered in dust with faded hand-written signs half fallen over. In the display cases, many items had toppled or were missing. Obviously the provincial government had no interest in funding a museum, and I was almost looking at a museum of a museum, a collection encased in neglect and silence. It was a little scary wandering the large rooms; no one else was around, and I began to be afraid I would be locked in.

The Leclairs themselves had never gone to the museum and, most likely, did not even know where it was. Even though we were in the largest city in Canada, neither the Leclair family or their friends took any part in its cultural activities. Since they never received the newspaper, I doubt they had any idea of what events were on. It soon became embarrassingly evident to me that my small town existence had given me a much richer cultural life than these denizens of Montreal, and this was a fact I took pains to hide.

At home, books were always in evidence in almost every house although most people used the library rather than buy them. Everyone I knew read the local paper every day and listened to the news on the radio. From an early age I had attended plays, amateur to be sure, and dance recitals, skating shows, piano recitals and other concerts. When the Winnipeg Ballet visited, we got our tickets early. My girlfriends and I always went to the art shows at the library and admired the local painters such as Kay McCullough and Sue Ross. We took in the Ukrainian dance festivals, the mandolin orchestra, and the annual visit from the Toronto symphony. We saw Charlie’s Aunt and The Importance of Being Earnest and Romeo and Juliet and Gilbert and Sullivan and even some of the experimental films from the Canadian National Film Board. Yet I would never call myself cultured or intellectual, but here I was in the big city among people who did none of these things, who never went to a play or a concert and seldom to a movie, who never read a book or a magazine or followed the news on the radio.

I learned later that almost all the French magazines were published by the church and adhered heavily to the anti-industrial line whether they were women’s magazines or dealt with sports or current events or any other topic. No wonder no one bought them.

It seemed odd also that my new relatives seldom, if ever, attended church although my father-in-law listened to the rosary on the radio after dinner. There were no church organizations or at least none that interested them. In my hometown, the churches put on plays and concerts and fostered many organizations such as mission circles, craft and dance groups, teen clubs and, above all, the Women’s Auxiliaries, which, in the forties and fifties, had large memberships. The Catholic churches were no less active than the Protestant. St. Andrew’s Catholic Church, down the street from my family home, had turned the church basement into a youth centre with pool tables and a four-lane bowling alley. But in Montreal, the church played no direct part in people’s lives either in a religious or recreational way. I heard some grumbling abut the riches of the church, and I knew I was in contact with the famous anti-clericalism of French Canada, but I never heard a reasoned argument or discussion or description of church power in the province. Perhaps, like the air, it was so pervasive, it could not be easily identified.

The first weekend I spent in Montreal, before we were married, I went to church on Sunday morning. This was Guy’s suggestion, and he dropped me off at a lovely large Anglican church while he took off to mass, so he said, but I soon learned he spent the hour at a corner store talking to old cronies and indeed, such corner stores were male hang-outs all over the East End of Montreal. It was convenient for Guy to make me out to be more pious than I was so he could slip off to his corner; but, in truth, by Sunday morning, I was longing to get away and be by myself. I found the two days spent in the apartment tiring. I could not read; this would have been considered unsocial and the idea that I would go out and buy a newspaper and read it was so outlandish I never tried it.

Once, I asked Guy to drive me downtown to see the sights but aside from a spin along the Main and St. Catherine Streets, he never did show me any of the features of Montreal. In fact, I do not think he knew where the “sights” were—he got lost when he tried to find the road up to the mountain to see the famous view—he had never been up there and he knew nothing of the west end or even the downtown area outside the big department stores. Once, we took a stroll through a large park but the concept of “talking a walk” was not in use. Once or twice, we, with his parents, went to a restaurant, always the same one, only a few blocks away. There was no idea of trying out different cuisines.

The bright spot, culturally, was the television where we watched the Plouff’s and Le Pays en Haut and other depictions of life Quebecois. At a time of increasing Americanization of English Canadian culture, here, in Quebec, the media was holding a mirror up to the Quebecois, showing them themselves and their past, a validation of their existence that did not exist in English Canada to the same extent.

Television was also replete with documentaries about the province, describing places historical and beautiful, extolling, perhaps, a picturesque village, or a local cheese factory or the fishermen who lived on an island in the Saint Lawrence. There was a claustrophobic quality to these numerous offerings as if the rest of Canada did not exist, and the continent and world beyond were lost in a mist.

I realized I was living in a small country with two or three cities and a population of under two million with one major highway and a government in Quebec City. Canada beyond was an unknown, seldom seen on the television, never visited; and I often heard the most ludicrous assertions about it—that it was all Protestant and very English. We English Canadians were supposed to send large amounts of money every year to support royalty and England was our mentor in all things. I was also told over and over that the English hated the French, were prejudiced against them and wanted to destroy them, but when I replied that I, personally, had never heard anti-French sentiments, I was looked at as if I were lying. Nor did I ever hear of anyone travelling outside the province for any reason. Years later, when I heard Guy’s brother and his wife had taken a trip to Atlantic City, I was amazed.

Of course, we could only watch television in the evening. There was no television in the afternoon because Premier Duplessis believed TV would lure the housewife away from her duties. I do not know when this government policy changed, but it was still in force when we lived in Montreal in the late fifties.

I could not get a handle on Quebec; it seemed to have a certain emptiness or deadness which, at the time, I was sure, was only in my mind and so I never mentioned my impressions to anyone. I was sure that, eventually, I would find people interested and interesting, people engaged in what? Politics, religion, hobbies, sports, the outdoors, collecting matchsticks, whatever – but, in fact, I never did. Guy’s relatives were kind, hospitable and likeable, but there was something missing that was inexplicable.

A clue to understanding came when we paid a visit to Guy’s brother and his wife, Louise, at their summer cottage. We visited twice, once on our honeymoon and a second time when our son was a baby. The women (Louise and her sister) spent hours cleaning and cooking up large, heavy traditional meals, (roast pork for lunch and roast chicken for supper with three veg each), doing laundry and ironing and changing the children’s clothes several times a day whenever they got dirty. The men sat around and drank beer. Occasionally we swam. I was appalled at the excess work. Cottage life was supposed to be relaxing, a place of hot dog suppers, grubby old clothes, playing in the sand, tanning and walks and talks with the neighbours and a brief sweep out in the morning but here, I saw my sister-in-law scrub and scrub some more every day—floors, counters, even the back steps. The wringer washer was brought out every afternoon, and the clothes were hung on the line outside. I simply could not keep up with her; it was too exhausting, but when I sat down to talk to Guy on the lawn chairs outside, I felt guilty because she was inside scrubbing away. She changed her own clothes several times a day and always looked impeccable while I had the same old shorts and baby Paul a limited selection of summer duds.

Once again the contrast was inescapable—no horseshoes or baseball, no boating or hikes or picnics or even excursions to near-by beauty spots, no sauna, no bonfires and marshmallows, no sand castles, no long walks or afternoon naps, no lounging about with out-of date magazines, nothing but unending cleaning and talking about cleaning and clothes. Stulifying.

Yet my sister-in-law and her sister were modern in one respect. They were limiting their families to two children, I knew, and not following the precepts of the priests to avoid birth control and have large families. In fact, the size of some families was unbelievable. Families with more than ten children were common, and families with more than twenty were not unknown. Even though this was the era of the baby boom when English Canadian women were having, on average, four babies, French Canada had the highest birth rate in the world. It is no wonder that, after the Quiet Revolution, when the power of the church was broken, a reaction set in and the birth rate plummeted to the lowest in Canada.

My father-in-law, Claude Leclair, died in February, 1968. His heart finally carried him away. He was a kindly man, and I admired his fortitude in the face of illness.

Guy and I drove down for the funeral from Ottawa, where Guy, an air force officer, was stationed. It was a bitter cold day and the entire week of funeral activities took place against a background of intense cold.

According to the custom, the corpse was laid out in its coffin in the funeral home and surrounded with massive wreaths of flowers and ribbons, very elaborate creations that came in from family and business colleagues. These accumulated to such an extent, they overflowed the special stands set up for them and, at the end, were hanging from the ceiling and attached to all the walls around the coffin.

Our job, for such it was, was to sit in the viewing room, in front of the open casket, for six to eight hours a day for three days and that’s it—just sit. From time to time, a priest would arrive to offer prayers. We could not talk, or only briefly in whispers. Guy and his brother greeted people who arrived, and then, they sat too. Three or four rows of chairs were lined up to face the casket as if it were on stage and a play or a performance was to begin. The visitors arrived mainly in the evening, and they too just sat, generally for half an hour or longer.

To say time hung heavily for me was an understatement—after an hour or so I was half-mad with boredom. We had a break for lunch at a near-by restaurant and a second break for supper and returned later for another two-hour sit in front of the grey shape that was my father-in-law. The corpse was quite visible from the chairs, and I often stared at the grey face pretending that it moved—the hands had twitched or the nostrils had inhaled.

The widow, Irene, did not engage in this bizarre sitting exercise and, in fact, she did not go to the funeral. It was explained to me that, in Quebec, the widow did not attend her husband’s funeral. Claude’s brother from New York arrived with his American wife; but, Americanized as they were, they did little sitting. They made token appearances each day, stayed a while and then left. Their conversation consisted of complaints about the cold and the lack of fresh salads in the restaurants.

After the very long funeral mass, the body was taken off to be buried in Three Rivers, the town where the first Leclair had settled in 1635. Guy and I drove off to Ottawa in the bitterly cold weather, back to our jobs and work-a-day world.

Premier Maurice Duplessis died in 1959 and the political party he led died with him shortly afterwards to be followed by various government commissions revealing the corruption that underlined every aspect of government business. One report mentioned the poor fellow who owned a truck, and who had duly paid the necessary bribe to the city snow removal boss. However, as a result of some mix-up, he was not hired. Naturally, he was furious. So accustomed was the population to this method of dealing with the government, that the trucker decided to take the case to court and sue for the return of the bribe. It is amazing a lawyer took on the case. There were many similar stories.

During these “noir years” as they are now called, the power of the priest touched everyone. When I lived on the military base in Valcartier, the Anglophone wives on the base collected books with a view to setting up a lending library using a room in the Protestant School. One day the local Catholic priest paid a visit and, after removing several books, proclaimed his intention to vet every book before it was placed on the shelf. When I heard about this, I was shocked and suggested we disobey, but wiser heads prevailed. I understand now that, if we had refused to go along, there simply would have been no library of any kind. I imagine the priest would have had a chat with the base commandant, a Catholic himself, and, if that had not done the trick, the “problem” would have taken to higher levels in the military. The church had reach, lots of reach.

Did Duplessis personally believe in the holy project of creating a Catholic utopia? No. He needed the church for its cheap labour to run the schools, hospitals, orphanages (and there were many of these) and other social programs. And he needed its support to get elected. And so he allowed the church its fantasies, and tailored his social legislation to their demands. The two were in a symbiotic relationship and when old Maurice died the church did too, as the parasite dies at the death of the host.  Now, church attendance is very low and few young men go into the prieshood.  Most convents and reigious orders have closed. This anti-church  reaction can be attributed to Duplessis.

The venom Duplessis showed toward France and things French was only matched by his venom to everything English Canadian. During the Quiet Revolution in the sixties, when the power of the church was broken, when a secular ministry of education was set up and when so many other exciting changes were taking place, the sneering attitude toward English Canada disappeared; but it returned soon enough in the person of Premier Rene Levesque  whose autobiography has such a snide tone toward English Canada that is makes for confused reading. One does not always know the point of many of the sarcastic remarks. It is as if the writer is referring to a general consensus on the imperfections of the Anglophone character, a consensus familiar to his Francophone audience but unknown to me. It was during these years of the early 70’s that many English- speaking travellers to Quebec reported impolite treatment or outright hostility. This too was legacy of Duplessis. Once again English Canada had to be enrolled to play the role of villain, but this time not in the project to create a Catholic utopia or elect the Union National, but in the struggle for a separate state. Without an enemy there can be no struggle and without the struggle, no Separatism.

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Joan M. Baril has been writing since 1985. For 10 years she did columns in local newspapers, covering immigrant issues weekly for the Thunder Bay Source, women’s issues monthly in the Northern Women’s Journal and local issues in Hot Flash. She has also been published in Herizons and CanadianForum as well as many women’s and outdoor magazines including Off Our Backs, Canadian Status of Women News, Nature Northwest and Rivers Running Free.