The Enchantment of Cottaging

Listening to the haunting cry of a loon echoing across the lake, the splash of the paddle as you glide through the water in your canoe, the crackling of the evening bonfire, the lapping of the waves that lull you to sleep. Watching the rising sun chasing the ribbons of mist across the mirror-calm lake, sailboats wafting by, another spectacular sunset, a nighttime sky so heavy with stars that some plummet to earth, the rippling of the moon across the black water. These are just some of the experiences that keep us going back and longing for time at the cottage.

In Canada, “cottages” are waterside dwellings that range from cabins with no running water or electricity to luxurious, multi-million dollar mansions with all the latest gadgets. Most, however, are comfortably in between, many not useable in winter. In Ontario, cottaging began in the last quarter of the 19^th century, when travellers discovered the wonder and beauty of the multitude of lakes carved out of the Precambrian shield by glaciers.  Escaping the heat of the cities, people with time and money could spend leisurely summers cooling off lakeside. Many of these cottages have now been passed down through four or five generations, those growing up there, feeling such a strong connection to these family places that they travel great distances - sometimes across the continent - to vacation at the cottage.

 And cottages do tend to be places where family and friends congregate to enjoy the outdoors, chat during morning coffee and afternoon cocktails on the dock, bond over meal preparations, and quietly share the tranquility. It’s little wonder that Friday evenings see an exodus of urban people undertaking the two or four or more hour drive to this sanctuary, with the reverse on Sundays. Our family cottage is on an island, which makes our journey more weather dependent, as the lake crossing - and docking the boat - can be tricky and sometimes impossible in high winds and storms that whip up punishing waves. It’s all part of the challenge of island cottaging - outrunning that wall of water coming at you across the menacing lake. But how glorious once you’re there. And how lucky those who, because they can work from the cottage (some even commute, if they live in towns nearby) or are retired, can spend the entire summer there. 

 My “Muskoka Novels” are set in cottage country, and describe the cottaging ethos prior to WW1, during Muskoka’s Age of Elegance.

Proud to be Canadian

On this 65^th anniversary of D-Day, I’m reminded of an encounter we had with an elderly French gentleman last year in Hardelot on the north coast of France. We had gone there to see the ruins of the “castle”, which I had read was a popular spot for the nurses working in the Etaples hospital district during WW1 to go for outings. (The ruins are being restored for use as some sort of international centre.) With our half-remembered high school French, we struck up a conversation with this elderly man out for his daily stroll. When he discovered that we were from Canada, he practically embraced us with tears in his eyes, and thanked us Canadians for liberating him and his family from the German occupation in WW2. The Dutch and Belgians, too, seem to have a special place in their hearts for Canadians.

On the flip side, I recently read an article about a prisoner-of-war camp during WW2, set on the shore of magnificent Lake Muskoka (north of Toronto) and touted to be the Rolls-Royce of camps. It seems that over 30% of the 34,000 Germans who were interred in Canadian prison camps returned to settle in Canada after the war. Surely another accolade for us Canadians.

The Victorians - not as prudish as we think?

“Victorian morality” summons thoughts of sexually repressed people (solidified by later Freudian theories) who covered piano legs with bloomers because they were too erotic. Bathing costumes for women of that era were enveloping, heavy, dark, wool garments over black stockings and even slippers, and many used bathing machines so that no one saw even them in these concealing clothes. So I was astonished to discover that there was a nudist beach - popularly known as "Bare-assed Beach" - at Hanlon’s Point on the Toronto Islands from 1894 to 1930, when morally upright citizens finally succeeded in shutting it down. 

Skinny-dipping (swimming naked) was something that many people did - and still do - in lakes and rivers, but usually in same-sex groups or as couples. One Muskoka cottager related how his Victorian grandmother always had her morning bathe in the lake, and was almost caught in the buff by an unexpected visitor. My British grandfather-in-law states in his memoir that when he and his wife honeymooned in Normandy, France, they found a deserted beach, stripped off their clothes, and bathed “au naturel” in the sea. What a delightful picture that conjured up of these young Victorians being spontaneous and uninhibited. Had I known this when I met him at the age of 96, just a couple of years before his death, I would have been even more impressed by this “Victorian” gentleman.

Researching the Riviera

Just over a year ago my husband, daughter, and I were sitting on a cliff-top terrace in brilliant sunshine, savouring a gourmet lunch - scant food, artistically prepared, and way too expensive - with the ever-changing blues of the Mediterranean lapping at the bleached rocks below. Considering itself the most luxurious in Europe, The Hotel du Cap - Eden Roc at the southern tip of Cap d’Antibes, boasts about the many celebrities that have stayed there. At the prices they charge, only the super-rich can afford to!

We hadn’t come to ogle stars - and didn’t recognize anyone famous, although the Cannes Film Festival was just a week away - but were watched suspiciously by staff, who wouldn’t let us film even though we explained that my daughter was doing a documentary and was not paparazzi. The manager gave me short shrift when I requested some historical information, since the hotel is mentioned in my novels, shoving a piece of paper into my hands and refusing to answer questions. Could we take photos? Absolutely not! Good thing we had before asking. The staff were self-important and quietly disdainful to “nobodies” like us, although they seemed to fawn over others. Noticing a good many of the planet’s most expensive cars in the parking lot, I’m certain the staff are forever mindful of who’s who. 

The reason for our visit was to see the place where some of my characters dine when staying nearby in their own villa, and because I had just read about how some Americans helped to make the hotel and the Riviera popular in the 1920s - something that will be explored in Book 3 of my Muskoka Novels.

In the early days, the French Riviera was a winter retreat for the wealthy, but shut down during the heat of the summer.  Americans Sara and Gerald Murphy convinced the hotel to remain open one summer, in essence renting it, and invited friends to stay there with them - Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and Picasso among them. So beguiled were the Murphys with Cap d’ Antibes, that they bought and then built their own villa there.

So it was exciting to see the places I had read about, to stroll the small beach at La Garoupe, which Gerald Murphy had virtually created by cleaning out the seaweed and daily raking the sand, and thus feel a connection to the past that I will write about. 

I think it’s ironic that now the Hotel du Cap - Eden Roc closes for the winter!

(Mis)adventures in moving

The first evening in our new house didn’t turn out as we had expected - we spent it in a hotel! After a long, arduous, and chilly day moving, we were all looking forward to hot showers, but discovered that we had neither heat nor hot water. The gas supply had been disconnected! On a Friday night you can only reach the gas company’s emergency line. This was no emergency, they assured us. It was only going down to the freezing point that night. Have to wash in cold water? Think of it as camping. Nothing could be done until the business office opened on Monday morning. So by snuggling under warm duvets and showering at the gym, we did camp out in our house after that first night.

Our lawyer - my oldest friend - had done everything required to arrange for the transfer of services, but the gas company denied receiving the instructions. On Monday they told us we might have gas by Friday! After a heated discussion and a talk with the manager, we were finally told we might be reconnected on Tuesday. And were by late afternoon - a job that took only a matter of minutes.

None of the service providers, except for hydro, delivered on time. The phone company made a mistake - which they at least acknowledged - so, although we were supposed to have been connected on Friday, we finally had phone service on Sunday, but no Internet until Thursday. The cable company was also 2 days late, not that we had time to watch TV in any case.

Ironically, we had a card delivered this week from hydro stating that we would be disconnected if we didn’t call their office to set up an account! When I spoke with them, they said that they could no longer take instructions from lawyers because of the Privacy Act, so clients had to call directly to transfer their services. Someone could have informed us of that new policy.

My lawyer and I had a laugh when she told me that the utility providers in her jurisdiction (my old home town, only 2 hours away) refused to take direction from one of her clients, saying that the lawyer had to do it! Surely there should be some consistency in these services, even across municipalities.

Of course none of this has diminished our delight in our new house. But it did make us realize how easy and comfortable our lives usually are, with light, heat (or air conditioning) available with the flick of a switch, and hot running water with the turn of a tap.

My first novel, A Place To Call Home, was set in pioneer Ontario. I marvelled at how those intrepid people had survived harsh Canadian winters in draughty log cabins, so cold that water froze in pitchers set next to the fireplace. One “gentlewoman” wrote in her letters home to England that the temperature in her bedroom was only 3 degrees Fahrenheit (-16 C), and she had frost on her blankets in the mornings. (Is it any wonder people didn’t bathe often in those days?) Blistering summers, especially for women imprisoned in corsets and those encompassing Victorian gowns, could be just as challenging.

But we don’t need history to tell us how lucky we are. We need only look at other, less “developed” parts of the world to realize that.

 

Obsessiveness pays off!

The coordinator of the “Lest We Forget” project at Library and Archives Canada was so impressed with my WW1 website that she will be using it for her workshops with students, and recommending my war-related novels, The Summer Before the Storm and Elusive Dawn. History teachers have also said that they would use the site in their classrooms. So all that research I did is useful for more than the framework for my books, which is thrilling!

I’m moving in a couple of days, and there’s still too much to do. I’ll be back next week.

The perks of research

A year ago I was in France, driving along the dramatic coastline between Boulogne and Calais, wishing the rain would stop. The colourful fields and yellow gorse were a delight after the drab April browns of Ontario, but the weather wasn’t a lot warmer. Yet I hadn’t come for sunshine. This was a research trip.

On an endlessly snowy day in February, I had been struggling with descriptions of the Calais area where some of my characters work during the First World War. I scoured the Internet for photos, spent plenty of time on Google Earth trying to get a feeling for the landscape, read descriptions by people who had been there at the time, but wasn’t satisfied I really knew what it looked like. So I told my family we had to go to France. Springtime in Paris! No persuasion required and the VISA card had lots of room.

When the rain finally stopped and we were able to walk the beaches at Caps Blanc-Nez and Gris-Nez, and the dunes at Sangatte, I realized how right I had been that I needed to be on location to get a true feeling of the countryside and the sea. And I experienced first-hand the gale-force winds that sandpaper your skin and which people kept mentioning in memoirs. The imposing cliff at Cap Blanc-Nez can’t be fully appreciated from photos, like the one above, and the hilliness of that stretch of coastline was a surprise. Since my characters drive ambulances along here, that was important to know.

Wimereux was a delight, with plenty of Victorian buildings still in existence. I have characters staying in the same small hotel that we enjoyed, since I found a postcard of it from that era, and realize that, except for its name, it has hardly changed. Seeing one of the villas that had been used as an officers’ hospital during the war was also an exciting connection to the past.

I could have spent more than five days exploring this area - we only went as far south as Le Touquet, and hope some time to go to Normandy (for WW2) - but our next stop was the Riviera, where it was warm and sunny. My excuse for this part of the trip was that I have a character who owns a villa in Cap d’Antibes, so we explored that and found the perfect location.

I know that my characters will visit here - often! - and have to admit that I would be thrilled to join them. The exotic vegetation and masses of flowers blooming in the generous sunshine, the rich blues and turquoises of the sea set against the snow-capped Mediterranean Alps were food for a hungry soul. Imagine people actually living here!