I am French-Canadian. I was born just outside Quebec at a little place called Sainte Famille on the north coast of the Ile d’Orleans, a long island that lies like a huge sunken ship in the middle of the Saint Lawrence River where it approaches the Quebec Straits. I grew up in and beside this great river, with the result that my main hobbies are swimming and fishing and camping and other outdoor things. I can’t remember much about my parents—except that I loved my father and got on badly with my mother—because when I was eight they were both killed in a wartime air crash coming in to land at Montreal on their way to a wedding. The courts made me a ward of my widowed aunt, Florence Toussaint, and she moved into our little house and brought me up. We got on all right, and today I almost love her, but she was a Protestant, while I had been brought up as a Catholic, and I became the victim of the religious tug of war that has always been the bane of priest-ridden Quebec, so nearly exactly divided between the faiths. The Catholics won the battle over my spiritual well-being, and I was educated in the Ursuline Convent until I was fifteen. The sisters were strict and the accent was very much on piety, with the result that I learned a great deal of religious history and rather obscure dogma which I would gladly have exchanged for subjects that would have fitted me to be something other than a nurse or a nun, and, when in the end the atmosphere became so stifling to my spirit that I begged to be taken away, my aunt gladly rescued me from “the Papists” and it was decided that, at the age of sixteen, I should go to England and be “finished.” This caused something of a local hullabaloo. Not only are the Ursulines the center of Catholic tradition in Quebec—the Convent proudly owns the skull of Mont-calm; for two centuries there have never been less than nine sisters kneeling at prayer, night and day, before the chapel altar—but my family had belonged to the very innermost citadel of French-Canadianism, and that their daughter should flout both treasured folkways at one blow was a nine days’ wonder—and scandal.
The true sons and daughters of Quebec form a society, almost a secret society, that must be as powerful as the Calvinist clique of Geneva, and the initiates refer to themselves proudly, male or female, as “Canadiennes.” Lower, much lower, down the scale come the “Canadiens”—Protestant Canadians. Then “Les Anglais,” which embraces all more or less recent immigrants from Britain, and lastly, “Les Américains,” a term of contempt. The Canadiennes pride themselves on their spoken French, although it is a bastard patois full of two-hundred-year-old words which Frenchmen themselves don’t understand and is larded with Frenchified English words—rather, I suppose, like the relationship of Afrikaans to the language of the Dutch. The snobbery and exclusive-ness of this Quebec clique extend even toward the French who live in France. These mother-people to the Canadiennes are referred to simply as “Etrangers”! I have told all this at some length to explain that the defection from The Faith of a Michel from Sainte Famille was almost as heinous a crime as a defection, if that were possible, from the Mafia in Sicily, and it was made pretty plain to me that, in leaving the Ursulines and Quebec, I had just about burned my bridges so far as my spiritual guardians and my home town were concerned.
My aunt sensibly pooh-poohed my nerves over the social ostracism that followed—most of my friends were forbidden to have anything to do with me—but the fact remains that I arrived in England loaded with a sense of guilt and “difference” that, added to my “colonialism,” were dreadful psychological burdens with which to face a smart finishing school for young ladies.
Miss Threadgold’s Astor House was, like most of these very English establishments, in the Sunningdale area—a large Victorian stockbrokery kind of place, whose upper floors had been divided up with plasterboard to make bedrooms for twenty-five pairs of girls. Being a “foreigner,” I was teamed up with the other foreigner, a dusky Lebanese millionairess with huge tufts of mouse-colored hair in her armpits, and an equal passion for chocolate fudge and an Egyptian film star called Ben Said, whose gleaming photograph—gleaming teeth, mustache, eyes, and hair—was soon to be torn up and flushed down the lavatory by the three senior girls of Rose Dormitory, of which we were both members. Actually I was saved by the Lebanese. She was so dreadful, petulant, smelly, and obsessed with her money that most of the school took pity on me and went out of their way to be kind. But there were many others who didn’t, and I was made to suffer agonies for my accent, my table manners, which were considered uncouth, my total lack of savoir-faire, and, in general, for being a Canadian. I was also, I see now, much too sensitive and quicktempered. I just wouldn’t take the bullying and teasing, and when I had roughed up two or three of my tormentors, others got together with them and set upon me in bed one night and punched and pinched and soaked me with water until I burst into tears and promised 1 wouldn’t “fight like an elk” any more. After that, I gradually settled down, made an armistice with the place, and morosely set about learning to be a “lady.”