Although Gabrielle Roy's famous novel The Tin Flute was set in a working-class district of Montreal, Roy herself grew up in Manitoba. Her formative years there were largely uneventful, but you can still find tantalizing traces of the world-acclaimed author around her home province.
BY LOUISE GABOURY
Born in 1909 to Quebecois parents who had chosen to move to Manitoba, Roy decided as a young woman that the Prairies had no hold on her own soul. She left the province in 1937, returning only sporadically thereafter. Yet years later, she wrote so poignantly of the Prairies that it was as if physical distance had drawn her emotionally closer to the land of her youth.
The girl who would grow up to garner a swarm of accolades - including the Prix Fémina, three Governor General's Literary Awards and the Companion of the Order of Canada - was raised on Deschambault Street in tranquil St. Boniface, now part of Winnipeg but at the time a separate city. Provencher Bridge, which Roy and her mother would cross on foot to shop at Eaton's in Winnipeg, still links St. Boniface to downtown. The St. Boniface Cathedral was ravaged by fire in 1968, but the surviving facade and walls are an eloquent echo of its grandeur in the days when Roy would go there to pray, a period she recalled in Enchantment and Sorrow. Her parents, Melina and Leon, are buried in the cemetery in front of the cathedral, along with two of her sisters who died tragically young.
The wooded area at the end of Deschambault Street is long gone; only a few stunted trees remain, and it would take an awful lot of imagination for a little girl to play there at being the great explorer La Vérendrye, as the character of Christine does in The Road Past Altamont.
The house where Roy was born in 1909 is a designated historical site, and most of the other houses on the quiet street have probably changed little from her childhood days. The plum and apple trees planted by Leon have disappeared, but you can still sense Gabrielle's presence at the dormer window where she spent long hours daydreaming, and on the shady veranda where her father thoughtfully strung a hammock for her.
Village Schoolteacher
At 20, Roy left St. Boniface to work as a schoolteacher in several villages in a predominantly francophone region of southern Manitoba. Tracing her route from modern-day Winnipeg, you're soon swept up by vistas of endless plains disappearing over the horizon, dotted with stands of scraggy trees that stand sentinel over this infinite arid expanse.
Roy's first teaching job took her to Marchand, a tiny village on a dusty road an hour outside Winnipeg. The Marchand school where she taught no longer exists, but you can pick up her trail again in Cardinal, "a bigger village, not so poor, and yet scarcely more lively, at the far end of the country," in Roy's description.
Less than 100 kilometres southwest of Winnipeg, Cardinal is today even smaller than Marchand. A few houses huddled together and a stately heritage church at the end of a dirt road are all that remain of the village Roy depicted in Street of Riches, Children of My Heart and Enchantment and Sorrow.
Roy’s grandparents, Elie and Emilie Landry, originally from Saint-Alphonse-de-Rodriguez near Joliette, Que., are buried nearby, in a small cemetery between Somerset and Saint-Léon, where Roy’s mother grew up.
Remote Settings
Turning northwest, you travel across the prairie on wide roads that lead away to infinity, with nothing but sweeping plains and immense sky as far as the eye can see, broken up by the occasional solitary grain elevator or a farm sheltered behind a bank of trees, rising from the flatlands likes oases in the desert. After a while, rolling north toward what feels like the ends of the earth, the road seems to become a river, a shimmering mirage beneath the prairie sun.
Near Riding Mountain National Park, the scenery at last begins to change and the monotony is broken by a few steep hills. Some of the names on the roadmap designate nothing more than small clusters of houses or a few abandoned barns that barely classify as hamlets. Onwards you go through Sainte-Rose-du-Lac, Rorketon, Toutes Aides, Meadow Portage and finally, after hours of driving, Waterhen - the northern Manitoba communities that immediately bring to mind Roy's 1950 novel, Where Nests the Water Hen, and its cast of colourful characters. You almost expect Luzina to materialize, or the priest from Toutes Aides, or even Martha, the gutsy heroine of Roy's Garden in the Wind.
In contrast to the south, this is a lake-filled region where the gentle gurgle of water is a steady backdrop to birdcalls and the whistle of the wind. You'll see Gabrielle Roy Island, so designated by the Manitoba Geographical Names Program in 1989. But you need to drive still further along a dirt road to find the idyllic setting evoked in Where Nests the Water Hen, written while Roy travelled in Europe with her husband a full decade after her sojourn in northern Manitoba.
The novel portrayed a large, loving family living on a beautiful, remote island in the middle of a river. Today, beyond a fragment of wall from the school, few signs remain of their world. That Roy could write so poetically of this lost land merely confirms she was blessed with both imagination and a piercing nostalgia for her homeland.
After a single summer in the area, Gabrielle returned to Winnipeg and then left Manitoba one autumn night in 1937. But Manitoba never left her.
source: Canadian Tourism Commision
This reproduction is not represented as an official version of the materials reproduced, nor has it been made in affiliation with or with the endorsement of the Canadian Tourism Commission.
Click here for more information on Manitoba
BY LOUISE GABOURY
Born in 1909 to Quebecois parents who had chosen to move to Manitoba, Roy decided as a young woman that the Prairies had no hold on her own soul. She left the province in 1937, returning only sporadically thereafter. Yet years later, she wrote so poignantly of the Prairies that it was as if physical distance had drawn her emotionally closer to the land of her youth.
The girl who would grow up to garner a swarm of accolades - including the Prix Fémina, three Governor General's Literary Awards and the Companion of the Order of Canada - was raised on Deschambault Street in tranquil St. Boniface, now part of Winnipeg but at the time a separate city. Provencher Bridge, which Roy and her mother would cross on foot to shop at Eaton's in Winnipeg, still links St. Boniface to downtown. The St. Boniface Cathedral was ravaged by fire in 1968, but the surviving facade and walls are an eloquent echo of its grandeur in the days when Roy would go there to pray, a period she recalled in Enchantment and Sorrow. Her parents, Melina and Leon, are buried in the cemetery in front of the cathedral, along with two of her sisters who died tragically young.
The wooded area at the end of Deschambault Street is long gone; only a few stunted trees remain, and it would take an awful lot of imagination for a little girl to play there at being the great explorer La Vérendrye, as the character of Christine does in The Road Past Altamont.
The house where Roy was born in 1909 is a designated historical site, and most of the other houses on the quiet street have probably changed little from her childhood days. The plum and apple trees planted by Leon have disappeared, but you can still sense Gabrielle's presence at the dormer window where she spent long hours daydreaming, and on the shady veranda where her father thoughtfully strung a hammock for her.
Village Schoolteacher
At 20, Roy left St. Boniface to work as a schoolteacher in several villages in a predominantly francophone region of southern Manitoba. Tracing her route from modern-day Winnipeg, you're soon swept up by vistas of endless plains disappearing over the horizon, dotted with stands of scraggy trees that stand sentinel over this infinite arid expanse.
Roy's first teaching job took her to Marchand, a tiny village on a dusty road an hour outside Winnipeg. The Marchand school where she taught no longer exists, but you can pick up her trail again in Cardinal, "a bigger village, not so poor, and yet scarcely more lively, at the far end of the country," in Roy's description.
Less than 100 kilometres southwest of Winnipeg, Cardinal is today even smaller than Marchand. A few houses huddled together and a stately heritage church at the end of a dirt road are all that remain of the village Roy depicted in Street of Riches, Children of My Heart and Enchantment and Sorrow.
Roy’s grandparents, Elie and Emilie Landry, originally from Saint-Alphonse-de-Rodriguez near Joliette, Que., are buried nearby, in a small cemetery between Somerset and Saint-Léon, where Roy’s mother grew up.
Remote Settings
Turning northwest, you travel across the prairie on wide roads that lead away to infinity, with nothing but sweeping plains and immense sky as far as the eye can see, broken up by the occasional solitary grain elevator or a farm sheltered behind a bank of trees, rising from the flatlands likes oases in the desert. After a while, rolling north toward what feels like the ends of the earth, the road seems to become a river, a shimmering mirage beneath the prairie sun.
Near Riding Mountain National Park, the scenery at last begins to change and the monotony is broken by a few steep hills. Some of the names on the roadmap designate nothing more than small clusters of houses or a few abandoned barns that barely classify as hamlets. Onwards you go through Sainte-Rose-du-Lac, Rorketon, Toutes Aides, Meadow Portage and finally, after hours of driving, Waterhen - the northern Manitoba communities that immediately bring to mind Roy's 1950 novel, Where Nests the Water Hen, and its cast of colourful characters. You almost expect Luzina to materialize, or the priest from Toutes Aides, or even Martha, the gutsy heroine of Roy's Garden in the Wind.
In contrast to the south, this is a lake-filled region where the gentle gurgle of water is a steady backdrop to birdcalls and the whistle of the wind. You'll see Gabrielle Roy Island, so designated by the Manitoba Geographical Names Program in 1989. But you need to drive still further along a dirt road to find the idyllic setting evoked in Where Nests the Water Hen, written while Roy travelled in Europe with her husband a full decade after her sojourn in northern Manitoba.
The novel portrayed a large, loving family living on a beautiful, remote island in the middle of a river. Today, beyond a fragment of wall from the school, few signs remain of their world. That Roy could write so poetically of this lost land merely confirms she was blessed with both imagination and a piercing nostalgia for her homeland.
After a single summer in the area, Gabrielle returned to Winnipeg and then left Manitoba one autumn night in 1937. But Manitoba never left her.
source: Canadian Tourism Commision
This reproduction is not represented as an official version of the materials reproduced, nor has it been made in affiliation with or with the endorsement of the Canadian Tourism Commission.
Click here for more information on Manitoba
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