“I Want to Join Your Club”: Letters from Rural Children, 1900-1920

Preface

Preface Many historians have shared the common but injudicious assumption that growing up is a universal process, changing little in its essentials from earliest times to the present. In fact, of course, how we grow up is as much a matter of where and when we lived as is any other human process. We know that children's lives, like those of all people, have continuity, change, and sudden disjuctures, and are intimately interwoven into the society in which they areplaced. New generations of historians have put the lie to notions that women , that workers, that slaves, that aboriginal peoples have no history. More recently, they have discovered that childhood also has a history. Norah Lewis surveyssome of its already rich literature in her introduction. Not only does childhood have a history but children have historical voice. In this collection of letters we hear these voices with a freshness and immediacy that belies their age. Children tell us about their families and schools, about the places where they lived, and something of what they felt about their lives. Most of all, they tell us important things about the nature of childhood and youth at a time that seems remote, but is actually so near to us that some who were alive then are still alive now. Two examples: First, we see that the current sharp divide between children and adolescents was much less evident earlier in the century. While certainly conscious of exactly how old they were, older correspondents display many qualities that we would now expect to find only in those much younger. They take pleasure in what adolescents today would view as childish things. Sixteen-year-old Helen Hussey, who calls herself "Brown Eyes," thinks "it is grand going through the woods" to fetch the cows. Self-described "Country Bumpkin" writes "Here comes a sixteen-year-old bud to join your club." Even youthful members of the armed forces write to what their counterparts today would look upon as a children's club. Were these young men any less able to carry out their duties than their modern counterparts who are forced to undergo bizarre rites of initiation? Second, many writers reveal how early and unselfconsciously youngsters entered into full- or almost full-time work. Thus it is ix unremarkable to ten-year-old Wallace Williams that he is not attending school anymore because he is herding 150 cattle and 350 sheep. When she was eleven, "Western Sheep Girl" bought three sheep. Three years later she has fourteen, and sells her wool as a member of the wool growers' association. Fourteen-year-old R. S. Sarty, selfdesignated as "Mudjekeewis," has the leisure to write because he is on vacation from his job in a pulp mill. Fourteen-year-oldMabel Sears tells us that she is "a stenographer in one of the biggest factories in Orillia, but I do more than typewriting and shorthand as I use the dictaphone most of the time." Norah Lewis tells us that these letters are not by any means fully representative of childhood at the time. Many children did not write letters. Of those who did, either they didn't describe the grimmest dimensions of their lives or, if they did, newspaper editors chose not to print their letters. Clearly, not all is sweetness and light. Children fall through the ice, get lost in blizzards, are threatened by grass fires, suffer gunshot wounds. They tell us these stories in a laconic fashion, unwilling, and likely unable as well, to articulate their deepest feelings . Thus William Bridge "got shot in the knee ... I was in hospital at Toronto for ninety-one days, and never saw anyone from my home all that time." I found eleven-year-oldKenneth Lyon's letter the most moving in the collection. He tells us about his school, his teacher and her car, his hunting prowess, and his agricultural triumphs. One senses that this list goes on and on because he can't bring himself to tell us his most important piece of news. Finally, however, he writes: "I have a brother that enlisted in 1916. He was killed in action on October 30th [two weeks before the Armistice ended the fighting]. He was 25 years old." We sense a grief too deep to articulate. And, even after seventy years, we share it with him. Long ago, William Blake wrote of a time When the voices of children are heard on the green, And laughing is heard on the hill...