Just a Larger Family: Letters of Marie Williamson from the Canadian Home Front, 1940–1944 ed. by Mary F. Williamson and Tom Sharp (review)

In the summer of 1940, John and Marie Williamson and their two children, Peter and Margaret, welcomed some long-term guests into their home: the children of Marie’s distant cousin in Britain, Margaret Sharp. The Williamsons took on this obligation cheerfully, seeing it as nothing more than part of their contribution to the war effort. They neither expected nor asked for any financial compensation. Over the next four years, Marie maintained a frequent and detailed correspondence with Margaret, striving to keep the absentee mother involved in her children’s lives and development. It is a matter of good fortune that many of these letters were preserved: Margaret saved most of Marie’s letters, and over 150 of these have been edited and published in this volume.

Despite the fact that the correspondence consists largely of a one-sided conversation (as Marie did not save Margaret’s letters), the picture that these letters paint is vivid; Margaret’s writing style is personable and compelling. Her letters reveal a great amount of attentiveness to the boys and to every aspect of their development: academic, physical, social, and emotional. Equally evident is the keen sense of obligation Marie felt to keep Margaret involved in the boys’ lives as much as was possible from across the ocean. And, on top of all this, Marie had to contend with the constant awareness that any one of her letters could be ‘sunk’ – lost en route if a ship carrying mail was torpedoed. She therefore took to carefully numbering all of her letters and keeping track of the dates that they were mailed, all in an effort to make sure that Margaret did not miss any information about her boys.

Initially, the book does not make clear how many Sharp children came to Canada to live with the Williamsons. The book jacket indicates that it was two boys; yet the first sentence of the foreword mentions three Sharp children. With further reading, it soon becomes clear that Margaret’s three sons were all sent to Canada at the invitation of the Williamsons, but, with Mrs. Sharp’s permission, they opted to send her oldest boy, Bill, to live with another Toronto couple. The inclusion of a family tree diagram, along with several pages of biographical notes, helps to prevent any subsequent confusion that might arise in following the narrative. Historian Jonathan Vance’s foreword provides useful background information on the wartime evacuation of British children to Canadian homes and sets the stage for the story woven through Marie’s letters to Margaret.

It was extraordinary to discover that the editors of this volume, Mary F. Williamson and Tom Sharp, are themselves an integral part of the story they edit: Mary is the daughter of Marie and John Williamson, and Tom is the youngest of Margaret Sharp’s three boys. It is a reflection on their childhood, as well as a tribute to the woman who was a mother to both during the war.

The editors selected and edited letters in such a way as to present ‘a continuous narrative focusing on lives lived in Toronto during the war years.’ Marie’s letters provide a compelling account of life in Toronto in the 1940s. As a Toronto native myself, I was delighted to discover that these children enjoyed the same sites and amusements that were so familiar to my own childhood in that city, decades later: Grenadier Pond and the zoo at High Park, for example, were popular attractions for the Williamson clan, and many a rainy day was whiled away at the Royal Ontario Museum. The war itself is mentioned very rarely, but occasionally Marie briefly describes her reaction to the latest ‘war news.’ The real heart of this collection, however, is the story of Marie Williamson’s efforts, while raising her own children, coping...