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Appendices 125 THE OFFICE ON THE LANDING162 Marian Engel I didn't write anything down because I couldn't. This is a very odd weekend for me because it forces me to confront someone I'm not sure I want to think about at all. She's myself at 22. A girl from the provinces if there ever was one. I came from an itinerant Ontario family—we hadn't meant to be itinerant, but the Depression had done something awful to the teaching profession and my father wasstruggling to put two daughters through University on $3000 a year. I found that there was a really clever way of getting a B.A. in three years at McMaster: if you took Pass French and German, you could take all the English courses but two. I found myself, then, with about 80% in Pass French and German, and I discovered that there was absolutely nothing one could do with that degree. So—being above all an ambitious and ingenious girl from the provinces—I often thought that if things got really bad my mother would figure out how to knit money. She "made do" in the most ghastly sort of way. Since we were teachers, we were professionals. Therefore, we had to be middle class. But there wasn't enough money to be middle class. We lived in the most extraordinary circumstances. So I took my Pass French and German B.A. and applied for every damned graduate fellowship I could think of in the country, and of course I knew I wouldn't get any of them. It seemed to me a lot better than going to work on a Thomson paper for $25 a week when room and board was $24 a week and I smoked. That seemed to be the alternative, or going to Teachers' College which meant that I wouldreally never leave home. And it's terribly important to leave home, of course. 162. Hugh MacLennan: 1982, ed. Elspeth Cameron. Proceedings of the MacLennan Conference at University College. Toronto: Canadian Studies Programme, University rVillpne—I Inivprsittr nf Trvrnntn 1QK7 Appendices 126 Dear Marian, DearHugh Eventually I got this letter from the Dean of Women of McGill saying, It was idiotic of you to apply for all these fellowships,but your name came up so often on the boards that I was on that I would be interested in knowing whether you would be interested in coming down to McGill and working in the Royal Victoria College as an Assistant Warden. And perhaps you could mark some English papers to pay your fees. Yours, Muriel Roscoe She was a great character in many other ways. So I found myself. I found that I had successfully avoided the Ontario College of Education, and I found myself at McGill totally bowled over. Even though I came from this penurious background I had been one of the rich students at McMaster. McMaster had 1100 students then; it was smaller than the high school I went to, and nobody but three or four stockbrokers' kids from Toronto who couldn't do Math at McMaster had any money. The rest of us were very, very poor indeed. The President's first lecture was "How to Take a Girl Out on 35 cents," and then he turned to the girls and said: "Don't cost him more." I went down to McGill and found a whole new world. Now I'd been dying to widen my world. To do so I had to confront my own narrowness and provincial background. I had to confront the fact that although I had been a sort of big person on campus at McMaster because I worked on the newspaper and I ran the literary magazine, I sure was a nothing as far as McGill went. I found out many things about McGill that other people didn't seem to realize. I won't forget the time the Dean of Women's secretary said to me: "Miss Passmore, could you not arrange that Jewish gentlemen do not pick you up at the front door?" Things like that went on then. They loved the Lord. I found that hard to take. So I was always confronting my own poverty and my own prejudices, my own lack of prejudice in some departments. I didn't know what to make of this town. I tried to assault McGill, with my usual funny lack of shyness, by suggesting that I do a...

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