At the beginning of 1947, some eight months before her art studies were due to start, and without consciously considering sculpture as her chosen field, Frances nevertheless followed her natural inclination. She began woodcarving, and this occupied much of whatever spare time she had. In the back of her mind there was always the knowledge that she would need every dollar for the years at OCA. The Department of Veterans’ Affairs would pay the tuition, plus a subsistence of sixty dollars a month, but she would have to live in Toronto, and there would be a thousand-and-one minor expenses, day after day, month after month.
March and April saw Frances pushing ahead with her woodcarving, getting her materials and tools together and producing four dog portraits. In May, she placed six dog portraits in Ada Mackenzie’s gallery in Toronto. These were among her first carving efforts. Later she sent six more dog portrait samples to a sales outlet in Mont Tremblant, Quebec. By the end of September 1947, Frances had seen many of her carvings selling briskly in the two outlets she’d chosen. She produced a wide variety of breeds, among which, perhaps for subtle personal public relations purposes, was a carving of the Alsatian belonging to Ada Mackenzie, the gallery owner. Frances sold the carvings for seventy-five dollars each; the sales outlets sold them for whatever the market would bear.
By the middle of August, Frances was preparing to leave home again, this time for “wild” and “sprawling” mid-century Toronto. The city was not as big and cosmopolitan as Montreal, and it was still seven years away from the inauguration of the first subway system in Canada (and even that would only run between the train station and Eglinton Avenue, a distance of less than seven kilometres). North of Eglinton wasn’t quite cattle country, but it was close. And the city was still very much “Toronto the Good.” A quarter of a century would pass before the law would allow you to have a drink on your own front porch, and all you could do on a Sunday was wait for Monday.
But to Frances it was the Big City, and she got lost half a dozen times in her house-hunting which took her all over town, without success. She and an ex-navy friend, Marion Cornett, planned to rent an apartment together. Marion had taken a job with the Telegram, a Toronto newspaper. She was more familiar with the city and quickly found a place in Rosedale, at 181 Crescent Road. “When I went home to our place in Rosedale, I’d take the streetcar,” said Frances. “This was the old streetcar that went up Yonge Street through Hog’s Hollow. In those days the streetcar was heated by a coal stove.” At some point along the way the conductor would stop and stoke up the stove, then continue up Yonge Street.
“When I went to see the rooms, I was sort of disappointed,” said Frances. “They were in the cellar.” A basement apartment was all right with Marion because she simply did not care where she lived. But Frances was different. To her a cellar was miserable — people’s legs going by the window, the atmosphere damp and unappealing. “My slippers became mouldy under the bed. Horrible.” But they had a wonderful landlord, a Mormon. “I heard him one day, hammering a nail. It must have bent or something and he cried ‘Oh! That Free Methodist nail!’ I guess Free Methodists were about the worst thing he could think of.”
The basement apartment was in one of the wonderful old Rosedale mansions which had been “renovated” to accommodate about thirty roomers. The roomers came and went. “There were a bunch of students from Ryerson, and some elderly people down on their luck. They changed all the time.
“And yet, in a way, I liked the basement apartment,” said Frances. “We had our own washroom, even though it was a laundry tub. There was a toilet down there. Beautiful old house. I got to know Rosedale very well because I rode around on a bicycle all the time. It was a bit confusing at first; there didn’t seem to be a straight street in the whole area. We used to have taxi drivers come and ask us where they were.”
Frances was in the Rosedale mansion for all four of her OCA years, first in the basement with Marion, her ex-navy friend. Shortly after moving in together, Marion left to get married, and Frances eventually took a top floor room, smaller but nicer and more convenient.
In that first year, after Marion’s departure, Frances was faced with having to carry the full cost of the basement apartment. She approached Marnie Pond, another first-year student at OCA, with the idea of sharing. “Marnie’s family came from Simcoe. They knew my relatives there, but not to speak to. Unlike the Ponds, my family was not upper class.” Marnie Pond was a strikingly beautiful young woman of eighteen, an only child, fresh from Branksome Hall, an internationally acclaimed and very posh girls’ school in upscale Rosedale.
“I would have been delighted to share the apartment with Frances,” said Marnie. “At the time I was living with Mrs. Graham, a friend of my father. She had a nice apartment on Bloor Street at St. George. My father came with me to view Frances’s rooms.”
After a brief introduction to Frances — “How do you do, Mr. Pond.” (warm smile) “Nice to meet you.” — the gentleman’s eye slowly scanned the basement apartment, what Frances herself called “the cellar.” He glanced at the washtubs, and the toilet at the end of a dim hallway; saw the legs of passersby through the ground-level window; sensed the mouldy slippers under the bed. And was appalled.
“No,” he said to Marnie, “I’d rather you stayed with Mrs. Graham.”
“He was horrified,” said Frances. “He’d seen the cellar, and the living conditions, which to him must have been primitive in the extreme. He’d absorbed the unabashed bohemian atmosphere, and I’m sure he looked at me — five years older than his daughter, an unknown woman, an artist, and an ex-sailor!”
“I had come straight from boarding school to OCA,” said Marnie. “I was an only child. My father was very protective.”
She did not join Frances.
“At the time, I was kind of mad at her,” said Frances, “because she wouldn’t share the apartment with me. But more than that, I think it was her father’s upper-class attitude that really teed me off. Okay, a bit of ego there, I suppose, but his obvious contempt just irritated me. I imagined him thinking that I had a lot of unmitigated gall to suggest that my ratty cellar might be good enough for his lovely Branksome Hall daughter. But then again, when I thought about it later, I had to feel that maybe, just maybe, he was more than a little bit justified.”
Shortly after the brief meeting with Marnie’s father, Frances moved to the third floor of the old mansion, to a smaller and less expensive single room, and stayed there for the remainder of her time at OCA. “It was a tiny room. I could stand in the middle and reach anything I wanted. It was so small, almost like a cupboard, so I did all of my work at the school.” OCA was open in the evening, and any homework that was required could be done there.
The year 1872 had seen the formation of the Ontario Society of Artists, a group which four years later opened an art school in Toronto. This school, in 1912, became the Ontario College of Art (OCA). In 1996 the college would see its name changed to the Ontario College of Art and Design, reflecting its artistic scope and standing as one of the largest art/design universities in North America. But in 1947, it was still the earlier OCA when a young woman walked through the front door: Frances Gage, art-student-to-be.
“The place seemed to be a rabbit warren of stairways and passages and doorways. It was so confusing. Later we were in the basement. That’s where they put the sculptors because we were so messy and noisy.”
Creative pursuits treat rules with the indifference they deserve, and rules at OCA were observed casually; there were much more important things to consider, like food. “We always spread papers on the model stand and had our lunch there. At lunch time in the OCA of 1947, you didn’t see too many knives and forks. We’d cut the bread for sandwiches