Children – Page 4 – A Family History in Letters

Summer 1964

The summer of 1964 was packed with activities and events. The major event was the wedding at the beginning of August, and everything else had to be fitted in around it. The first activity for the children was camp. Now I know that countless North Americans look upon their time at camp as idyllic childhood summer fun that they joyfully repeated year after year- but such was not the Costain experience. Going to camp was sold to us by our parents as a thing we ought to try- it would only be two weeks out of the summer, we would be able to have swimming lessons and canoe, we would have fun with friends. My friend Janet’s mother was working and her English parents probably thought this would be a chance to have a holiday instead of being home alone all day. But because of the time crunch, Linda and Janet were sent to the Anglican Church youth camp with girls 2-4 years younger than they were, with a couple of the mothers from the Women’s Auxiliary of our church working there too, for reassurance. We were miserable, two teens (but not teens old enough to be counsellors) in a sea of 9 year-olds, divided into wooden cabins full of bunkbeds, herded from dining hall to fireside singsong in a cloud of gloom. The activities were unexciting, the cultural appropriation of ‘Camp Pontiac’ was painful, the religion classes boring, the swimming a disaster of shrieking splashing little girls, there was not enough free time for reading! (and there was an enticing library) and the food- not what we were used to, somehow, coming from English backgrounds. Charlie’s Boy Scout Cub Camp seemed less well organized- when he returned home with a pack of wet, muddy, and mouldy clothes, it appeared from his account that he and other inexperienced tent mates were abandoned to set up their equipment themselves, and had been flooded out at the beginning, spending the rest of the fortnight in soggy surroundings. (Strangely, this was not enough to turn Charlie off camping- he’s just returned from a Labour Day weekend camping trip in Algonquin Park. It didn’t rain till Monday.)

When we returned from camp we were upset to find that we had missed the beginning of visits from relatives gearing up for the pre-wedding excitement. It was always fun having people to stay and we were glad to be home. John had completed his theology degree and was ordained, Sharon had trained as a teacher, Lorne had already been teaching that year, as were his parents, and he and Liz had baby Debbie who was adorable. Charlie and I had swimming lessons again and then in August, we were off to Brantford for the wedding, to be combined with a trip to Stratford to see King Lear, The Marriage of Figaro, and Yeoman of the Guard.

For the wedding, Cyn had made herself a dress out of a beautiful sari that the Kalras had been commissioned to buy years before in India. It was shot silk, a rich green in one light, brown in the other, with the ends embroidered with gold thread. Cyn took those ends for a wrap, and the dress from the middle yardage with the gold embroidery at the hem, and with it she wore a wonderful hat of long narrow iridescent blue and green feathers, close to the head. Merle, the mother of the groom, had a more commanding hat, pink petals outstanding, and Auntie Lily from Toronto represented the older generation. (John’s charge as a minister was ‘out West’ so the Costain grandparents, and uncles and families, could see the newlyweds once they had moved closer.) There were lots of Lees from the bride’s side, two red-headed younger brothers being groomsmen along with John’s two brothers, to escort the bride’s attendants. I was moderately pleased with my green dress, had white gloves and shoes (and nylon stockings) and a floaty headdress that blew about in the breeze. The bouquet was a surprise, being white carnations- with half of them dyed green- as if nature did not produce enough greenery for a bouquet! But I was thrilled wth a bridesmaids’ gift of a string of pearls to wear, and kept my opinion of the flowers to myself. The weather was lovely, the service went beautifully with all of us doing our parts properly, the pictures in one of Brantford’s riverside parks looked good afterwards and were relatively painless to take, and the reception was full of family and we all had fun. Then the Costains went off to Stratford and had a marvellous time.

We had been going to Stratford since I was 8, and Cec and Cyn had always bought tickets off to the side of the thrust stage down in the first couple of rows, thinking that the children would be fascinated by the actors brushing by them to enter and exit even if the plot was beyond them. (It never was, what with the summary in the programme and the play in front of us.) So on this occasion, Gloucester’s eyes were gouged out realistically above and in front of us, and I bet I was not the only one hiding my eyes! The Gilbert and Sullivan productions were always marvellous, and The Marriage of Figaro has, from that summer on, always been my favourite opera. It was a happy time and a lovely holiday.

When we returned to Ottawa, Merle and Dix joined us for a visit, and brought Liz and Debbie to stay with her family in Ottawa. I had a birthday, became a teenager, and then a new adventure would begin- Gloucester High School.

December 1963 to June 1964

The school year continued , and Christmas approached with the usual concerns of overseas parcels, cards, baking, and Charlie’s birthday. The plan to spend Christmas in Brantford was scotched, along with Charlie’s birthday festivities, when he came down with shingles- a connection from our earlier bout of chicken pox in 1957. However, he recovered in time for us to visit the Moors for New Year which was fun for the children staying up late watching old movies with their cousin Bruce, and necessary for the adults to discuss plans for the summer wedding of the oldest cousin John with Sharon- who had asked Linda to be a bridesmaid!

The winter of 1964 involved fundraising events for the church- Cyn’s Cookery Demonstration for adults, and for the young people a Sleigh Ride. This was not a happy, cozy, ‘jingle bells’ experience in my opinion. There was no ‘one-horse open sleigh’, instead a pair of horses dragged a flatbed strewn with straw on runners slowly though fields covered with knee-deep snow. The jolly companions on the wagon competed in shoving their weaker ’friends’ off the wagon into the snow, forcing them to run to the point of exhaustion to try to scramble on to the conveyance, sometimes aided by compassionate friends, or repelled by nastier bullies. The bridge of Linda’s nose received a lifelong bump when she was helpfully pulled on – along with several more victims who ended up on top of her and her glasses. The hot chocolate served at the end of the ride was poor compensation for the experience.

At school there were preparations for the musical play to be performed in the spring, and at home more personal excitement. It had been arranged that Linda would meet Sharon in Toronto during Spring Break to join the other bridal attendants for dress shopping. An air ticket was bought for Linda’s first flight alone- and I can clearly remember how I was dressed for that trip. I had a grey suit with a jacket and pleated skirt. With it I wore a white pillbox hat, white gloves (both nylon with stretchy elastic) and white socks with black shoes. John and Sharon met me at the airport and we joined the other junior bridesmaid and Sharon’s two adult friends at a bridal shop and proceeded to try on dresses. I was shy- I only knew Sharon of the party, and uttered no opinions on the outfits, but it was finally agreed that we would be wearing pretty green full- skirted dresses with white accessories. I went to Brantford with the party for the weekend, and presumably they put me back on the plane in Toronto, and I returned home with great relief. I wish there existed a letter giving Cyn’s take on the excursion (I expect I had plenty of opinions to express about it once I was home) but I remember nothing more. Probably Cyn had agreed to make sure my dress was fitted properly when it arrived, and now we just had to wait for the summer.

Easter was at the end of March, and Cyn’s birthday followed, with celebratory cards from her closest friend in England, Nancy Heslop.

The school play that year “Asses’ Ears” was a musical telling the story of the Greek King Midas, not involving his golden touch, but his later offence to the god Apollo’s music, punished with donkey’s ears. He hid these under turbans but his barber knew the secret, and whispered the news to the corn- and the growing corn rustled the news to the reapers. Grade 7s and 8s were involved in the singing chorus- and Linda and her friends were also the secondary singing-and-dancing barbers, with a jolly song “Midas has got asses’ ears” to perform. It was presented in the auditorium of the new high school that had just been built, and the Grade 8 students were very interested to see the school they would be going to after their graduation in June.

In June, there were exams, we passed, got our report cards, and Linda would be going into Grade 9 in the high school built beside the new bypass, the Queensway, a four-lane highway designed to relieve Ottawa’s traffic congestion, and link the growing suburbs being built east and west of the city.

Graduation from Grade 8 was a rite of passage that involved one of Cyn’s most successful dresses for Linda- a white sleeveless dress with a panel down the front, embroidered with pink rosebuds. This was the first time I wore nylon stockings- with garter belt and suspenders attached (pantyhose had not been invented then)- to be followed by the second time later that summer, as bridesmaid. I felt almost adult- I would be going to high school, and when I started there I would be a teenager.

November 1963

It seems somehow significant that I am writing this post on the 20th anniversary of 9/11/2001. Because in November 1963, an earlier shattering tragedy struck America and stunned the whole world.

In the Costain household, world events were discussed with references to the daily newspaper and the CBC radio, especially as they impacted friends and family. It is a pity that there are no letters from Cyn to her mother in St Vincent from October 1962, when the Cuban Missile Crisis had the world in suspense, because one would think the islands of the West Indies would have been affected. Sometime in the early 60s, the Costains got a television- not new, but a second-hand black-and-white set which required the insertion of a knitting needle to change to the other channel, that Cec had acquired from a colleague. I believe the upcoming Olympics were mentioned as a reason why the parents finally got what All Our Friends had had for years- and it became part of our daily lives quickly. Cec and Charlie watched sports, the adults watched the news, we all saw Ed Sullivan together on Sunday nights, and the Kennedys were part of the news the children might have stayed for, with Mrs Kennedy’s style and children, and the Presidents’ successful handling of Cold War crises.

On November 22nd in the afternoon, the principal, Mrs Tufts, came into our Grade 8 class and told us that President Kennedy had been shot. Charlie remembers his Grade 7 teacher telling his class. When we were sent out for recess, I remember walking with friends on the playing field as we discussed whether it was a Soviet plot and if nuclear war was likely to follow. (My husband, who grew up in Windsor Ontario across the river from Detroit, had practiced ‘nuclear bomb’ drills in the 50s in elementary school, where the children sheltered under their desks in preparation for a strike made at- the US car industry? We never experienced this sort of fear-mongering in Ottawa, but we were certainly conscious of living in Canada’s capital city, a possible target of war.) When the school day ended, Charlie and I were surprised to find our mother waiting with the car to pick us up, and we went home and watched, with the rest of the world, endless repetitions of the motorcade, and the announcement that the President had died, Lyndon B. Johnson being sworn in as 36th President, the plane returning to Washington, with all the gruesome details the news could include. Over the weekend, our fears were relieved by the arrest of the shooter, then there was his subsequent murder on live tv in Dallas while the body of JFK lay in state in Washington. The President’s funeral was on Monday. There was a lot of television watching.

In her scrapbook, Cyn kept a column of Art Buchwald’s from the newspaper and a cover of the memorial stamp issued the next spring. The assassination was an introduction to the troubling issues of the 60s to come: the Civil Rights struggles, the Vietnam War, the continuing Cold War, worldwide student protests, and more assassinations in the States.

Summer 1963

The Costain’s summer holiday was a road trip to Quebec City as tourists, followed by the exciting scientific event of a solar eclipse on July 20th.

We explored the old city of Quebec, stared at the Plains of Abraham where the British took over Canada- big, flat, and boring except for drilling soldiers- (by Grades 7 and 8 we had studied Canadian history covering the 18th century over and over again, while the 20th was never mentioned), took a river cruise on the St Lawrence by the Isle d’Orleans, ate yummy food, and enjoyed staying in hotels.

On the 20th of July we were on our way home, and left the highway for the back roads to find a spot that Cec had determined would be ideal for viewing the eclipse. Charlie’s telescope had been packed in the car of course, and we stopped at a farm outside Montreal and asked permission to set it up. There were no crowds, no one at the farm seemed interested, so in the laneway we had a solitary viewing of the phenomenon with the special lens, with time for each of us to see the sun disappearing as our surroundings became darker and darker, then reappeared. [I recommend the NFB film ‘Eclipse at Grand’Mère’ on YouTube which shows the interest the public had in this solar eclipse- and the boxy cars, and be-gloved ladies using their telescopes.]

Plus, at the farm, there was a puppy!

The rest of the summer was more local, with Cyn and Cec’s wedding anniversary at the end of July and Granny and Grandpa Costain staying with us for the rest of the summer.

In August, Linda’s birthday was celebrated with a family excursion to Upper Canada Village. I can’t help thinking that much of the ‘old- time’ pioneer atmosphere that the village attempted to re-create, such as the horse and buggy, must have seemed quite familiar to my grandparents, but there was a picnic table and birthday cake and Linda was 12!

A few weeks later, school started in September, with Linda in Grade 8, the top grade in elementary school, and Charlie in Grade 7. To get to school, they walked out the back door, through their garden past the old apple tree and Cec’s vegetable garden and compost pile, and crossed a fallow field to the highway. On the other side of the highway, there was a path down the edge of another field, then their church hall, and the school playgrounds. It took them 10 minutes, rather than the 30 or 40 minutes on the school bus which took them on a tour down to the river and back picking up students- and occasionally longer on icy winter days when it could not climb up the steep hill on the return journey!

A bit later in the fall, the family took the grandparents to Kingsmere, one of our favourite places to take tourists. William Lyon Mackenzie King, Canada’s 10th Prime Minister, was an eccentric man, whose personal beliefs in the occult only became known after his death, but one thing well known was his estate in Quebec, 24 km north of Ottawa in the Gatineau Hills. He bought this acreage in the 1920s and over the next 30 years, developed and landscaped it into a showplace modelled on English country estates, with lawns, hedges, trees, fake ruins, picturesque buildings, attractive vistas, stone statues… After his death, the Mackenzie King Estate became a lovely park with buildings and tearoom managed by the National Capital Commission, open year-round, and the Costain children always enjoyed exploring and having tea there. If you leave the pathways to walk on the lawns you realize that you are walking on thyme, not grass, and the scent is wonderful.

April to June 1963

Happy Birthday to Cyn!

Cyn’s friends in England, Anne and Jessie, sent cards!

The rest of the school year went well for all the Costains.

Linda and Charlie’s French classes in Grades 6 and 7 combined to put on a production of Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” with the older students narrating, and Charlie being Pierre with his classmates as Grandpere and the animals!

Cyn managed his costume in spite of being very busy having her birthday and being featured in the newspaper.

As President of the Ladies Guild of her church, Cyn was designated as the opening Speaker for the 67th Annual Meeting of the Women’s Auxiliary of the entire country which was being held in Ottawa.

“Madame Chairman, my Lord Bishop, Ladies and Gentlemen-
I have a very great pleasure in welcoming you all to the 67th Annual Meeting of the Women’s Auxiliary of the Anglican Church of Canada in the Ottawa Diocese. I have been given this privilege as President of the Women’s Auxiliary of St. Christopher’s Church in Cardinal Heights, because we are one of the newest branches in the Diocese. I must admit that I have cast a longing thought back to Victorian times when the youngest member of the family was seen and not heard, but I am most aware of the fact that this is a very living part of Women’s Auxiliary traditions, that the new and young should be taken into the family and should share responsibilities and pleasures right from the beginning.

When the Ladies Guild of St. Christopher’s Church decided to become a branch of the Women’s Auxiliary we received a very warm welcome from the Diocesan President, Mrs. Johnstone and other members of the W.A. and I greatly appreciate the opportunity of passing on that welcome to you. A ‘warm welcome’ is such a happy phrase, which immediately makes one think of old friends being reunited and the meeting of new ones – of exchanging news of past doings and making plans for the future. I hope that this meeting will mean all of these things to you and that you will have a worthwhile, satisfying and rewarding time here.”

Cec, Boris Stoichef, Dr. Herzberg, and Don Ramsay

Meanwhile Cec was enjoying a visit from Dr Shimoda, one of the scientists he and his colleagues had met in Japan, who was presumably working with the N.R.C. spectroscopists. Cec was also invited to dinner at his College in Cambridge in June. He sent his regrets no doubt, but it was an honour.

The great excitement of June, however, was the first wedding of the young generation of the Costain family. Linda was the oldest girl of that generation, but she had 4 older male cousins and 2 of these, Merle’s sons John and Lorne, were engaged, with Lorne marrying Liz in Brantford, the Costains driving down for the occasion, and everyone getting dressed up on a lovely summer day.

John and Sharon- the next wedding couple in 64!

They were a lovely couple, I was thrilled by the whole occasion, and remember the hats as a key feature. Out west, the grandparents were enjoying the youngest members of the family, but no doubt their daughter Merle kept them informed of the festivities we all enjoyed.

After that excitement, the summer approached, the children advanced to Grades 7 and 8 and their holidays in the new house.

Cec had plans for a large garden – there already was asparagus- and there was a lovely Manitoba maple tree providing shade behind the house, the site of a future patio. The summer was going to be fun!

January to March 1963

From January until March of 1963, the Costains were preparing to move to their new house, while leading their ordinary lives. Since the house was literally down the hill and around a corner, overseeing the renovations was not a hard job, but imagining living there was another matter. They would be living in a neighbourhood not on the highway, so it would be a different perspective, even though they already knew many families around. The school was closer, as the crow flies, but getting to it in a Canadian winter would have meant wading through snow over two untrodden fields, so the children left that idea until spring. Selling the Montreal Road duplex they lived in was an important part of the financing plan, so an ad was put in the newspaper. And packing began.

Cec and Cyn had planned the overall structural changes already, and Cyn had sent her mother the diagrams showing how the reversal of the orientation of the stairs made for better floor plans on all levels, but the renovation of the kitchen was Cyn’s pet project, and she was meticulous in designing it to suit her exactly- counters low enough to work at, enough cupboard space, efficient placement of equipment, pale blue paint, and a phone corner, making it her office!

Doors and old cabinets removed, wallpaper gone, new dining room wall added!

The living room already had a big window looking out on the road, and Cyn’s beloved stone fireplace with chimney was added on to the outside wall. The children were quite taken with the novelty but having always lived with central heating, it did not have the same associations for them that it had for their mother!

The children each had a bedroom upstairs, with the roof and the gable windows making the walls slope inside, and they were promised that they would be allowed to choose the colour of the paint to cover up the hideous wallpaper.
The basement was unfinished, with a concrete floor, a sump pump in one corner to deal with spring flooding threats, the furnace under the stairs, the washing machine and dryer that kind Dorothy Scott had included in the house price close by, and a remnant of the farmhouse origin- a cold room in one corner, insulated from the heated house, with wooden shelving for the jams and jellies and bins below with earth in, to bury the root vegetables for winter storage. Cec had his tools down there, (and added to them more farm remnants as they appeared from overgrown mounds in the neglected garden). There was lots of room for storage, a permanent table for Charlie’s train set, and all the boxes and extras that come with moving.

Grandparents and family out west approved!

Moving Day was March 1st, and the children’s Spring Break came a few weeks later so they could help more with the settling in and learn to climb the old apple tree in the back garden. They would miss the hollow down behind that flooded in spring, and the wide fields they had played in, but as the years passed the hollow was filled in, and the fields became covered with houses. Ottawa was expanding, and the move was an excellent choice. Altogether, an exciting time!

Our teachers were always confusing Janet and Linda- just because we both had glasses and braids?

December 1962

December was always a time of preparation for Cyn. She sent out Christmas cards with names from Cec’s travels added, and lovely unusual cards arrived in return, along with the customary pictures of the children of their friends, some quite grown- the adorable flower girl from their wedding with two children of her own!

Cyn also had to get her Christmas parcels for friends and family overseas off as early as possible, and she needed to get ready for Charlie’s birthday and the Costain Christmas as well. Presents this year had been made easier by Cec’s travel- her ‘Presents Sent List’ shows that Cec’s sisters and mother all got ‘Japanese silk material’, with sisters-in-law Errol and Leona an ‘Indian Scarf’, while the men of the family got ivory trinkets, and nephew Bruce a ‘Toledo knife’.

Cec’s bowling sessions with the Lab. led to a Christmas present of his own bowling shoes from Charlie (size 12 shoes may have been hard to rent) and prompted the activity for Charlie’s birthday party: he and his friends went bowling with Cec, followed by a celebration afterwards.

December also had local invitations, a funeral, and the birth of a Pembleton baby- Cyn’s cousin in New York very happy about becoming a grandmother.

And while all this usual Christmas activity was going on, with baking and wrapping and decorating part of the family life, Cec and Cyn were planning a real change- renovating and then moving to their new house. Excitement for all in the New Year!

December 21 1962

2043 Montreal Road,
Ottawa 9, Ont.
21st Dec. 1962.

Dearest Mummy,
What do you think that Cec and I are giving to each other for Christmas? A NEW HOUSE! Of course we have done it all in our usual slow deliberate fashion – thought it over carefully – discussed it for a long time – didn’t do anything in too much of a hurry, and took a whole week over it!
Now, having given you the initial shock I can tell you all about it! First of all it is the house that Dorothy Scott’s father owned – he died in the spring of this year and left his property divided amongst Dorothy and her 2 sisters. They tried to sell the house all summer but had no luck and at last a few weeks ago Mrs. Scott told us that she had taken the house as her share of the estate and that she now had the deed herself, so that is when we began thinking about it. I don’t know if you remember the house – it was next to Ken’s place, but around the corner on the way to Fanni’s – it is a small white house and very neat and pretty from the outside – the type they call a Cape Cod house. Cec and I had always liked the look of it from the outside, and actually I had quite often thought that it was just a sort of place that I would like to have, but when Dot and Ken sold their house and went to live with Mr. Watt we saw the inside and got such a shock! Of course, Mr. Watt was an old man when he built it for himself and his wife and it was as he wanted it, but it seem to be all cut up into little rooms, full of great big old furniture, and it was quite a disappointment. In the summer when it was for sale Cec and I talked about it casually and wondered who would buy it and decided that whoever did it would have to spend quite a bit of money modernizing it and and what they could do to improve it, but all in an academic kind of way!
Anyway, when Cec was away this summer, the Hansons next door in the old house sold it and moved away. Not that I regretted them much as neighbours but all along the highway here is zoned as commercial property and I began to wonder what on earth we would get beside us as the house is worth nothing – no plumbing or water or anything, and the land might be sold for a service station or goodness knows what. Then of course, Myrtle is always a thorn in the flesh, and I felt that she probably wouldn’t be able to stay out here by herself much longer and then something would be done with her house, so with one thing and another I began to feel that maybe we should begin to look around and see what other places in the area were like and prices etc. Cec and I talked it over when he came home, and he thinks that maybe I have been a bit restless since the accident, and perhaps unconsciously that has had something to do with it. Anyway we saw some advertisements of houses being built down by the river in Rothwell Heights, and they seemed quite good value, but neither of us were keen on going so far away from the school and buses etc. Then one Sat. evening we had Ken and Dott up to see Cec’s pictures of his trip and in the course of conversation Dot told us about having the house herself now, and also said that they had tried to sell it for 20,000 dollars in the summer and that she thought that this was too much and that she would be happy if she got 17,500 dollars for it. After they left Cec and I were sitting talking and he suddenly said “You know, instead of buying a house right down by the river, I would rather buy Mr. Watt’s house.” So we began talking about it and wondering and sat up till all hours of the morning discussing it and then went to bed and couldn’t sleep, and next day Cec phoned Dot and asked if we could come down and look at it. We looked over it and Dot gave us the blueprints of the house so we could see if it was possible to alter it into the kind of house we wanted, and we sat up most of that night and most of the nights that week drawing plans and putting stairs up here and pulling walls down there until we were exhausted! The biggest problem was that instead of the stairs going up opposite the front door from front to back as they usually do in that type of house, Mr. Watt had put them in sideways and not only did this take a big piece out of the size of the rooms downstairs but it meant that upstairs there was only one big nice room – the other room had the stairs coming right up into the middle of it and there was a big long passage around the stairs to the other bedroom. Then downstairs there was a little living room with 2 doors in it, and the dining room ran right into the kitchen and had no less than 4 doors in it counting the door to the basement and 2 outside doors. There is quite a big entrance hall, but no coat closet, just a big old hall stand, and actually the closets were very few – none upstairs and then each of the 2 downstairs bedrooms they were long and thin and just hooks – no rod for hangers, and a little thin linen closet so deep that you couldn’t reach.
Well, after all our cogitating and drawing and many trials and errors Cec and I came up with the plan which I have drawn for you, which we think will solve all our problems! We are going to have the stairs reversed – i.e. from the hallway we will have the entrance down to the basement stairs, and we will have the stairs going up into the middle of the upstairs instead of to one end. On the plan I’ve shown by the dotted line where they come now, and how much space we will save when they are put the other way. That leaves two lovely big rooms upstairs – the ceilings slope at the side but they are light and nice and we will have closets built in. There is already a small washroom there with toilet and washbasin and we will have a nice linen closet in there. [I really wish I could see that plan, but it doesn’t exist now. There is a plan of her kitchen in the scrapbook, but the plan of whole house went to St. Vincent.]
Now downstairs we will not only have the stairs reversed but moved along a bit to make the passage smaller and the dining room bigger, and then we will have a wall built between the kitchen and dining room with a sliding door between and the wall between the dining room and living room knocked down giving us a lovely big L-shaped room just about as big as the one we have here. Also – joy of joys – we are going to have a FIREPLACE put in! We will close up the one outside door, just leaving the one into the kitchen, and instead of having the stairs coming down into the dining room we have curved them around to come into the kitchen opposite the back door. The kitchen will be small but at present it hasn’t much in the way of cupboards or counter space – a big old kitchen dresser is there and so on, so we are going to have it all taken out and remodelled into a brand new modern kitchen for me. The refrigerator will be on one side with a nice long counter – low for me to work at! – and on the other side I will have the stove and sink with a window above and cupboards at the side. [Cyn was only 5 foot so if there was no room for a kitchen table, she needed a counter suitable for her own height.] There will be a small partition the height of the stove between it and the back door and I will have a little shelves on it for my spices etc. Now, what else – the two downstairs bedrooms are both nice big rooms, I think I have made the bathroom too big and the end bedroom too small on the plan but you will get the idea. That bedroom will make a nice study–spare room – all ready for grandparents! – and oh! what bliss to have a proper bathroom with a BATH. The front bedroom will be ours and it is about the same size as the one we have here. The only change we will make in it is in the closet. We are going to do away with the skinny linen closet and instead make us a long closet in the bedroom with sliding doors and a closet into the hall also with sliding doors to take coats.
There is an acre of land, all the front nicely landscaped and with all sorts of nice old apple trees, and a big shade tree in the back, and a hillside left wild behind that – not nearly as deep and rough as here though. There is a garage for two cars and a porch and kind of covered veranda round to the back door, and we plan to enlarge this a bit and screen it in so we will have a lovely big screened porch. For all of this we are paying 17,500 dollars, and what do you think – Dot felt that maybe she was asking too much so she is throwing in a beautiful automatic washing machine and a dryer of her father’s as well! Of course all the alterations will cost us $2000, and we have a carpenter who has worked for Ken on his new house in Cumberland all ready to begin in the New Year. Now you will wonder where on earth we are going to get all this money – particularly as we haven’t even mentioned selling this house yet – we are a TWO HOUSE FAMILY! However, we will begin to try to sell this one in the New Year – the alterations will take about 6 weeks, so we don’t expect to move until nearly the end of Feb. and we really don’t own it until Jan. 5th although we were down at the lawyer’s office signing the deed today. Dot will hold our mortgage and we are paying her $1000 now and maybe another 1000 or more when we sell the house – she doesn’t mind if we don’t pay her any more as she looks on it as a source of income and will buy an annuity with it. The money for the alterations we borrow from the Gov. as a Home Improvement Loan from the Housing and Mortgage Corp. and we will pay this back when we sell this house too, so actually though we seem to be running around spending money like mad at the moment, we think we will be fine once we get it all settled.
The children are so funny – at first they were horrified at the thought of moving, and didn’t ever want to leave this house. Then, when they went down and explored the big garden down there and found all sorts of exciting places to play they began to get quite thrilled, and now they’re all ready and set to go! They still can’t imagine themselves living in the house I don’t think and I must say that I am the same – up here when we plan and draw out the rooms etc. I can visualize it all beautifully, but when I go down there and see it and all the rooms full of furniture I can’t believe it is true! We will take some ‘Before’ and ‘After’ pictures so that you will be able to see what it is all about, but I hope that you will be able to make out most of it from all my elaborate drawings!
This is our big New Year’s Surprise for you, and I haven’t managed to write about anything else, but I was waiting till it was all signed and sealed before breaking the news! I will write about other things in my next, but this letter is really a fat one already, and I really can’t think of anything but House!
We all send big hugs and kisses and all our good wishes for a Very Happy New Year for both you and Auntie Muriel.
With much love from us all – Cyn

Sadly, this is the last letter we have until 1966! I am glad it exists because this was a big change in the Costain household, but I am sorry to only have a few pictures in a scrapbook to cover the new house, the alterations, the move, and the changes in the years that follow. It is the small details of daily life that I think make Cyn’s letters worth reading, but I will cover the missing years briefly and we will join her again in four years.

I am also sorry to be having technical difficulties at the moment that prevent me from being able to publish any pictures at all, which is why the usual documentation and photos are missing. I hope to be able to add them later, but until then there will be a brief pause!

November 1962

November is not a great month for camping but it appears that Charlie’s Cub Group (the younger division of Boy Scouts) had a cookout one weekend.

Cec preferred indoor activities, and went bowling with his colleagues from the Lab.

The Costains no doubt sent best wishes and congratulations to Santiago Polo on the occasion of his wedding, and probably some of his friends from the Lab in Ottawa attended.

However, for the Costains, the main event in November seems to have been preparing for the Public Speaking Contest at the school. Both children incorporated some personal connection into their speech based on the gifts Cec had brought home from his trip, but most of the speech was informative and factual. Cyn typed their efforts but at this level, there was less input from her. The speeches were given in class, then the best competed within the school. Linda made a case for reading being her favourite hobby, and ended her speech on ‘Hobbies’ with this paragraph. “Most boys and girls have at least one hobby. I collect postcards, small china figures and dolls of all nations, and I learn a great deal every day through my favourite hobby, reading. One of these might lead to my life work and anyway I will get a great deal of pleasure from them.” This speech went no farther (probably to her relief), but Charlie was once again one of the 7 contestants in the Intermediate Level with his telescope speech.

After touching on the history of telescopes with Galileo and Newton, he went on to explain that Newtonian telescopes like his were based on mirrors, and gave details about the biggest in the world at Mount Palomar, then returned to his personal experience. “It is rather unfortunate that at first when I got my telescope, it turned cloudy. Instead of looking at the sky, I have had to look at other things. I can see the Uplands Airport radar tower about 5 miles away and I can watch it turning around with an occasional flash as a plane comes down. I can also see birds in perfect detail on the telephone line if they would only stay in one place. The magnification of the telescope is 126 so if a bird is 126 feet away, it appears to be only 1 foot away from your eye. I have also been looking at the sun, and for this I put a special sun glass in the lens.” He goes on to describe and explain sun spots, then his observations of Jupiter and Saturn once there was a clear night. He finished with “I don’t know much about astronomy yet but it is very exciting to look and to learn.”

This time, Charlie won the Intermediate Contest, and got a letter of appreciation from the Fairfield School District Association, as well as a page of the scrapbook devoted to it. The typed copy probably was sent to Carol in the West Indies, but the rough copy survives.

As a teacher (my life work?), the adult Linda found looking at the children’s work at the Grade 6 and 7 level an indication of future direction. I believe Linda’s ‘Hobby’ topic had met some opposition when she stated that her hobby was reading books. Her speech carefully defines the different sorts of hobbies- Collecting, Crafts, Activities- and in the latter category, which she explains as doing things for relaxation, she lumps all sports (which she was not at all interested in) with bird-watching, gardening, and, in her case, reading. It was an argument which she made sure to win, presaging her interest in debating in high school and her future success in essay writing and exams at all levels- not to mention the collecting of a library of over five thousand books.

Charlie’s speech shows his interest in science, and illustrates clearly the technical points as well as personal observations made with his telescope. And I believe at this point, the Costains started to plan their 1963 summer holiday, when there would be a total eclipse of the sun, best seen from the province of Quebec with a telescope …

October 1962

Cec’s wartime experience of India had not allowed for travelling within the country. This time, after his stay at the university in Mumbai, he visited colleagues in the north, in Banaras (Varanasi), and after that, the Observatory in Nainital where Dr. Pant, who had worked with Herzberg at the N.R.C. earlier in the 60s, and whom I expect Cec had met at the Spectroscopy Conferences in Columbus, or even the symposium in Japan, gave him the opportunity to see the Himalayas in the distance when the clouds allowed.

Another picture shows the Yamuna or Ganges River up close, as if Cec was looking at the 16th century Allahabad Fort from the water.

He must have made a side trip from New Delhi to see the Taj Mahal, since his slides of the outside were foreshadowed by postcards to Linda and Charlie showing the detail of the inside that interested him. The children had a multi-volume children’s encyclopedia, so would have been able to look up the places of interest, but Cec added more facts rather than personal details!
On the back of the Taj Mahal PC to Linda: “Dear Linda, Here are the actual tombs seen thru the arch in Charlie’s card. The flowers are semi-precious stones inlaid 1/2” deep in the marble. The tombs themselves are each from one piece of marble. Love Daddy.”

He also did a lot of shopping: Linda got another 2 dolls out of the visit to India, magnificent male and female Indian dolls, and Cyn silk saris and scarves- material for future sewing projects.

Cec left for Europe October 13th., stopped briefly in Italy and Spain (another doll, more PCs), and arrived home in Ottawa October 21st. On the postcard of Venice addressed to Master Charles Costain he writes: “17/10/62. Typical sight along the Grand Canal, the homes of nobles & princes of the Middle Ages. The canal has lots of traffic, gondolas, water taxis, & continuous ferry or ‘bus’ service. Tell Mummy the food was wonderful. See you soon- maybe before you get this. Love Daddy.”

Having Cec home again was reason enough for celebration, but getting presents is always fun. There was a lot of loot in his luggage- no Declaration Forms were preserved- but Cyn must have collected the telescope that had been shipped from Japan at Canadian Customs earlier that month while the children were at school, and kept it until Cec returned, because Charlie remembers that Cec’s help was needed to put it all together.

Later that Fall, Charlie made a speech about My Telescope where he describes what happened. “When my father goes away on a trip, he usually brings back a present. This year he went to Japan and India, and when he got home, he produced a huge box, nothing like I expected. I went to work unwrapping the parcel, and found a long wide tube with a mirror in the bottom. We put the pieces together. What a surprise- a telescope, for looking at the stars…”

Of course, life went back to normal now that everyone was in their proper place. Cec was glad to be home and back at work in the Lab. Among the younger scientists at the NRC, there was a spate of weddings. Dr. Hin Lu, on the permanent staff in the Physics Division, had married Marion in October, before Cec got home. In November, the wedding of the Spanish Post-Doc. Fellow, Santiago, would happen in the States, and the South African George Ritter’s wedding was planned for the new year in Ottawa. Cyn and Cec started having late night discussions that would bear fruit by Christmas, and the children incorporated their father’s travels into their November Public Speaking assignments.