Unlikely Paradise

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Alan D. Butcher. Unlikely Paradise

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UNLIKELY PARADISE

The Life of FRANCES GAGE

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Friends indirectly fostered Frances’s own artistic inclination. Una Brown Noble, a neighbour and a painter, became a great friend. For two summers, in 1934 and 1935, she took Frances to Algonquin Park, the beautiful nature reserve 145 kilometres north of Oshawa, Ontario. “I don’t know why anybody would want to be bothered by a scruffy little kid hanging around all the time,” said Frances, “but she did.” Una Noble had a small cottage on Canoe Lake, where memories of the painter Tom Thomson’s death were still fresh. But Frances’s intimate contact with Thomson was still twenty years in the future. As an eleven-year-old girl vacationing with her friend, she spent six to eight weeks in Algonquin Park during those two wonderful summers. It was her first contact with the park, a contact she was later to renew for many years as a counsellor at a summer camp.

Una Noble died of kidney failure at the age of thirty-nine. This was the first big tragedy in Frances’s life. Her mother said, “Never mind, you’ll see her in Heaven.” This did little to relieve Frances. “Yeah, but I might be eighty and she’ll still be thirty-nine!” she wailed. “What kind of a relationship will we have?!”

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