Ellen worries about her father as she's heard all kinds of rumours about the men who have left to find jobs: some are in jail, others doing hard work on the railroad or in the mountains.
Finally a letter arrives from her father letting them know he has work in a logging camp in British Columbia. He has included two dollars for Ellen and money for them. Two months pass and no letter.
School closes with the arrival of summer break. Another hot, dry and dusty summer without rain. Their cattle and the horses are gone and the garden has dried up due to lack of rain. Mr. Carson buys their last horse Chief. He advises Ellen's mom to consider moving back east where she has family.
One morning Ellen learns that they will be moving from the farm. Ellen's mom tells her that they won't lose the farm as they didn't borrow money, and Jack Carson knows where they have gone so he can forward her tather's letters. She tells Ellen she has just enough money to buy them two train tickets to Toronto. Martha tells Ellen that she is going to accept her sister Gladys's offer to come live with her in Toronto. Gladys owns a boarding house and she can give them a room, and Ellen's mom can work helping her prepare meals. It also means they will be eating breakfast and dinner with others in the boarding house - complete strangers, something Ellen doesn't like.
Ellen tells her mother she does remembers when the farm had green fields and a cow that gave milk. Her mother is happy that she has this memory because the last time it rained was 1930 when Ellen was only four or five years old. Over the next two days they sort through their possessions and each pack a suitcase. Jack Carson drives Ellen and her mom to the train station but they stop on the way so that Ellen can say goodbye to her best friend Sarah Murray. Ellen and Sarah were the only two girls in their class at North Star School. Sarah asks if Ellen will be back in September, but Ellen doesn't know.
The train trip to Toronto takes three days. They are met by a very excited Gladys who notes how skinny both Ellen and her mother are. Outside Union Station Ellen sees streets filled with streetcar, cars honking their horns and many people. They take a taxi to Gladys's boarding house which she has named Saskatchewan House. The street it is situated on has many brick houses, each with a porch. Aunt Gladys tells Ellen there are many children on the street, so she will soon have some friends. And in fact the house next to Saskatchewan House has six children on its porch, all staring at Ellen. Aunt Gladys takes them to their room, located on the second floor at the front of the house with a large bay window and huge tree in front of it. While her mother has the large room with the bay window, Ellen has a smaller room separated from her mother's room by green velvet curtains, with a bed, desk and a tall window that also looks out onto the tree, a large Elm tree.
At dinner that night, Ellen and her mother are introduced to the other boarders: Miss Sprucedale who works in the millinery department at the Eatons store, three young women students: Addy, Bertha and Caroline who attend university, The girls are not in class during the summer but are working cleaning houses. Mr. Martineau who was a lawyer but is currently working as a streetcar driver. There are two brothers who are not at dinner but who work at the waterfront and who are helping their parents on the family farm. They pay their rent in fruit and vegetables and eggs, which is why the boarding house has plenty of food.
Ellen feels overwhelmed about meeting so many new children at once. After dinner upstairs in her room she discovers that she can open the tall window, climb out onto the flat roof of the front porch and be completely hidden from anyone on the street by the leaves of the Elm tree. She can hear the children on the street playing hide and seek.
Ellen's mother feels that she needs to get a job as helping her sister Gladys just won't be enough. She quickly finds a job as a housecleaner to an older lady, Mrs. Bartholomew who lives near the abandoned Casa Loma. Her house is huge and while there is plenty of work to be done, Martha also believes the woman is lonely. And so her mother gets up a six o'clock and after breakfast is gone to work by eight in the morning. Ellen helps clear off breakfast and has free time in the morning. For the first three days she doesn't go outside but on the fourth day, bored, Ellen decides to go out onto the porch roof and manages to climb into the tree next to their house. From this point she can hear the children next door, Joey and his older sister Charlene and their sister Gracie.
Ellen and her mother receive a letter from Mike telling them he is working on a farm in Peace River, Alberta where there hasn't been crop failures. He sends along two dollars to help them out. Ellen takes the two dollars and hides them in her desk along with the two dollars her father has already sent her. The other good news is that Mrs. Bartholomew has given Ellen's mother dresses her granddaughter has outgrown. While some are too big, Ellen ends up with four new dresses.
Every morning is the same at the boarding house: once breakfast is done and cleaned up, Aunt Gladys spends time in her rooms downstairs in the basement. Ellen tidies her room and then climbs out to sit in the elm tree. From her eavesdropping she knows that Charlotte is in charge of looking after her younger brother Joey and her sister Gracie who is four-years-old. Charlie often plays up at the "castle", Casa Loma which is abandoned with a group of boys. Charlotte, who has to mind Gracie plays with two other girls on their street, Pearl and Jeanette. Ellen calls the elm tree her "listening tree".
The boys from the third floor, Tony and Al return to living at the boarding house, and bring with them not only vegetables but six hens. The hens are placed in the garage and Ellen is assigned to look after them. They are Plymouth Rocks and not the Rhode Island Reds that Ellen was familiar with. It is the hens that instigate Ellen's first encounter with one of the children next door, when the dominant hen whom Ellen calls the Queen Hen, escapes. Queen Hen runs down the laneway behind the house and when Joey comes out of the garage next door he helps Ellen catch the chicken.
Then one night while her mother is at Mrs. Bartholomew's helping with a supper, Ellen decides to climb into the Elm tree to see what it is like at night. It is dark, with the yellow glow of the street lamp barely showing. Then Ellen overhears two men talking below about the house next door, the one where Charlene, Joey and Gracie live. Their mother owes forty dollars in rent and has recently gotten a job. She has promised to pay the money owed but can only do it in payments of five dollars as she has to feed her children. But the two men have a devious plan. The one man states that he will tell the elderly lady who owns the home that the tenant won't pay and that he will get an eviction order. The police will then serve the eviction order later in the week and that leaves Charlene's mother one month to pay the rest of the money. But their plans go even further: they plan to trick the old lady into selling her house by claiming they can't get tenants and then push her to sell the house to his companion. These men plan to cheat an elderly lady out of the home she owns, and force a family out on to the street.
After hearing this Ellen goes inside but the word eviction troubles her. She knows she has to tell Charlene in the morning what she's heard. The next morning Ellen goes out on the front step to wait until someone comes out of the house next door. Charlene comes out and is surprised to see Ellen. Ellen tells Charlene what she heard and learns that her mother was without work for two months and fell behind on the rent. Like Ellen, her father isn't around but it is because he did something wrong and the police were after him. Although Ellen's father is also not around, she knows that some day he will be able to return home. Ellen realizes that Charlene was not surprised when she told her about the plan to evict them and Charlene reveals that one of the men is Mr. Braggs who collects their rent and that he bullies her mother. As Ellen and Charlene talk more about what is happening Ellen begins to suspect just who the old lady is that owns their house - an old lady who lives up near the castle. She decides to talk to Aunt Gladys to learn if her suspicions are correct. Together, with help from Gladys, Mrs. Bartholomew, and Mr. Martineau, Ellen and the three Kennedy children come up with a plan that just might save them from "flitting".
Discussion
The Listening Tree is an short novel set in Toronto, Canada during the height of the Great Depression. The novel begins on a prairie farm in Saskatchewan where the author is able to portray just how difficult life had become for families there. The prairie drought that led to the Dust Bowl of the 1930's had its origins in the immigration and land policies in the early 20th century in North America. In Canada large numbers of immigrants settled in the western provinces on prairie land building farms to grow wheat and other grain crops. These farmers removed millions of acres of native grasses and shrubs, destroying the delicate prairie ecosystems. In the 1910s and 1920s good growing conditions and increasing demand for wheat led to more prairie land being converted to farming. With the beginning of the Depression in 1929 and 1930, wheat prices fell, resulting in farmers attempting to recover their losses by planting even more acreage. Then in 1931 there was a drought. The result was disastrous. Without the native grasses to anchor the soil and the lack of rain in the summer and snow in the winter, vast dust storms developed. Southeastern Alberta and southern Saskatchewan were most severely affected. Farms were repossessed and other abandoned. Almost 750,000 farms were lost in Canada between 1930 and 1935. Many of these farmers moved to northern parts of the affected provinces, to urban areas like Edmonton and Regina, and to Southern Ontario as in the case of Ellen and her mother in the novel.
The Listening Tree is an short novel set in Toronto, Canada during the height of the Great Depression. The novel begins on a prairie farm in Saskatchewan where the author is able to portray just how difficult life had become for families there. The prairie drought that led to the Dust Bowl of the 1930's had its origins in the immigration and land policies in the early 20th century in North America. In Canada large numbers of immigrants settled in the western provinces on prairie land building farms to grow wheat and other grain crops. These farmers removed millions of acres of native grasses and shrubs, destroying the delicate prairie ecosystems. In the 1910s and 1920s good growing conditions and increasing demand for wheat led to more prairie land being converted to farming. With the beginning of the Depression in 1929 and 1930, wheat prices fell, resulting in farmers attempting to recover their losses by planting even more acreage. Then in 1931 there was a drought. The result was disastrous. Without the native grasses to anchor the soil and the lack of rain in the summer and snow in the winter, vast dust storms developed. Southeastern Alberta and southern Saskatchewan were most severely affected. Farms were repossessed and other abandoned. Almost 750,000 farms were lost in Canada between 1930 and 1935. Many of these farmers moved to northern parts of the affected provinces, to urban areas like Edmonton and Regina, and to Southern Ontario as in the case of Ellen and her mother in the novel.
The effect of the drought is well portrayed in the first two chapters of The Listening Tree. Ellen's mother asks her if she can remember the green fields of their farm. Ellen remembers shelling peas in the front yard and planting her own flower garden. Four years later and the farm is now barren, without cattle or horses, with Ellen and her mother close to starving. In 1934, the garden that Ellen and her mother plant in the spring has dried up. They are eating only oats and the occasional egg. Because he can no longer farm, Ellen's father has left to find work so he can feed his family, hitching a ride on a train. And Ellen and her mother leave their farm to move to Toronto where they hope to wait out the drought and the Depression.
While the novel doesn't portray many of the problems common to the Great Depression, such soup kitchens, homeless and unemployed young men, the author does portray how precarious life was for some families. Ellen's neighbours, the Kennedy family owe a significant amount of money in back rent after their father abandons them. They are being threatened with eviction by an unscrupulous man. Families unable to pay their rent due to unemployment often "flitted", that is they quickly abandoned their rental homes, usually at night. In the novel, Charlene explains to Ellen they will "flit" before being evicted so they can save their furniture. Once they are served with an eviction, their furniture is thrown out onto the street and destroyed. Families like the Kennedys who are struggling to pay rent, often had little to eat. Ellen realizes this when Joey helps her capture the runaway Queen Hen with a scrap of toast he was likely saving from his meager breakfast and she gives him two cookies.
The Listening Tree also sets part of the story at Casa Loma, at one time the largest home ever built in Canada. Unfortunately Lottridge doesn't give much background information in her note at the end of the book. It was built between 1911 and 1914 by Sir Henry Pellatt, founder of the Toronto Electric Light Company. Pellatt was a renowned philanthropist who loved the British royalty and all the attendant pageantry and pomp associated with the aristocracy. The castle was designed by one of the most prominent architects of the early 20th century, E.J. Lennox. Due to high debt, Pellatt was forced to abandon his royal castle in 1924. He passed away in 1939. Casa Loma operated as a hotel from 1926 to 1929 and also a night club. With the Depression in 1929 until 1933, Casa Loma was vacant and was repossessed by the City of Toronto for back taxes of more than $27,000. Although various projects were proposed for the estate, it remained vacant until 1937. In 1937 it began operating as a tourist attraction under the guidance of the Kiwanis Club of Western Toronto. In the novel, The Listening Tree, Casa Loma is abandoned but under surveillance by a watchman. For Joey Kennedy it is a place to explore during the trying times of the Depression.
The story is told by nine-year-old Ellen Jackson, who has moved from her family's farm in Saskatchewan to the big city of Toronto. It is 1934, in the middle of the Great Depression. Ellen, who is an only child, is shy and is struggling to adapt to life in a big city. Lacking in confidence to meet the children on her street, she takes to climbing into the Elm tree outside her bedroom window and eavesdropping, listening to the children playing. This tree becomes her "listening tree". "She looked up into the branches of the tree. They made a world where she was safe and alone, listening in on the world of the street. It's my listening tree, she thought. Up here, I can only listen. By listening I can get to know the kids down there, just a little, but they can't know me at all. " This however, makes Ellen feel lonely. Gradually Ellen comes to realize that she doesn't belong in the Elm tree. One day after watching a squirrel jump from branch to branch Ellen undestands that although it's very beautiful in the tree she doesn't belong there like the squirrel does.
After overhearing the plans of two men to evict the family next door and Ellen's determination to help the family, the place of the listening tree in Ellen's life comes into perspective. As she searches for ways to help the family make up the rent money owed, Ellen retreats to the tree. But now her view of the listening tree is different. She still loves sitting in the beautiful tree with its green leaves, but she knows it's only for a short time. " 'I'll come back when I can,' she promised the listening tree. 'I'll come back because I like it here. But I don't need to listen anymore.' " Ellen's mother discovers her climbing into the listening tree and she understands when Ellen tells her that the tree helped her adjust because it was something only she had.
Author Celia Barker Lottridge ties up her story in a heartwarming way: Charlene's family is helped, Ellen finds her place in Toronto, making a new friend in Charlene Kennedy and helping Charlene's family to pay off their debt. She's a responsible, caring young girl who recognizes and understands hardship because she has experienced it first-hand. She understands how Charlene feels about the loss of her father.
Canadian author, Celia Barker Lottridge is an excellent author who lives in Seaton Village, a part of the Annex in Toronto, Ontario. Lottridge decided it might be interesting to explore what life was like in her neighbourhood during another era, in this case, the 1930's Depression. The author wanted children to learn about this era and what life was like in Canada during the difficult times of the Depression. “I saw it as a time when life was full of practical problems—the majority of people were having to cope with the day-to-day of getting money … the Depression had a huge impact here in Canada, but I don’t think a lot of children or adults have any idea of how extremely hard it was. We like to forget about hard times,”
(taken from http://gleanernews.ca/index.php/2011/01/19/a-seaton-story/#.UHSj1K542qg )
(taken from http://gleanernews.ca/index.php/2011/01/19/a-seaton-story/#.UHSj1K542qg )
Several caveats: a map showing Saskatchewan and Ontario and the route Ellen and her mother travelled as, well as a map of Toronto and Casa Loma would have been helpful. The novel deserved a more engaging cover that would appeal to the 9 to 12 age group it is written for. And why does Ellen's mother refer to Ellen's father as "Mike' and not "dad" of "your father"???
Book Details:
The Listening Tree by Celia Baker Lottridge
Markham: Fitzhenry & Whiteside 2011
168pp.
Book Details:
The Listening Tree by Celia Baker Lottridge
Markham: Fitzhenry & Whiteside 2011
168pp.
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