A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [60]
In time this son, my great-grandfather, Branwell Woodman, would be sent by his now widowed father to Paris to study painting. How his father justified this in a society that must have believed his artistic interests were pure foolishness was never properly explained, but it likely had something to do with getting the young man out of the way. There was whispered mention of a pregnant parlour maid who had been banished from the island once her condition was known. Branwell, however, may not have been eager to give the young woman up, and his father may have wanted an ocean between the pair. Perhaps studying art had been considered simply the lesser of two evils. Besides, the boy had talent—not as much as his sister, Annabelle, but enough that sending him to Paris for a year or two would not seem unusual in the eyes of the few families of quality with whom Joseph Woodman was acquainted and from whom the secret of his son’s indiscretion had to be kept.
So Branwell took the boat to Le Havre and went to Paris, a city I myself have visited a number of times. Branwell remained in France for a year or two, living the bohemian life of a young art student, while back in Canada his father cursed the steamboats that were replacing schooners in the Great Lakes (“the ugliest species of watercraft ever to diversify a marine landscape!” he was said to have thundered), cursed the steel that was replacing wood, and watched his fortunes slowly recede. When they had receded further, he cut back Branwell’s allowance and demanded that the young man return. But by this time Branwell had seen one of his paintings hung in an “exposition,” had had a taste, a crumb, of artistic triumph, enough that he was able to at least imagine, if not devour, the whole cake, and, understandably, he did not immediately want to separate himself from a life warmed by these few small victories. Moreover, it seems that he had been quite close to his mother, who had been dead for only three years. Perhaps the memory of his father’s sternness, combined with the absence of both mother and lover, made the prospect of returning to the island simply too gloomy for a twenty-year-old boy.
This was not the first time that Branwell had been away from home. From the age of about eleven onwards, while his mother was still alive, he had been sent to one of the English-style boarding schools that were beginning to spring up in a few places in the colonies. There he would have suffered, at least for a time, from unbearable homesickness and from the bullying of older boys until he himself learned to be a bully and learned as well to at least pretend to care about cricket. During the holidays, as an addendum to his education, his father insisted that he keep a journal, a nautical record of any and all of the variations of the wind that bore down on his island home, as well as a listing of the subjects of the sermons delivered by the various visiting Methodist clergymen. My father inherited this journal, which contained many personal references as well, usually written when the boy was miserably unhappy or terribly bored. Those particular entries were mostly about the progress Branwell had been making in the construction of a wind-driven iceboat in the winter and a small sloop in the summer. As for the sermons the young man dutifully recorded, my father could recite the titles of some of them verbatim. I can