The Life of Jane - Chapter Five

                                Chapter Five - Jane Goes To McGill

  
       In the fall of 1955, a young blonde 18 year-old woman walked along Sherbrooke Street taking in the sights and sounds of downtown Montreal. The day was sunny and warm and cars roared along, moving far faster than they did in Fredericton.
    Jane Sinclair was now a McGill University student registered in the first year arts programmme. She'd won a scholarshp into McGill. But she also needed money from her parents as well as some of  her small savings from summertime jobs to come to Montreal and enroll at McGill. The sights and sounds of Montreal at first overwhelmed her. Now she realized in this city of one-and-a-half million people, how small Fredericton was.
    By now, she'd visited Boston, New York City, and Philadelphis. But then she'd been with her parents. Now she was on her own. She stayed in the women's residence, a four storey brick building, right across the street from the McGill campus in downtown Montreal.
    "Where do you come from?" another young woman asked Jane, as she sat beside her in the women's dining room on the residence's first floor. Dozens of other female students were also eating a dinner served up by a white smocked staff who stood behind a counter.
     After Jane told this slight, brown-haired woman where she came from, the woman told Jane, "Oh I'm  from Albany, New York. I'm studying arts and I'm  in first year." After these introductions, she and Jane hung out together. They would stroll along Sherbrooke Street, gaping at the great mansions that had at one time lined the street. Now many of them were being converted into rooming houses. Two or three blocks away, lay Saint Catherine Street, which was full of well-dressed crowds and neon lights that flashed above store windows.
   "Wow, the people here sure move fast," Jane said at the roaring cars and hordes  of moving people. "The cars really speed and the way people dress up here. It's amazing."
    Nothing changed in Montreal in the four years she lived there, at least as far as the size of the crowds and the speed of the city was concerned. The city kept growing and Jane's interests grew too. "It was a nice time of my life," she recalled many years later. "I was a small-town girl coming to the big city with lots to learn."