Right, Left and Centre: The Poltics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe. Chapter 43, part one.

    From California to Canada. One woman's journey to adulthood.


      Marion Lansbury wasn't happy. In less than an hour another school day would end,. This 12 year old knew what was waiting for her in her family's suburban Pasadena home. Her three younger siblings would be tearing around their southern California home, causing her all sorts of problems.
Their faces would be smeared with jam and food from the fridge. Their noise would fill the house.
      "Oh my God," Marion said as she walked through the front door of her home. She saw her siblings up to all sorts of mischief. "What are you kids up to, to-day? And where's mom?"
    Yet she knew already where her mother was. Antonia Lansbury was no doubt lying down on her a and her husband's twin bed in one of the home's bedrooms on the second floor. She was probably enmeshed in an alcoholic haze. A half empty glass of scotch liquor was usually perched on one of the bedroom's side tables. Next to the bottle of scotch often sat a half empty glass of liquor. When Marion went upstairs to check her mother's condition, she was right again.
     Marion knew before the age of ten, that her mother had serious problems with life. A few years later, she told some of her friends, "My mum's a lush. All she does is drink liquor."
     Now in this spring time afternoon of 1957, Marion had to bring order to the Lansbury home. She had to clean up the faces of her younger brothers and sister.  She had to cook a meal for all of them. Then, too, she remembered she had to do the laundry and clean up the house. She also had to prepare the meals for her siblings to take to school tomorrow. Her father, a big chunky man was far away, steering a big plane across the Pacific Ocean for a private U.S. airline.
     "Fly the friendly skies of United," went one popular airline advertisement of a few years later. Marion Lansbury stood in the living room of her home and asked herself, "Where's the people who will help m and where's my friends?'' She looked out at the house's  small back yard that also needed cleaning up, and sure couldn't see too much help for her. Once again, she was on her own, confronted with problems that no 12 year old should have to face alone.
     So Marion had to grow up early but not always happily. Her blue eyes turned cold. Her blonde hair became grey early on. At first, she bloated up and became fat. Later on, when she reached her adult medium height of  five foot five inches, she slimmed down. Soon she took up smoking cigarettes. It was a necessary evil  but a necessary vice.
       Yet Marion was also a very intelligent young female. IQ tests were all the rage in the 1950's. Marion nearly always scored in the top 5 percent when taking these tests. When she was 17, she won a scholarship to a nearby state university. Here she studied biological sciences and benefitted from the tremendous post- Sputnik surge in spending on science that happened in the U.S. in the late 1950's. When the Soviet Union beat the U.S. into launching rockets into space, science student like Marion Lansbury benefitted. Then in the middle of her academic career she moved to northern California.    
      "I want to go and study somewhere else," she told her family and a university guidance counselor. In fact, she wanted to leave her family and her still alcoholic mother Antonia behind. Which she did.