Sun in Winter: A Toronto Wartime Journal, 1942–1945

Christopher English is a professor of history at Memorial University of
Newfoundland and the author of A Cautious Beginning: The Emergence of
Newfoundland’s Supreme Court of Judicature in 1791–92.

Born in Germany to an English mother, married to an American expatriate
in London and pregnant with her second child, Gunda Lambton shipped out
as part of the last government-sponsored evacuation of refugees to
Canada in 1940. Thereafter, despite the ever-present spectres of
financial stringency, sudden unemployment, discriminating landlords, and
a feckless absentee husband, she strove single-mindedly to provide for
her two girls, to improve her material and professional prospects, and
to realize her talents as a visual artist. Her diary of these years of
challenge and exploration offers fascinating insights into a woman of
grace and wit historically (and sometimes literally) frozen in a Toronto
that is unrecognizable now.

She often scrimped to get by. With pre-war breadwinners away at war,
families welcomed the extra cash that boarders could offer, but the
price was overcrowding, unwelcome noise, frazzled nerves, and the
tensions imposed by shift work, long commutes on public transport,
inadequate or non-existent daycare, and constant worries and
uncertainties about absent family and the future. A rare family summer
holiday on Lake Huron demanded frugal camping and, crucially, quitting
her job. Lambton coped, with determination, practical optimism, and the
support of friends on the shop floor and in the city’s literary,
artistic, and academic circles. To visit or house-sit in Rosedale or
Forest Hill was to travel to a foreign land. And it appears to have been
true: wartime winters really were more severe than those today!

Her vignettes are beguiling: North of Eglinton Avenue lay fields;
Malton, where she read blueprints and inspected Lancaster bombers, was a
sometimes uncertain adventure on rural roads. She describes the treat of
a Christmas trip for the children to be photographed on Santa’s knee
at Eaton’s; the enjoyment of nature at Lake Simcoe or Wiarton; the
intellectual excitement of walking and talking with a young Nathan
Cohen, fresh from the Maritimes; the solidarity that bound academics,
artists, and workers united by memories of the Spanish Civil War, the
rise of fascism, and the near defeat of the George Drew Conservatives in
Ontario by the CCF in 1943. Less positive were the deference and
supportive role demanded of women, the demeaning nature of the divorce
laws, and a conversation (of which Lambton provides a moving account)
with another wartime “displaced person,” a Canadian citizen of
Japanese heritage, employed by a doctor uncle but as marginalized and
vulnerable as Lambton. Through it all her little family, and, at war’s
end, her extended family in England and Germany survived.

Remarriage, more children, a career as an artist, and the final move
from eastern Toronto to Quebec deserve a second volume. Meanwhile, this
study of Toronto in the war years—its attractions, bleakness, and
blemishes—could only have been written by a sympathetic but not
uncritical refugee and future citizen.