Low Down Articles
In the Hills
Article 14 of 18
This article first appeared in the "In the Hills" column in the August 19, 2009 issue of the The Low Down to Hull and Back News.
Reprinted with permission. Search complete list of Low Down Articles.
o o o
Gunda Lambton - nonagenarian extraordinaire
by Catherine Joyce
This is a milestone year for Gunda Lambton: a 60th wedding anniversary in June, a 95th birthday coming up in September, and a sixth book in the works. At home in the heritage log house that she and her husband Bill restored 35 years ago west of Farrellton, Gunda still speaks with the razor-sharp authority and intensity that have defined her life.
Born near Hamburg of an English teacher mother and a German naval father, she grew up in Germany between the wars, a time of inflation, poverty and the relentless rise of Nazism - an era she has poignantly documented in her 2000 memoir The Frankenstein Room.
To better survive the impoverished times her parents moved their five children to an orchard farm near Berlin where they could grow their own food - a magical place where the children could run free over the heather-covered hills. With no school nearby, unemployed teachers who usually stayed for only one winter taught Gunda and her siblings at home.
By the time Gunda was eleven the family had moved to Darmstadt, an Art Nouveau centre with a lively artist colony, where the children could receive a progressive education. An artistic child who loved to read, write, paint and draw, Gunda took adult art classes from age thirteen. When she graduated at 18, Gunda left for a year to visit her mother's family in England, where she became a student teacher of German in a school outside of London.
At 20 she spent a year in Catalonia, learning Spanish and working in the library of a vocational college that housed books in seven languages. Fluent in many of them, Gunda read voraciously and met young students who shared in endless discussions in the ferment leading up to the Civil War of 1936. Gunda has just finished documenting this year in Spain, 1934-35, in her most recent memoir.
Returning to Germany, where she worked as a translator for a wine company in the Rhineland, she met her first husband, the English artist Garth Williams, who would go on to become the renowned illustrator of the Stuart Little books and Charlotte's Web - their daughter Fiona, the inspiration for the beloved character, Fern.
WW2 found them back in London, enduring nightly air raids during the 1940-41 Blitz. With Fiona, and pregnant with their second child, Gunda was finally evacuated to Canada where she initially taught art in Barrie and later worked in an aircraft plant in Malton. The end of the war brought her the opportunity to further her studies. A single mother now, she combined her interest in community development with arts and crafts programming at Toronto's Central Neighbourhood House - an era she has documented in her 2003 memoir, Sun in Winter, a Toronto wartime journal, 1942-45.
Bill Lambton came into her life in 1947. The brother of a London friend, he came to Canada from Kenya where he had worked on an 8000 acre family farm. Together he and Gunda moved to a dairy farm near Stouffville, Ontario, where for the first four years they had no hydro. Gunda continued to commute to work in Toronto until their first son was born. Her two older girls attended a one-room schoolhouse with eight grades.
In 1956 Bill became the editor of the Sutton Reporter for two years before they moved to Kirkland Lake. There Gunda started a nursery school and hosted a women's TV program while writing for the women's section of the Globe and Mail. In 1961 a family trip to Europe turned into a five-year stint in Scotland where Bill became an editor with the Glasgow Herald.
When they returned to Canada they landed in Ottawa with two keys sent by Jewish friends Gunda had cared for after the war: one to their home in the Glebe, the other to their cottage in the Gatineau. That first visit to the Hills sealed their fate. They had finally found where they wanted to settle. In the almost 40 years that the Lambtons have lived in the Hills Gunda has been actively involved in the artistic and community life of Wakefield and beyond. She has documented timeless tales of the Gatineau and the Pontiac in her 1996 book, The Wildest Rivers, the Oldest Hills, and celebrated the work of seven women artists in Canadian Public Art, Stealing the Show.
Now at 95 Gunda is writing her sixth book, exploring the history of their heritage log home, built in the 1860s by the Barrie family, and lovingly restored in 1974 when the Lambtons bought it. To listen to her speak is to marvel at the continuing vitality and vision of one remarkable woman.