Remembering writer and lightkeeper Evelyn Richardson

Seventy-six years ago, a Canadian literary icon published a landmark book. We Keep a Light was Evelyn Richardson’s memoir of life on Bon Portage, a tiny island off southwest Nova Scotia where she and her husband, Morrill Richardson, tended the lighthouse and raised a family of three. Published in 1945, the book won that year’s Governor General’s Award as the best work of non-fiction in the country. And somehow, everyone but a few family members missed its 75th anniversary last year.

Although Richardson’s lifestyle remained unchanged, she went on to publish two novels and four more works of non-fiction. In all her work, Richardson describes a kind of yin and yang in this coastline that’s echoed in the lives of those who live along it. For every rocky, treacherous reef and headland where wind and sea take their toll, there’s a corresponding quiet inlet and sandy cove protected from the open ocean where life thrives. Reading We Keep a Light, it becomes clear that this coastline is as inextricably entwined with her identity as her own name. The island is her and she is the island.

Island life was bred into Richardson’s bones. Born Evelyn Fox on May 16, 1902, on Emerald Isle (aka Stoddart Island) adjacent to her beloved Bon Portage Island, her family roots go back to the first handful of Puritan settlers who arrived on these shores in the 1760s. Her maternal grandfather Ephraim Larken was Emerald Isle’s lightkeeper. Her paternal great-great grandfather James Fox was the first lightkeeper at Yarmouth’s Cape Forchu Lighthouse. She grew up on the adjacent Cape Sable Island where her father Arthur taught school.

Always an island hopper, Evelyn spent almost every holiday with her family on Emerald Isle. When she was 15, her father took a principal’s position at a school in Bedford. After graduating from Halifax Academy and Dalhousie University, she became a teacher herself. More than anything, she wanted to follow in her father’s footsteps. “My sole ambition was to be a teacher,” she writes in We Keep a Light, where she also admits to cutting short her university education and her teaching career—for love. She and Morrill were engaged and moved to Worchester, Massachusetts where he worked. The following summer, they returned to Evelyn’s birthplace on Emerald Isle for their wedding.

Both found city life in Worchester unbearable. They spent three years pining for their beloved Nova Scotia and daydreaming about starting a small farm. In 1926, while on a visit home, Evelyn’s oldest of five brothers told her that Bon Portage Island was for sale and the lightkeeper’s job there would soon become available. Immediately after she wrote to Morrill about the opportunity, he bought the island. She writes about the impulsive decision, “the whole thing brought me out of my rosy day-dreams to solid earth with quite a jolt.” But she soon settled into the idea. They spent their free time in Worchester, planning every angle of Morrill’s coming appointment as lightkeeper and escaping Worchester’s heat at the lake in the city park, where they imagined a tiny island there into Bon Portage.

In February 1929, the news they’d been waiting for arrived from Ottawa. “No words can describe our joy when the appointment at last came through,” she writes in We Keep a Light. Upon first seeing the red and white buildings against the green island and the blues of sea and sky, she writes, “Home. I have come to my home.” They spent the next 35 years on the island, tending the manually operated lighthouse, running a mixed farm, and raising three children, rarely taking the three-kilometre boat ride to the mainland. It wasn’t until the light was fully mechanized in 1964 that they left for good.

Cape Sable Historical Society

Life on the island

On a map, Bon Portage Island is an elongated figure eight, hinting at its geological history. A pair of low drumlins formed when retreating glaciers dropped piles of rocky debris after the last ice age. Over the centuries, a marshy isthmus joined the two, creating what is now a 600 acre island. A friend of Richardson’s called it, “that God-forsaken strip of swamp and rock.” It’s from this thin thread that Richardson wove both a full life and a rich literary legacy.

Life was not easy. She and Morrill often found themselves suddenly astonished, “living under conditions that most of the country outgrew 50 years ago or more.” The water was of poor quality and had to be hauled by hand. Their house was dark and drafty. The cook woodstove smoked badly in any wind but a rare and gentle southerly.

Daily life would have been struggle enough, but the Richardsons had three children to raise on a menial lightkeeper’s income. Needless to say, they worked long, hard days, rarely with a day off. As the children grew, Evelyn put her teaching skills to good use by homeschooling them, adding yet another responsibility to her long list of duties.

The youngest, Betty June, came along in 1933. Soon after leaving the island to take secretarial training, Betty June married Sydney Smith. The two repeated her parents’ life, keeping the Cape Sable light from 1953 to 1979. I met her in her home community, at The Old Court House in Barrington where there’s a permanent exhibit about her mother. The building is part of the Barrington Museum Complex—the Barrington Woolen Mill, the Old Meeting House, the Western Counties Military Museum, and the Seal Island Lighthouse—which her mother played a key role in establishing years ago. 

When I ask Smith what she most loved about island life, she answers, “How close the family was.” She has many fond memories of growing up on the island: swimming in salt water pools, exploring the island’s forest, climbing trees, picnicking on the beach, helping with the haying, and dodging the waves after “August twisters” or hurricanes. “Mom and Dad had this rule,” Smith says. “We could do anything that was reasonably safe.” But it’s the closeness of family that she remembers most fondly.

In We Keep a Light, Richardson records many good family times, but she also admits to feelings of guilt about raising her children on an island away from friends and family. “I don’t think she is guilty of anything,” Smith says. “But I can see how she would feel that way. I feel the same way when I think of my two children.” She adds that her children have told her they wouldn’t change anything about being raised on an island
by lightkeepers.

 

We keep a light

Somehow, in the midst of such a busy life, Richardson found time to write. Smith says she was always jotting down observations, ideas, and words on the backs of greeting cards, envelopes, and one-sided letters. “Whenever she was at the sink and heard old-fashioned words from a fisherman, she’d grab a pen and an envelope or something, write the word down and chuck it back in the box. Then she would put all these little hunks together.” Richardson wrote We Keep a Light by hand, and then bought a typewriter, “an old Underwood,” Smith says. “We still have it.” When Smith was older, she became Richardson’s proofreader and typist.

We Keep a Light was rejected by at least one publisher, according to Smith, but it was only a few months after its publication that it won the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction. The win catapulted Richardson to national and international fame. She travelled to Toronto in borrowed clothes to receive the award, then returned home to begin her writing career in earnest. She wrote fiction and non-fiction about her own childhood, natural history, and the age of sail in books like Desired Haven and My Other Islands.

Fans made pilgrimages to Bon Portage, sometimes arriving without notice. “Mom was a bit of a celebrity at the time,” Smith recalls, but says that fame didn’t change her in the least. “I was very happy that she was a gifted writer, but she was my mom, and I guess the world’s best mom.” It is through her writing that we can best understand Richardson. “Read her books, both the novels and the non-fiction,” Smith suggests. “That’s how you get to know mom.”

Richardson’s fame probably has a lot to do with the honesty of her writing. She was always just herself. Her work was permeated by the joy she found in everything around her and the way she embraced her circumstances. She was a beacon of dignity. Without preaching, she wrote about the importance of family, the need for a determined but never mulish work ethic, and of intellectual pursuits. The fans who read her works and visited the island were in search of a fast-waning, simpler way of life, one lived in a concentrated way on an isolated island occupied by a single family.

 

A fitting legacy

Morrill and Evelyn Richardson deeded Bon Portage to Acadia University when they left the island. Their friend, Dr. Harrison Lewis—the first head of the agency that would become the Canadian Wildlife Service—helped with their conservation efforts. Morrill died in 1974, and Evelyn passed two years later.

Today, Bon Portage is co-owned by Acadia and the Nova Scotia Nature Trust, which negotiated an easement to protect it forever from development. Science students travel to the Evelyn and Morrill Richardson Field Station in Biology to conduct research, often on the abundance of bird life there. The landscape and location attracts migrating birds crossing the Bay of Fundy, as well as some 40,000 breeding pairs of Leach’s Storm Petrel, an otherwise solitary bird that spends most of its life at sea.

It’s a fitting legacy. From the day Evelyn Richardson first stepped foot on the island, she found these avian wonders captivating. “The trees and bushes seemed alive with birds, the bright coats of the Yellow Warblers predominating over the more sober hues of the others, and all singing their hearts out to welcome us… I had never seen so many birds in so small a space, and the numerous birds on the Island have continued to be one of our chief joys here.”

Two years after her death, the Writers Federation of Nova Scotia created the Evelyn Richardson Non-Fiction Award, bringing her contribution to the genre full circle. A few years ago, her two daughters gave the Federation the rights to all of Richardson’s works. We Keep a Light is the only one in print, but others are available in libraries.

Evelyn Richardson left behind an account of physical hardships gracefully overcome with hard work and balanced by the soaring joys of daily life lived to the absolute fullest. Her account of island life rises beyond the particular to the universal when she writes, “As for Morrill and me…we share a companionship and deep happiness that we never could have surpassed, and might not have reached, elsewhere. I believe there is nothing that binds a man and a woman more closely than mutual reliance and assistance and the knowledge of difficulties faced and overcome together.”

Here’s hoping We Keep a Light is celebrated on its centenary and beyond.

 

A tribute in mittens

In 2018, Shirley Anne Scott and Christine LeGrow wrote the first of three best-selling books on so-called Newfoundland knitting, Saltwater Mittens. To say the books have been popular is an understatement—so much so that next year they’ll be rolling out a fourth, Saltwater Socks, through Newfoundland publishing house Boulder Books.

Shirley (aka Shirl the Purl) is deeply fond of Nova Scotia’s South Shore, and also has been a fan of Evelyn Richardson for years, rereading We Keep a Light on a regular basis. Late last year, Shirley offered the Barrington Museum Complex, part of the Cape Sable Island Historical Society, a custom-designed mitten pattern in recognition of Evelyn Richardson’s life and writings, which they use as a fundraiser for the museums in the community where Richardson and her family were so well known (The museum also holds Richardson’s papers).

The pattern is called “Wind and Seas”, and may be purchased at the museum complex (where you can also purchase yarn created at the Barrington Woollen Mill) or through their online giftshop at barringtonmuseumcomplex.ca.

As Shirley explains, “The character of life in Nova Scotia is as much about the tides, winds and seas today as it was in Evelyn’s time. We Keep a Light endures. Thank you, Evelyn.”