Heart So Hungry

A book such as this cannot be written without a great deal of help. Among the many librarians and archivists to whom I am indebted for their research assistance, I extend a special thanks to Gail Weir at the Centre for Newfoundland Studies Archives in St. John’s, and Sherri Campbell at the Eccles-Lesher Memorial Library in Rimersburg, Pennsylvania.

As always, I am grateful to my agent, Peter Rubie, for his friendship and faith. And to my editor, Michael Schellenberg, for his insights and suggestions.

This book is a hybrid of fact and fiction. The events and individuals depicted here are a matter of historical record; scenes have been expanded and dramatized based on known facts.

May 4, 1956

“I
AM GOING TO EXPLORE
,” the old woman said. The friend with whom Mina Hubbard was visiting cautioned her not to stay out too long, their midmorning tea would be ready soon. The friend would have preferred that Mina not go out at all, for at eighty-six years old Mina had become a bit forgetful of late. More than once she had “gone to explore” the town of Coulsdon, a suburb of London, England, only to lose her bearings and be brought back to Fairdene Road by strangers.

But Mina Benson Hubbard Ellis was not the kind of woman who could be persuaded to pass the day in a rocking chair, especially not a fine spring day like this one, a day that smelled of balsam and spruce and of rivers swift with melted snow. A Canadian who had trained as a nurse in New York City at the beginning of the twentieth century, Mina still possessed the same headlong spirit that had defined her as a young woman, the same iron will that, in 1905, had made her one of the most celebrated women of her time.

Even now that spirit was evident in the quickness of her gait and in the angle, not quite imperious, at which she held her chin. She
came away from her friend’s house, paused for a moment to enjoy the scent of the bright May morning, then strode in the direction of the Coulsdon South railway station. She crossed the busy street with barely a glance at the traffic, extending her arms in both directions like a traffic cop, enforcing a path for herself, as was her habit.

Few people if any in Coulsdon were aware of Mina’s fame and accomplishments. Few knew of her lecture tours across America and England. Few knew that during the Second World War, while bombs dropped all around her lovely home in London’s Hampstead neighbourhood, Mina, as described by biographer Anne Hart in the CBC radio program
Through Unknown Labrador
, was “serving up left-wing causes with the tea, and retiring each night, oblivious to bombs, to a bed whose silk coverlet was always spread with the grey blanket she had slept under on the long-ago Labrador trail.” Few knew that at thirty years of age Mina had been timid and indecisive, that she had considered herself unattractive and of small value except as a companion to the man she all but worshipped, the hapless Leonidas Hubbard Jr., whose ignominious fate would soon determine her own.

If the citizens of Coulsdon knew Mina at all, it was as a small, eccentric old woman—a woman who now, on this sparkling spring day, climbed a grassy bank near the railroad tracks and strolled along like an explorer on a high ridge, eyes searching for something or somebody.

According to the
Purley and Coulsdon Advertiser
of May 11, 1956, Jill Foster, a fourteen-year-old girl, was standing on the platform of the Coulsdon South station when Mina came down the grassy bank and walked toward the tracks. Jill wondered where the old woman thought she was going; she had already passed the pedestrian walkway that would have brought her safely across the tracks to the station. Then Mina opened a gate intended to keep pedestrians away from the tracks, and Jill nudged her companion, fifteen-year-old Roger Aslin.

Roger cupped his hands to his mouth. “You’d better watch out there!” he called. “Train’s due any minute now!”

But Mina paid no attention. Perhaps she did not hear well. Perhaps she assumed that an approaching train could be held at bay by her outstretched arms, just as the cars and lorries were.

Or perhaps she knew full well that a train would never yield, that some things in life remain unswervable. A woman’s iron will, for example. A wife’s unflinching devotion.

In any case, Mina paid no heed to the warnings. She paid no heed to the rumble of the train as it approached the station, or to the shrill blast of its whistle. Maybe the rumble reminded her of a waterfall’s roar, a sound that, in an earlier time, had never failed to thrill her. In those days every new waterfall and every new set of rapids had murmured with the promise of discovery, and she had approached each one with a constriction in her throat and the hope that somehow, miraculously, Leonidas, her Laddie, would be waiting there to receive her, to welcome her back into his arms.

Now, she crossed the first set of tracks and stepped into the centre of the second set, and there paused, lifted her chin slightly, and smiled once more.

The children on the platform screamed to her. Mina turned her face to the sun. Did she hear the shouts of warning? Or were her thoughts attuned to another world entirely, to the perfume of pine in the air, the scent of a misty river a world and a lifetime away? Did she again feel that familiar tightening in her chest and hear in the train’s approach the rumble of a waterfall rushing to engulf her on such a fine spring day … a perfect day for her journey’s end?

W
HATEVER
M
INA’S MOTIVE
for stepping onto the tracks that day, her devotion to Leonidas Hubbard Jr. was surely at the heart of it. He was a man whose infectious enthusiasm for adventure altered not only his own life but hers and many others’ as well.

As a child growing up in rural Michigan, Hubbard developed a passionate interest in history and geography and a love for the natural world. Mina later described him as an imaginative and sensitive boy who had been reared on stories of travel and adventure. “His imagination kindled by what he read,” she wrote, “and the oft-repeated tales of frontier life in which the courage, endurance, and high honour of his own pioneer forefathers stood out strong and clear, it was but natural that the boy under the apple trees should feel romance in every bit of forest, every stream; that his thoughts should be reaching towards the out-of-the-way places of the earth where life was still that of the pioneer with the untamed wilderness lying across his path. …”

He brought those same sensibilities to his duties as a reporter for an evening paper in Detroit, where he went to work upon his graduation from the University of Michigan in 1897. A slight man of large ambitions, it wasn’t long before he yearned for more challenge and
adventure. In the summer of 1899, with less than five dollars in his pocket, Hubbard left Detroit for New York City. New York was throbbing with growth, the perfect place for him to launch himself into the ranks of his heroes. His most fervent desire was to become as famous as Teddy Roosevelt, Robert Peary and Jack London, all bold and independent souls, men with fire in their blood. He considered himself cut from the same cloth.

Unfortunately, Hubbard arrived in New York City with no contacts, no letter of introduction and no job prospects. Armed only with clips of his work in Detroit he trudged from door to door in search of a position. No offers were forthcoming.

All too soon the money ran out. With nothing to eat, his energy faltered, and for two days he staggered from place to place so weakened by hunger that he feared he would be arrested for public drunkenness.

Finally, when it seemed he was destined to collapse and die unnoticed on those friendless streets, an acquaintance from Michigan appeared out of nowhere and forced fifteen dollars into Hubbard’s trembling hand. That same day one of Hubbard’s stories was accepted for publication. But even better news was yet to come. A few days later he was hired as a staff writer for the
Daily News
. Before long he was getting all the best assignments for that paper and also selling an occasional piece to the
Saturday Evening Post
.

Then, calamity. In early May the headaches began, a pulsing ache like a hammer to his brain. Then the cough and sore throat, the nosebleeds and constipation. That first week he continued to work, doing his best to ignore the pain. But when his temperature rose and would not return to normal and the other symptoms worsened too, a doctor sent him to the Long Island Infirmary. Just like that his job with the
Daily News
was whisked out from under him.

In a few short weeks typhoid fever can rob a man of all dignity. Certainly Leonidas Hubbard Jr. felt he had lost that and more as he
lay abed in the quarantine ward. During the long days and longer nights of May 1900, as his body fought off the illness, he wondered anxiously what new misery would befall him.

The only bright spot in his life was his nurse. The comely Mina Benson, shy and petite, was a not quite pretty woman but with a gaze so soft that he had more than once felt himself drifting away on it. And she was a wonderful listener as well. A very good thing, too, considering how much Hubbard loved to talk.