Eileen Walkem-Hall:
Queen of Hearts

Was Eileen’s childhood yearning for an Easy-Bake oven simply typical of the dreams of every little girl who grew up in the forties and fifties, or was it a song that had been humming through her veins since birth, a harbinger of her destiny?

Eileen Walkem-Hall, who has been a student of Jungian thought for much of her life, believes, as did Carl Jung, that we are all “born with everything within us, hardwired and ready” for our unique gifts and talents “to be recognized in the outer world.”

Eileen’s dream of owning the Easy-Bake oven in avocado green, a thing of beauty that was displayed in the glossy pages of the magazines of the day, was the first of many stepping stones to her ultimately realized dream of becoming a woman who despite defeats and losses, learned to follow her soul’s blueprint to the person she believed she was meant to be.

Perhaps her future was already foretold when she journeyed with her mother on the Union Steamships boats to her beloved Savary Island where she remembers her mother running up the road from the post office on August 14th, 1945, swinging the two-year-old Eileen up in her arms and shouting, “The war is over.” What she couldn’t have known was that the battles and struggles of her own life were just beginning.

For Eileen, the Easy-Bake oven represented something significantly greater than her being able to bake; it represented independence. She alone could create delights from the oven in the privacy of her playroom. And the oven – clearly an instrument for learning –was also to teach her about disappointment and loss. The oven did not live up to the glory of what it promised on the pages of those glossy magazines. She felt utterly betrayed.

In 1987, Eileen, sun-browned and barefoot, exchanged her gardening skills and the Capability Brown moniker that was emblazoned on the side of her old Bowen Island truck, to follow the first urgings of her ‘inner baker.’ Quoting Plato, Eileen said, “’Necessity...is the mother of invention”’ and it was sheer necessity that sent her knocking on doors and looking for work. She was hired at the island’s one local bakery, baking pies all night for $4/hour; that barely paid the rent on her small Union Steamship cottage in the nearby Orchard community. She earned only a pittance more when she moved on to work for Bowen’s only restaurant and baked pies for $4 each, eventually adding muffins to her repertoire.

Necessity once again dictated that she move on. She was close to penniless; her three teenaged children lived with their father in West Vancouver. Winters were brutal in the un-insulated wood cabins in the Orchard; they were heated only with cheap wood stoves called ‘Tin Lizzies.’ Under  the cover of  pre-dawn darkness Eileen slipped into the nearby woods with an old bed sheet that she filled with windfalls to feed her fire and keep her warm. She would emerge sometime later, determined and unbowed in the face of such poverty, dragging the bed sheet over frozen puddles and along the frost-heaved road to her little cottage.

In winter her cottage smelled of woodsmoke and kerosene. The power went out frequently on Bowen Island in those days and kerosene lamps were a ubiquitous part of Orchard living. On the table sat bowls of bean seeds,  a silver vase of dried blue hydrangea, framed family photographs, books by Jung and Joseph Campbell and Marion Woodman.

In summer in her small back yard she grew a lush garden of flowers and vegetables: Peas and beans on tall poles, rhubarb, tomatoes, squash. I saw her one warm moonlit summer night, a night that was alive with the scent of honeysuckle and mock orange. She was walking down the Orchard lane carrying a lemon meringue pie upturned on one palm. It truly was a thing of beauty. I didn’t know her then, but I named her: she was the Queen of Hearts.

In the mid-eighties, Eileen went further afield with her baking and sold cinnamon buns, muffins and her pies to the cafeteria at Cypress Bowl during the ski season. It was these tentative beginnings that slowly broadened the way for Eileen to turn her earliest dreams and visions into reality. Needing to make more money than she was making, she set up a bakery in the basement of  Capers on Marine Drive and 25th and it was there where her name became synonymous with her magnificent pies.

Eileen’s journey finally took her to the realization of her heart’s dream: to own her own bakery. On April 17, 1989 she rented a space beside the ‘Black Cat’ building on Marine Drive in West Vancouver and with the help of her children, she took her first fearful steps into the world of retail. Savary Island Pie Co. opened its doors.

She worked all day and slept at night in the back room on a cot pushed up against bags of flour. She sold her pies to Stongs and Hearts and remembers vividly setting out each morning to deliver the day’s goods and to find out what had sold the previous day. “I was terrified,” she said. It wasn’t hard to choose a name for her bakery. Savary Island was where all her dreams and memories had begun. Her journey had carried her from her earliest beginnings as a visionary – in Jungian thought a manifestation of the divine feminine, an open place from which our dreams are born – to an explorer in the world, the archetype of the creative masculine which carries our dreams out into the world as realities.

Today Savary Island Pie Company is a presence that hums with its own magical energy. And that energy and that magic come from one source: the living manifestation of a powerful personal journey and one strong woman’s unstoppable dream.

- Edythe Anstey Hanen