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Inside the change room of Etobicoke’s Westway Park hockey rink sit the last vestiges of Arnold Hughes’s Carnival legacy.

Between the wooden benches, six folding tables have been assembled and are covered with an arts and crafts dreamscape: sequins, glitter, beads, cloth, feathers, pencils, paper, glue guns, masks, scissors. Against the walls rest bent wires and enormous pink panels, awaiting their turn to shape the “wings” of this Carnival Queen costume that has been months in the making.

Construction on masquerade (mas) costumes, some of which are so large they’re built on wheels, starts at 7 p.m. daily — just enough time for volunteers to get off work and grab a bite to eat — and ends as late as 2 a.m., leaving just enough time to get some sleep. As parade day draws near, the long nights here at the Toronto Revellers’ mas camp can stretch until sunrise.

Between extended bouts of silent concentration, are waves of laughter crashing from one table to the next. Sometimes about what song is on the radio, or from children running between workstations, or more often, about the elephantine task at hand.

For this team, mas camp has always been both work and play. This year is different, though. They are returning to mas after the global pandemic put a two-year pause on Toronto Caribbean Carnival or “Caribana” as it was formerly known.

And they are also without Hughes.

This crew working away is focused on honouring Hughes, the band’s late creative designer who passed away in 2020.

“We’re doing this for him, that’s the drive. That’s our motivation, that’s our incentive. We’re doing this for him,” says Kathleen Noel, Hughes’s daughter.

In April 2020, Hughes died while still designing the Junior and Senior Queen costumes for what he hoped would be Carnival that year. Suffering from vertigo, he slipped and hit his head on the baseboard of his bed. The injury caused a brain bleed that led to a coma from which he never recovered. His intricate sketches helped his family and friends bring his final vision to fruition.

“Mas was his passion. It was his life. It’s what he loved to do. He would be talking mas, 12 months out of 12 months of the year,” Noel says. “When mas is starting, during mas time, after mas, we’re always talking about mas. He’s either designing a costume, doing research, or thinking about a costume.”

Over 40 years ago, Hughes started his mas journey. First in his home country of Trinidad, as a member of local masquerade bands, then as a hobby in the 1980s after he moved to Canada.

Eventually when he retired from his career as a shipper, mas garnered his full-time attention. His costumes becoming so revered, he travelled as far as Hong Kong to showcase his talent. Mas became his art.

The Star visited Hughes’ mas camp in 1989, only that time it was in his living room. His tiny apartment in Toronto looked just like mas camp does today, yet somehow more crowded even with just him, his daughter and granddaughter present.

That was the year after he famously spent over $20,000 as a band leader to construct a costume, at a time when the “Band of the Year” title only landed him a $3,000 prize.

“Anybody can tell you that the cost that you put in, even if you win first place, you don’t even make that back. So, you really do this for the love,” Hughes’ granddaughter, Whitney Smart, explains. “Our time is voluntary. Everything that we do is voluntary because we love our culture.”

Like Hughes did in the past, this year’s costumes were handcrafted by family members primarily using local supplies, an element that some say is disappearing from the mas community.

“There’s a lot more people stepping away from the design aspect, even if that was something they did back in the day,” says Cyrese “Cece” Pounall, who has filled Hughes’ shoes as artistic director. “The type of band or family concept has been lost. It’s now a business. What we bring is no longer a thing.”

The family concept of Hughes’ mas camp is more than enough to bond people together though. Both Pounall, and Nicole “Nikki” Brand, who is wearing Hughes’ final Queen design in this year’s Grand Parade, aren’t blood related to Hughes, but they’re close enough emotionally to call him family without hesitation.

“I’m so happy that I’ll be the one bringing his last costume across the stage.”

As Hughes’ legacy comes to an end, so will his family’s.

“We’re all retired!” Smart, Brand, Pounall and Noel say, in unison. “We’re all hanging up the scissors and the glue guns after this,” Noel resigns. “We’re doing this for him one last time … and that’s it.”

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