Читать книгу Unlikely Paradise - Alan D. Butcher - Страница 11

2 A SAILOR’S DAYS AND POLITICAL NIGHTS

BY THE SUMMER OF 1942, the tragedy that was the Battle of Britain had passed, at heartbreaking cost, and England was still there, though standing on the edge of the abyss. The war brought a lack of manpower in many essential areas. The WRCNS, or Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service, was formed to assume the roles men were not available to perform. While many in those years would have looked puzzled if you mentioned the WRCNS, the affectionate sobriquet “Wren” was immediately recognized. Thousands of Canadian women answered the call, and by the time the service was disbanded in August 1946, nearly 7,000 young Wrens had taken over such jobs as sick bay attendant, cook, mail sorter, truck or ambulance driver, radar operator, and, in Frances’s case, telegrapher (communications). And these were just a few of the dozens of services provided by the Wrens. The young ladies earned — and earned is the very word; they earned their pay — about one-third the money paid their fellow (male) sailors. It was felt, in those misguided days, that it took three women to do the work of one man, an assumption the Wrens quickly disproved.

The Ontario government had provided a school in Galt for the use of the new women’s naval service, and by the close of 1942, the initial contingent of Wrens had arrived. In June 1943, the training base was commissioned HMCS Conestoga, under the command of the executive officer, Lieutenant H.M. Macdonald, and quickly acquired the nickname “The Stone Frigate.”

Marjorie Jordan, one of Frances’s old friends and an officer in the Wrens, had persuaded Frances that the navy was the best of the services, and Frances was easily convinced. Marjorie was a very attractive woman, and even more so in her smart uniform.

Life in the navy gave Frances more of the structure she did not see in her life at home. She was never keen about being told what to do, preferring always to do what she felt was right, what she knew was good for her, what she wanted to do. Her first hours in the navy brought a glint of revolt to her eye; anyone who has been part of the military knows that if you seek common sense, you’ll not find it there. The military bureaucracy has more rules and regulations than a dog has fleas, and anyone who is prone to do as she pleases and follow the sensible dictates of her own intelligence will quickly find she is in the wrong place.

Frances spent four weeks in HMCS Conestoga, undergoing the standard drills and lectures. From there, sixty Wrens were sent to the Canadian Signal School in Saint-Hyacinthe, Quebec, to become visual signallers. Twenty of these, including Frances, then transferred to become TSOs (Telegrapher Special Operator).

During Frances’s time in the navy, she was in Intelligence, specifically monitoring Japanese ships and submarines. But she didn’t know she was working for the secret service until she was discharged. “We were getting an extra seventy-five cents a day,” she said, “and couldn’t figure out why.” But in 1945, six-bits was six-bits, so you didn’t ask questions.

Once, when monitoring a particular frequency, Frances heard a strange and continuous beeping. She and the other Wrens tracked it right across the prairies. They couldn’t understand what it was. Eventually they learned it was a weather balloon; one came down over central Canada and the authorities were able to identify it and determine its use. It was Japanese, and had apparently been sent over to test air currents. Some, according to Frances, were armed with small bombs, and all had transmitters and were sending back weather patterns to Japan. “The theory was,” said Frances, “they were going to send more powerful bombs and release them in the right place at the right time. Which they didn’t, thank goodness!” Frances estimated the balloons were thirty feet in diameter and made of rice paper. “Must have been quite an engineering feat,” she said. “I imagine it had ribs and stuff made of bamboo. It seemed beyond belief: a rice paper balloon, borne on air currents, making its way across the Pacific Ocean!”

For the remainder of 1944, until the middle of March 1945, the Wrens’ days were an unending series of studies and lectures. There was a rumour that the top fifteen in the upcoming exams would be going to the west coast. The rumour proved true, and Frances was one of the fifteen. They left for Vancouver on May 3, 1945. Frances arrived there on VE Day, then boarded the boat to Victoria — her first “sea” voyage. After five days at HMCS Givenchy in Esquimalt, she and her fellow Wrens were sent south to Seattle — Bainbridge Island — on loan to the American navy.

As a child, Frances got into a lot of trouble doing what she wanted to do. As a Wren, not much changed. She was an attractive, blond, twenty-year-old woman, and so was her friend Marnie. American sailors were no slower than Canadian sailors, so, within two days of joining the Canadian Wrens’ school in Seattle, she and her friend were invited by an American sailor to tour one of the large warships moored near the navy yard.

When it came time to leave the vessel, the two Wrens stepped ashore in the navy yard — and were promptly arrested. A marine officer seized them and dragged them off to the station.

“How the hell did you get in?” cried the American officer. “A colonel in the U.S. Army can’t get into this place without a pass!”

And then he phoned the FBI.

Frances and Marnie looked at each other, at a loss to understand. They had just walked in with their friend, the American sailor, casual as you please, and been given the Grand Tour of the USS Bunker Hill. And here they were, with the officer talking to the FBI guy on the phone.

“Their stories check …” and “Their number on file …” and “At the time they were apprehended …” Frances swallowed. Apprehended?!

Finally, another officer came in and said, “How did you people get in?”

Frances, by now more irritated than frightened, looked him coldly in the eye. “We swam in — from Canada.”

The officer, Frances thought, appeared to have had “a couple of jars” with his lunch. In any event, he took her response without offence, escorted them to the gate, and let them go.

On July 5, 1945, Frances’s group returned to Canada.

In August 1945, the Japanese surrendered, bringing the Second World War to an end, and with the cessation of hostilities, Frances’s thoughts turned to the future. Get out or stay in?

A week after the war ended, she celebrated her twenty-first birthday. Her friends gave her a party, and among her gifts were a sketch pad, a pencil, and a portfolio — a subtle hint of things to come. Throughout her time in the navy she had been sketching regularly. She found she had a facility and could capture a likeness easily and quickly.

At this point, her inclination was to leave the navy and take advantage of what was for many servicemen and women the opportunity of a lifetime: A university education, paid for by the Department of Veterans’ Affairs.

By mid-September she had made her decision, and submitted her name to the RCN depot, her formal “resignation” from the navy. It was not without the usual advice from many quarters. “Lieutenant Cassidy advised me to take art, but to stay in for awhile,” she said. “And after the Victory Loan Show, where I sang, Lieutenant Berlin wanted me to become a torch singer.” She laughed, but was thoughtful, too. “Might have been interesting.”

Above all, though, was the university education. But in what field? Medical? Her love of animals was strong, and veterinary medicine had its appeal. Music? She was already a competent violinist, she had a good voice, and music had always been in her nature. Art? Her sketching led her to consider drawing or painting; she thought she might become a good portrait artist.

In mid-October she sang at the Givenchy dance. “Dark Eyes” and “Night and Day” went over very well, and once again she saw herself draped over a piano, provocative off-the-shoulder dress, her husky voice lamenting a lost love, with Cole Porter at the keyboard, gazing up at her with a smile as he played the romantic hits of the day: Frances Gage, torch singer.

A long leave allowed Frances to return to home and family for the first time in seven months. Unfortunately, while her time in the navy had opened Frances’s mind to the exciting opportunities the world had to offer, nothing much had changed at home. She found that her mother and sister Barbara still didn’t get along. “Never did,” said Frances. Barbara was the youngest of the family, neglected at best, more often roughly ordered about, to which she responded with the stubbornness inherited from her mother.

“For heaven’s sake, girl, haven’t you folded those shirts yet?”

“I’ll fold them when I get around to it.”

“Do it now.” (A hard edge to the voice.)

“Later. Can’t you see I’m busy?” (Equally hard.)

“Don’t you give me that tone, my girl!”

Barbara would respond in kind, and any tranquility the day might have had was lost forever.

“There was the same unyielding nature in both of them,” said Frances. “Like a couple of mules. The best thing in the world would have been for Barbara to get away from home. Good for Mother, too.” Barbara, barely twenty, was already showing the signs of alcohol addiction, the demon that would torment her for the rest of her life.

On February 27, 1946, though she was technically still a Wren, Frances began a new job. She was hired to work on the development of a new Canadian flag. “I was still in the navy, but I had been doing a lot of drawing and sketching for the past two years, and had shown some of my work to Alan Beddoes, who was a wonderful typographer and an officer in the navy. The result was that I was hired to be the designer. Not so much the actual designer of the flag, but rather working with Alan to render the artwork of each design and determine the final choice among the many designs submitted.”

Frances was given a working area in the House of Commons. There she made a panel bearing all the flags of the world, with a small area in the middle where a new Canadian design would be placed, visually affording a quick and easy way of avoiding duplication of, or similarity to, another nation’s flag. Design suggestions came from a national contest. Frances took these submissions, drew them to scale, and then placed each in the panel for consideration by Alan Beddoes and herself, and the members of Parliament. They decided yes or no, then moved on to the next submission. “There were some very good ones,” she said, “and some that were awful. Twenty years later, when A.Y. Jackson saw the flag we have now, he said it looked like a Japanese dishrag.”

During the time she worked on the new flag, she was preoccupied by thoughts of the future. The flag work would not last forever. Veterinary medicine appealed to her. So did art. So did music. And, of course, there was always Frances the torch-singer. She sang at the Valentine party in mid-February, receiving much applause. She had a lovely contralto voice, and was confident that with proper training she could sing professionally. But as a career? Well, Doris Day and Jo Stafford weren’t doing too badly. During February she thought about it, but did not forget the other possibilities. Another consideration was the Wrens itself. She could stay in the service and sign on for perhaps twenty years. There were men in the military who were doing just that, planning for a discharge twenty years down the road, with a good pension, only forty years old with twenty years experience in a trade! Get a job and you’re looking at two incomes — paycheque and pension. The only thing wrong with that, in her mind, was those twenty long years in the service — not very exciting or satisfying.

Earlier, in February 1946, she had applied to the Ontario Veterinary College at Guelph for particulars on the course. A few days later she received a reply: she was number 361 on their waiting list of veterans. They would look forward to taking her in the fall of 1948. “I was devastated,” said Frances. “I knew I simply couldn’t wait two years. Now was the time I should be getting my education.” Frustrated, depressed, anxious for her future, she didn’t know where to turn.

Meanwhile, at “Flag HQ,” Frances’s “command post” in Ottawa, work on the new Canadian flag was moving ahead and she was buried in the bureaucratic brouhaha that surrounded the flag’s development. Her discharge from the navy had come through on the twenty-eighth of February, but because of her work on the flag, a letter was written to the secretary of state, and the discharge was placed in abeyance for another six weeks.

As with all operations in the hands of bureaucracies, work on the flag went beyond the six weeks allotted for its completion, and when Frances’s discharge was official, she would be obliged to come back and continue the flag work as a civilian. But until then, most of April was a madhouse of work, changes, delays, more changes, and more work.

On the twenty-third of April, she was on a train to Toronto for a much-appreciated leave, a brief few days with her family. She was twenty-one years old, the war was over, her navy days were over, but looking into her heart she found … nothing. She felt she knew nothing of herself, what she wanted to do with her life, what she could do with her life. Just emptiness. A complete blank. She experienced a sense of frustration, and a profound weariness. Study music? Study art? Like a child, she wanted to do both at once, but as a grown-up could decide on neither.

After a few days at home with her family, she was back in Ottawa on the first of May, as a civilian now. Her situation had changed, but it was business as usual in the committee room: Chaos. There were cartons of new flags yet to be examined and evaluated, hundreds of “old” flags that had been tested and found wanting in one way or another, and scores of designs that “seemed to exhibit a certain merit” for which Frances would have to execute the final art for the committee’s consideration. By mid-May, she was reproducing what would become the lucky semi-finalists. “Most of them were stupid, though,” she said with a long sigh of resignation.

But as sometimes happens in the senseless backing and filling of committee work, a ray of common sense penetrates the clouds of confusion. Someone pauses, and says “Hey, hang on a minute. We’ve got these flags down to about twelve. How about this: Let’s submit them to a group of experts, people who know what they’re doing.” He then looks around at the committee members, all of whom are frowning, wishing they’d said that. Far away at her drawing board, Frances sighs again. “Should have been done months ago.”

But it hadn’t been done then, and it wasn’t done now. New-born common sense was buried beneath discussions, amendments, meetings, and delays. Bureaucracy was once more ascendant. Disenchantment settled over Frances. “The matter is back in the hands of a bunch of politicians who know nothing about the job. And still it goes on! Even the big shots are getting into the act. The prime minister himself, Mackenzie King, dictated a design to me which he thought was awfully good.”

On the seventeenth of June, Alan Beddoes delivered yet another large package to Frances at Flag HQ, the nerve centre of “The Flag Affair.” She opened the parcel.

“Twenty-one variations on the red ensign.” She marvelled at the consistency of the submissions, the number of treatments that doggedly dwelt on that single theme of the red ensign, at that time the de facto flag of Canada (though historically just the flag of the merchant marine). Frances was somewhat concerned. “I wonder if the ministers are aware that a lot of people don’t want to change.”

The next day, Alan Beddoes looked in and dropped another parcel on her desk. “More red ensigns,” he said, “and, oh, here’s a bunch with maple leaves. Not much imagination out there.”

Two days later a frazzled Frances plodded up the stairs to the committee room. “Twenty-four more red ensigns, complete with maple leaves, up to the House of Commons. Will this week ever end?”

After four more days of the same monotonous story, she was growing reluctant to show up for work. “Reported in, and got three more designs that must be ready for the day after tomorrow. Don’t know how long I can keep my sanity.”

The next day: “Two more designs to paint up.” After lunch Alan Beddoes looked into her office, hesitantly, and handed her another parcel.

“I don’t want to see you!” she cried.

“It’s, uh, not many. Maybe … could you do them after supper?”

The following morning she was called into Beddoes’s office. He tried to smile bravely. “Hi, Frances!” He shuffled a few papers around on his desk. “There’s a few, uh, sort of rush orders to paint …”

“A … few … rush … orders!” She almost stamped her foot. “Do you know? Have you any idea …” she stuttered. “Are you aware that I have yet to be paid for any of this flag business?”

The twenty-second of July was her last day, and she packed her bags and left for home. As usual, she thought, with the last shreds of exasperation, after all this bureaucratic brouhaha, all these weeks of work, it would have been so much easier if they had taken the millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money and simply flushed them down the toilet.

The Great Flag Affair of 1946 was shelved and never heard of again.

To move from the active pointlessness of navy life to the inactive pointlessness of civilian life was not much of a career change, and in the autumn and early winter of 1946, Frances found herself looking for a job, any job, and growing more and more frustrated and hopeless, not to mention poorer and poorer with no source of income. The world seemed filled with jobs that started nowhere, went nowhere, and in that dull progress provided neither the satisfaction nor money to at least make them worth the effort. For Frances, sadness became depression. She was miserable at having missed the entry dates for any kind of educational institution; she still saw university as the only way to go. But she was left with a year to fill before she could try again and, not incidentally, to decide in which field she wanted to study. Her mind still jumped from art to music. Which field to pursue? How? Where? Even with the support of the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, she was, as always, concerned about money. The government didn’t pay for everything.

For the moment, she was staying with her family in Oshawa, which gave her a roof over her head but also the uncomfortable feeling of not being able to contribute. She had the loner’s passion for independence, to be able to pay her own way, to be in a financial position to make her own decisions independent of anything and anyone else.

Two of her acquaintances, Jean and Jim Stafford, had recently been blessed with twins, and Frances agreed to give the parents some help for a period of three months. The pay? Five dollars per week. For a thirteen-hour day. Almost immediately she regretted the move. “God! I felt like — and was treated like — an au pair!” After three weeks, Frances had a serious discussion with the Staffords, and a new schedule was instituted. She would have the same duties, same pay, but the hours were reduced to five hours a day starting at 8:00 a.m. “Wow,” said Frances, sarcastically, “my hourly rate more than doubled — seven cents an hour to a princely fifteen cents an hour. For heaven’s sake, I knew a fifteen-year-old office boy — a mere gofer — who was making four times that!” And the incredible thing was that the Staffords seemed surprised, even hurt, by Frances’s demands for an increase in pay.

During this period, Frances had been talking to the Oshawa YWCA. An offer of work brought the Stafford situation thankfully to an end, and by the last week in October 1946, Frances was working evenings at the YWCA.

Frances was not one to stand around waiting for someone to tell her what to do. From the outset she became involved with many of the YWCA’s activities. By January 1947, she was the instructor of the sketching class, running the teen centre, giving lectures to women’s groups, and at the same time continuing with her orchestra and choir practices and studying for her chemistry certificate.

Then, on January 20, 1947, there occurred one of those acts, prompted by an inexplicable change in mental state or chemistry, that happens perhaps once or twice in a lifetime. Or was it a rough push from Destiny’s impatient hand? On that fateful morning in January, she took a firm grip on her own bootstraps, and pulled. “Okay, that’s it. Time to cut the procrastinating and get to work.” The next day, she left for Toronto and marched into the office of the registrar of the Ontario College of Art. Later the same day, she sat down with the people from the Department of Veterans’ Affairs and made the decision that would change her life.

The following September she would enroll in the four-year program at the Ontario College of Art.