Читать книгу The Beleaguered - Lynne Golding - Страница 9

Chapter 1

DECLARATION OF HOSTILITIES

On the afternoon of August 4th, 1914, our family acknowledged what most Canadians knew to be true: Canada was at war. We acknowledged Canada to be at war, although our parliament had not yet proclaimed it. We acknowledged it, although Great Britain itself had not yet announced that it was at war; although the time provided for Germany to accede to Great Britain’s ultimatum had not yet passed. We acknowledged it without knowing what the war would cost us in men or materials; without knowing where its battles would be fought or where our troops would be sent; without knowing the means by which mortal payloads would be delivered; without knowing the anxiety, uncertainty, and sacrifice that would be experienced by those at home; without knowing the innocence we would lose, the beleaguered state we would assume.

We did not know the vocabulary we would acquire; the songs we would sing; the names we would revere and the names we would revile. We did not know the foreign cities, towns, and villages that would become as familiar as our own; or the identities of those among us we would come to consider courageous or cowardly; patriotic or traitorous; leaders or followers. We did not know the alternative uses to which our buildings would be put; the way we would come to celebrate; the way we would come to mourn.

I was only eleven years of age when World War I commenced—the Great War, as we first came to know it. Just as I could remember where I was and what I was doing when I first sat in an automobile, when a room in our home was first illuminated by electricity, when I had my first telephone conversation, I remember where I was that day, August 4th, 1914, when we realized that hostilities with Germany were to commence.

It was a Tuesday, midafternoon. My mother and I were home alone, beating dust, food particles, and strands of hair from an enormous wool carpet. The rug, which ordinarily covered our dining room floor, was then off the ground, spread over the white wooden railing of our verandah and a number of wooden saw horses. A part of our semiannual ritual, we had earlier that afternoon exposed the dining room curtains to a similar vigorous walloping.

As was most often the case, my mother, then fifty-three years of age, wore a brown wool dress, a lighter-weight version of her winter attire. The colour complimented her warm brown eyes and her still-brown hair. The plain fabric covered her moderately plump form from the short neck below her sweet, round face to her delicate ankles, from her gently curved shoulders to her thin wrists. In case the garment she wore was not sufficiently modest—and Mother always dressed modestly—the brown dress itself was largely concealed by Mother’s signature white apron, a shell she wore from dawn until dusk, removing it only when entertaining non-family members and during meals. The two-toned hand-tooled leather shoes that were the only extravagant aspect of her wardrobe were not visible below the many undulating folds of her long skirt.

I was wearing one of my two everyday summertime dresses, a lightweight navy and white gingham frock. Consistent with my age and the fact that the dress was then only two years old and so remotely within the dictates of the days’ fashion, a two-inch expanse of skin could be seen between its hemline and the black socks that covered the remaining distance to my black buckled shoes. My hair, a mass of brown ringlets, was mostly pulled into a bow at the nape of my neck. I say “mostly” because its thick, unruly nature meant that it was rarely entirely captured within a ribbon, bow, or elastic. Ringlet tendrils poked out of the top and sides of the gathered mass.

As our arms and the brooms we batted released six months of accumulated grime, the lustrous violet, plum, lime, and gold threads of the rug were rerevealed. The bright colours complimented the large-patterned, similarly hued, Victorian paper that lined the walls of the room normally around it. Though the work was laborious, it was not unpleasant. Household chores were a constant part of my summer days. The day was bright, and our conversation was full and light.

The beating work was not continuous. In addition to breaks taken to rest our arms and to recover from fits of sneezes and coughs, not to mention the laughter that often followed such outbursts, we stopped occasionally to sip iced tea, and more often, to turn the carpet in order to expose our brooms to the portion of the carpet previously draped over the far side of the verandah’s railing. It was while we were engaged in that turning exercise that an image appeared on the road before us. Pedalling up the hill from Main Street below, astride his bicycle, was Michael Lynch, a local telegram delivery boy.

“Mrs. Stephens! Mrs. Stephens! Did you hear the news? We are at war! Canada is at war!” Michael hollered without stopping. “Hurray! Canada is at war!” The basket of his bicycle appeared to be full of telegrams. We watched him continue on past our house.

“Do you think it’s true?” I asked Mother with a combination of trepidation and incredulity. Proclamations of this nature were not in keeping with the manner in which telegrams were usually delivered. “I didn’t think he was allowed to announce the contents of a telegram like that.”

“He isn’t permitted to disclose the contents of confidential telegrams,” Mother replied. “He’s been in that job for a long time. If he’s making that kind of a statement, then it isn’t a confidential matter.” Mother looked at her timepiece, a small clock dangling within a pendant on a gold chain hanging from her neck. “It’s only four o’clock,” she said. We all knew that the Germans had until seven o’clock Eastern Standard Time to respond to the ultimatum of the British government, to respond or to find itself at war with Great Britain and her allies.

“Michael must know something. If we are at war—and I suspect we are—the Turners will cut short their trip to Toronto today. You’d better run down to your aunt’s. The family should be together tonight.”

“Here or there?” I asked, knowing the answer before I asked the question.

“There. It will take us a while to restore the dining room and,” she confessed, “we are low on meat. Your aunt always has enough to serve us all.” That was undoubtedly true, for although the dining room of my Aunt Rose, who lived just down the road from us, could accommodate the same number of people as our dining room, and although our pantries and kitchens were precisely the same size, my aunt’s larder was always more full.

I was back on our verandah within five minutes, my Aunt Rose agreeing with Mother’s suggestion. Over the next hour, Mother and I completed our beating of the rug. We half-dragged, half-carried the heavy carpet through our front foyer, parlour, and sitting room into the dining room, where we resettled it within the dark rectangular area of the elm floor that had escaped the sun’s bleaching rays. We lifted the skeletal form of our dark walnut table onto the rug, setting its legs into the familiar wool divots, before reinserting six of the table’s leaves. Finally, with ten of the fourteen petite point cushioned chairs tucked under the table, our work was complete. It was done in silence. The idle banter Mother and I shared earlier that afternoon in taking these steps in reverse was gone.

My Aunt Rose and her two children, John and Hannah Darling, lived in a house that was the mirror image to ours. Both located on Wellington Street, they were built by my grandfather, Jesse Brady, shortly after I was born. Each was clad in red brick and adorned with white trim. Tall windows topped with stained glass panes and surrounded by large green shutters graced two sides of each house. The first floor of each home had a grand front entrance or foyer, a parlour for entertaining visitors, a sitting room in which family gathered, a dining room, a kitchen, and a pantry. The second floor of each contained a bathroom and five bedrooms. The two floors were connected by two staircases: a wide, polished wood, carpet-lined staircase that wrapped around two walls of the foyer and which was the principal staircase used, and a small staircase entered from the pantry behind the kitchen. That staircase at the back of the house and the small second floor bedroom next to it were referred to by my aunt as the “back stairs” and the “back bedroom.” In our house, the same set of stairs and the same bedroom were referred to as the “maid’s stairs” and the “maid’s bedroom.” This was so, even though my family never once employed a maid, in contrast to my Aunt Rose, who often did.

The attic, which formed the third floor of each house, had two finely sculpted gabled windows. They sat below the house’s dark green roofs, which rose at various levels. The most striking feature of each house was the cylinder-shaped three-story tower that stood where a corner would have otherwise, each topped with a graceful spherical dome and a small black spire. Grandpa’s signature verandah formed another striking feature, in each case bordered by a white wooden railing wrapped around two sides of the house, including the tower. Grandpa believed that a verandah on a home was essential to the development of community; that families congregating there during their leisure hours in the four months of the year that the northern climate permitted it, while children played on the lawns and streets beyond, would foster a sense of true neighbourliness. In the seasons that our verandahs were not covered in snow, they were equipped as outdoor parlours, with wicker chairs, tables, stools, and swinging chaise lounges.

When my sister Ina and I were younger, our verandah had other uses too—an outdoor laboratory for Ina’s scientifically minded endeavours and a make-believe ship for my less lofty pursuits. They took on these uses, that is until Father required the removal of the accompanying contrivances, a persistent occurrence that forestalled our recreational use of the verandah for at least a few weeks thereafter.

While these two houses had two separate owners, they were treated by all of us as though they were common property of not only our family, the Stephenses, and my aunt’s family, the Darlings, but also of our Winnipeg cousins, the Turners, and my father’s sister Lillian, who lived in Toronto. We all entered each house as though it was our own, never thinking of knocking before doing so, let alone waiting for an invitation to be extended. Meals among my extended family were frequently taken together, particularly when there was a special occasion (a holiday or a birthday) or when family was in from out of town.

Father agreed with Mother and Aunt Rose that our families should be together that night, August 4th, 1914. He had heard earlier that afternoon that the king had ordered the mobilization of the British army. It was that information, we concluded, that sent Michael, the telegraph delivery boy, on his premature town crier mission. But the announcement was, Father declared, likely only a few hours early. We would be at war at seven o’clock that night. It was a night to be spent with family.

The outbreak of the war did not come as a complete surprise. The imminent declaration had been predicted by many Canadians for months beforehand, although with each prediction not coming to pass, some were more surprised than others when the hostilities actually commenced. Over those months, at the various dining room tables of my family, I learned of the Triple Entente formed by France, Britain, and Russia the prior decade; the many acts of aggression of Germany in the interim; the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Serbia at the end of June; the creation of the German-Austrian pact at the beginning of July; the declaration of war by Serbia against Austria at the end of July; and the declaration of war by Germany against Serbia the next day. I learned that Germany had issued an ultimatum to the independent Belgium that German troops be granted access to its territories or Belgium would face German invasion. I learned that in response Britain had issued an ultimatum to Germany that Germany withdraw the demand made to Belgium or face British hostilities.

At those dining room tables, I also learned how my family members felt about that likely war, who was for it, and who was against it. Their positions, which had been evolving and eventually staked, were stated starkly that night at the Darlings’ dining room table. Twelve of us were assembled there: my immediate family of five, the Darling family of three, and the four Turners, who had, as Mother suggested, returned from Toronto earlier than they had planned.

Of my parents, my aunts, and my uncle, nearly all of them considered a British concern to be a Canadian concern; a British cause to be a Canadian cause; a British war to be Canada’s war. But their enthusiasm for the war, their confidence in the speed with which the battle could be won, and the resources required to attain that victory, varied between them.

At a time when most Canadians regardless of age, background, length of residency in Canada or language, wholeheartedly supported the British cause, my father’s support was tepid at best. Father had a contrarian personality. It was in his nature to swim against the tide; to argue red when everyone else argued black. He took positions against ardent advocates; against seasoned specialists; against acknowledged experts. He would take his positions in a public meeting, perhaps at a meeting of the High School Board of which he was chairman, or of the Water Commission, of which he was also chairman. He would take his positions in our church, at which he was the choir leader. He even waged his arguments against his dental patients, including when (possibly preferably when) their mouths were pried open with his fingers and other devices, when their responses could only be an incomprehensible gurgle or a slap of their hand against their thigh or some other gesture.

There were three explanations for Father’s contrary positions. One explanation had to do with politics. My father was an unrepentant Conservative. He took issue with almost anything said by a timid or fervent Liberal. Father’s position on the war could not be explained on this basis, however, given the proposed formation of a union government between the ruling Conservatives and the opposition Liberals. On the subject of war, there was, at least in the early days, no dissonance between the positions of the two parties.

A second explanation for Father’s contrarian nature, though it was not as obvious to me as a child, was my Father’s conscious or subconscious need to take positions that varied from the consensus view of our town’s “establishment.” It was, I came to understand, his way of showing that he was not actually inferior to its rarefied members, something he was truly afraid of being; that he had a superior intellect, something he was not actually confident he had. This too did not account for Father’s position on the war, for though he was not afraid of taking contrarian positions, this did not extend to being seen as treasonous or in any way unpatriotic.

The final reason for his often-contrary positions was his concern for our family economy. Though Father had for most of his career been a successful dentist, the method by which his patients paid for his services (sometimes with cash, often with goods or services in lieu, and sometimes not at all) meant that our family had to be careful with its funds. His significant loss of income for much of 1913 and early 1914 when his business was being boycotted meant that he had to be particularly careful. The amounts he and Mother had put aside for a rainy day were entirely depleted during that period that we ironically referred to as the “drought.”

Thus, Father was unlikely to support any public policy that would require a larger outlay of funds on taxes. For that reason, he had years earlier opposed the purchase by the taxpayers of the local electricity supplier. It was for that reason that he still opposed plans to divert the Etobicoke Creek out of the downtown area, even though that watercourse, which ran along the main street of our town, caused at times hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage. It was his stated reason as well for opposing the war.

“It’s going to cost us millions of dollars,” Father said that night at Aunt Rose’s dining room table, shortly after we began our end of day meal, something we then called “tea.” After swallowing a large mouthful of mutton, he expounded on his view. “Millions! Colonel Sam said last Saturday that Canada is getting ready to ship twenty thousand men overseas—and that we will send five times that if required. Twenty thousand.” Colonel Sam Hughes was Canada’s Minister of the Militia and Defence. He was known affectionately by most Canadians as “Colonel Sam.”

“Do you know how much it’s going to cost to transport, shelter, feed, and equip those men?” Father asked. “That’s before counting the amount we will have to pay them and their family members in benefits. And what if another twenty, thirty, or fifty thousand follow them? Our population is not even eight million. Can you imagine how much each taxpayer is going to have to pay to foot that bill? We can’t afford it.”

Mother, who sat kitty-corner to Father, nodded in agreement as he spoke. As was the case with most matters at this time, Mother’s views on the war echoed Father’s. Though Father liked to take contrarian views, he liked it best when others, having heard those views, came to share them, either because, in the case of his wife and children, they should, or in the case of all others, because he had persuaded them to do so. Father was rarely disappointed by Mother, who always agreed with him, or at least appeared to. When it came to his reticence about the war, Mother adopted a similar stance.

“I disagree,” my Uncle William said, putting down his knife and fork. Father and Uncle William rarely agreed on anything political, my Uncle William being both a Liberal (he had previously sought election as a Liberal Member of Parliament for our area) and, though no longer a resident of Brampton, still a member of its establishment. Uncle William was a former mayor of our town, a position previously held by both of Father’s brothers-in-law, but despite Father’s ambitions, never a position held by him. Uncle William resigned as mayor of Brampton in 1907 in order to take an executive position with the Maple Leaf Milling Company in Winnipeg—an act that displayed so little confidence in the future of our town that Father never truly forgave him.

“We’re already paying most of those costs,” Uncle William said. “Colonel Sam is going to send men to England that we’ve already trained and equipped.” Uncle William was referring to Canada’s volunteer militia and our small standing army.

“You know that won’t be enough,” Father responded. “Colonel Sam has promised twenty thousand men. Our force is not that large. Even those that are equipped and trained will need more equipment and more training. They will need transportation and lodging, and we will have to pay them a wage. The British parliament approved $525 million today as an emergency fund for its war costs. Canada won’t get away with spending less than $50 million. And we will spend even more if we increase the number of our troops beyond twenty thousand.”

“Well, I doubt we will need more men than that,” Uncle William replied. “Dublin has committed to sending a hundred thousand Irish soldiers. Add that to Britain’s own and those from France, and that will be more than enough for a short war. This war is going to be over before Thanksgiving.”

My Aunt Rose disagreed with both men. The youngest of Father’s sisters, she was attractive, with thick light brown hair wound loosely at the top of her head. Never lacking in confidence or determination, she had acquired further measures of both in the four years that she had been a widow. She sat at the end of the table closest to the kitchen, opposite to Father. Though Aunt Rose never let her brother assume a role as head of her household, she had during her widowhood allowed him to sit in a location at the dining room table commensurate with that position.

“Jethro,” she said, first addressing Father, “we can’t escape our responsibilities to Britain. When it comes to foreign affairs, we are Great Britain. Once Parliament is recalled later this month and the new union government convenes, they will make that very clear. And the cost? Yes, it will cost us financially—not so much as you fear, Jethro, but more than you will allow, William. Surely, no one is saying that this war will be over by Thanksgiving, William. Christmas. That is what they are saying. Christmas.”

“It’s true, William,” said his wife, Charlotte. “Christmas is what they are saying.” It was an amazingly short number of words to be uttered on a subject about which I knew she felt strongly. Over the past month, Aunt Charlotte had let it be known on a number of occasions that she firmly supported the position of Great Britain and that Canada should be prepared to support the mother country in its time of need, no matter the cost.

As for the young people at the table, we fell into two categories: those who enthusiastically supported the war and wanted to immediately enlist, and those who supported the war but had no intention of enlisting. The first group included my Turner cousins, Roy and Bill, and my other male cousin, John Darling.

“Father,” Bill said, “please don’t say that the war will be over by Thanksgiving or even Christmas, Aunt Rose. You know I can’t enlist until next spring. Unless…” He turned to his Father “…unless you will allow me to seek a deferral of my law studies for a year?” Bill was then twenty years old. His tuition for the coming school year had already been paid. Aunt Charlotte and Uncle William repeated what was obviously a mantra, that Bill had to complete the first year of his studies before he could enlist.

“Uncle William,” John said, “please don’t say that the war will be over by Thanksgiving or even Christmas, Mother. You know I can’t enlist for another year. Unless…” He turned to his Mother. “Unless you will allow me to enlist, though I am only seventeen?”

Aunt Rose laughed lovingly at her son. “John Darling, there are not too many things you can be sure of in this life, but there are two things I think we can be quite confident of: one, I will not be consenting to a minor child going to war; and two, the war will be over long before you turn eighteen next March.” Of the three such cousins, he seemed the most resigned.

“Father,” said Roy, then twenty-two and clearly agitated, “why did you insist I come to Brampton this summer? I told you that the war would be declared while we were here! I need to be home now. I need to be with my regiment. I have to leave tomorrow!” For two years, Roy had been a member of the Winnipeg militia. While completing his university education, he had been training for warfare in the evenings and on weekends.

“Roy,” Uncle William said, clearly repeating another mantra, “the militia has not yet been called up. There is no point rushing to return to the west tomorrow. When the time comes, your commanding officer may prefer you to go directly to England from here. Let’s wait and see.” Roy was only slightly mollified. Ironically, in any other year, the Turners would have been home by August 4th. It was the threat of war that developed in the last week that required Uncle William to stay in Brampton. His firm sensed that his presence in Ontario at that time could be extremely helpful. “We’ll leave next Sunday, per our current plans.”

Roy was an adult. He could have left without his parents—but he knew that it would break his mother’s heart if she was not at the train station when he entrained for England. His mother would not return west without his father.

Of the four remaining young people at the table, three were girls. Our strongest view was that no one we loved or cared about should get shot and killed.

“Like who?” Bill asked.

“Like….our fathers,” I replied. I couldn’t even bring myself to mention my brother and cousins.

“Don’t worry,” Roy said, “they are too old to enlist.” Father, then fifty-one years of age, and Uncle William, two years younger, scowled at Roy, but neither objected.

“Like our brothers,” Hannah said.

“Don’t look at me,” her brother John said. “Apparently I am too young to enlist.”

“Don’t look at me,” her cousin Bill said. “Apparently I am too poor to forego my tuition.” Uncle William scowled more.

“Don’t look at me,” Roy said. “At this rate the war will be over before I get back to my regiment. And if it isn’t, well then, I will be just fine. I have plenty of training. I can take on one, two, or three Germans at a time! They won’t know what hit them!” He ended his battle cry with a firm fist on the table. The cutlery around him leapt briefly above its station.

“Thank you, Roy,” Aunt Rose said, patting his hand before rearranging her dessert cutlery. “We don’t need quite that much enthusiasm at the table.” Everyone turned to my brother Jim, also then twenty-two.

“Don’t look at me,” Jim said. “I have no intention of enlisting. I have important dental work to do, don’t I, Father?” Jim was about to enter his last year of dental studies. Father nodded in agreement. “The war will be over before I graduate, I expect.”

“Like our friends,” Ina added, in response to the “like who” question. Her voice was timid, her tone melancholic, her gaze distant.

“Yes,” Roy said, laughing, attempting to raise the mournful drift of the conversation. “Your friends may be worth worrying about!”

“It’s true,” Bill confirmed. “I know most of them. Many are uncoordinated dullards! Hardly worthy of your friendship or mine!” He threw his napkin at Ina, laughing the entire time, expecting his action to lighten her mood. She instead used the napkin to wipe two tears falling down her cheeks.

This, then, summarizes the views of my entire extended family but for two of its members. The first, my grandfather, Jesse Brady, was not with us that night. He often spent time in Toronto while the Turners were visiting us, allowing a little more room for the accommodation of the four Winnipeg guests between our house and Aunt Rose’s house. But Grandpa had made his views known over the preceding months. Though he was born and raised in England, and though he understood the legal niceties, Grandpa considered this war to be Britain’s war and not Canada’s war. In this way, his views at this time diverged from those of the Brampton establishment, though not for any of the reasons Father might advance. Grandpa, at seventy-eight years of age, held no property and thus paid no property taxes. The war would not materially affect his personal finances. He took no particular delight in taking views opposite to those of the town’s establishment. England had not been unkind or unjust to him. He had arrived in Canada at the age of twenty-two, ten years before the country of Canada was formed. He came to forge a new life. He no longer felt any allegiance to the old one.

The other member of my extended family whose views on the war had not been presented that evening was my Aunt Lillian, Father’s eldest sister. It would have been impossible to state her position with certain knowledge, since she was as unpredictable as Father was contrarian. Her disdain for Brampton, the place of her birth, including her refusal to visit her home town more than twice a year, meant that we were all truly surprised when just before dessert was served and shortly after Bill was scolded by his father for throwing a napkin at his cousin, a persistent halloo issued from the front foyer.

“I think that’s Lil,” Aunt Rose said, rising from the table. She walked through the sitting room and the parlour before returning a few minutes later with the suspected guest. We naturally rose when she entered the room, but instead of rushing to embrace our favourite aunt as my siblings, my cousins and I would ordinarily have done, we froze in place.

“I’m sorry,” Aunt Lil said in a halting voice as she entered the dining room. She was clearly distressed. Her long red hair, which when not captured in a large hat was always worn loosely down her back, was tied that night in a long braid. The green of her blouse and skirt (the only colour she ever wore) did not match. Her face was ashen and her eyes were bloodshot. She was shaking. What had happened to our favourite aunt, I wondered, the aunt whose zany ways and eccentricities always made her lively company? We loved her for that, for her disregard of convention (which made her a lenient chaperone), and for her inability to tell even a white lie (which made her a trusted source for the truth from which other adults often sought to shelter us).

“Lillian, what is it?” Charlotte asked as we sat back down. “What has brought you all this way? Why didn’t you let us know you were coming? We’d have had someone meet you at the train station.”

To our utter horror—at least to the horror of the younger generation of the family—our favourite aunt began to cry. None of us had ever seen our consummately steady aunt dissemble. We all rose to go to her before Father stopped us.

“Sit down, all of you!” he commanded. “None of you has been excused. Charlotte, Mary, will you please take Lillian away from the table and help her calm herself.”

“No. No, Jethro,” Aunt Lil said, putting her hand up in his direction. “I’m sorry. I will be fine. I don’t want to be away from the children. They are the reason I came here tonight. It’s the children. My boys.” Jim pulled a spare chair from its resting spot next to the wall. After placing it beside Aunt Rose’s chair, the two ladies sat down. We all turned to her.

“The children? The boys? What about them, Lil?” My father rarely had patience for what he considered to be the very odd ways of his eldest sister, who he sometimes referred to as “Lulu”—though never to her face. That night was no exception. “What the deuce is wrong with you?”

“With me?” she asked. “Not with me. Nothing is wrong with me. With the world. With your world,” she said, confirming the other worldliness to which we children all knew she belonged. “Your world. Your way. Don’t you know how many lives are going to be wasted on this war?”

“Wasted? What do you mean wasted? Lil, for once we are almost on the same side of an argument. I don’t think we should have our boys over there, but I agree with what William said earlier.” He then repeated it for her benefit. “If our troops do go, they’ll be back quickly. With a minimal number of losses. Please, you must see this.”

“I don’t,” she said. “I don’t see that. Quick? It won’t be quick. This is not South Africa—though that was not particularly quick either. Both sides have machine guns. And aeroplanes. There is no quick solution to this. And a minimal number of losses? You are thinking we will send twenty thousand men. We will send ten times that number. Or more. And they will not all come back. So many of them will not be back. My nephews, my boarders, my students, so many of them won’t come back.” She was crying, but she inhaled deeply before asking no one in particular, “And for what? What is the point of this war?”

No one had a reply. Eventually, Aunt Rose put an arm around her.

Finally, Roy stood up. “I’m coming back!” he said with all of the confidence of the unknowing.

“And I’m coming back!” Bill said, standing too. “If the war is not over before I can enlist.”

“And I’m coming back!” said John, rising as well. “If I ever get over there.”

“And I’m not going at all,” said Jim from his seat. There being no suggestion that Ina, me, or our cousin Hannah would go to war, we too remained seated.

Aunt Lil, who had almost regained her composure, lost it again. “All right, you are all excused,” Father said. “But Hannah, John, Jessie, none of you are to go out tonight. It’s a night to be with family, those who are dear to you. It is not a night for frolicking.” As he said that, we saw through the room’s large picture window three young men walking down Wellington Street toward Gage Park, carrying a Union Jack, singing “Rule Britannia” at the top of their lungs.

* * *

“It’s all that history,” Father groused to Uncle William as I cleared the table. Mother and my three aunts were in the sitting room. “She spends too much time in the past,” he continued. “She should know by now that she is knowledgeable about the past, not the future! She’s a history teacher, not a prophesier! This is why I urge all of these young people to study sciences, not history. What can we learn from history?”

“Well, there are probably a few things we could learn from history,” Uncle William conceded in defence of a course of study enjoyed by many members of our family.

“Yes. Some things. But not everything. Really, what does Lulu know about war?”

Uncle William had no answer to that. The two men rose to move to the verandah, where they could take in some fresh air and smoke their pipes. Those permitted to leave the house followed them out the door.

Jim was the first. He wanted to be with Millie Dale. Millie had been Jim’s sweetheart for over two years. He had loved her for even longer. It was a night to be with those with whom you are close, Father said. He should go to her, of course, and he did.

Ina left for the McKechnies. They lived on Peel Avenue, just to the south of our house. Mrs. McKechnie had lost her husband four years earlier to a premature heart attack, and just two years later, her son, my friend Archie, died even more prematurely to a mishap in the Etobicoke Creek. Of the three female daughters, Katie was Ina’s particular friend. Father agreed that it would be appropriate for Ina to call on the McKechnies that night. Father always approved of a nice turn in support of a family without a senior male member. Roy and Bill followed in close succession, each determined to visit old friends.

My young cousins and I, having been forbidden to engage in anything frivolous on that solemn night, looked for distractions. John eventually retreated to his room to work on the construction of a model train. Hannah and I moved through various rooms, listening to our elders. We quickly tired of watching the ladies try to calm Aunt Lil. We noticed that in reality, Aunt Rose and Mother were doing most of the calming. Aunt Charlotte, normally the one to take control of such situations, sat on her own, staring vacantly out the window into the darkness beyond.

Eventually, we found ourselves on the verandah, watching Father and Uncle William smoke their pipes and listening to their discussion about the war. Though as children we were generally prohibited from participating in such conversations, we were always welcome to listen to them. Father viewed our presence at such times as a means of educating us.

We sat on the Wellington Street side of the “L”-shaped verandah, the two men occupying the big wooden chairs facing the Wellington Street Bridge and the park beyond it. Hannah and I took the less comfortable chairs across from them, with mine closest to the street. From there I had a good view of our house and Chapel Street that crossed in front of it. Father and Uncle William were discussing whether Colonel Sam, who had earned his military credentials fighting in the Boer War, was likely to accompany the Canadian troops abroad.

“The current thinking is that he’ll stay here in Canada,” Uncle William said, turning his pipe over in the ashtray before refilling it.

“It would be better if he went over with the troops,” Father said, his mouth full of smoke. “I can’t say that I’m in favour of our men going to war, but if they do, they would be well served under his command.”

“Apparently, not everyone thinks so,” said Uncle William. “I hear he caused the British no end of aggravation during the Boer War.”

As Father and Uncle William continued to discuss war leadership matters and whether one could be a cabinet minister being too far away to attend cabinet meetings, my mind began to wander. How was this war going to affect us? Roy said that Father was too old to enlist, but if Parliament decreed otherwise, would he have to go to war? Would Grandpa? Who would look after us if all the men left? Who would grow our food? Who would fill our furnaces with coal? Who would deliver our milk, our vegetables, or our meat? Who would teach us math and science? Who would lead our church services?

As I contemplated a manless reality, something caught my eye in the distance. It was Ina. She was walking toward our house along Chapel Street. Her visit with the McKechnies was apparently complete. I was about to announce her return when I saw her look furtively toward our verandah, then, presumably on ascertaining its vacant state, look equally furtively toward the Darlings’ verandah. Seeing the backs of Father and Uncle William and apparently not noticing me looking her way, she ran quickly along Chapel Street, past our house and toward Queen Street beyond. It was clear she did not want to be seen.

Half an hour later, Mother and Aunt Charlotte joined us on the verandah. Aunt Lil’s agitation had been quelled. She was now settled in Aunt Rose’s back bedroom—the room then absent of any maids. We said goodnight to Hannah as my parents, the elder Turners, who were staying with us in Grandpa’s vacated bedroom, and I left for our home just up the street.

Neither Ina nor Jim were there when we arrived, spent and tired. Minutes later, I lay in the double-sized bed that Ina and I shared, the drapes and sheers to the long window next to my side of the bed pulled open wide to allow as much cool night air as possible to enter the room. Though I was tired, I could not sleep. My mind was fixated on what Aunt Lil had said and how Father and Uncle William reacted to it. It was all about history. I knew some history. We had studied a number of battles in our history classes. I could think of a few: Culloden, Gettysburg, Waterloo, and Bosworth came to mind. We learned of the atrocities that men of one side inflicted on those of the other; we learned of crops and villages and government buildings burned to the ground; we learned of soldiers hacked to bits; of heads cut off and positioned on stakes; of women and children left to starve; of bridges and roads being destroyed. Was this to be our fate? Father had assured me that if Germany and Britain went to war, the battles would not be fought in Canada. But what if he was wrong? I thought about the courthouse, the registry office and the jail—all government buildings located just down the street from me; the Wellington Street Bridge beyond them; all the men I knew who could be called up for service. Eventually, I thought of their sweet heads.

Around eleven o’clock, I heard the front door open. A few minutes later, Ina opened the door to our room. “Where were you all this time?” I whispered after she had changed into her cotton nightgown and crawled into our bed. It was a sign of our maturing relationship that when she told me she had been with the McKechnies for the entire evening, I did not expose her. I knew who she had been with. I knew she should not have been with that person. But I was glad she was.