Читать книгу War Brides - Melynda Jarratt - Страница 11
Оглавление| INTRODUCTION BY MELYNDA JARRATT | |
| THE ONLY PLACE SHE WANTED TO BE | JEAN (KEEGAN) PAUL |
| RATHER THAN LOSE HIM, I MARRIED HIM | BETTY (LOWTHIAN) HILLMAN |
| THERE WAS A COLOUR BAR | MARY (HARDIE) GERO |
| NO HARMONY IN HARMONY JUNCTION | ELIZABETH (KELLY) MACDONALD |
| TIME IS SHORT | MILDRED (YOUNG) SOWERS |
| A UNION JACK ON HER GRAVE | MARY (FLETCHER) SHEPPARD |
| THE TOWN THAT WAR BRIDES BUILT | MARION (ELLIOT) HODDINOTT |
| EVERYTHING WILL BE FINE | ROSE (O’REILLY) BOULAY |
When we think of the War Bride experience one of the first things that comes to mind is the long train journey across the vastness of the Canadian landscape, but War Brides who came to the Maritime provinces had geography on their side.
For women headed to Halifax, the long transatlantic journey ended the moment her ship landed at Pier 21. When War Bride Marguerite Turner of Leeds, England arrived in March 1946 she was thrilled to see her husband Jim waving at her from atop the building facing the Aquitania. ‘I remember it clearly. He was standing on the roof, wearing a brown pinstripe suit and he had a brown fedora and I was standing on the side at the rail of the ship and he was dead opposite me with two other chaps’.1
That kind of a reunion was unusual; most British wives had a long distance ahead of them and the vast majority did not meet their husbands in Halifax. For those men waiting patiently in Quebec, Ontario and especially out west, another five more days would pass as their wives made their way across Canada by train.
In 1946 Canada consisted of 11.5 million people living in nine provinces and two territories, stretching nearly 4,000 miles from Nova Scotia on the east coast to British Columbia on the west.
The Maritime region, where Halifax is located, consisted of three eastern provinces, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. Together they had a combined population of just over one million people2 and of these, most lived in a rural setting, either on a farm or out in the country, far away from the closest city or town.3
Compared to Ontario and Quebec, the Maritimes were a mainly rural population. In 1946 there were only three or four big cities in the whole of the region, the main ones being Halifax, followed by Saint John and Moncton, New Brunswick, the hub of the Maritimes where trains travelling east and west would pass through. The whole of Prince Edward Island had only 95,000 people and the majority lived on farms.4 Most people in the Maritimes worked in the resource-based economies of farming, forestry, fisheries and mining as had their forefathers for generations.
The three provinces share a unique cultural heritage that is tied to 400 years of European settlement as well as a pattern of immigration that brought newcomers mainly from France (known as Acadians), England, Scotland and Ireland. There is also an Aboriginal presence stretching back more than 10,000 years with Mi’kmaq and Maliseet settlements throughout the region, and even Black Loyalists – former slaves – who were promised their freedom for supporting the British during the American Revolution. The French-speaking Acadians shaped the character of the region and there were immigrants from other countries such as Lebanon, Italy and Eastern Europe, but for the most part Maritime Canada in the postwar years was English speaking and place names like New Glasgow, Newcastle and Hampshire reflected its British heritage.
Newfoundland is often mistakenly included as one of the Maritime provinces but it isn’t today and it certainly wasn’t in 1946. As Newfoundland had not yet joined the Confederation – and wouldn’t until 1949 – War Brides who went to Newfoundland were, in fact, going to another country and when they arrived in Halifax they still had a long way to go by ferry before they were home.5
But War Brides who were headed to Halifax or Dartmouth could have taken a taxi to their new homes or driven to surrounding communities like
Map of Maritimes, Canada including Newfoundland and Labrador. The Maritimes included Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick. Newfoundland did not become part of Canada until 1949 so War Brides who travelled there were headed to another country.
Truro in a couple of hours. Depending on the weather, those destined to the far-flung reaches of Cape Breton or New Brunswick would be in their husband’s arms in less than a half-day by train. And although Prince Edward Island was accessible only by ferry, War Brides who were headed to PEI were at home, bags unpacked and sipping a cup of tea a long time before their shipmates who were going to Quebec and Ontario.
London-born War Bride Beatrice MacIntosh came to Halifax on the Mauretania in March 1946 destined for South Harbour, Cape Breton. She had no idea of the hardship she caused her husband who had the wrong date of his wife’s ‘imminent arrival’ in Halifax. His long journey by snowshoe, dog sleigh, foot, ferry, bus and horse sleigh in the middle of a cold Cape Breton winter amounted to a journey of epic proportions.
He assumed that the War Brides for Cape Breton would be sent by train from Halifax to Sydney. It was February, mid-winter, and the roads were not open. He started out by snow shoes to Big Intervale. He was joined by a local friend who also wanted to travel to Sydney. From Big Intervale they got a ride by horse and sleigh to the foot of North Mountain. Carrying the snowshoes (one pair between them) they followed a snow track made by the mailman … They finally reached Pleasant Bay and went to a hotel … The next morning they gave their backpacks to the mailman (he had a dog team), left their snowshoes at the hotel and walked behind the mailman all the way to Cheticamp, crossing both MacKenzie and French Mountain. Quite a walk!
In Cheticamp they stayed a night at Aucoin’s Hotel, owned by a man nicknamed ‘Johnny on the Spot’. The following morning they took a large six passenger bus to the Strait (Hawkesbury), where they changed to an Acadian Lines bus. They had only gone a few miles when the bus had problems so the driver pulled into a hotel where they stayed that night. There was a dance in a hall close by, so the passengers all went. The bus driver got very intoxicated and couldn’t drive the bus the next morning. He was fired and another driver came to drive the bus. At last, they arrived in Sydney, only to find out that I had sent a cable to South Harbour telling Kendrick that the boat I was supposed to travel on, the Ile de France, had been wrecked in a storm and I had to wait for further notice about another boat.6
Beatrice MacIntosh’s experience aside, for most War Brides who went to the Maritimes the journey by train was not so important. Their biggest challenges lay in adapting to the cold Canadian climate and adjusting to a rural lifestyle far from towns and city centres where the things they had taken for granted in Britain, like shopping, transportation, and culture, were now but a distant memory.
The Only Place She Wanted to Be
Jean (Keegan) Paul
Jean Keegan was born in Coulsdon, Surrey, England in 1926. She married Charles Paul of the Tobique Indian Reserve in New Brunswick.
Jean Keegan was just a teenager from Coulsdon, Surrey when she fell in love with a young Aboriginal soldier, Charles Paul, of the Tobique Indian Reserve in northwestern New Brunswick.
One of four daughters of Charles and Mary Keegan, Jean came from a comfortable, middle-class background and lived in a large English city with all the modern amenities. No one in the family would have imagined that Jean would end up on an Indian Reserve in Canada but once she met Charlie Paul, that’s the only place she wanted to be.
Jean’s older sister Pat was stationed with the WAAF at the Kenley Aerodrome and she only came home to Coulsdon on leaves, but she remembers when Jean and Charlie Paul started going out together.
‘They met at a dance near the old Cane Hill Hospital in Coulsdon,’ says Pat, who is now eighty-three and lives in Warlingham. ‘There were a lot of Canadians around the area and my mother really liked “Buck”, as we called him, so she didn’t mind Jean going out with him. They all used to go to a pub called the Midday Sun where the Canadians and their girlfriends gathered.’
Jean’s father was only thirty-nine when the war started so he rejoined the King’s Own Regiment and was stationed in Formby, Lancashire. The three younger girls lived at home with their mother and when Coulsdon was under attack from German bombing the two youngest, Kathy and Mary, were evacuated to northern England. That left Jean and her mother at home so the two of them would go to the dances, her mother as the chaperone. Mrs Keegan was attractive in her own right and was often mistaken as a sister to Pat and Jean, to her great delight.
Pat says other people may have thought that Charlie was different but nobody in their family gave much thought to the fact that he was a Canadian Indian. ‘I remember after they married a girl came over to look at Jean’s baby Christine and said, “Oh she’s white!” I was amazed. I never even thought of Charlie or his brother Jim as not being like us.’
But in the weeks before Jean and Charlie married, her mother’s friendly disposition towards Buck had changed.
‘I was on my first leave home and Mum greeted me with tears,’ Pat recalls. ‘She said that Jean was pregnant, and what was she going to say to dad? What was she to do?’
The first thing they did was make wedding arrangements. Jean and Charlie were thrilled: they were in love and wanted to get married – everything was unfolding as planned as far as they were concerned – but Pat remembers her parents weren’t very happy about it and neither was the Catholic priest, Father Tindal at St Aidan’s Church.
All food and clothing was rationed so a friend of Mrs Keegan helped out by lending Jean a fur stole for the wedding ceremony and she even hosted the reception. Soon after, Charlie was sent to Italy with his regiment, the Carleton York, and after Christine was born, Jean went to Liverpool to stay with an aunt. Charlie contracted malaria and was diagnosed with arthritis that bothered him his whole life, but once he recuperated from his illness he was sent back to serve in northwestern Europe and at the end of the war he was repatriated to Canada.
Soon it became time for Jean to make her own travel arrangements through the Canadian Wives Bureau. Pat recalls that the padre of Charlie’s regiment tried to dissuade Jean from going to the reserve and so did the British Red Cross, but Jean wouldn’t listen to any of it. She was going to be with her husband and nothing would change her mind.
‘It’s what she wanted,’ Pat says. ‘Jean was very headstrong and always got what she wanted.’
In May 1946 twenty-year-old Jean and her daughter Christine crossed the Atlantic with hundreds of War Brides on board the Aquitania, arriving at Pier 21 on 21 May. From Halifax they made their way by train to McAdam, New Brunswick where they were met by the Roman Catholic priest, Charlie and Mrs Valreia Hunter, a volunteer with the Canadian Red Cross Train Meeting Committee who faithfully recorded Jean’s arrival in the diary she kept of War Bride arrivals at McAdam.
The priest, Jean, Charlie and Christine were taken by canoe to the Maliseet Indian Reserve above Perth, New Brunswick. Reserve life was a very trying experience for a woman from a fine home in urban England. The community was located at the juncture of the Saint John and Tobique Rivers where the people eked out a meagre existence from the land, relying on the seasons and nature to bring what they needed to survive. Jean adapted to this rough life: she learned the ways of the people and became fluent in the language and ways of the Maliseet tribe. It was another twenty years before she was able to return to England for a visit.
There was little or no employment on the reserve so Charlie found work as a river guide during the fishing season and a hunting guide during the hunting season. In the fall, they would pick potatoes and in the summer they’d follow the blueberry trail as had generations of Native Indians before them.
Their daughter Cindy remembers growing up with her three brothers and sisters in grinding poverty in a shack on the edge of the reserve where rats would scamper across the floor. They didn’t have a fridge or electricity and the bathroom was an outhouse in the back. When the Indian Agent would show up on the reserve to do his annual assessments he’d leave behind a barrel of flour and leftover army rations for every family. The convent school was run by nuns and they’d give the children a treat of hard tack and cod liver oil to battle malnutrition and rickets.
When Cindy was still a youngster her father built a small house for the family near the church. It was a step up and Jean was pleased with the new surroundings. When Jean’s grandfather died she was asked what she wanted from the inheritance; a bathtub and running water was her request, and that’s what she got.
Jean never complained about her life on the Tobique Reserve and her English family had no idea of the living conditions until her mother came to visit when the last child was born. It was quite a shock to see the way people lived on the reserve but Jean wasn’t asking for sympathy from anyone: her husband was good to her and even if they weren’t rich, they loved each other.
‘I didn’t know till years after what a brave and courageous woman my sister was,’ says Pat.‘She was always the bossy and daring one, but lovely with it. There is no way I could have done what she did, even for love, but I’m proud to have been her eldest sister.’
Over the years, their situation improved considerably. Jean’s younger sister Kathy married an American and moved nearby to Maine, USA, so for the first time Jean had her own family within reach. At one point, Jean’s mother even came to stay with Kathy in Maine but she ended up going back to England. Charlie was elected Chief of the Tobique Reserve and in the late 1960s he became involved with the Union of New Brunswick Indians. With the children all grown up, Jean and Charlie left the reserve and moved to Fredericton in 1971 where he worked for the Union as a member of the Executive.
Cindy remembers going for a visit to see the relatives in England and everyone thought Jean had really ‘made it’ now. Jean lived in a nice home in the city and she even went to the hairdresser!
Jean and Charlie Paul had six children. Most grew up to have university educations and all have been successful in their own right. Charlie was recognized for his work with the Aboriginal community with an honorary PhD by St Thomas University in Fredericton, and could now carry the title Dr Charlie Paul. He and Jean were further honoured when they were invited to sit next to the table of Prince Philip and Princess Anne during a Royal Visit in 1986. While in England, they never got that close to the Royals. Had anyone bothered to ask, they would have heard the story of Sachem Gabe Acquin, Charlie’s grandfather and the founder of what is now St Mary’s First Nation in Fredericton.
Gabe Acquin was a leader in the Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet) community and was frequently coming and going from the Lt Governor’s residence along the Saint John River in the 1800s. During the Royal Visit of 1860 Gabe took the Prince of Wales for an unscheduled canoe ride along the river. The Prince was supposed to be at church and couldn’t be found. He showed up late for the service and shortly after that Gabe was invited to England by the Royal Family to visit and demonstrate Wolastoqiyik culture to the people of London.
In 1991, Jean was diagnosed with cancer and the four Keegan sisters came together for the very last time for Christmas in New Brunswick. It was an emotional gathering for the sisters and they were grateful to spend the last moments of Jean’s life at her side. When Jean finally slipped away soon after the New Year, her family, friends, and Natives from all over Maliseet and Mi’kmaq territory came to the funeral mass which was conducted in both the English and Maliseet languages in her honour.
Jean died sixteen years ago but her memory lives on. In December 2005 her grandson TJ Burke, the first Aboriginal member of the New Brunswick Legislative Assembly (now Attorney General and Minister of Justice in the provincial Liberal government), introduced a motion to have 2006 declared Year of the War Bride in honour of his grandmother.
The idea soon caught on, and before the year was out, nearly every province in Canada followed suit: in villages, towns and cities across the country, Canadians celebrated the Year of the War Bride in 2006, honouring this very special group of citizens who helped build the Canada we know today.
Postscript: Charlie Paul died in 1997 knowing that he and Jean did the best they could for their children. Their oldest daughter, Christine, is a hairdresser and moved back to Tobique First Nation Reserve after living in Fredericton. Stewart has been the Chief of Tobique since 1987. Nick has a Masters Degree in Social Work and works in Tobique. Cindy has a Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Education and was a teacher for many years. She lives in Fredericton. Lindsay was a journalist and served on the Tobique Band Council. Pam, the baby, has a Bachelor of Social Work and works in Fredericton. Today, there are sixteen grandchildren and sixteen great grandchildren of Jean and Charlie Paul.
Rather Than Lose Him,
I Married Him Betty (Lowthian) Hillman
Betty (Lowthian) Hillman came to an isolated farm in Hawkin’s Junction, New Brunswick.
Betty Lowthian was an Academy Girl dancer in the Isle of Wight dance troupe called Concert Party when she met her Canadian husband, Doug Hillman of Millville, New Brunswick.
Concert Party was a wartime entertainment company that grew out of Nesta Meech’s dance school in the Isle of Wight. Betty remembers it consisted of ‘a comedian, a contortionist, a baritone, a soprano, a pianist, a male tap dancer named Mr Ward, and the six-member Academy Girls dance troupe’, of which Betty was one.
The war was on and the Isle of Wight was transformed into a training centre for the British Army, with Canadian and Americans also being trained there for the Dieppe raid. The performers would travel by private bus to different army camps to entertain the troops.
Betty was a member of Concert Party for four years, from the age of fourteen to eighteen. ‘I finished school at age fourteen and the next year I tried to join the forces,’ she explains. ‘But when I saw the recruiter I was told to come back in three years. By being in the Concert Party I felt I was helping the effort in my own small way.’
She recalls that they had beautiful costumes made by their dressmaker, Mrs Sloper, and sometimes they would back up Nesta Meech when she sang. They did all kinds of routines, including tap and soft shoe dancing, and after their performances there was always a big meal in the Sergeant’s Mess.
On two occasions, they did a show at Camp Hill Prison. The convicts were in charge of the curtains and when the show was over they gave the beautiful young dancers flowers called rose buttonholes that were grown in the prison gardens. A guided tour of the cells and a buffet lunch followed. Not surprisingly, the prisoners were very happy when the Academy Dancers performed!
Betty Lowthian was born in 1927 at Newport, Isle of Wight. Her mother’s father, Charles Price, was a sea captain who owned two merchant ships, the Wessex and the Moultonian. Charles was captain of the Wessex and Betty’s father, Albert Lowthian, later became first mate. Betty’s paternal grandfather, William Lowthian, came from Carlisle, Cumberland County and he worked for the railway. Her mother Florence met Albert when he was stationed on the island with the Argyle and Southern Highlanders.
Betty had an idyllic life growing up on the Isle of Wight. Her favourite memories are of Christmas when the neighbourhood would be full of the sounds of caroling and her mother and aunts would make Christmas pudding. She remembers one Christmas when the milkman stopped at every house with his horse and cart. He ladled out the cream and milk for his customers and by the time he got to the end of their road he was rather tipsy since everyone wanted to give him a Christmas drink.
Betty was only twelve years old when the war broke out and her life was soon transformed. The island was a target for the Germans because it had a shipyard and housed two aircraft factories. Everyone was supplied with gas masks and trained how to put them on in case of a gas attack. Betty’s family had their own air-raid shelter and she recalls that some nights the warning siren would go off three or four times so they didn’t get much sleep. A searchlight at the bottom of their field would pinpoint oncoming night bombers as the target for ack-ack gunners.
Betty attended Parkhurst School until age fourteen and then joined the dance troupe. When she wasn’t performing with Concert Party she worked in her aunt’s café, Ma Freemon’s, in the evenings and weekends. She also worked as a shop assistant for the Maypole Dairy.
One evening in 1944 Betty was working at Ma Freemon’s when Doug Hillman came in and asked her for a date. He was in the Provost Corps (Military Police) and he looked smart, but she was a bit dubious at first.
‘I thought he was good looking so eventually I agreed to go see Gone with the Wind with him. I was sixteen and he was twenty-one.’
Over the next two years Betty and Doug saw as much of each other as they could. Doug had already asked her to marry him when she was sixteen but at the time she thought he was crazy. By age eighteen she had to make up her mind.
‘He was coming back to Canada and I had to make a decision,’ she says. ‘Rather than lose him, I married him.’
Doug and Betty were married on 6 September 1945 and she came to Canada ten months later in July 1946. Leaving her family was very difficult and the trip across the Atlantic memorable, but nothing could have prepared Betty for the new life she would live on a mixed farm in Hawkin’s Corner, New Brunswick. From the beautiful surroundings of Newport to an isolated, rural farmhouse and a household of three men – her husband, his brother Les, and their uncle, an eighty-seven-year-old bachelor – Betty was in for a culture shock.
Doug met Betty at the Woodstock, NB train station and the next day they proceeded by car to his uncle’s farm. Ladies from the Women’s Institute met with Betty and went out of their way to make her feel welcome, knowing full well there was no other woman in the house and that it was not going to be easy for a young English girl in these new surroundings. They gave her a big shower the following day where she was presented with three handmade quilts and over ninety gifts.
No amount of presents could overcome the cultural gap Betty found herself in. The language and the life were utterly different from what she was used to. She came from a house with electricity and modern plumbing, but in Hawkin’s Corner she couldn’t decide what was worse: the outhouses, the wildlife or three very stubborn, argumentative men.
On one of her first walks along the railway tracks she thought she encountered a bear but it turned out to be a groundhog, which was the source of great amusement to the men. With her husband gone in the woods all day Betty was expected to help with the chores such as milking the cows. But the cows knew she was afraid of them and one day they chased her out of the barn and into a stream. One of the neighbours, Mrs Marr, rescued her from that predicament and also did the milking that day, but Mrs Marr’s husband had a pet crow which would perch on a tree in the yard waiting for a treat. When the crow was outside Betty was afraid to leave the house!
Then there was the water: all the water for cooking came from the aforementioned stream. When Betty dipped her pail into the stream she saw tiny fish swimming around and it turned her off. She quickly changed to drinking milk instead, but then she had that little problem with the cows. Her husband thought the best way for Betty to bond with the cows was to give her one as a pet so he presented her with a calf aptly named Newport!
About a year after her arrival in Hawkin’s Corner, Betty became pregnant. When she was four months along, Doug sold eight pigs to pay her fare back to England. A few months later, he made the trip himself, arriving before their first daughter was born. It was a good thing Betty did go back to England because she was very ill with toxemia and eclampsia after giving birth and she was in the hospital for a month.
Doug found a good job as a foreman with an engineering firm and they decided to give it a try in England. It was eleven years before they returned to Canada to stay.
Although she has been back several times and many of her relatives have come to visit, Betty says firmly, ‘Canada is now my home but England will always be close to my heart.’
Postscript: Betty and Doug Hillman had five children. Doug passed away in 1987 and Betty moved to Upper Kintore, New Brunswick where she lives next door to her daughter Jackie.
There Was A Colour Bar
Mary (Hardie) Gero
Coming from a regimental family in Scotland, it was no surprise when Mary Hardie married a soldier. What no one could have anticipated was that her husband would be an African-Canadian with Black Loyalist ancestors.
Mary Hardie met Albert (Al) Gero of Truro, Nova Scotia in 1943 when he was on leave in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was billeted in the same building where Mary’s sister-in-law lived and they struck up a conversation on the stairs. Al was an African Canadian serving with the Cape Breton Highlanders. In the course of their stairway conversation he suggested that Mary write to his sister in Nova Scotia. Soon after, Al asked Mary to write to him.
Al was soon shipped off to Italy and he and Mary started writing to each other. The relationship blossomed into romance and over the course of the next two years they saw each other whenever they could. They decided to get married and even had a date arranged but it had to be cancelled because Al couldn’t get leave.
There were a lot of servicemen from other countries in Scotland during the Second World War and the people were good to them knowing the sacrifices they were making in defence of Britain. And so was the case with Al Gero. Mary’s widowed mother had no problem with Al being of a different colour and if she did, all she had to do was deny them permission to marry since Mary was under twenty-one years of age. What Mary’s mother was concerned about was that her youngest child was moving so far away.
Meantime, Mary wanted to do her part for the war effort so she joined the WRNS in July 1944. All of her brothers were in the military and one had even been reported killed piping in the troops at Dunkirk. His wife began to receive a widow’s pension but in fact he was a prisoner of war at Stalag 13 in Germany. No one notified the family that he was alive; he just returned and shocked everyone after the war.
Mary first served in Liverpool and later at the Fleet Air Arm in Abbotsinch, which was close to Glasgow. One of the greatest moments in her life was meeting General Bernard Montgomery, ‘Monty’. She was going up the steps to Saint Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh as he was descending with his guards. He came over to shake her hand and they spoke for a few minutes. She will always remember that moment.
Mary and Al were married on 12 October 1945. The best man was Phillip Fontaine, a friend of Al’s from the service who was a Native Indian from Manitoba. The minister who married them was the Revd Cecil Thornton, which seemed appropriate; Mary had been the first baby he baptized and the last War Bride he married.
Unusual for the times, a large reception with a sit down meal for 200 guests was held at Tollbooth Hall, which is part of the Royal Mile. They spent one night together at her mother’s house and then both reported for duty the next day.
Two months later Al returned to Canada and Mary followed in July 1946 on the SS Georgic. Al and his brother Michael met her in Halifax and they drove the sixty miles to Truro in Michael’s new truck. Knowing what the rationing was like in Britain, Al had asked Mary if she wanted something special to eat when she arrived in Canada. Waiting for her on the front seat of the truck were what she asked for – bananas – the first she had tasted in years.
Al told Mary that he lived with his family on a farm in Truro but when she got there she found out it wasn’t a farm like in Scotland. The ‘farm’ was a house, a field and one goat. The outdoor toilet was another surprise; coming from Edinburgh she had never seen an outhouse before. There was no running water either, but she learned how to clean her laundry on a scrub board and to maintain chamber pots in the winter.
The biggest adjustment for Mary was realizing that there was a colour bar in Truro. In Scotland, the people treated everyone the same, whether they were white or black or Indian. This was especially so for servicemen who were risking their lives for Britain. Al had been wounded twice in Italy and Mary thought that meant something. But in Canada in 1946, race was an issue.
Although nothing was said to them outright, it was obvious the locals could not accept the fact that a white woman was married to a black man.
One day she and Al were walking up Young Street where they lived and a man was coming up the hill behind them. Al said, ‘Look at him, he’s staring at us, he just can’t stand it that we’re together.’
There were two large posts on the street and Al said to Mary,’ You watch; that man is staring at us so hard he’s not watching where he’s going and he’s going to walk right into one of those poles.’
Sure enough, that’s exactly what happened. ‘He got a few bumps on his head after that,’ Mary said.
Mary’s mother came to Truro when their first child was born in 1947 but they didn’t stay there much longer. The next year Al went to Montreal to get a better job and Mary soon followed with their baby son. At first Al worked at Hollander’s Furs dying the skins for the coats but later he became a pipe fitter which was a better living for their growing family. From 1949 until 1954 Mary and Al had four more children. Her mother came to visit the family in 1950 and stayed for two years,‘My mother was a big help to me,’ Mary says.
In Montreal, Mary had a lot of the conveniences she didn’t have in Nova Scotia, such as indoor plumbing and a washing machine. She and Al also didn’t have the problems they faced in Truro; no one gave them a second glance. Getting an apartment was not a problem for them and their children didn’t experience any racism in the diverse cultural environment of Montreal.
Mary and Al lived in Montreal for seventeen wonderful years; then in 1963, despite being quite content in Quebec, they moved back to Nova Scotia. Al was getting lonely for his family, particularly his mother who was getting elderly. Three weeks after they arrived, Al had a heart attack and died.
When Mary and Al lived in Montreal she didn’t have to work, but now she was a thirty-six-year-old widow with five children to support. She found a job at the Colchester Hospital as a cook, and later a cook supervisor. Mary worked at the hospital for twenty years and when she retired she took her first trip back to Scotland. After that she went every two years, the last time in 2000.
Mary never remarried or even dated another man after Al died. She had a good life, a good marriage and good children. She never regretted her decision to come to Canada, but once in a while she entertains the notion that she should have moved back to Quebec after Al died so the children would have had more opportunities. Now that she’s in her eighties she’s content to be in Truro with three of her children and their families living close by.
Postscript: Mary Gero has fourteen grandchildren, nineteen great-grandchildren and one great-great-grandchild.
No Harmony in Harmony Junction
Elizabeth (Kelly) MacDonald
Elizabeth (Kelly) MacDonald was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1920. She married Addison MacDonald of Souris, Prince Edward Island and ended up in Harmony Junction.
My mother and father met on a blind date while he was on a furlough in Edinburgh. She actually had two dates that night but after being introduced to Addison MacDonald she never bothered with the second.
My father was a farmer from Souris, Prince Edward Island (PEI), a small island province made famous by author Lucy Maude Montgomery in the children’s book Anne of Green Gables. PEI is in the Northumberland Strait off the coast of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and the only way to get there until the government built the Confederation Bridge in 1997 was by ferry from the mainland.
My mother came from a family of nine children and so did my dad. His father died in a tractor accident when he was four years old so my grandmother in PEI was widowed with a large family to raise. She never remarried.
My parents went on three dates and married on their fourth. Before the wedding, my grandmother in PEI wrote to my mother and, invoking the uncertainty of the times, implored her to delay marriage until the war was over. But my parents adamantly refused – my mother found out later that his family had a hometown girl in mind for him and that was the real reason for the letter.
They remained in Edinburgh for most of the war. In between my father’s war assignments my mother lived with her parents except for a short period in London when dad was stationed there.
My mother’s home in Edinburgh was often filled with my father’s brothers and friends who would drop in to visit. For some it became a home away from home. Five of my father’s brothers served overseas and two of his sisters also joined up – one brother died and is buried in Holland. My mother’s sister and three brothers served as well, one brother spending time in a prisoner of war camp. His wife told me that the only person her husband could ever talk to about his experiences was my father.
As was common among veterans, my father never talked about the war. He would talk about people he met, the food he ate, and the beauty of the countries he was in but not what happened to him while serving his country. I learned a number of years later that when he was quartermaster in Italy, he lost his stripes for shooting another soldier who was raping an Italian girl.
My sister Elizabeth Anne was born in December 1942. She was adored and pampered by all her grandparents, aunts and uncles. She and my mother came to Canada via Pier 21 in 1946 following my father’s repatriation. Mum never remembered much about the voyage on the Queen Mary because she spent much of it seasick – another War Bride took care of Elizabeth.
My mother and sister were met in Halifax by my father, his brother and two of their friends. They continued on by ferry to PEI where they lived for six months in Harmony Junction, outside of Souris with my grandmother (Nanny), my uncle and his wife.
Mum in her hat, heels and fur stole was not prepared for what awaited her in Harmony Junction: it was a very unhappy time for my mother because she missed her large rambunctious family and she was scorned by those she lived with.
Mum was a city girl who loved clothes and was used to city ways. I believe PEI was insular and not terribly forgiving of those who ‘came from away’. When she dressed up for church, Islanders took it to mean she thought she was better than them. When she tried to cook, her in-laws (except for Nanny) laughed at her and set her up to fail. She was used to certain standards and Islanders thought of her as strange and uppity. If Mum washed the floor my aunt would rewash it. If she did a washing my aunt would complain about the quality of her work.
My grandmother taught Mum to cook and bake. One day Mum baked ginger snap cookies and was so proud of them. Another uncle came for a visit and after trying one he took the cookies outside and buried them before the other aunt came home and made a fuss.
Nanny would wake Mum up when the others were in bed and teach her how to cook. She had to do it when my aunt and uncle were not around because my aunt would criticise and lie about ingredients. Finally after months of this covert operation Nanny announced that Mum would be cooking dinner. The relatives were gleeful, looking forward to her failure and an opportunity to yet again make her the target of their vitriol. Much to their chagrin, and my mother’s surprise, dinner was a success.
My mother did make friends and she loved Nanny but living with my aunt and uncle was excruciating for her. She would often trudge down to the next farm, even in deep winter, and visit with her friends despite the two-mile walk.
My father opened a butcher shop in Souris and they moved to a house just down from the Catholic church. Here she was under less scrutiny and made new friends. She and Dad loved to dance – he was a great mimic and loved to laugh. My mother’s new friends discovered she was a gifted singer and soon she was called upon to sing at ordinations and country fairs.
My brother Richard was born in 1947 and I followed in 1949. My grandmother Kelly came for her first visit to Canada when I was born and it was a wonderful thing for Mum to have the support of her mother.
The only other problem was the amount of drinking of my father and his friends. My mother did not drink at all, which was unusual given her parents owned a spirits store in Edinburgh. Dad came home one night to find her sitting up at the kitchen table with boxes packed. She said she couldn’t stand it anymore and was going home to Edinburgh.
That was when they decided to leave PEI and Dad went to Ontario to find work. In no time he had a job with Ontario Hydro but it took one and a half years to save enough money to send for my mother and the children.
During this time my mother was alone on the island; she lived for Dad’s letters and watched while his business was sold. She also had to put up with a few men trying to seduce her and some nights had to barricade the doors of the house.
My father asked her to come to Ontario to look for a house and she was gone for a month. My parents asked the relatives to look after us but aside from eleven-year-old Elizabeth – who went to an aunt so she could babysit the kids – they refused to look after Richard and me so we were sent to the orphanage in Charlottetown to be cared for by the nuns.
One oft-told family story was that I had long strawberry blonde hair that Mum would put in braids. When she returned from Ontario and collected us from the orphanage she burst into tears when she saw me because the nuns had cut off my hair. The nuns could not understand why she was upset as they saved my braids for her: it was the first thing they did. Mum kept the braids for years.
After we left PEI for good my father’s family sold what was left of our belongings and we never received a cent. My mother was happy to be gone from the island and began to make a new life for her family in Ontario. The only person Dad and Mum wrote to was Nanny. Dad used to say that when he retired they should go for a visit and not tell anyone they were there. It never happened.
Through Dad’s job we traveled the province of Ontario: Chippewa (now part of Niagara Falls) where their youngest Mary Estelle was born in 1954; Whitedog Falls (on the Ontario Manitoba border); Red Rock Falls; Little Long Rapids (north of Kapuskasing) and finally Pickering.
When we were in Pickering we had a surprise visit from one of my PEI uncles and his wife. Thereafter he and my Dad kept in touch and in time we all met the relatives, even those made infamous in family stories. It was interesting to us how they spoke only in glowing terms of our mother.
My father died at a young age in 1969 and it broke my mother’s heart. She lived to see eighty-one.
When I think of my parents I think of theirs as a love story; a story of forging a new life in a world away from home and family. When I close my eyes I see my young, elegantly dressed mother standing on Pier 21 not knowing what life was about to throw her way; not knowing that she would face it with great courage and dignity; not knowing she was going to make a difference to this new country of hers and that she was going to teach her beloved children that courage and dignity in adversity made them very proud children indeed.
Contributed by Valerie MacDonald, daughter of Elizabeth and Addison MacDonald.
Time Is Short
Mildred (Young) Sowers
Mildred (Young) Sowers was born in Buffalo, New York in 1924. Her parents returned to England in the Depression and lived in Thornton Heath. She married Harold Sowers from Fredericton, New Brunswick.
One summer evening in 1941, seventeen-year-old Mildred Young and her friend Joan were in Croydon when they met two Canadian soldiers looking at photographs in a shop window.
One of the soldiers, Harold Sowers, was a member of the Carleton York Regiment and he and his friend Eddie were stationed nearby at Caterham. The four young people struck up a conversation and agreed to meet again later.
Mildred and Harold liked each other from the start and within a few weeks she took him home to meet her parents in Thornton Heath. Mildred’s younger brother, Lawrie, was away in the Navy and her older brother Billy had been killed in an air raid in August 1940. As the only child left at home, her parents were naturally concerned about this Canadian soldier, but they welcomed Harold and he soon became a fixture at the Young household.
Everything was going smoothly for Mildred and Harold until they missed the bus back home one evening. There wasn’t another from Croydon back to Thornton Heath for over an hour so they walked several miles home. Coming up Norbury Avenue, they saw Mr Young waiting by the front gate, obviously upset.
Mildred was sent inside and Harold got a stern warning: ‘If anything has happened to my Mildred, there is nothing I wouldn’t do to you!’
Mildred and Harold became engaged in 1943. Harold would not consider marriage until after the war ended because so many women who married servicemen were widowed and he didn’t want Mildred to be one of them. Soon after VE Day Harold returned to England and they set a date of 24 July 1945. His regiment was being repatriated to Canada so in order for him to remain overseas until the wedding he had to join the 3rd Battalion of the North Shore Regiment, where he served with the Occupational Forces in Germany.
When the time came for Harold to travel to England for the wedding, he only got as far as Calais, France. The British Railway was on strike and only British soldiers were crossing the English Channel to Dover. Harold was desperate to get across; he couldn’t miss his own wedding! He tried every way he could think of to get through. He even tore all the Canadian badges off his tunic and tried to sound British, but that didn’t fool the guards; they knew he was Canadian.
Meanwhile, back in Thornton Heath, everyone was busy making arrangements for the wedding. The circumstances which transpired over the next days and weeks were so unusual that a light-hearted account of the ceremony appeared in the New Brunswick Telegraph Journal back in Canada.
Wedding Bells Ring Loudly Three Times Before Final Take
Sgt. Major Harold Sowers and Bride-Elect Had Tough Time Getting Married
Reception Before the Marriage
The Minister’s First Marriage in the Parish
All Ended Happily
Already postponed once, the marriage of Company Sergeant Major Harold D.E. Sowers of Sheffield, New Brunswick, now overseas, and Miss Mildred Young of Norbury Avenue, Thornton Heath, was scheduled to take place on a Monday not long ago.
The guests assembled at the church where the ceremony was to take place and at five minutes to the hour when the bride and groom were to stand before the minister and become man and wife, a messenger arrived with a message which postponed the ceremony until 3 o’clock, as the Sergeant Major, the groom, was delayed by circumstances beyond his control. Three o’clock arrived. The minister, waiting patiently to begin the ceremony, and the bride-to-be glanced anxiously at the church door, waiting for the groom to arrive, but the groom did not show up. The bride had gone to a lot of trouble for the occasion, so the reception was held anyway – before the marriage. Even the wedding cake was cut and eaten.
Next day, the Sergeant Major arrived from Germany. He had been held up along with 10,000 other servicemen at Calais because of a rail strike. So arrangements were made to have the marriage take place the following Saturday.
Saturday came and over twenty of the original guests who wanted to witness the marriage they had been invited to the previous Monday were on hand, as well as the groom, who arrived bright and early for his wedding. This time the groom and the guests waiting patiently, the groom gazing at the church door waiting and hoping to see the bride appear, but this time there was a groom and no bride. Ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five minutes passed slowly, and still no bride. Then there appeared another messenger, this time with a message from the bride, saying that the automobile in which she was riding to the church had broken down.
One of the guests ran out into the road and thumbed a passing motorist to beg for help. Away they sped to the bride’s home to pick up the trail from there. The bride was not home and they could not locate the broken down automobile, but after searching for some time, they came across the vehicle on a side road. There was the bride, nearly in tears. Practically snatching her up bodily, they hustled her into the other automobile and sped away to the church.
To the tune of the Bridal Chorus, the happy couple, finally united, met in front of the minister, who gave a sigh of relief as he commenced the wedding ceremony. The Revd J. Freeman was the new vicar at St Oswald’s Church, and this was his first marriage in his new parish. What a time he had to get it started!
Wearing a heavily brocaded satin gown with a long train and embroidered silk net veil surmounted by a headdress of feathers, the bride was given away by her father …The groom wore, along with other necessities for a marriage, a beam on his face as he gazed at his bride and deep in his heart apparently had a thought – the third time always takes.
A second, smaller reception was held at the bride’s home, this time with the groom, after which the happy couple left for their honeymoon in Seaford.
The newlyweds had one month together before he was repatriated to Canada at Christmas 1945 and it was six months before they were reunited.
Mildred sailed on the Lady Nelson from Southampton, arriving at Pier 21 in Halifax on 21 June 1946. A War Bride train took her on the short trip to Moncton, New Brunswick where Harold and another couple were waiting. The next day they drove to Harold’s family home in Sheffield, a small farming community outside of Fredericton, and along the way she was treated to fresh strawberries from a roadside stand, her first taste of New Brunswick.
An English War Bride was quite an attraction in Sheffield with her accent and funny expressions. The first time Mildred saw a moose, she called it a ‘gentleman moose’, a phrase that sent everyone into fits of laughter.
Mildred was a city girl and living in the country was difficult to get used to but she learned how to stretch pennies, earning extra money trapping muskrats and selling pelts. Harold’s sister Dean and her husband Tommy lived on a farm nearby and they shared their livestock and vegetables. Deer and moose meat were plentiful in season. With times rough for everyone, people looked out for each other and Mildred managed to cope.
Next door lived Celia, who also happened to be a War Bride, and Mildred was fortunate to find a second family away from home with her friend Jean’s parents, who were from England. Being near people from her homeland helped ease the initial culture shock she experienced and made her adjustment to Canadian life easier. She spent her first Christmas in Canada at their home, but was homesick for her family and Jean’s mum provided a shoulder for Mildred to cry on that Christmas Day.
Their first child, Malcolm, was born in March 1947 and Linda in July 1948. Harold was working in construction and like many other women whose husbands worked away from home, Mildred was left to raise the children mostly on her own. It probably wasn’t what she expected out of marriage but she made the best of the situation by being the best mother she could be.
She had an uncle, George Young, who lived in Toronto and he visited New Brunswick occasionally. During the summer of 1958 Mildred’s parents came over from England and they all had a reunion in Sheffield but Mr and Mrs Young were alarmed to see the very harsh living conditions their daughter had to cope with in rural Canada.
Moving to Fredericton in 1960 dramatically changed life for everyone; the new house had modern luxuries like indoor plumbing and television, though Mildred still cooked on a wood stove. Malcolm and Linda attended a large school in the city and it wasn’t long before they made new friends and had lives of their own. Harold was still employed with the same company but was working in an office now and had time to socialise as well.
Mildred wanted another child but had several miscarriages; finally in 1961 she became pregnant again. Susan was born in September and she was thrilled, focusing her attention on the new baby. She often wrote to her family about her little daughter, hopeful they might come to Canada again to see her.
Mildred’s father died in 1962 but she could not afford to attend his funeral, which was a great disappointment. Uncle George died a few years later, leaving her a small inheritance so she returned for her first visit home in May 1966. Mildred spent two nostalgic weeks with family and old friends in familiar places. It was a wonderful visit but she was glad to return to her family in Canada. She said that she could not live in England again. Canada had become her home.
Shortly after Mildred’s return her daughter Linda got married. It was difficult for Mildred to accept, soon followed by the news that she and Harold would be grandparents.
As the year drew to a close, personal circumstances had clearly begun to affect Mildred. On 16 December 1966 she wrote a letter to her brother Lawrie, in which she told him, ‘Time is short, so a brief letter will have to do. I’m not looking forward to Xmas too much. If you were here, you would understand.’
It was obvious from the melancholy tone of her words that Mildred was not her usual cheerful self. She ended her letter by saying she was going to town later that afternoon. Mildred had no way of knowing how short time really was, or the tragedy that awaited her before the day was over.
Later that evening, Mildred and Harold were returning from a Christmas party when Harold lost control of their car on an icy bridge and crashed. Mildred was in a coma for several hours and passed away the following day, 17 December.
Contributed by Susan Willis, Mildred’s youngest daughter. Susan moved to England in 1998. Today she lives in Essex and works as Domestic Violence Services Manager for the national charity Refuge.
A Union Jack on Her Grave
Mary (Fletcher) Sheppard
Mary (Fletcher) Sheppard was born in Liverpool in 1921. She married George Sheppard of Corner Brook, Newfoundland in 1940. George served in the Royal Navy as an Able Seaman on a number of ships including the HMS Nelson and the King George V.
Crossing the ocean in 1947 as the wife of a Newfoundland sailor was the single defining decision of my mother’s life.
Until she met my father when she was eighteen, she was a giggly factory worker in Liverpool who loved to dance, see the latest films and ride her bike down to the docks to see the ships moored in the Mersey.
Seven years later, she was the mother of two girls, very pregnant with a third and on a ship going to Newfoundland. She thought she had extracted a promise from my father that he would stay in England. And he did try. They stayed two years after the war and were making a go of it, just barely, when a telegram came from home to say his father was ill and he wanted to see his eldest son one last time.
Granddad met them at the train station, healthy as a horse and they both knew they’d been had. But they agreed they would wait until the baby was born to see what was to be done.
She stayed. The facts were simple. England was absorbing hundreds of thousands of men home from the war and jobs for foreigners were scarce. Meanwhile, Bowater had promised any man who volunteered to fight that his job at the paper mill was guaranteed when he came back home.
But her heart never settled. It was always understood in our household that ‘home’ was not the house we lived in. It was that mythical place across the sea where roses bloomed in May, houses were built of brick and rainwater made the softest hair on earth.
This business of ‘home’ not being where her children were raised and not being the house that she and father had bought and finished, furnished and refurbished over the years was a constant threat to us bonding as a family. How could we be a family like in Father Knows Best when our mother’s home was somewhere else?
Like the other War Brides, she had to start again. She had no mother to confide in, no sisters to console her or to help with babysitting, no lifetime neighbour who knew her as the cute kid from Fortescue Street or teacher who knew of her academic successes. She was her dad’s little princess when she stepped on that ship, and while she didn’t know it then, she would never see him again.
We lived in a newly built postwar veteran enclave. The house had four walls and not much else when they moved in. There was no running water, the road was barely passable and the veterans’ houses were built on top of a hill that was swept with deep snow and high winds most of the long winter.
She had never seen snow and with three small children, twins on the way, no family support, no road and water that had to be hauled up the hill by the buckets, snow was hell. She never did get to like it. In winter, it kept her prisoner; in spring, it kept her garden from blooming well into June.
The common ground for War Brides was the Legion. It was there, at Branch No.13 that my mother felt comfortable talking with the other War Brides and raising money. She must have helped cater hundreds of dinners and weddings and auctioned off dozens of novelty cakes made in our kitchen.
I think it was the volunteer work at the Legion that brought her out of her domestic cocoon. And once that happened, she became a force to be reckoned with. Sure, there were now nine children underfoot, but there was greater work to be done.
I was in grade three the year my mother went on a campaign to get water and sewers to the neighbourhood. She did radio phone-in shows, wrote letters to the editor, talked to politicians until she was blue in the face. And finally, the diggers moved in and after more than ten years of community water tap at the bottom of the hill, we could turn on hot and cold water and flush a toilet.
She went on a mission to get my father’s war pension sorted out. That took her twenty years, but in the end, she got what she felt my father deserved for his many wounds. Over the years, she learned when to call the Premier’s office and how to get action.
I think that eventually, say after forty years of marriage, my mother finally accepted that marrying her Newfoundland sailor was indeed a good thing. By that time, she’d gone ‘home’ a few times and compared the cost of raising nine children in England versus Newfoundland. The Rock won out, hands down. She was shocked when in the 1990s, her sister was robbed of her TV while she was asleep in her bed in a little village near Liverpool. That wasn’t her England. But she never stopped referring to England as home.
She’s dead now. I sometimes think we did her an injustice by burying her on an isolated hill overlooking the Bay of Islands. I keep meaning to buy a British Union Jack to put on her grave so there’s a reminder that here lies a woman who is forever far from home.
This article is used with the permission of CBC.ca and the author, Mary Sheppard. Mary is the executive producer of CBC News Online.
The Town That War Brides Built
Marion (Elliot) Hoddinott
Marion (Elliot) Hoddinott was born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1923. She married Walter Hoddinott and came to Newfoundland where she helped build a new town consisting almost entirely of War Brides.
Marion Elliot was seventeen years old and working in a munitions factory when she met Walter Hoddinott of Corner Brook, Newfoundland. Walter joined the Royal Navy at the outbreak of war in 1939. At the time, Newfoundland was British and when the call went out for commonwealth volunteers Walter joined up.
Marion and Walter were married in Glasgow on Valentine’s Day 1942. Soon after, Walter shipped off and Marion settled in to a small apartment in Clydebank. Walter Jr was born nine months later.
Walter was demobilized in July 1945 and it was nearly eight months before they were reunited in Corner Brook. Against doctor’s orders, she left England on 17 March 1946, eight months pregnant with her second child, but she was young and healthy and weathered the crossing like a trooper. Soon after, a second son, Robert, was born.
In 1945 the Government of Newfoundland announced the Post War Resettlement Program and the farming community of Cormack was born. Cormack was about fifty miles from Corner Brook on the west coast of Newfoundland. The area was cleared of timber, the soil was conducive to farming and there was a railway and road connection at Deer Lake, twelve miles away. Construction began in 1946 and Walter and Marion were approved for the program becoming one of more than fifty War Bride families in the new town of Cormack.
Each family was supposed to receive training in farming methods, fifty acres of land (ten acres cleared) a six-room house, a barn for livestock, a cow, a horse, pigs and cash for machinery and seed. This was a generous scheme but, like so many other government initiatives, it was ruined by politics, greed, mismanagement and even fraud. Conditions faced by the families participating in this experiment led to extreme hardship, heartbreak and in many cases, divorce.
Walter and Marion went off to St John’s with the two boys in the spring of 1947 to take training in farming techniques. In September they travelled by train to Deer Lake and were met by a government agent who put them on a ‘Cat train’ headed for Cormack. A Cat train is made up of a bulldozer pulling a series of large sleds linked together like rail cars and designed to be pulled over mud, dirt or snow-covered logging roads. The road to Cormack was a muddy, rocky track through the woods, passable only by the Cat trains and Bombardier-tracked snow machines. An all-weather road, which was part of the Trans Canada Highway across Newfoundland, would not be built to Cormack for another ten years.
After a six-hour trip, the family reached their new home just before dark. They entered the house to find it was only a shell with a large wood burning stove in the kitchen and no furniture. The government agent in Deer Lake had given them a few supplies to get them settled including a kerosene lantern, kerosene, a few days food supplies, a metal pot and kettle.
Walter took the pot down to a brook nearby and brought in water for tea. He then gathered enough wood scraps to feed the fire and set about making a meal for the family. While Walter seemed happy and excited with this new adventure, Marion was feeling lost and miserable. After they ate, the two boys were put to sleep. Since there were no beds, heavy quilts and blankets were arranged on the floor and would serve the family for many weeks until beds arrived from the agent in Deer Lake.
The final insult came when Marion had to go to the bathroom. Walter took her by the hand, led her to the woods and told her to squat behind a nearby tree and do her business. Then he handed her some thin bark from a birch tree to use as toilet paper.
Marion had grown up in Glasgow where there were electric lights, hot and cold water, indoor bathroom facilities, gas for cooking and heat and public transportation right outside the door. Nothing in her wildest dreams prepared her for going into the dark woods and squatting on the ground like a wild animal. Marion spent the first night in her new home crying herself to sleep.
The days and weeks to come were unbearable. The temperature dropped and the first snow came. Daily chores of hauling water from the brook for cooking, washing clothes on a wash board and chopping wood to feed the big stove’s insatiable appetite were back breaking. Neither she nor her boys had proper clothing for the weather outside.
Walter had gone into Deer Lake several times in the first two weeks to see the agent and get more supplies. It took him a whole day to walk the twelve miles to town and hitch a ride back. Left alone with the boys, Marion was afraid of the wood stove and was terrified that savage beasts were waiting to pounce on her outside.
On the third week at the farm Walter made a trip to town and didn’t return until the early hours of the next morning. At 2 a.m. she heard someone on the steps outside and opened the door to find two strangers holding up a very drunk Walter.
Now her fear and loneliness turned to rage. She didn’t speak to him for a week. It didn’t occur to Marion until much later that he was feeling the same frustration and handled it in the only way he knew how.
As the fall progressed Walter dug a well near the house, and cut and split enough fire wood for the winter. He finished two rooms in the house with material on hand and built a table, two four-foot benches and a kitchen cabinet. Marion now had a furnished kitchen and one bedroom.
The winter brought mountains of snow and freezing temperatures, Marion had never experienced anything like it in her life. During the frequent storms, snow would actually blow in through cracks in the outside walls.
Wildlife was plentiful so Walter put out a trap line and brought home beaver, otter, muskrat, fox, martin and occasionally a lynx. He taught Marion how to prepare a fur pelt and dry it in the kitchen on drying boards which would stand behind the wood stove. He also shot moose, snared rabbits and bagged partridge to eat. This food was new to Marion and it took her quite a bit of time to adjust but it was a break from their supplies of salt beef, pork, fish, canned meats and bologna which made up most of their diet.
As their first Christmas in Cormack approached, Walter had accumulated quite a collection of furs from his trap line. His plan was to take the furs to Deer Lake and sell them to an agent for the Hudson’s Bay Company. While Marion had dreams of curtains, gifts for the boys and maybe some treats, Walter had other ideas: he sold the furs and returned with a Belgian mare named Queenie. Marion was furious, wondering what they were going to do with a horse.
Then Walter dropped a bomb on the family. He was taking Queenie to a logging camp to haul wood and he’d be back in mid-March.
In early January Walter set out with Queenie for the camp. Marion struggled alone with the two boys. The deep snow, constant cold, hard back-breaking work, and long lonely nights without her husband all conspired to make her long for Scotland.
In September, shortly after arriving, Marion had made friends with a neighbour who was also a Scottish War Bride. Helen Reid had arrived in Cormack in 1946 and endured all the same hardships as Marion. Every day they would visit each other and reminisce about home, crying on each other’s shoulders. Later Marion would say that Helen was the only thing that kept her from going insane.
Walter returned from the logging camp in March with enough money to buy seed and pay off his bills with the merchants in town. Walter’s brother Gordon had taken up the farm next door and together they planted potatoes, turnips, carrots and cabbages. The crops seemed to do well but a frost in August killed almost everything and the potatoes that survived were too small to sell.
The whole summer had been a waste so in September Walter went back to work in the lumber camp. That winter was a repeat of the previous and Marion was growing more despondent.
The spring of 1949 arrived with renewed hope. Vegetables were once again planted and were doing well. Then disaster struck; in September Newfoundland was ravaged by a hurricane. This coupled with news that some of the logging camps were closing caused many of Cormack’s original residents to throw their hands up in defeat.
Some went back to their home towns, others took their families to larger centres to find work. Many went back to the fishing industry. Unfortunately many War Brides returned home with their children and Marion was one of them. Walter joined her the next year in Scotland, but jobs were scarce and rationing was still in effect. Realizing it wasn’t much better in Scotland, they returned to Cormack in 1951 with the boys and a new baby, a daughter named Marion.
Things had improved immensely between 1949 and 1951. Newfoundland had joined Canada and signs of prosperity were everywhere. The roads were vastly improved, mail was delivered weekly and Walter joined with most others in Cormack to form a co-op. They built a general store and started a full-time school from kindergarten to grade eleven. It was easier to get to town and regular visits to doctors and dentists were now possible. Marion and other women in the community worked tirelessly at fundraising to build Saint George’s Anglican Church, the first church in Cormack.
Farming, however, was still precarious. The weather was unpredictable and promised government marketing initiatives failed to get off the ground. Walter found seasonal work and never went back to farming. Two more children came along and Walter fixed up the house, replacing the wood stove with an oil furnace thus ridding Marion of the dreaded chore of cutting and splitting wood. She didn’t get electricity until 1964 and it was another ten years before she had inside plumbing but Marion was a lot happier.
Marion was killed in a car accident on 23 December 1982, just two weeks shy of her sixtieth birthday. Shortly before she died, Marion had ended a feud with her sister-in-law, also a War Bride, who lived next door. Although their husbands were great friends and the children of both families grew up together, something caused Marion and Margaret Hoddinott to steadfastly refuse to speak to one another for twenty-five years.
Marion was a devout Christian, and she offered the proverbial olive branch to Margaret. Although she and Margaret would never be close friends, she did enjoy the company and felt good about her Christian act. On the morning of 23 December, Marion went along with Margaret to Deer Lake to do some shopping. The car was hit broad side and both Marion and Margaret were killed instantly.
War Brides Marion and Margaret Hoddinott were buried on 26 December 1982, on a cold, stormy, old-fashioned Newfoundland winter day.
Postscript: Walter died in Toronto in November 1985. Marion and Walter are resting peacefully together in a cemetery at Pasadena, Newfoundland. Their story was submitted by Rob Hoddinott, their second son.
Everything Will Be Fine
Rose (O’Reilly) Boulay
Rose (O’Reilly) Boulay was born in Co. Cavan, Ireland in 1920. She followed the advice of her husband’s regimental padre and married Horace Boulay of Belledune, New Brunswick, a small village near the border with Quebec.
Rose O’Reilly was only seventeen years old when she left Co. Cavan, Ireland and emigrated to London, England with the dream of becoming a nurse.
At the time, Rose was working in the ‘greener pastures’ of Dublin, about fifty miles away from the rural farm where she grew up in Ireland. Rose had two brothers and two sisters living in London and when her older sister came home on vacation she persuaded Rose to go back with her to London. The plan was to work for a year and then begin her nursing course. But when the war broke out, Rose’s plans were put on hold and she worked for the war effort instead.
Rose filled shells for aircraft at the Royal Ordnance Factory in Swynnerton, Staffordshire. The factory was in a rural area in a camouflaged setting and the shift workers were bussed in; at night the bus windows were blackened and its headlights were covered so just a little slit of light would show as it made its way to and from the factory, dropping off and picking up workers.
Rose met Sgt Horace Boulay of the North Shore Regiment during a visit to her sister’s in London at Christmas 1942. Horace was from Belledune, New Brunswick a small village along the shores of the Bay of Chaleur near the province of Quebec. Although Horace’s ancestors were from Quebec, his Catholic grandfather had married into an Irish family in Belledune and the next generation, including Horace, were brought up speaking English.
Rose and Horace wrote to each other during the next two years and whenever he was on leave he would go to London and they would visit with Rose’s sister. When Horace asked Rose for her hand in marriage, she hesitated and told him that she would have to think about it.
Southern Ireland was neutral during the war and there were travel restrictions for military personnel. That meant Horace would not be able to meet her family in person and this was cause of some concern because her parents didn’t know what kind of a man she was marrying.
To assuage her family’s concerns, Father Raymond Hickey, the Roman Catholic Chaplin of New Brunswick’s North Shore Regiment, wrote to Rose saying that he knew Horace’s family well and that they were a good Catholic family.
Rose kept his letter, which included some good old-fashioned advice for anyone contemplating marriage:
Dear Miss O’Reilly:
I am the chaplain of the North Shore Regiment and one of my boys, Horace Boulay, spoke to me about your intention to marry. Now, Horace is a fine boy, from a fine Catholic family. I know them well, and Horace is a good Catholic himself. I hope Horace has told you of conditions in Canada, how we live, etc., then you will not be disappointed. So long as you love one another and are sincere about everything, then everything will be fine. I hope you can be very happy and you can be, by deciding to be right now.
Sincerely, Father Hickey
At the same time, Horace wrote to Rose’s mother and asked for her hand in marriage. With the ringing endorsement of Father Hickey, Mrs O’Reilly gave her blessing, along with an invitation to visit Ireland when the war was over.
Rose and Horace were married on 29 April 1944 at St Agnes Catholic Church in Cricklewood, London. One week later Horace was sent to Southampton awaiting the invasion of Normandy and on 8 June he landed on the Normandy coast as a dispatch rider bringing messages to and from the front lines. From there on he served in France, Germany, Holland and Belgium, earning the Military Medal for bravery in the field. Having survived the war, Horace returned to New Brunswick with the North Shore Regiment in August 1945.
Nine months later, Rose followed her husband to Canada, but before she left, she went to Ireland for a three-week visit to say goodbye to her family. ‘It was a big decision to leave my home and family,’ she said, ‘but it was part of growing up.’
On 4 April 1946 Rose boarded the Aquitania at Southampton, and arrived in Halifax less than a week later on 10 April. It was a pleasant crossing and on board the train bound for Bathurst she will always remember the landscape of trees and snow. A snow storm prevented her from getting off the train in Bathurst so she had to continue her journey to Belledune. There Rose was met by Horace and her in-laws who welcomed her with open arms. She finished her long trip by horse and sleigh to the family farm.
The literal translation for Belledune is ‘pretty sand dunes’ which in the heat of the summer are a sight to behold along the Bay of Chaleur; but in the winter all Rose would have seen from the sleigh was ice and snow along the shoreline and she would have felt the penetrating chill of the Bay’s northerly winds.
Despite her snowy introduction to New Brunswick, Rose says that she didn’t really experience any culture shock because the living conditions were very similar to Ireland in the 1930s and ’40s. There were a rich mix of French, Irish and Scottish families who had settled in the Belledune area since the early 1800s and other than adapting to married life, she was very lucky because she didn’t have any difficulties settling in. ‘Horace’s family became my new family and life on the farm became my way of life,’ she says. ‘I have no regrets.’
Father Hickey’s advice so long ago to a young Irish girl lasted fifty-five years: ‘So long as you love one another and are sincere about everything, then everything will be fine.’ Rose and Horace visited Ireland many times before he passed away in 1999.They had three children, four grandchildren, one great-grandchild and another two are on the way.
Postscript: Rose Boulay still lives in Belledune. Since Horace died she has visited Ireland with her daughters and granddaughters.
