January 6, 2021.

I sat glued to the television watching hundreds of people, armed and angry, storm the Capital Building in Washington. They had been incited by Donald Trump to overthrow the recent presidential election results, the election that Trump claimed had been stolen from him by Biden and the Democrats. This violence could not possibly be happening in America. This was Third World stuff.

I no sooner said the words then my mind was yanked back sixty-four years to a Third World insurrection I had witnessed as a teenager.

In seventh grade, at the age of twelve, my father accepted a job overseas with an engineering company, part of an international consortium contracted by the Pakistani Development Corporation to build a paper mill on the Ganges Delta. Khulna, the town selected for the mill, was situated in East Pakistan known today as Bangladesh. The logs were to be hauled by boat upriver in huge booms from the mangrove forests of the Sundarbans (home of the Bengal tiger) to be made into the pulp necessary to produce various paper products.

The salary for a four-year contract was considerable, deposited in a Canadian bank account and not taxed by either country. A house was provided, a school, leisure facilities, servants, and first-class transportation there and back. On the way out we sailed to England on the Empress of Britain, flew to Dacca, the capital of East Pakistan, and finally driven by car to the site. We returned home with stops in Hong Kong, Tokyo and Honolulu, truly an “Around the World Adventure”.  

Dad saw this contract as the opportunity to give his three children the university education he never received following the bankruptcy of his father’s bookstore during the Depression and the necessity for he and his brothers to support the family.  My parents were certainly adventurous to take their children to live half way around the world but, in hindsight, very naïve about international contracts, particularly in southern Asia.  

We arrived at the site in 1957 during the construction phase of the mill. India had only acquired Independence from Britain ten years earlier becoming India and Pakistan (East and West sections) in 1947. East Pakistan then began a drawn-out process of separation from West Pakistan, largely for religious and linguistic reasons, to eventually become Bangladesh in 1972. The years in between were full of political unrest and civil disobedience. East Pakistan was placed under marshal law in 1958 shortly after our arrival. Uprisings continued, growing ever-more dangerous.   

The attack I witnessed was against the construction of the mill. I was much too young to understand the whys of what was happening. All I saw was the huge mob of rioters trying to access the compound. As they attempted to break down the gates and climb the protective walls, they were beaten off by soldiers, local police and compound guards. The mob grew larger and larger and those who fell under the blows were trampled.  The noise of the crowd was unforgettable – continuous chants I didn’t understand, sounds of batons pounding flesh and cement, screams of pain and barking dogs, all under the heat and humidity and the everyday smells of south Asia.

For a short while the company families huddled on the upper deck of the Newsprint Club overlooking the scene until company employees escorted us to safety. My heart pounded – surely it would pound right out of my chest. By the time the time the fighting was finally over, the streets outside the walls were littered with dead and bloodied bodies.

Although we continued to see evidence of uprisings in and near the village until we left the country in 1960, never did the violence come as close again. The company purchased a river boat to keep onsite should an emergency evacuation be required. Thankfully, it was there when my four-year old sister had to be evacuated to a hospital in Dacca to save her life from amebic dysentery. It was the only time it had to used.

According to the Hudson Bay Company biographical records, in May of 1829 an un-named “Indian woman” married George Robertson. In the 1827 census George is reported to be the father of seven children born before his marriage.  

George Robertson was my son’s fourth great grandfather on his father’s side.

In May of 1791, George Robertson entered the service of The Hudson Bay Company and sailed from Stromness in the Orkney Islands to York Factory on Hudson Bay. He was 19 years old when he began work there as a labourer. An HBC contract was for one year but George renewed his contract year after year, moving on as a canoe man, a bowman and a steersman. His death is recorded as being in St. Andrew’s, Scotland in January 1855 at age 84.

White women were not allowed into Hudson Bay Company territories so many HBC employees turned to indigenous woman or “little bits of brown” for physical comfort and the survival skills necessary for life in the harsh north. Some would eventually marry a “country wife”. When George retired to Scotland sometime after 1835, he abandoned his Metis family to what is now northern Canada.

The 1811 the Canadian census records Catherine Robertson, a daughter of George Robertson and the widow of Robert Beads, (another HBC employee from the Orkneys), as living with her daughters Elizabeth and Caroline in the Atikamekw native reserve of Manawan inland from James Bay on the upper St. Maurice River. Catherine described herself as Scottish, not Atikamekan.

In the summer of 2020, almost three hundred years after the Hudson Bay Company began trading for beaver pelts on Hudson Bay and referring to Indigenous women as “little bits of brown”, Joyce Echaquan, a 37-year-old Atikamekw woman from Manawan live-streamed the moments before her death in a Joliette hospital. Health care workers were seen and heard taunting her with racial insults.

So much had been tried during the intervening years to “beat the Indian out” of the indigenous peoples of Canada. Indigenous children were pulled from their families and sent to residential schools where they were beaten for using their mother tongue or following their traditional practices. Many never went home again. Their descendants still suffer from the trauma they experienced.

The “Sixties Scoop”, a series of government policies beginning in the mid1950’s and continuing well into the 1980’s, allowed for indigenous children to be taken from their families, fostered and eventually adopted by white families across Canada and the United States. These children lost their birth names, their languages and any connection to their heritage. 

Today there is a long list of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls across all provinces whose cases have not been solved. These “little bits of brown” appear to be unworthy of a full investigation.

Back in1852, Caroline Beads, Catherine Robertson’s daughter, married French Canadian Joseph Mercier, a riverman working the St. Maurice River. Caroline’s daughter Mary died in childbirth leaving two older children, Flora and Lily. Immediately afterwards, the girls were abandoned by their father Ligouri Tremblay to be raised in La Tuque by a spinster aunt.

At that time, La Tugue had a large but socially, economically and politically marginalized indigenous and Metis population. Flora Tremblay, my mother-in-law, married Lawrence Tarrant, a World War I veteran from the Eastern Townships. She was accepted into La Tuque’s mainstream society because Larry had a management position at the local pulp and paper mill. She learned to hold her head high above the whispers behind her back about her native background. To this day her own daughter will not speak of it. 

Yet I am determined not to despair for these indigenous women, past, present and future. There is hope in 2020.  In 2016, under Prime Minister Trudeau, the Canadian government established the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. Many cases have been solved and the root causes of what is referred to as a overall genocide have been identified. Address has begun through actions based on the Truth and Reconciliation Recommendations.

The summer of 2020 saw thousands and thousands of Canadian and Americans and others nationalities around the globe march in the Back Lives Matter movement – black lives and brown lives, indigenous and multiracial lives – following the death of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis. White lives are not the only lives that matter any more.

The most meaningful evidence for me, however, was the election of Kamala Harris as vice president of the United States. Kamala is multiracial, Indian and Jamaican. She represents so many women in North America, my own grandchildren included. Eleven-year-old Evelyn and seven-year-old Marisa have a Japanese mother and a Caucasian father and, tucked inside that heritage, a little Northern Quebec indigenous. Finally, they can see themselves in a political leader, a leader who can, and will, lead to significant change in how the “little bits of brown” women are viewed.

Brown Girl, Brown Girl

What do you see?

I see a Vice President

That looks likes me.

(Leslie Honore)

Sources:

Family conversations

Newman, Peter C., Company of Adventurers: How the Hudson’s Bay Empire Determined.  the Destiny of a Continent. Penguin Canada, 1986.

George Robertson, Biographical Sheet, www.govv.mb.ca/chc/archives/hbca/biograhical/index.html.

Various newspaper, television and digital articles

For many children, cousins are their first playmates. Others never get to meet their cousins even as adults. I have experienced both scenarios.

When my father, Ian Angus, and his brother Oswald were discharged from military service following WW II, they returned to their home in Quebec City and the jobs they left when they enlisted. Ian settled in the suburb of Sillery and Oswald in Ste. Foy. Both eventually had three children each.  Although the children did not attend the same schools, they visited frequently and celebrated holidays and birthdays with their parents and grandparents.

Angus cousins with fathers and grandparents

My mother’s Willett family came from New Richmond on the Gaspe Coast. Two of her brothers, together the fathers of four children, remained there. Keith and my grandfather worked the family farm. Ralph, an electrician, built a home across the road from the farm. Every year my father bundled the family into an old Pontiac he named Rebecca and drove eight hours to spend the summer holidays with my Willett uncles, aunts and cousins. The kids picked strawberries, fished in the brook, and swam in the frigid waters of the Baie de Chaleur, a story much like Cynthia Rylant’s in The Relatives Came. “Then it was hugging time. Talk about hugging!” 1

Willett cousins with Aunt Kay on Baie de Chaleur beach

My seven Angus and Willett cousins were playmates as children and we remain close to this day.

But my mother had other siblings, two sisters who never married and a brother who married but died young and childless.

A third sister, Madge, also died young leaving two young sons, David and Paige, aged four and six. Their father owned an apple orchard in Abbotsford south of Montreal. Albert remarried and fathered two more children. He kept in touch with Madge’s family by sending a barrel of apples to each household every Christmas although the families never actually got together.

Paige and David with mother Madge

David grew up to become a notary in Montreal where I finally met him as an adult. He never married. When his father died, his step-mother and half-sister Louise moved into his home in Westmount where they remained until his mother’s death. Louise moved to Whitby, Ontario and later David joined her when he retired.

Paige forever remained a romantic mystery. My mother and aunts spoke about his early career in the Royal Canadian Airforce and a stint with the Canadian Snowbirds, a RCAF demonstration squadron, with adventures in the sky that further romanticised him for me. He later moved to the United States to fly with American Airlines and in 1971 he applied for American citizenship.² He, too, never married. In 1972 a news article listed him as First Officer and one of the crew of Flight 96 flying from Los Angeles to New York who safely landed a plane load of 56 passengers and 11 in crew in Detroit when the cargo hold burst open in flight.³

A few years ago, David phoned to tell me that Paige had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, the disease that has haunted the Willett family. My mother and five of her six siblings died with Alzheimer’s and now Paige was the first of our generation to succumb. David and Louise helped him to move back to Canada and enter a care residence in Ottawa near the home of his half- brother Stephen. In 2014, two years later, David called to tell me Paige had died at age 75. We had never met; we were never playmates; we were not even adult friends.

And what happened to David? I have not heard from him since he called about Paige’s death.  My emails do not bounce back but they are never answered. The message on his telephone says that his phone cannot accept incoming calls. My calls to all the Whitney names listed in Ottawa and Whitby prove fruitless. None of them are the Whitney family for whom I am looking. Ancestry gives me David’s his birth date but not that of his death. Perhaps David, who would now be 86, is still alive but struggling with Alzheimer’s, the curse of the Willett family.

1. Rylant, Cynthia. The Relatives Came. Scholastic Inc. New York, 1985.
2. Ancestry.ca, Nevada Naturalization Petitions, 1956-1991
3. Wikipedia.org. American Airlines Flight 96

A singular memory of my childhood is the summer I spent with my Angus grandparents in Quebec City. I was nine years old.

My family had moved to La Tuque several months before my sister’s birth. The move, a difficult pregnancy, and a three-day labour left my mother exhausted. Caring for a new- born and two school age children set free for the summer was overwhelming. In an effort to help out, my grandmother invited me to come to Quebec.

My grandparents lived in a third-floor walk-up apartment on St. Cyrille Blvd. (now Rene Levesque) at the corner of Maple Ave. During the Depression, they moved from an elegant home on Fraser Avenue while my grandfather fought to save his book store. The store eventually failed but my grandparents remained in the apartment until my grandfather’s death.

A large porch extended the full length of the apartment overlooking the street below. The sun shone down on it all morning so Grandpa planted petunias in boxes that grew into a beautiful profusion of pinks, lavenders and burgundies. My job that summer was to water and deadhead, a responsibility I took very seriously. “A new blossom will not grow until the dead one is removed”, Grandpa explained. “We want lots and lots of blooms.”

The various rooms of the apartment were strung out along a narrow hallway stretching from the front door to the back bedroom: an elegant parlour with life size china dogs standing sentinel on either side of an artificial fireplace; a very large dining room with several china cabinets and a table for twelve; and a sitting room with three walls lined with books salvaged from the store that were the core of my grandmother’s lending library. There was a bathroom and two bedrooms, the largest of which looked out on the city stables. How I loved to watch the caliche horses going and coming each morning and evening. I imagined them to be my very own and gave each one a name.

Then there was the kitchen tucked into the middle of the flat. It was a very tiny room, only big enough for a stove, a fridge, an ironing board that dropped from the wall, and the food prep table where my grandmother sat to work her daily cross word puzzle. The sink was folded into a back corner beneath a set of cupboards. The dark, cramped room had but one window in the door leading to the back porch and another in the walk-in pantry. How different from my Willett grandparents’ large, sunny farm kitchen in the Gaspe that housed not one but two stoves and a pair of day beds.

Yet it was in this tiny kitchen that my grandmother cooked daily meals for two (three that summer) as well as large family meals for various holiday occasions: Christmas, Easter and Thanksgiving. She carried dishes of food through the swinging door into the dining room in what I now recognise as priceless Spode and Limoges bowls and platters. Nothing was served onto plates in the kitchen and brought to the table. Glasses and desert dishes were cut crystal. I even ate my morning boiled egg from a silver cup. Such a little princess.

Lazy summer afternoons were spent in the park. A friend and I would meet there, walking by ourselves from our homes, carrying our dolls and their accessories along with several umbrellas. The umbrellas served to demarcate the various rooms of our “doll house”. Who today would allow two young girls to spend an afternoon alone in a park? The caliche drivers came to know us and would wave, pointing us out to their tourist passengers as a quaint part of the old city.

I walked a lot that summer – my grandparents didn’t own a car. I walked with my grandmother to buy groceries on Cartier Avenue or dolls’ clothes at Woolworths on St. John’s Street. I walked with grandpa to Earl Grey Terrace to watch ships sailing the St. Lawrence to and from exotic ports. On Sundays I walked to church with both of them. The Sundays that babies were baptised were the best. As a church elder, Grampa would walk the family to the font and stand, straight and proud, while the minister performed the ceremony.

Evenings were spent reading, doing puzzles, or completing paint-by-number kits. My grandparents didn’t have a television – televisions were still too new and expensive. Sometimes on our walks Grampa and I would stop and watch the news on a TV in a store window. I don’t think Grampa would ever stoop to that if he were alone. I was the excuse for him to take a peek.

I learned to cook that summer in the tiny kitchen. My grandmother must have had the patience of Job. How much faster and easier it would have been to do it herself. Apple Brown Betty became my speciality. Eventually I could peel and slice the apples myself, measure and mix the flour, oats and brown sugar, and work in the butter with my fingers. The final touch was the nutmeg grated by hand over the top before the desert went into the oven. So delicious served with a slice of ice cream!  Remember, Ice cream was purchased in a brick-shape wrapped in cardboard.

The days passed slowly with a pleasant and predictable sameness. I was loved and indulged. Before I knew it, it was time for me to return home.

I would be sixteen when next I lived with my grandparents for my final year of high school. Although I loved being back with them, life was never again as simple as the summer when I was nine.

 

 

 

 

 

                                     Ring around the rosie, a pocket full of posie.

In a video my son posted on Facebook, my granddaughters Evelyn and Marisa, hands clasped, laugh happily as they as they sing and swirl in circles to the nursery rhyme.

                                                       Husha, husha, we all fall down.

The girls tumble to the grass, still laughing. The activity appears to be great fun and certainly a way for them to expend some energy during the pandemic shut- down.

The rhyme dates back to the 1600s and the Great Bubonic Plague. The fatalism of the rhyme is brutal: the roses represent the deadly rashes, the posies are the herbs used in an attempt to treat the disease, and the falling down is the almost inevitable death.

Today we are entering the seventh week of a country-wide shut-down in an attempt to mediate the spread of the world’s most recent pandemic, the Corona-19. As of May 3rd, the total number of cases in just one country, Canada, is approaching 57,148 confirmed cases with the total number of deaths at 3,606. Television ads constantly urge Canadians to wash their hands frequently, wear masks in public, keep two metres apart, and stay at home.

Schools, stores, businesses, restaurants, sports and entertainment facilities, barbers and hair salons are all closed. Borders are shut. Airline flights are cancelled. Streets are all but empty. Only essential workers are employed and they must all wear masks.

The pandemic began in Wuhan, China in December of 2019 and was initially spread by international travellers. Very soon it spread rapidly through community transfer. The first Canadian cases emerged in a Senior’s Home in Vancouver. Seniors, not children, have been the hardest hit by this pandemic, most of them confined to care homes where a single case becomes rampant. Front line workers fall ill and cannot care for their patients. Hundreds of our elderly have died resulting in what has been referred to as geriatric genocide.

So far, my family is healthy. My son and his wife are able to work from home and, unlike thousands of others, their income remains intact. The girls are bored and restless with schools closed, parks and playgrounds barred, sports and extracurricular activities cancelled. While child care is not an issue for them as it is for many families, they struggle with home schooling the girls via on-line learning. A simple childhood game of Ring Around the Rosie is a welcome reprieve.

This is not the first time that family members have been impacted by a pandemic. During the Spanish Flu, the disease was formally documented for two ancestors in their military service files.

In June of 1918, my son’s grandfather, Laurence Tarrant, contracted the Spanish flu while convalescing at the Epsom Military Hospital in England from surgery to save an arm badly injured during the Battle of Arras. He survived.

My great aunt, Ella Willett, a nursing sister in WW1, also survived the Spanish flu. She contracted it in June of 1919 during the second wave of the flu and recovered in the Basingstoke Military Hospital, England.

The Spanish flu began in an American army camp in Kansas and moved back and forth across the Atlantic with the troops. The military provided an ideal incubator. The soldiers lived in conditions conducive to its spread. Stressed, dirty, hungry, wet and cold, massed in camps, huddled in trenches and tents or jammed into troop trains and ships, soldiers and nursing sisters were easy prey.

Unlike today’s Covid-19 flu, the Spanish Flu attacked more young adults than those who were elderly and it moved with grim speed. Symptoms experienced during the second wave were far more severe than those of the first wave. Victims’ lungs filled with bloody, frothy liquid and their faces turned blue as they drowned in their own fluids, often overnight.

The first wave of the Spanish flu killed 3-5 million people world-wide; the second wave killed 20-50 million. Without today’s computers, it is difficult to be definitive.

World economies have suffered dreadfully during this corona pandemic. In Canada, the Federal and Provincial governments have poured out billions and billions of dollars to aid of closed businesses and unemployed workers leaving the country with a mountain of debt.

In the last week we have heard much talk of when and how to reopen the economy. In most provinces, the number of those infected has not yet peaked despite all our interventions. The virus will clearly not go away until there is a vaccine.  Our reopening must be done slowly, gradually, and very cautiously or all our efforts thus far will be for naught. We do not want a second wave with the number of dead exceeding that of the first.

Ultimately, we can never return to the way we once were in pre-covid-19. We must instead create a new, safer normal. Test, trace and isolate and treat will be the key strategy.

Look back at the photo of the girls playing Ring Around the Rosie. There is a black hearse very clearly parked in the background. Let that be our warning.

Sources

Tarrant, Lawrence. Service File, Archives Canada

Willett, Ella. Service File, Archives Canada

www.canada.ca/covid-19/coronavirus

Sharon Adams. “War and the Spanish Flu.” Legion: Canada’s Military History, Sept. 2018.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Canada did not repatriate its close to 61 thousand dead service men and women during WW1. Throngs of Canadians did not line highways as they do today, paying their respects as hearse after hearse carries bodies home to cities and small towns across the country. The overwhelming number of dead made repatriation virtually impossible.

Initially the dead of the First World War were buried on or near the battlefields where they fell, often in mass graves, marked with simple wooden crosses.

In May of 1917 the Imperial War Graves Commission was established to design and construct cemeteries and memorials. The war dead are now commemorated on white headstones, uniformly and equally, irrespective of military or civil rank, race or creed. Red roses, not poppies, decorate the graves.

In the summer of 2019, my husband and I, together with, my husband’s cousins Elaine and Max Shane , took a coach tour from England to visit the Western Front Battlefields in France and Belgium. Knowing so little of WW I battles, this tour was an eyeopener for me. But any tour to the battlefields inevitably meant visits to cemeteries.

The tour stopped at the largest cemeteries and memorials such as Tyne Cot Cemetery, the Ploegstreert Memorial, Newfoundland Park and even a German cemetery at Langemark. It was the small cemeteries, however, that captured my attention. Hundreds can be found in towns and villages and along the roads and highways we travelled. Some gravestones appear to be right in the backyards of the homes of the living.

My son’s great uncle, Lloyd William Tarrant, is buried in the small cemetery of Bedford House in Belgium, 2.5 km south of Ypres on the road to Armentieres. It was not a scheduled stop but the tour guide kindly pointed it out to me.

Lloyd died at Mount Sorrell sometime between June 2^nd and June 3^rd, 1916. (see Boy Soldier of The Great War at http://www.genealogyeemsemble.com) The mount was the only high ground retained by the Allies from the fighting of the previous year. It was of strategic importance and a key target for the Germans. On the morning of June 2^nd, a furious bombardment was unleashed against the Canadian Third Division defending Mount Sorrell and simultaneously four huge mines were exploded under the mount.

Trenches and their defenders vanished.  Only 76 of the 702 men of the 4^th Canadian Mounted Rifles, Lloyd’s regiment, survived. It was not before several more battles over a two weeks period with a total of 8 thousand casualties that, on the 13^th of June, the Allies regained their lost positions.

It is assumed that, as the bodies of those slain at Mount Sorrel were found and identified, they were buried nearby, their graves marked with the ubiquitous wooden crosses.  Many bodies, or pieces of bodies, likely shared a common grave.

In 1923, Lloyd’s mother received a letter telling her that her son’s body had been reburied at Bedford House Cemetery.

Bedford House was the name given by the army to Chateau Rosendal, a country house in a small wooded park with moats, that was confiscated to use as a clearing station for men wounded at the front. Those who died at the station before they could be moved on to hospitals for further treatment were buried there. More bodies were added, particularly between 1916 and 1918. Enclosure #4 where Lloyd is buried is the largest of six enclosures. Three thousand bodies were brought in from other burial grounds and from the battlefields of the Yves Salient, battlefields like Mount Sorrell.

Almost two thirds of the graves at Bedford House are unidentified. Lloyd’s family is one of the lucky ones in that they know where his body lies. The saddest words on a gravestone are A Soldier of the Great War Known only to God.

 

Notes:

Remembrance Day drawing by Evelyn Tarrant (age 9),  great great niece of Private Lloyd William Tarrant

Service file of Lloyd William Tarrant