I know because I have it in a letter.
As Remembrance Day is coming up, I thought I’d write a few blogs about the POST -Tighsolas era, using the Nicholson letters from 1914-1918. I’ve already posted one a few days ago about the Tuckers, who in 1918, lost a son, Percy. They were family friends of Flora and Edith.
But I know from reading the letters from 1914 and 1918 a while back that they contained some interesting stuff.
In 1914, Marion was married with a newborn, Margaret. Flora was living with her, and also teaching at William Lunn in Griffintown. Edith was teaching in Richmond, in 1914, her second year there. By the end of the war era she’d be working at Sun Life Headquarters. I have one typed letter from her. She says she is boning up on her stenography, trying to re-gain speed. So it looks like she did take a secretarial course, sometime before. (Stenography often just meant typing back then. She joins the St. John’s Ambulance in 1917. She was Commandant of the Quebec Red Cross during WWII.)
“Herbert seems to be a strange boy in not letting us know what is happening to him. He is altogether different from the girls. I get the blues about him, fooling away his life when young, not providing for his later years. I hope he doesn’t enlist and go to the front. When in Montreal, I was walking on St. Catherine Street, where I met two returned soldiers, one of whom had a crutch and one leg and one with his arm tied up, I couldn’t see with his big coat. Both about Herb’s age. To have to go through life in that way seems hard. When you think how much that is to suffer all your life to satisfy a few crown heads. All other troubles can be settled by the courts or tribunals of some sort. But their troubles have to be fought out there, is still something wrong with this civilized world of ours. I am not making a speech or trying to write a book, but I feel sad to think that the best of our young men have to be slaughtered in this war. It will take twenty five years to replace these men and 100 years to pay our war debt. “
In another letter Norman talks about the cost of flour. 16.50 a bushel where it had been 5.00 prior to the war. And Marion talks about how every free plot of land in the city is being taken up with vegetable gardens, more than in Richmond, although she suspects the harvests from these gardens won’t be terrific as many people seem to be first timers. “Every vacant lot around the city has been utilized for gardens and I think it is more common to see people out digging and planting these days than it is in Richmond. Surely, with all these gardens producing it ought to make some difference in the cost of everything. That is if they all amount to anything. Some, I think, are making their first attempt.”(Margaret had long kept a vegetable garden in Richmond.) Marion’s husband Hugh digs a garden for them eventually, where they grow onions, beets, carrots, lettuce and radishes.
But in 1917, conscription is the talk of the town. The Nicholsons feel that Borden is using it as a political ploy. They describe the French as being all up in arms against it. Marion says her mother in law, Madame Blair and her sisters are terribly upset: “What they say I could fill a book and some of the sayings are NOT very deep…..”There is a lot of talk of conscription here, and the French are more than excited about it. I am not well enough versed in the political affairs just now to form much of an opinion. But it seems on Borden’s part an effort to keep his party in power -for a great many will be afraid to oppose it. Whether it is for the best, or not, I do not know but personally I hope it will not go through; it seems so different when you know it will take some of your own people.” Later, in another letter, she chides her mother in law again, “Madame Blair is not the only woman with sons to lose.”
