Canadian War Veterans and Rememberance Day

My father in law, Tom Wells, flew Harvards during the war. He was an instructor. MY father flew Mosquitos. He was in the Ferry Command.

Lately, some Canadians have come to my online play Looking For Mrs. Peel, www.tighsolas.ca/page745.htmllooking up “Double Tenth Incident.”

This is somewhat unusual. As I wrote in an earlier post, it’s mostly Britons and Australians who come to the story, Britons looking up relations who were interned at Changi, Australian school children looking up info for projects and such.

One person who came to my site was using a Canadian Military IP. And the week before someone came from Afghanistan, looking up “Double Tenth Interrogations.”

The Double Tenth Incident was a WWII torture incident, a big war story out East but hardly remembered in the UK, where they keep promoting their war stories, if BBC Radio Four is any indication.

I wrote my Looking For Mrs. Peel Play hoping it might be produced in the UK. But alas!

Anyway, Remembrance Day is coming up and I have noticed that CTV has had a ‘Remembrance Day” piece every day this week, which is unusual. Usually it’s a one day deal.

That means Remembrance Day events are being spread out over the week. There was a ceremony at the Field of Honour in Pointe-Claire. (Where my Dad and Mom are buried.) People interviewed talked alot about how “these soldiers fought for our freedom.”.

They always say that, don’t they? I am watching past Simpsons episodes, to improve my colloquial French, and there’s a bit where the family visits an event “Veterans of Popular Wars.”

WWI seems to be the war most ‘treasured’ in Canada. We forget that back then, not everyone was for the war. And we forget that Veterans were often treated like trash upon their return.

In the UK, Veterans dressed up as women to ‘illustrate’ how they weren’t being treated any better than the ladies.

In the US (according to Barbra Kingsolver) some Veterans set up a tent village a la OWS, but General MacArthur gave the order to storm it.

The Nicholsons weren’t for the war, particularly, although they did their bit, knitting socks and such.

I have a 1917 letter where Marion Nicholson writes about how her Mother in Law “Madame Blair” is railing against conscription. Marion feels she is being selfish.

Yet, Hugh, Marion’s husband, didn’t go to the war. He didn’t have to being married and having children.

Chances are, if you are here today, you had no ancestors who fought in WWI. That was the lost generation after all.

I recently stumbled upon an historical paper about 1917, when some Canadian women were given the vote.. those who had men already fighting overseas.

I hadn’t known about this fact (that Canadian women FIRST got the vote in 1917, not 1920) until last year, when a scholar I met at the War Museum in Ottawa told me about it.

I bet this REALLY IRKED Margaret Nicholson back then.

According to this paper, Divided by the Ballot Box, by Tarah Brookfield, from the Canadian Historical Review, it was felt that if women who had loved ones overseas voted, then conscription would pass. It was felt these women would be PRO Conscription, feeling that the more soldiers out there, the better it would be for their own men.

It was a clever (somewhat cynical) ploy by Borden.. whom the British Suffragettes had pounced upon a few years earlier when he was visiting. With this, the then PM pitted woman against woman. And it showed that even members of the ‘gentler kinder’ sex would vote on self interest, given the chance.

Anyway, here are a few letters from a WWI soldier to Flora Nicholson.

Dear Flora,

I have received more letters from home since I came to this country than I received all the time I was in England. You say you would like to come over here as a nurse but take it from me and stay as far away from this country as you can. It’s no bonne over here. If you want to drop me a letter again, which you can do as often as you like, send them to #349412.4th CDAC France.

Love Herb

France, Feb 14, 1918

Dear Flora,

I wrote you a letter the same night as I received your parcel. I got a letter from Bid last night and she says you wouldn’t go to church with her and pray for me. Mr. Craig wrote me a very interesting letter, telling me all about the fine work done by the Aid Society and all other branches of relief societies etc. in which I am very interested. How is the world using you? There isn’t much to do now, so there is nothing much to write about. I got a letter from Percy at last. He is now an officer and is expecting to come back soon. I started to write this letter last night, but had to stop. I got another letter from Percy to-night. He is in Bramshott. Well, Flora, I guess I will quit.

Epsom, 27-10-18.

I received your letter last night and was glad to hear from you. I feel pretty blue over Percy as he refused to go back to Canada when he was here last time. It doesn’t pay to be a hero here. He must have been killed outright as he wasn’t admitted to any hospital. There are quite a few 24th boys here and they all speak very highly of him. I don’t know how I got away with what I did. It is only a miracle that brought me here alive. If I had fallen, I would have been killed but as luck would have it, I stood up and got away with a crippled finger. It might come back in time but I doubt it. The piece went through the back of my hand and came through the knuckle of my first finger. I can’t use my finger at all but can get on without it. I’ve had a swell time since I came across. I was in hospital away down in Devonshire. I only came here on Thursday and the sooner they send me out the better. I expect to go on leave Friday. I am going to London for a while and then I am going down to Exeter in Devonshire for the rest of my leave. The meals here are punk and good grub is half the battle. Do you love me as much as ever, because if you don’t I will get downhearted and marry my nurse and stay here after the war. Well, Flora I think I will quit for today as I have written four letters today and can’t write any more. Remember me to your people and take care of yourself,
Love Herb.

My father in law is in the Veterans Hospital in Ste. Anne and I will be visiting him on Remembrance Day. (Well, we go all the time.)

My father was there in 2000 to 2005 with Alzheimer’s and my aunt Flo, who had been a recruiter is WII was there in the late 90′s. (She was a beautiful, sexy woman and I guess they used the pretty girls as recruiters.)

It is a wonderful facility. But only Canadian soldiers who fought overseas or were wounded in the War are supposed to be allowed in. This rule was created after WWI…. you see, they couldn’t deal with ALL the needy veterans back then so they made this rule.

Well, they bend it now. My father was an RAF pilot, and at first, they wouldn’t let him in. I wrote my MP and the GG and the VA Minister and everybody else I could think of.. but they said there was NO CHANCE. But then my mother found his RCAF log book. He had been in the FERRY Command. He got in, after all.

Anyway, he must have made an impression. Last week, a nurse accosted me in the elevator, “Are you the daughter of Peter Nixon?” Six years later, she remembered!

I think they liked him because he was very polite, despite his condition. He just walked about all day, all over the common areas, with a newspaper tucked under his arm. (Alzheimer’s patients often like to keep moving, a nurse had told me.)

He had been in a wheel chair in a straight-jacket in his previous place… so you can imagine how happy we were to have him at the Veteran’s.

And now my father in law, who barely leaves his electric armchair, is getting the best of care too.

On a quiet calm sunny floor of the Veterans Hospital. It makes it easier for us to visit often too.

As I told my husband, yesterday, we dodged a bullet, thanks to the Veterans Hospital.

You see, my father in law is Anglophone, and there are no Anglophone facilities in our area, other than the Veterans Hospital. (Unless you can pay 10,000 a month! for one of those corporate places, with the overworked underpaid help and underqualified medical staff. (Believe me, I know. I found out the hard way watching my mother suffer ‘in luxury’ in one of these places because the nurses aids they employed were afraid to give out morphine and the so called house doctor never came around.)

And the ‘government’ facilities can be awful, if the stories I’ve heard are correct. A person I know spent his last FOUR years with a woman screaming beside him.Night and day. No one could visit him for long…

The More Things Change..

Flora Nicholson, second from right. The Twenties.

The next time I get an unsolicited marketing call at 6 pm from God Knows Where to buy Who Knows What, I won’t be rude and say “No, Thanks” and hang up abruptly.

I’ll be like my husband, who says “Thank you for the call, but I am not interested.” He feels sorry for these workers.

You see, today, I read a chapter from The Great Silence, Juliet Nicolson’s follow up to her book the Perfect Summer (about 1911). The great silence is about after the war. I am reading the chapter on how the boys who managed to return were rather poorly treated, despite promises to the contrary. Especially the wounded ones, in body and soul and mind.

One such young man, apparently from a good family, was left to peddle magazines home to home to women.

According to the book, he said that this form of work took more courage than being in the trenches.

My book, Flo in the City, which I am writing on this blog, is about a young woman, Flora Nicholson of Richmond, Quebec coming of age in the pivotal 1908-1913 pre war era.

It is based on the letters of my social studies website http://www.tighsolas.ca/

On the website I have also posted some letters from WWI, from a man, Herb Tucker to Flora. These letters, 3 in total, are kept separately from the other Nicholson letters. They are tucked into a used shell brought home by my husband’s great uncle on his father’s side from the front.

Herb isn’t killed in the war, but his brother is. I have other letters where Edith writes that she visits the family at that time in Montreal and first they hear he is dead;then they hear he is alive; then that he is dead. Percy is his name. Herb writes in his letter from Belgium that he wonders why he is spared. His only battlefield wound is a hurt pinky finger. His brother didn’t have to die, He was de-mobbed but re-enlisted. As it was, he was killed but a few days before the armistice.

Nicolson writes of the many men who were seriously disfigured and how masks were made for them. These men, for the most part, stayed in hospitals. They were often told to stay out of sight, so as not to upset people.

I suspect a similar thing is going on now. A soldier’s death makes, headlines. One Canadian was killed recently in Afghanistan and McKay commented on it. But that’s all window dressing. I imagine we aren’t taking care of soldiers and their families once they return. Indeed, another news item this week says that it’s hush hush, but the Department of Veteran’s Affairs is being scaled down as WWII veterans are dying off.

My father in law is still waiting to get in Ste Anne de Bellevue Veteran’s hospital. (He’s ninety and has just had a debilitating stroke.) The paperwork is done, and we’re waiting for a space. Apparently, there’s a long waiting list.

He’s with us now, but the stroke left him unable to process information from the TV and Radio. He loved watching sports, especially football. So he could use a place that would provide him with alternate modes of stimulation. But who knows…

So many young men were killed or wounded in WWI that I read somewhere else there were 10 women for every eligible man. That’s why the flapper dresses came into style. Women were competing for men’s attention and needed to shake their booty. (I think I heard this on BBCRadio 4 from a book by Virginia Nicolson.)

My husband’s grandfather, Hugh Blair, and my grandfather, Robert Nixon, didn’t fight in WWI. I imagine most of us are here because our grandfathers, or great grandfathers, etc, DIDN’T fight in WWI.

In Canada, being married gave you an excuse not to go. Hugh Blair married Marion Nicholson, Flo’s sister, in May 1913. My story will end there, with that wedding.

My grandfather was off in Malaya in 1914. I imagine that’s why my grandmother went off to marry him. Lack of men in England. That, at least, would be a good guess.

Oh, and the book The Great Silence has another relevant anecdote. The Nicholsons are from Isle of Lewis stock (who came to Canada in 1850′s). Well, apparently Isle of Lewis sent a huge percentage of their men to WWI and at the end, there was to be a great celebration when the survivors returned, except that the boat sunk just off the Isle, killing 200 of the men.