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.

Harvards and War Heritage

My father in law in front of Harvard airplane. St Lazare.

On this blog, which is about the 1910 era, primarily, I have written about my father in law, Tom Wells, 90, who suffered a stroke on April 2, his ninetieth birthday and who spent two months in hospital, in care and in rehab.

For a while it looked like he couldn’t return home, as he couldn’t walk or care for himself in any way, but he has made great strides. Indeed, he was well enough to take a short trip to St. Lazare on Saturday to see an air show, where a Harvard was on display. My father in law flew a Harvard during the war, at pilot training school, where he was an instructor.

My father in law receives a disability payment for his hearing, as Harvard’s were extremely noisy planes.

My husband asked him how many hours of training a kid got before he flew. Five hours my father in law said, and another five hours and the trainee was off into the wild blue yonder. No time to fool around back then.

I’ve also been writing about Heritage, as I am taking a Heritage Studies course at Athabasca College online. War stories are heritage, no doubt. Big time. I have visited the Imperial War Museum in England in 2006 and the Aviation Museum in Ottawa (many years ago with my kids).

Of course, my story, Flo in the City, based on the letters of http://www.tighsolas.ca/ takes place in 1910, when airplanes, or aeroplanes were just getting off the ground. The Aviation Museum has a lovely painting of a woman in big 1910 era hat and corsetted dress, at an air show at St. Hubert. My father in law taught out of St. Hubert and Dunville and Kingston.

I’ve also been reading up on the Ferry Command, where my British father served, in the Montreal Gazette archives on Google. The Ferry Command was headquartered in Montreal. My father flew mostly mosquitos, so I remember him telling me.

Anyway, the Harvard took off for home in St. Donat,leaving us quite literally in its dust, and we returned home, where my father in law scaled the steep steps into the main part of the house. Imagine, a few weeks ago he couldn’t stand without help.

Ste Anne de Bellevue Veteran’s Hospital Catch 22

Yesterday, I am told, there was a press conference at the Veteran’s Hospital at Ste. Anne de Bellevue. They are, apparently, opening the facility up to civilians as they have over a thousand workers and only 400 patients.

As I wrote in the previous blog, my father in law, 90, who lives with us, is very ill in hospital and may not be able to return for he may not be strong enough to walk or dress himself.

He is a veteran, so we phoned the Veteran’s hospital, last week, which happens to be but a hop skip and a jump from where we live, to see if he was eligible to be cared for there.

No.

Although my father-in-law is a veteran, a flying instructor in Ontario, he did not go overseas. It has long been the rule at the Veteran’s Hospital that servicemen who did not go overseas cannot be treated there. This made sense, I guess, in early part of the century, when there were too many veterans alive and needing care. But now, when the Veteran’s Hospital is begging for new patients, this rule still exists. A bit of nonsense, if I ever heard. A piece of bureaucratic claptrap. Why can’t all war veterans go to the hospital if they need care and that hospital is crying for new patients?

Well, this very question was posed by reporters at the press conference, yesterday. (They couldn’t believe this rule, all considered.) Yes, it is the rule and it cannot be changed, someone admitted.

One reporter told my husband (who works at at TV station) that my father in law would have more luck getting into the Veteran’s Hospital at Ste Anne de Bellevue AS A CIVILIAN.

My father, an allied (British ) soldier was cared for at the Veteran’s Hospital He had Alzheimer’s.. It was wonderful there for him. They have so many good staff and volunteers, all bilingual. We had trouble getting him in, as he was British, but my mother found his RCAF log book. He flew for the RCAF, as the Ferry Command was headquartered at Dorval. So they admitted him. We lived twenty minutes away and we could visit him often, as well.

It would be wonderful if my father in law, who speaks and understands no French (and alas, he can’t hear well anyway) could be taken care of at the Veteran’s, as my father was. We could visit him regularly, my husband on his way to work every day. (Wherever my father in law is placed (if necessary) my husband, his son, will surely visit him every day, because that is who he is. That’s why my father in law lives with us, because my husband is a devoted son.

If we are lucky, my father in law will get into another nursing facility nearby, in Rigaud,where we are told the staff is unilingualFrench but many of the patients are English, from this area. But he will find it hard, as he is finding it hard at the hospital he is in, for the nurses speak little English.

My father in law, who was in WWII for the duration, didn’t go oversees. The fact is, he risked his life as much as anyone, teaching young boys to fly ‘on the fly’ so to speak. He has wonderful stories of recruits panicking and planes almost crashing. It all makes no sense at all.

Looking for Mrs. Peel Part 1

Me at 12. In the Kitchen on Coolbrook,which I call Lemon Creek Road in my story, in homage to the Japanese Canadians who were interned unjustly during WWII in the interior of British Columbia. Dig those 60′s curtains.

I’m going to interrupt Flo in the City (since I’m struggling to figure out where to go from here) to bring you Looking for Mrs. Peel, my play about the 60′s, WWII, and waterboarding. I spent years researching the background to this play and I do believe I nailed it. The complete play is at www.tighsolas.ca/page745.html

LOOKING FOR MRS. PEEL: Script of a play for radio about The Fall of Singapore and Changi POW Life and The Double Tenth Incident at Changi Prisoner of War Civilian Internment Camp from a first hand account INTRODUCTION:”All Things are Connected” Chief Seattle The year 1967 has been described as The Last Good Year, by Canadian historian Pierre Berton, also as The Year That Changed Cinema, by Time Magazine, as well as the Best Year Ever in Pop Music by, well, just about everyone. In and around anglo Montreal,that memorable year, radio was the communications medium of choice for young people. Kids listened to the likes of Buddy Gee on CKGM, Dave Boxer on CFCF and CFOX’s Charles P Rodney Chandler on their chintzy transistor radios and kept track of the respective weekly hit lists. One of the most popular new DJ’s was an import, a former British merchant marine sailor named Roger Scott also on CFOX. In late May of 1967 Scott aired ‘pirated’ tapes of the Beatle’s Srgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Album,before it was officially released. My older brother was mightily impressed.

. In the US it was the Summer of Love and the Summer of Race Riots -two facts I couldn’t ignore because my British father preferred getting his news from American Walter Cronkite, on the CBS television station WCAX Montpelier Vermont – and as was the norm, we had but one black and white tv. But these same heady Expo months were also a time of tension in the Middle East with Six Day War where we came close to nuclear war ….again… and ‘the tipping point’ for Vietnam and a time when decisions were made that ‘signaled the end of Britain’s’ imperial adventure’.* According to Historian Matthew Jones, in 1967 the British wanted to pull out of ‘East of Suez’(Singapore, Malaysia and the MIddle East) entirely. While school children from Victoria to Gander were learning the words to CA NA DA, Bobby Gimby’s giddy centennial year signature song , the Americans were putting pressure on the British to stay. President Lyndon Johnson even bribed them, offering to back the pound sterling and “solve all your financial problems.”*

So, if Lyndon Baines Johnson appeared to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders, as he rode that long long escalator up past the kitschy photographs of Marilyn Monroe and Humphrey Bogart in the American Pavilion at Expo 67 on his official visit, that’s because he did. (* Matthew Jones’ Decision Delayed Historical Review.)

Malaysia, the 15th country to sign up for the World’s Fair – in July ’64 (plot 3320 Ste Helene’s Island) didn’t have a pavilion in the end. They had pulled out; perhaps because Singapore had been expelled from the Malaysian Federation in 1965 ( to quell the unrest between the Chinese and the Malays) and couldn’t come up with the money.

Tunku Abdul Rahman Malaysia’s first PM had visited the Expo site in ’64. One wonders what Bobby Gimby felt about all this: the so called Pied Piper of Canada, a former CBC musician and bandleader, and a Canadian cultural icon, is reported to have composed them an unofficial anthem, Malaysia Forever, and earned his whimsical moniker, on a visit to Singapore in ’62. The song itself is steeped in mystery; no former colonial or expert in Malaysian studies I have reached has ever heard of it. Negara Ku has been Malaya’s (Malaysia’s) national anthem since 1957