大象传媒

Difficult Decisions

In September of that year, 1939, we found ourselves at war with Germany and our school was closed for many weeks. So that we would not fall behind in our studies Mother started teaching children who lived nearby, using the large playroom that Father had built at the back of our garage. When we returned to school we had been equipped with gas masks and had air-raid drills that took us into the air-raid shelters that had been built in the school grounds. Otherwise lessons returned to normal. There was a blackout at night, but in this period the fighting in the war was elsewhere. In Britain it was known as "The Phoney War".

In 1940 we thought my Father would have to transfer to work in London, even though the bombing had started there and it would be quite dangerous. It did not seem a good idea for the whole family to go to London with him, so Mother arranged to take me and my Brother Michael with her to her home in Vancouver. This is a large city in Canada and the journey was over 9,000 miles and took twelve days to complete.

In Vancouver I met my Granny, who lived there, and then we went on by boat to Victoria [on Vancouver Island] where we lived for one year with Aunt Etta and Aunt Jean in a large red brick mansion called "Sissinghurst". It had a very large garden with lots of trees to climb and games to play. At the foot of the garden was a boathouse situated on a river or estuary, which joined up with Victoria harbour. I soon learned to swim and Michael and I spent many hours at Towner Bay swimming in the Pacific Ocean. It was a sheltered bay, and I would float for hours on a wide flat log [shaped like a surf-board] that I had found, and could use to skim across the bay easily while lying on top of it. The bay had been used years ago by native Indians to catch and bake whole feasts of clams. We also visited friends on Shawnigan Lake and swam there too, but it was more difficult to keep afloat because it was fresh water. Salt water makes you more buoyant.

In the summer of 1940 my Father became ill and my Mother decided that she should return to Dundee to look after him. I was then age 7 and Michael was age 4. In theory we could have been left to be cared for by my rich relations in "Sissinghurst", or we could have gone to Vancouver and lived with my Grandmother and her sister Aunt Leo. However Mother thought that they were too old to know how to look after two very young children, so she asked for the names of a couple who wanted to look after evacuees from Britain and in this way we found Ruth Sendey, who became our "Mother Ruth".

We went to Vancouver by boat and said good-bye to Mother in Granny's garden. She was wearing a blue dress with a labyrinth pattern on it. I was a bit upset and I traced the pattern of the maze on her dress while we talked. Her journey back to Britain in the middle of the war was difficult. She had to fly from New York by 'flying boat' to Bermuda, and then to Lisbon. Eventually she got permission to fly home via Dublin.

Meanwhile Michael and I had a short holiday staying with friends of Mother's who lived on Bowen Island, one of the many islands dotted about between Vancouver and Victoria. The island was mostly thick forest and one afternoon I took Michael for a walk and we got lost. I was more puzzled than frightened, and luckily the island was not too large and they found us OK. That night we toasted marshmallows in front of an open log fire. Next day we went back to Vancouver, met Ruth Sendey, and Ruth took us by boat to Victoria. We lived at 3351 Linwood Avenue with Ruth and her husband, Hugh, for four years.

Cloverdale School was just across the road, and it took only a minute to get to school. I started in Miss Bossie's class and enjoyed learning again. She was quite elderly, I suppose aged about 50 or so. She was a very experienced teacher and we all made good progress in her lessons.

What impressed me most was that she had visited Switzerland before the war, and had lots of stories of what she had seen and done there. Especially exciting to me were the stories of her visit to the Zoo in Geneva. [or Berne?] It seemed amazing to me that a teacher in a small Canadian school had been able to travel to Europe and come back and tell us all about it. I guess I knew from my own experience that the journey was not easy, and took several weeks each way. I also knew that the journey would now be impossible because of the war.

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