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My dear mother was born in Vancouver, to a deaf and mute father, and a deaf and blind mother. Two younger siblings. For a while, as a teenager, I lived in Grandma’s basement suite. We talked by the manual alphabet spelling on her hand, where the five finger tips were the five vowels. I never knew her first husband.
My grandfather on my father’s side I never knew because he lay drunk in a snow drift in Edmonton and later died of pneumonia. Before that he worked in shipyards in Glasgow.
My parents met when the young man next door was home on leave during the war against fascism and brought Dad with him. They were motorcycle dispatch riders together. Later dad was an ambulance driver. The neighbour served solely in Canada, but Dad applied to go overseas after some zombies were posted to his outfit. “Zombie” was the slang for Canadians who had a special rule that they wouldn’t have to go overseas. I think that was part of the Quebec conscription agreement.
While overseas dad drove the stacked parts of Bailey Bridges, the model T of steel bridges, for the combat engineers. Once he showed me one spanning a small creek. It looked like something out of my childhood mechano set. Dad said the bridges can be popped together and extended over the water very fast. He landed ten days after D-Day, getting as far as any Canadian troops did, in Bremen, Germany.
As a British subject Dad could vote in our local elections. The family joke is that he didn’t get citizenship until he and Mum went to Scotland and a Canadian passport was cheaper than a British one.
Down the years, Dad always drove a Volkswagen Beetle and we managed to fit our eight person family into it (three front, five back) when we went to the China Villa for supper. It had a neon sign of a rickshaw with a moving wheel.
Dad built our house after taking building courses for veterans. At first, my older brothers lived in the city, on the street that I pass driving into Vancouver’s downtown. Later, we lived in a shack, which I don’t remember, (Brother Pat carried heavy coal) until the house, 40 feet long, was done when I was born. The shack was later a Boy Scout house. A younger uncle, who didn’t serve in the war, had a backhoe and he dug our well down to bed rock beside the creek. One day the well failed because a rat was blocking the intake pipe.
Today I live on the prairie in Alberta, the largest rat-free land mass in the free world (A Rat Patrol guards the border).
One year I was pleased because I, not my older brothers, fixed the pump in the pump house (Jeez, I forgot that until just now).
Had we stayed on the coast, among the deltas, I would have grown up on confiscated Japanese-Canadian land, good only for berry growing, but no— the water table was too high and so certain bushes grew that gave mother hay fever. Instead, they bought a place with a shack up the valley. This I learned when my dear mother one day angrily told me some precise very low prices, and how much she saved, buying confiscated bedsheets. Who remembers decades-old prices? Being dysfunctional, she was easily angry but only now, as an adult, do I think her anger on that specific day was to cover her guilt. She only told me these things once.
When the Japanese-Canadians were forced into internment camps many miles inland, none of their stuff was reserved for their return. Not even their fishing boats. My Japanese-Canadian mathematics teacher told Mum, during parent-teacher day, that the removal got them out of their ghetto.
I was not angry but sad, very sad, I when shared Mum’s story in London. We were having a film discussion at an art house theatre following the premier of the Oscar-winning Zone of Interest. I told them because we had watched a housewife near Auschwitz say “the same thing as my mother,” complete with comparing prices. By the way, the film does not show anything inside the wall of that grey sooty camp, only Good Germans outside in a world with flower gardens, a world, as Disney would say, full of colour. I suppose, having survived the Great Depression, the camp commandant’s wife felt only pride at being on easy street.
Before seeing London, on a road trip to my favourite part of Surrey B.C., I found that, in my absence, society had grown so affluent that McMansions were ubiquitous: I didn’t see any bungalows until at last I turned down a dead end side street to my old high school. I found that modern school kids are so rich that berry patches go uneaten, while a grassy place with trees, once magical, stands unplayed in, forlorn.
I am sure kids today, and grown adults too, forget the economics of the Great Depression, forget the lives uprooted and the ambient fascism. I think it’s why they so cheerfully re-elect a racist US president.
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Sean Crawford
Alberta,
January,
2025
Update: I just saw a Youtube on WWII leaders who would conceal-carry; Eisenhower had a holster in his trouser pocket. This reminded me: My dad once told a family friend that he had a conceal-carry pistol: The wool battledress jacket of the Commonwealth troops had big pockets that opened sideways along the front buttons.
My dad would only mention things such as driving a team of horses (my sister went through a horse book phase) if it came up in conversation with another adult.
