The Dominafuhrer - THE GODMOTHER

Episode 22 - Kelly's Chronicle

 “Grandfather Jack was the youngest of four sons and he was seventeen when his father died in Eighteen Ninety. With two the eldest brothers married and already with families, he knew that the farm would not support all of them, so he got the other three to buy out his share. He walked from Thursford to Norwich, bought a train ticket to Liverpool and from there, a sea passage to Canada. For two years he worked his way west, anywhere from one month up to six at a time on a farm or a ranch, saving as much money he could before he moved on. He was thinking about taking on one of the free quarter sections that the Government was offering under the Homestead Act but, in November Eighteen Ninety Two; he stepped off a Canadian Pacific Train in Calgary and saw a poster for the newly opened Calgary to Edmonton Railroad. The Government had given the Company a huge land grant for building the line and they were selling it off in sections. Grandpa didn’t know whether to go north to Edmonton or south towards the US border so he got this out.”

Kelly released her grip on my mine and drew a small, slim blue leather case from her handbag. The cover was battered and water stained and I realised that it had probably gone into the River Spree when she had had to swim for her life, and ours, four years before. Kelly opened it up and showed me a large gold coin with the young Queen Victoria’s head on one side. When she lifted it out and held it between her fingers, I could see a mounted Saint George slaying the dragon on the reverse.

“This is the last of the English Gold Sovereigns that he had brought with him to Canada. When he tossed it in the air it came down tails for south and that was train that he boarded. He didn’t go that far because there was a halt, in the hills about 30 miles south, at a community called the Crossing where the railroad crossed the High Woods River. It was named after a ford there that the Blackfoot Indians had used. The River was lined with these tall trees and even with snow and ice everywhere, Grandpa thought it so beautiful that he had to get off and look around. Apart from the Railroad Depot, there was a Church, a Hotel, several Stopping Houses (that’s a Boarding House to you) and a couple of stores.

Grandpa hired a horse and a spade, got a grid map from the Railroad Agent and rode along the river, checking out the sections as he went. Finally he came to one which was flat and had its own creek flowing through it to the river. He went to each of the mile corner posts, dug into the frozen earth and then did the same in the middle of each of the quarter sections. The soil was not perfect but he knew that he could grow wheat on it and he loved the view of the distant Rocky Mountains and the river flowing between the trees.

He went back to the Crossing and put his name his name down for the whole section but he had to go into Calgary to pay his sixteen hundred Dollars for the title. That was most of his savings and he spent the winter clearing the land, building himself a log cabin and hiring his labour out wherever and whenever he could to raise more funds. In the spring, he hired a horse and a plough and bought seed on credit. He worked hard, got enough from his first harvest to pay his debts and put a little more money away for the following year. Two years later, when he married Felicity McBride, one of the daughters of a Calgary grain merchant, he started building a house on the land and my Pa was born at the beginning of Eighteen Ninety-Six. Nothing was easy, the high foothills were mainly cattle ranching country and there were only a few farmers, mostly Mormons, then growing crops successfully. By now, settlers were flooding in from the East, South and West, taking up Government land offers or looking for jobs in the growing numbers of towns and there was problems when they found the Chinese would work for a lot less wages than the Europeans. The Crossing grew as well, was renamed High River and soon had schools, grain elevators, a newspaper, and all the other things that young frontier towns of six hundred people had, even telephones and motor cars. But hard times were never far away and there was a short recession. Many farms failed, particularly the homesteaders, and Grandpa picked up sections to his north and west before land prices spiraled again. He had a bigger farm but it meant that he had to work all the harder to keep from going bust. As Pa got older he was able to help out when he wasn’t in school but he took off and joined the Canadian Army when the Great War broke out. Grandpa just about coped by working with Sean Maguire, his neighbour to the west, whose son Philippe, was Pa’s best friend and had gone of to war with him.

My Pa came back from Europe in June Nineteen Nineteen, a sad and disillusioned man. He had joined up with a romantic notion to save England, saw the slaughter in the trenches and Philippe blown to pieces next to him at the attack on Vimy. Then, after the Armistice, he came to Thursford before his regiment embarked for Canada and found that the only male member of the family still alive was his cousin, Michael’s father. Those that hadn’t been killed in the war had been carried off by the Spanish Flu’. Michael’s father hadn’t been expecting to inherit and wasn’t interested in farming because he was off to University to study Law. He gave my Pa first refusal on the farm but he just wanted to go home so the farm was sold off except for the cottage where Michael lives now. 

As I said, Pa had lost all the romantic illusions that he went off to war with and he didn’t join in when everyone else went wild with patriotic fever at the Prince of Wales’s visit in September. The Prince stayed on the Bar U ranch and liked the area so much that he bought his own ranch nearby. Nor did he march in the welcome home parade with the other returning veterans, preferring to stay away to remember Philippe and the eighty other young men of High River who had not come home. The war had exhausted Grandpa but Philippe’s parents were so shattered with grief that, when Pa married their daughter Annette, they gave him their farm as a wedding present and both died within the next couple of years. Pa got married in the Catholic Church but only went back for my Grandparents’ funerals. My brother and I were supposed to be brought up as Catholics but he wouldn’t have us baptised, or circumcised because that was in the Bible or let us go the Catholic schools. He told the Priest that he couldn’t believe in a God that created the hell he went through to get to the top of Vimy Ridge. Ma, with her Irish and French Canadian upbringing, gave up arguing with him but she still goes to Mass every Sunday Morning. Probably because he had been on his own, Grandpa hadn’t overextended himself financially in the war years and the combined farms were able to cope better with the post war recession and Pa even had time to go to Agriculture College and father my brother Brian who arrived in nineteen twenty two. When I was born in nineteen thirty one it was the middle of the big recession and things were really tough and three years later came the dust bowl. Grandpa and Pa had never overused their land or turned cattle loose on it and always followed the practices Pa had learnt at College to prevent erosion but it didn’t stop the dust blowing onto our farm all the way from the other side of the prairies. It choked our crops, filled our creek and got into the house round the windows and doors; I can remember the Railroad having to fit snow ploughs onto the fronts of the engines in summer to clear a way through the dunes of dust across the tracks. Then, just as things started to get better again, Grandpa dropped dead with a heart attack, eighteen years ago yesterday as a matter of fact. Grandma went to live with her sister in Calgary and the old house was locked up because we were living it what had been the Maguire’s home but it was understood that Brian would move into my Grandparents place after he had been to agricultural college and got married.

Of course all that changed when Hitler invaded Poland and the day after his eighteenth birthday in nineteen forty, Brian enlisted in the Air Force. Mum cried, I was proud and Pa stormed into the RCAF recruiting office in Calgary but found that, because Brian had volunteered for flying duties, it over rode any deferment as an essential war worker. Boy, Pa was angry!             

We got by the first year and Brian got special leave from training to help with the harvest but he sailed for England at Christmas. The next year we got four Italian Prisoners of War to help on the farm, Pa was offered some German POWs later but he refused to have them, and Michael arrived. His father wrote to my parents before the London Blitz started asking if they would accept him as an evacuee but it was several months before he could get passage on a ship. 

Michael was eighteen months older than me and everyone said how much we looked alike but he was thinner in the face with darker hair. We got on well but were not really close at first because he was that much ahead of be in school and made his own circle of friends. Still, I taught him to ride a horse, rather than the pony he was used to, and to swim in the creek and the High Woods River.

The war seemed to get a lot closer after Pearl Harbour, especially when the Japs landed in Alaska, but the Government sent a big American combine harvester to do our harvest and it cleared our four square miles of wheat in a few days, when it normally took Pa a couple of weeks. Brian wrote from England and, the more air raids he went on, the more his letters changed from ‘what a wizard show’ to what a bloody business war was. Ma prayed with her Rosary, Pa just looked grim and I showed Michael the balsa wood Wellington bomber that Brian had sent me.

And then I became a transvestite”.

To continue this story, click Surprised In The Straw

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