Category Archives: romantic suspense

The Homestead, Part Six

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WATER – Water was always an issue on the homestead. In the spring, my sister, Nell, and I took buckets and walked to the slough which was about a half mile away. We filled the buckets and carried them back to the house. We would do that several times a day, or as often as it took to take care of our home. If Mom was doing laundry, it was pretty laborious. If it was just a regular day, we filled the barrel, the wash tub, the reservoir in the cook stove and brought extra buckets for washing dishes.

Trips to the slough were required every day. The water was actually quite clean until about mid-summer. By then it would begin to taste slimy. The number of frogs would have markedly increased and the mosquitoes would be popping out of the water in clouds. On top of fetching buckets of water, we would walk the cow and calf to the slough to water them. Often we were walking barefoot as shoes were sometimes hard to come by. Once I remember, as we reached the slough, the cow stepped forward to take a drink and landed her hoof on Nell’s bare foot. Luckily she was standing on the edge of the slough where the mud was soft. Her foot sank into the water under the pressure and she stood still, waiting in pain until the cow finished drinking before we were able to make it step back.

By late summer the water in the slough was no longer palatable. Our neighbour, Olaf, had a well which he kindly allowed us to use when needed. Dad would hitch the horse to the stoneboat with a few barrels on it, drag it down the dirt road a couple of miles to Olaf’s well, and handpump the barrels full. None of us appreciated it very much. The water was heavily sulphered and bitter to drink. But of course we couldn’t have stayed there without access to water.

Then it would snow. We had a 45 gallon drum standing upright beside the barrel heater in the living area of the house. At the first heavy snowfall, we would fill the barrel with snow several times a day over a week or more until the barrel was full of water. This water was used for drinking, dishes, washing and laundry. After the barrel was full, we only had to fetch snow in buckets a few time a day to keep it topped up.

Once a neighbour lady had come to visit Mum. As she walked around the small living space during her visit, she removed her false teeth and casually rinsed them in the barrel. Nell and I watched in horror. As expected, Mum had us empty the barrel and begin the process over again until the barrel was full of clean water.

After we had lived on the homestead for a few years, Dad hired a guy with a back hoe to come and clear some trees for planting a crop. In addition, he had him scoop a dugout, which filled up with water in the spring. This worked well to provide water for the garden and the animals throughout the summer. We also swam in it a few times. But the water was full of leeches and when we emerged from our swim we would find the blood suckers burrowed into our skin. Removing them was painful.

SCHOOL – The local school had two rooms. One room was for grades one to four. The second room was for grades five to eight. When we arrived in Cecil Lake, Nell and I were both in the second room. To our surprise there were a lot of boys in that class who were fifteen and sixteen years old. Most of them had missed a lot of schooling because of staying home to help out on their family farms. They would leave the school year early, in April or May when the ploughing and planting of the land began. And they would arrive in class later than the other students in the fall, usually in October when the harvest was finished. As a result it would take them a few years to complete each grade.

There was no bathroom in the school, but a couple of outhouses were provided, one for boys, one for girls. A third building was attached to the schoolrooms, a teacherage which had a boardwalk leading to the classrooms. The year my sister and I started school in Cecil Lake, there were two young women living in the teacherage, both having just graduated from University of British Columbia with their teacher’s degrees and about to begin their first year of teaching. The substitute teacher for when one or the other was sick or off on a course was the mother of one of my friends. This woman had taught at the school in years past and kept her hand in for when she might be needed.

The children in each classroom were lined up in rows of desks by grade, so one row per grade, or two if needed. When we had spelling tests, the teacher would walk across the front of the room, call a word to the first row, shuffle the spelling books in her hand, call a word to the second row, repeat. After reaching the last row, she would walk back to the first row and begin again with the second spelling word.

The back wall of the room held a giant row of coat hooks. A line of parkas and scarves hung there, a shelf above holding toques and mittens, with an unruly row of snow boots along the wall beneath.

After we had been attending school for a couple of months, the other students seemed to get their nerve up. Nell and I were suddenly surrounded at lunchtime by a group of girls who were all asking where we were from. As always, we said we were from Duncan, on Vancouver Island. “No,” they said, “you’re from England.” I guess Mum’s proper pronunciation had rubbed off on her daughters. That was not the only time I was asked that question.

One day, in the first year we were there, Dad was escorting us to the bus stop, but we were late. We missed the bus, and watched it drive away before we reached the end of our road. Dad didn’t give up. He kept us going. We walked another mile to the main road, then two more miles to the Co-op store and gas station, then another mile to the school. The kids at recess surrounded us, wanting to know how we got to school, because they knew we didn’t have a vehicle. Some of them had also seen us approaching from up the road, when the bus stopped and then took off without waiting.

When we said we’d walked, no one believed us. No one walked that far. We did. (more to come)

The Homestead, Part Five

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Snow

Snow usually came early. The girls at our two-room school were required to wear skirts or dresses to school until the end of October, which is when we were allowed to attend class in pants. But the snow always arrived before that. Hallowe’en was carried out in the snow up there. As the road to where the school bus stopped to pick us up was a mile and a half away from our house , it was a jarringly cold trek in a skirt. Sometimes we wore pants under our skirts to ward off the frigid temperatures.

As the snow deepened and continued to fall intermittently over the winter months, it began to pile up and the depth increased. There were times we walked through snow up to our mid thighs. It could be a tough slog. Our family didn’t have a vehicle that could navigate such conditions, so there wasn’t another option for us. Dad tried to train our dog to pull a sled so Nell and I could take turns walking and riding on the sled. Unfortunately, Captain was a pretty undisciplined animal. The only way we found to get him to turn around and come back to us was to roll off the sled into the snow. Then he would continue racing down the road, and as he got further away, we would call him and he’d roar back, pulling the empty sled.

The wind could be wicked cold as the snow fell. However, when the temperature dropped, the wind died down. By the time it hit thirty below Fahrenheit, usually there would be no wind. The air was crisp and clear, crackling around me, but didn’t feel as cold as when the wind blew in slightly warmer temperatures.

The school closed when it hit minus thirty and the bus didn’t run. Dad would listen to the radio every morning and if the school was closed, there would be an announcement sent out to the community. The last thing we wanted to do was walk the mile and a half, wait for a bus that didn’t come, and walk back.

After we had lived there for a little more than a year, it seemed to register that a family with school children lived on our road, not just the two bachelors who had settled there some years before. Thus when the snow plow came through, our road would get ploughed too, which was a real luxury. It was much easier to walk the road after it had been ploughed. No trudging through knee-deep snow that day. Given how often and much it snowed each winter, the clearing of our road only happened sporadically and most days the snow was pretty deep. Our winter boots were stuffed with insoles and we wore several pairs of socks with pant legs tucked into them so the boot tops were blocked and the snow didn’t collect inside.

We had a driveway to the house, which had been cleared by felling the trees to open up a path when we first built there. It was seldom used, as we had no vehicle. However, when we had visitors the snow would get packed down from the wheels of the visitor’s trucks. But, we didn’t walk out to the road that way. Going out the driveway to the road and then down added a good half mile to the walk to meet the school bus. We had forged a different path through the trees, emerging at the ditch beside our road. When the snow first started to fall each winter, we would plough through, getting snow in our boots. As the winter extended, our feet tamped down the snow to create a useful trail. The snow got hard and the trail, although elevated due to the depth of snow compacted on it, would be easier to walk.

However, in the spring, when everything began to melt, the trail would get slippery and a bit difficult. The softened snow crust would weaken, and we would break through the path, sinking deep into the snow. We would pull our feet out to try again. Eventually, it was easier to walk beside the trail in the melting snow rather than stick to the trail and continue to break through the crust with every other step.

Our Car

When we arrived in Fort St. John, we had the car that we had driven there. That vehicle worked for about a year. However, in the first fall, Mum had gone berry picking with Sarah Greene, a neighbour who lived a couple of miles away. They were out in the bush with buckets picking saskatoon berries and had several buckets full.

At the time, Mum was pregnant with our youngest brother, Teddy, who was born in early spring the following year.

After a morning of picking, Mum was heading home. On the way, she parked on the side of the road in front of the Co-op store to pick up the mail. But before she or Sarah could get out of the car, they were rear-ended by a transport truck.

The buckets flew into the air, berries spraying everywhere. The front bench seat disengaged and banged backward into the rear seat. Mum had whiplash and the baby was knocked about in her womb.

The car was a total write off. The insurance company took the truck driver to court, where he testified that the sun was in his eyes and he didn’t see a car parked on the side of the road. He paid one hundred dollars damages, which in no way could replace the car. We were left without any transportation.

Pamela, my older sister, still has the rear window from that car. She always intended to make a coffee table out of it. (More to come)

The Homestead, Part Four

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Building the House

During the month of our occupation of the basement suite in Fort St. John, Dad spent his days out on the homestead. He built a small structure on the land which would eventually become the kitchen for the house. It was eight feet by twelve feet, walls and floor made of quarter inch plywood, no insulation. They bought a cast iron kitchen stove, wood fired with a water reservoir, and set it up with thicker pieces of wood beneath the feet to support its weight. Then we moved in. There was also a dry sink against one wall. A dry sink has no water supply. It is used usually with a basin in it, and the water in the basin can be let out through the pipe in the bottom of the sink. Sometimes that pipe leads straight outside. Sometimes, as in our situation, it lead to a bucket under the sink. The water could thus be reused to water the garden, or the animals as needed.

In the kitchen, my parents set up a double bed with a single bunk positioned above it, and the rest of us slept on the floor. It was now October and the temperature had plummeted.

Pamela, my oldest sister, began distance learning, what we then called correspondence, which was conducted through the postal service, as she was past grade eight, and that month my second sister, Nell, and I began to attend the two-room school in the village of Cecil Lake.

Dad was felling trees in preparation for building the actual house, and the surrounding neighbours generously organized a house-raising day. Trucks began to arrive early that morning, and men tumbled out of them, carrying axes and saws. More trees were felled, limbed and dragged to the construction site where the ends were whittled until they fit together. By the close of that first day, the walls of the structure were about eight feet high, no floor as yet.

Dad dug a root cellar in the middle of the square of walls, to be used for the storage of produce and canning in the future. Little did he know that when the snow melted in the spring it would always fill with water and Mum would find her canning jars had floated off the shelves and hovered in the water just below the trap door used to access the cellar.

As the weeks went by with all of us living in the small kitchen, we began to get sick. Once we all came down with the flu. Most of us stayed in bed when not throwing up in basins or buckets. Dad went out to chop firewood, vomiting into the snow when necessary.

Several of the men kindly returned for more days of voluntary work and eventually the house was built. The roof was erected and covered with tar paper. The floor of plywood was installed on a grid of logs to hold it up off the ground. There was a short staircase to the small second floor that was positioned beneath the eaves with a window at each end. This would be the bedroom for all the children.

Dad cut the doorway through from the kitchen to the house on Christmas Eve that year.

The Homestead, chapter two

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Our Journey North

My parents met in Esquimalt when Dad was sent to Vancouver Island for training in the Canadian Navy. They married during the Second World War. After the war ended, they settled in Victoria, where my two older sisters, Pamela and Nell, were born. I was born there also. When I was five, our parents sold their small house situated near the Gorge, and bought a box truck. Dad loaded everything into the truck, positioning a couch in the front facing forward with a window cut out of the box allowing us to see through the windshield of the cab. This is where my sisters and I travelled, looking through the front window as we drove.

We ended up in Nipawin, northern Saskatchewan, Dad’s old hometown. However, we weren’t there long. Obviously things didn’t work out as Dad had thought they would, and about eight months after we arrived, we were riding in an old Ford car headed back to Vancouver Island. It was Christmas Eve when we stopped on our journey to overnight at a hotel in Regina. I remember running up and down the hallways on the second floor with my sisters, working off steam after a long day of travelling in the car. There was an elderly bachelor in one of the hotel rooms who invited us in for a sip of pop and some candies. We never got pop, and were thrilled to receive such a treat.

Once we arrived back on Vancouver Island, we stopped in Duncan, just north of Victoria, and bought a house there. This house had three rooms, and was about four-hundred and fifty square feet in size, with a front porch and a set of stairs at the back. After about a year, Dad had enclosed the front porch to create a bathroom, and dug a new well in the yard as the old one was too shallow and ran out of water in the summer. The fourth daughter, Cindy, was born there, as well as the first son, Derek.

Dad was a journeyman carpenter, able to perform just about any task. He raised our house on car jacks and built a foundation for it. But he didn’t fit the mold of a regular working man. He took several jobs while in Duncan, one of them working on the construction of the Chemainus mill, but none of them lasted very long. After six years, Duncan proved to be a poor fit for our family and our parents had become interested in the land grant program in the North Peace River area.

Dad found an old truck and cut the box off it. He welded a ball mount hitch onto the frame of our car, and a towing hitch onto the front frame of the truck bed. We loaded all our stuff into the truck bed, including a full-sized pump organ, beds and linens.

By now there were five children. Mum and Dad sat in the front seat of the car with our youngest sister, Cindy, positioned between them. We three older girls sat in the back, with our one-year-old brother, Derek. He crawled restlessly over our laps and legs during the entire journey.

It is a long drive from Vancouver Island to the North Peace River area, especially in those days with the type of vehicles we had. Today, it is eight hundred and fifty miles or thirteen hundred and sixty kilometres by road. We camped along the way, sometimes in someone’s field. We met some kind and interesting people that way.

Pamela, who at fifteen years of age had already started high school, was devastated by the decision to move. She cried pretty well the whole trip north, mourning her lost friends and life at school. Nell and I, at thirteen and eleven, were less concerned, likely because we didn’t have a good grasp of how our lives were about to change.

Once we reached the town of Taylor, situated on the Alaska Highway between Dawson Creek and Fort St John, we discovered that when the ice left the Peace River earlier in the spring it had taken the bridge out with it. The only way across the river was over the railway bridge. This is how the locals were getting back and forth until a new bridge could be built.

It was hair-raising. Dad maneuvered the car onto the railway, the truck/ trailer bumping up behind. Between the ties, we could see the river roiling below us. I remember holding my breath in the hope we would get safely across. So that is how we arrived in Fort St. John, after driving across on the narrow railway ties high above the Peace River.

(More to come )

“The Homestead”

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This is the story of my family’s adventure. We left the Canadian west coast, travelled to northern British Columbia, established our home there, and then left. It is the story of six children who managed to live this adventure and build a new life after the journey ended. Here is how it happened.

Homesteading

A homestead is defined as a home and land occupied by a family. But homesteading means something slightly different. In Canada, homesteading was a programme offered in the past in many provinces with the goal of settling the land. There was also a drive to increase the population, often from outside the country if necessary. In British Columbia, the government passed a new homesteading act which encouraged people to claim land in the 50s and 60s. The land was divided into sections, 640 acres each, and each section was divided into quarter sections of 160 acres each. A section is measured as one mile by one mile and a quarter section is a half mile by a half mile in size.

The Land Titles office in each area had maps and a list of the land that was available. Upon application, a person could claim a quarter section. There were no taxes payable on the property until title transferred. The goal was to move onto the land, build a home, and carry out developments or what were called improvements. These could include clearing the land and farming it, building barns and raising animals, whatever was needed to become self-sufficient. The goal was to improve the land over a period of 5 years from the first claim. If one succeeded in doing that, the settler could then make application with proof of the improvements, and the land title would be transferred into his or her name.

Free land! But wait a minute, not quite free. Developing the land could be quite a challenge and incur substantial expense, depending on where it was located and what it was like. Was it heavily forested or spread over steep hills? Was it a wetland, covered in sloughs and creeks which divide the area? Was there a road providing access to the property? Lots of things could change the focus of how easy it was to get and keep the free land.

My Parents

Dad’s father, George, was one of twelve children. He was born in Upper Canada and moved with his whole family to the Canadian Prairies when the land opened up for homesteading in the 1880’s and they all claimed land. Dad was born in Sintaluta, southern Saskatchewan. When he was one and a half years old, in February of 1919, his mother, Emily Annie, died of the Spanish flu. George’s mother, Hannah Ruth, my father’s grandmother, died of the flu the following day, and the two funeral services were held at the same time in the local village church.

According to one of my cousins who knew George, our grandfather was devastated by these losses, and more or less gave up. However, he continued to farm with his father and his brothers. Each one of them had claimed some land and they used their horses and equipment in a united effort to work the soil. A couple of years later, snow came early to the Prairies. The family had harvested their father’s crop and were working down the list of brothers from oldest to youngest. George was the last brother, and before they got to his land the snow had flattened his crop, demolishing his total income for the year. Unable to pay his taxes, he lost his land, and took his family of six motherless children by train, moving them to Nipawin, in northern Saskatchewan. He set up shop in the small town as a saw and knife sharpener.

Dad grew up motherless and more or less fatherless. He remembers sleeping with his sister on a mattress on the dirt floor in a small log cabin in Nipawin. One night he woke, terrified he was alone. But when he looked around, he saw an angel standing at the foot of the mattress, keeping guard over him. He was able to calm down and go back to sleep, secure in the knowledge that he was safe.

Dad was used to being without and used to being alone. At some point he discovered he had another brother, a baby who had been born just before his mother died, making him one of seven children, not six. The baby had been taken to be raised by his aunt and uncle in Sintaluta, and remained with them when the rest of the family moved. The boys met for the first time as teenagers, and came in contact again as young men, my Dad in a navy uniform, his lost brother in army gear at the start of the Second World War.

Dad’s approach to being sick included going outside and working it off. He told a story about feeling ill and having a fever as a young man. So he went out and chopped firewood for his father. A family friend who was a medical doctor had come to visit, and when he heard Dad didn’t feel well and had a fever, he went out to check on him, diagnosing diphtheria. The doctor instructed Dad to attend at his medical clinic to get the vaccine, as there had been a number of cases in the town.

Mum was raised in a family of seven children. Her parents were from England, her father, Sidney, from Southampton, her mother, Rosa, from Rye. The father’s family ran a grocery store, and he joined the English navy at age nineteen. A few years later, Sidney resigned to sign up for the Royal Canadian Navy Volunteer Reserve and travel to Canada on the HMCS Rainbow, the first ship of the Canadian navy, which landed at Esquimalt, Vancouver Island, British Columbia in 1910. He settled there.

Rosa’s family ran a pub and bakery in England, and emigrated to Canada in about 1914, at the start of the First World War. Rosa and Sidney met in Esquimalt and married.

Mum was their third child, and when she was a young girl, she was devastated by the death of her brother, Arthur, two years younger than herself. He was run over in the street by a delivery truck. They had been close, sharing a bed. The loss had a lasting effect on her life. I remember she mourned the loss of her brother even as an adult.

She was raised to be polite, speak correctly, and always use her manners. She did needlework, could knit or sew anything, loved to paint pictures, and gardened for food and flowers. But especially her talent was with words, in both poetry and prose. (more to come 🙂