Family, Memory and the Second World War
by Robert Calder
EXCERPT
IN THE SUMMER of 1945, I was four years old and living in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, in a small house on Hochelaga Street with my mother and my seventeen-month-old brother, Kenneth. My father, a captain in the Canadian Army, had spent most of the war years as a training officer at various military bases in western Canada, and was home only rarely and for short visits. In my memory he is only an alien presence, an unfamiliar smell, someone who disturbed the comfortable, predictable, maternal warmth of the house
Like all small children, my world was centred on my own immediate surroundings, bounded almost exclusively by the corners at each end of the block, and I happily patrolled the cracked and pitted sidewalk between them on my tricycle. I had a small band of friends: the older girl in the next house who kept a protective eye on me, and a boy across the street with whom I would explore the wilderness of the vacant lot two doors away. My other companion was Spunky, an excitable offspring of a long line of black-and-white Boston terriers owned by the Calder family.
My little world nonetheless had its perils. The honey bees in the neighbours' yard, I learned, could exact a painful vengeance on a small boy attempting to block the entrance to their hive. Two slightly older boys who lived at the far end of the street flaunted their status as the local bullies, and my forays into their territory were always undertaken with an eye to how quickly I could retreat to the safety of my yard and my mother's protection. Even my friends, my allies, liked to torment me by pointing to the uniformed motorcycle cop, Mickey Mackie, parked in an alley across the street watching for speeders. If I did not behave myself, they warned me gravely, "he'll come and get you."
My only knowledge of the world beyond my street had been gained under the watchful eye of my mother, as I accompanied her shopping or on visits to friends and relatives. The morning of June 19, however, was to be different.There was an air of excitement in the house. My father was home on leave from Camp Shilo, in Manitoba, but I did not see much of him because he left the house that day soon after breakfast. I was then cleaned up, dressed up, brushed up and combed, and told that I was going to do something I had never done before: I was going to walk to my grandparents' house over on Alder Avenue all by myself. To get there, I would have to venture four blocks beyond the furthest point of my tricycle patrols, a stroll through a seeming no man's land of unfamiliar territory before I reached the safety of the Calder home. I was thrilled by the urgency with which my mother got me ready and by the importance she attached to my expedition.
The reason for this walk, and for the excitement in the house, was a man I had never seen before: my uncle Ken, my father's only brother, who was returning to Moose Jaw for the first time in nearly six years. I knew him only as the person who had sent me a birthday present of a stuffed tartan Scottie dog, with the word "CANADA" and red patches that he had sewn on each side of it and a collar with a band that said: "Second LAA RCA." The night before, he had arrived, along with 154 other returning soldiers, to a tumultuous crowd of relatives and friends waiting expectantly in the Regina railway station. My grandparents and my father had driven the forty-five miles across the flat southern prairie to pick him up, and now, in the light of a warm Saskatchewan June morning, I was going to see him for the first time. One young man was being sent off on the most adventurous mission of his life to meet another man who had travelled far beyond the wildest imaginings of his own youth.
My mother walked with me down to the end of our block and watched while I made my way around the corner, down the avenue and across Caribou Street. Even with motor traffic diminished by wartime restrictions on gasoline and tires, this seemed a risky venture to a small boy. From there, Grandma Calder, strategically placed on a corner near her house, was able to watch me make my way along the Technical Collegiate playing field, down First Avenue and across a vacant corner lot into her domain. On any other day the profusion of lamb's quarters, plantain, milkweed and scrub grass would have been too appealing, and I would have foraged along the dirt path for some dandelion flowers to take to my grandmother. On this morning, however, with Mother's firm command "Don't dawdle" still fresh in my mind, I understood that I had more serious matters to attend to.
With my grandmother at my side, I walked the remaining half-block to 923 Alder Avenue, a well-kept two-storey yellow wooden house built early in the century. As I tentatively made my way up the sidewalk, through the gap in the lilac hedge, its few remaining blossoms still fragrant in the morning air, I saw my father sitting on the wooden porch steps, a cigarette dangling between his fingers and a smile on his face. As I approached, he said, "Bobby, say hello to your uncle Ken." Beside him sat a man with a shock of thick dark hair, dark eyes and a full moustache. His broad grin, twisted slightly to one side, did much to dissolve my natural shyness, and I was won completely over when he gave me a little tin of English toffees brought from so far away.
I was aware of being the centre of attention, on show, so to speak, as my father's—and my grandparents'—trophy put before the returning soldier. Look what I produced, younger brother, while you were fighting the Germans, my father's smile suggested. And I seemed to pass inspection, if Uncle Ken's affable questions and kindly interest in my toys and my doings were any indication.
As the morning wore on and the novelty of our meeting faded, I busied myself with my building blocks on the kitchen floor while the brothers sat at the table drinking coffee and catching up on six years lived apart. From time to time I stole a glance at my uncle, so unfamiliar to me yet so important to my father and grandparents. I sensed that something significant had changed in my family life and that nothing would ever be quite the same again. This man seemed so different from my father and grandfather, but I liked him already and wanted to see him again.
I never did see my uncle Ken again. Or, rather, I did see him one more time, though I did not know it. About three weeks after our meeting there was more unexpected activity in our house. I was surprised to see my father back home so soon, but this time there were no smiles. Instead, there were sombre conversations, and he and my mother were more-than-usually occupied with matters at my Calder grandparents' home. These were not, it seemed, things to concern a little boy, and so I was not included in the trips to Alder Avenue. One afternoon a few days later my parents left me in the company of my other grandmother and departed the house. At a certain point Grandma Remey walked me down to Main Street, Moose Jaw's central thoroughfare, and we stood in front of Johnstone Dairies, a large old brown brick building pleasantly familiar to me because it was where my mother would buy me an ice cream cone on the way home from shopping. But there were no ice cream cones on this day.
Before long, a procession came very slowly down the street: a gun carriage covered with a flag and lots of flowers, a group of soldiers marching in slow and measured step, and then a military band playing sombre music Following it was a line of cars moving more slowly than I had ever seen cars move. My grandmother told me I should watch closely because this procession had something to do with my uncle. I stood, I think, as dutifully observant as a four-year-old boy can be, but I wondered why my grandparents and mother and father were riding in cars in this parade, and I resented being left on the sidewalk in the crowd of people who had gathered to watch. With drums muffled, the procession turned off Main Street onto Caribou and made its way slowly out to the prairie grassland west of town, and to Rosedale Cemetery. As the groups of people left the sidewalks to return to their affairs and the traffic began to come to life again along Main Street, my grandmother and I walked the two blocks back to the little house to wait for my parents to come home. Grandma Remey, by nature stern and taciturn, was even quieter than usual. I wanted to know more about this parade, but all she would say was, "Someday, when you're much older, your mother will tell you all about it."
I was indeed much older before I understood what a funeral cortege was, and at least a dozen years went by before I began to learn what had led to my uncle being carried through the streets of Moose Jaw on a sunny July afternoon in 1945. Nearly sixty years later, I am still trying to understand what happened to him in that last wartime summer.
A few days after I had met him on my grandparents' front steps, Ken left for Vancouver to be reunited with the wife whom he had married a week before he left for England and whom he had not seen for five and a half years. Eight days after he had arrived in Vancouver, on an afternoon when she was away from the apartment, Captain Kenneth Alexander Calder, Royal Canadian Artillery, put on his uniform, turned on the gas of the kitchenette stove, and killed himself. He was thirty-four years old.