Part One: Leaving Germany--Never Going Back

My father was Irish; my Mother was German. They met in Wiesbaden when Dad was a soldier in the British Army of Occupation. Later, he stayed on in Germany to work for the British Graves Commission, locating the graves of British and allied soldiers in Germany. That job ended in 1927. Hence the interest in coming to Canada.

Mother tells the story: "There was this British Legion scheme of sending 3,000 families to Canada. They had sent them over in the years since the war, and there were 50 wanted to make up the 3,000. They were trying to get at least one family from the Rhineland, from the Army of Occupation, and they did have a different man, but his legs were bad. Another Irishman. He wanted to go, but...

"So Mr. Storey, the man from the Consulate, was after your Dad to go. I refused to go, you know. I didn't want to go to Canada. I never thought I'd live my life in another country. But he talked us into it. Your Dad was okay; he wanted to go. Your Dad says, 'Well, it's up to you now. I've got my medical. I've got everything. If you don't want to go, we won't go.'

"Well, they talked me into it. Told a lot of lies. We had to go right away; we were already late.

"We left right away. We got to Cologne at nine o'clock at night, and the train left at twelve."

That meant that they had three hours to say good-bye to the German side of the family before leaving forever. They never got to Ireland to say good-bye at all.

Part Two: Food

So there they were, from Berlin to Northern Saskatchewan. In the training camp in England, Mother had more or less (rather less than more) learned to milk a cow. She thought that Dad had had the opportunity to run behind the tractor and see how that worked.

Looking at the photo, Tom observed: "That's right up against the house. That's our abode, or part of it: the old homestead. That's the back porch. You can tell it isn't the barn because the door isn't big enough for the cows to get through!" Laughter all around.
Molly added: "Mother's favourite cow, Biddy..."

Mother showed her farming mettle; sentiment and favouritism did not get in the way of practicality.

"...We always butched a calf [in the fall], or that old white cow, finally; she was seventeen. I said 'You kill that cow and I won't eat any,' but Pat, that meat was delicious! It's the way it was raised, you know, with all that good stuff. It was always hollow, a big, white bony cow, but what meat!"

"You ate some, I gather?""Yes! That was fantastic meat."

Part Three: Housing

The house was minimalist, to say the least. Two rooms, walls unfinished inside, no insulation but tastefully whitewashed to the eight-foot level. In the winter, it was even more tasteful, because the hoar frost carried the white right up to the roof. Freezing, but the kids never caught a cold.

Part Four: Baby Davitt

Bill and I were born on the farm: He was fine, but I was sickly.

Kae asked, "When did you know that Patricia was sick?"

"Almost immediately, Mother knew there was something wrong." ...

Tom said, "You were one jump away from renal failure. It was a close call, and it was lucky it didn't happen earlier, or you would have been deader than a smelt!"

Molly added, "Kidney problems, born with it. Then a friend's daughter, living in Saskatoon, told Mother she should maybe bring Patricia to Saskatoon to this Dr. Brown, to try out this new treatment. He couldn't guarantee anything, but it was a chance."

"How old was the baby then?" asked Kae.

"Less than a year old; getting on for a year, I guess. So they took her in; left her there; came back [to the farm without her]. We had reports every day, remember? On the radio, from the general hospital in Saskatoon, reporting on all the babies that were in there, and the ones that were ready to pick up and take home. Baby Davitt: we were waiting to hear what they said about Baby Davitt!"

Added Tom, "They didn't have first names; just Baby! I remember that. On those farm programs, they had birthdays and everything from soup to nuts. There was quite a bit of coverage."

"It was a great service," Molly agreed.

In the time before rural electrification and telephones, the radio provided an vital communication link and a lifeline across the province and the country.

Part Five: Transport

In those days, Mother pointed out, "... getting around in the north meant horses. And first you had to catch your horse. Mother knew that. "I could hitch up the horses. But there again now: you made up your mind that you were going somewhere on Sunday, so you'd go look for the horses...Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! The damned things would disappear. If you actually did find them, it would be in the slough. It was half a mile long and there would be water in there, and the damned horses knew that. They would be standing in the middle and they wouldn't come out! You could shake your can with the oats; they wouldn't budge; they'd just look at you. They knew. They'd stand there in the water, and you couldn't get them out of there. And I wouldn't go in there, because I'd be up to here in water, and God knows what was creeping around the bottom! Yech! Oh, [when you had to depend] on the horses, the best was when they were in the barn."

Part Six: School

Molly and Tommy attended a one-room school with about 30 other children. The number fluctuated depending on how many of the boys were needed for farm tasks.

Bill only went for one day, before the family left the north, but his older siblings were quite willing to give him lessons.

Kae pointed out: "Bill tells of you writing in the dirt with sticks, doing your sums."

"No, I don't think so," Tom replied. "Maybe we showed him something in a patch of sand, on the way to school. Come to think of it, I don't even remember him going to school. Once, maybe."

"He saw the two of you writing your sums in the sand," said Kae firmly.

"He said that?" said Molly, with considerable disbelief. "No, no way."

"We took him," recalled Tom; "We took him once, I think. Maybe we took him a couple of times....but why would he remember that particular thing?"

"Well," replied Kae; "it must have been a marvellous thing for him to see."

"Maybe we just showed him," thought Molly.

They all mulled that over, and then Kae started to laugh. "It does leave the impression that you people had nothing but sticks and sand!" Everyone was laughing.

"Higher education!" proclaimed Tom. "You stood on a stump and wrote in the sand" [which obviously required a longer stick]. "And homework! I don't remember anyone ever doing homework!"

"Well," joked Kae, "you ran out of sticks!"

Part Seven: Fun

Life wasn't just about doing sums and fishing reluctant horses out of the slough. Fun was definitely had by some, some of the time; fashion statements were made, and health concerns cropped up disastrously.

Designer Clothes by Hettie Davitt

Kae noted that she was very nicely dressed. "Where would she get a dress like that?"

"Oh, Mother made it, probably," replied Molly. "She was very good at things like that. We were always dressed well." Pat agreed, remembering all the dresses made for her. "And she made our coats," said Molly.

"So this is Mrs. Carter," said Pat, "who died, as Mother told me over and over, because she got sick and couldn't afford to go to the doctor, so she didn't go and didn't go.

These were the years before any kind of health system. In Germany, there had been a health system in place for decades. Mother couldn't believe how backwards it was here...in many ways.