Editorially speaking...
Can you believe it, already the middle of October? What happened to the sun and heat? Most of us, no doubt, would welcome the return of sunshine but not the melting pot of June-July...
There was a beautiful story in last week’s Times Colonist about 105-year-old Primetta Giacopini who’d survived the 1918 Spanish ‘Flu epidemic as a child but succumbed to COVID-19. (Her own mother died of the pandemic that swept the world at the close of the First World War.)
In all the story there was a quote that leapt out at me. According to her daughter, Mrs. Giacopini had believed that “all Americans who weren’t around for World War II were sissies”
Hear! Hear!
If I’ve come to believe anything in my worldly travels through life and, by comparison, my studies of the lifetimes of previous Canadians, white and Indigenous, it’s that we really are sissies today.
If ever you’ve read anything about life on the Canadian frontiers, of having to work—and I mean work—from sunrise to sunset on the farm, or go to sea, or labour in the woods or the mines or cook, clean house and care for a multitude of young children while carrying yet another—you’ll probably admit that we moderns have it pretty good by comparison.
And those of us who haven’t really experienced hardship are ill-equipped to deal with life’s ill winds without making a real fuss. (I know, I know, I’m using broad brush strokes here, but I’m trying to make a point.)
For many of us in our affluent society, our idea of hardship is for the power to go out and the lights not to come on or—God forbid! as happened last week—Facebook and Twitter to go off the air for a few hours. Just think of the mental anguish, the trauma of not being able to blather to friends and acquaintances at will, or to download misinformation and trivia, even if only for a few hours!
Why, it’s too horrible to even think about.
Please forgive my sarcasm but, you see, I’m currently reading a fascinating book by local author Ruth Steeves of Arbutus Ridge, entitled, No Englishmen Need Apply. It’s about her grandparents coming to Canada about 1906 or ‘07 on the promise of a job as an accountant with the CPR in Winnipeg.
Well, there was no job in a CPR office or any other office; hardly any jobs anywhere, and those that there were paid only a pauper’s wage.
It’s the story of how, with a young son who was soon followed by two daughters, they struggled to, first, get a roof over their heads, then, second, to keep it over their heads in the icy cold of Winnipeg winters. It’s the story of years of mind-numbing misery and physical and mental hardship such as very few of us today have ever had to endure.
It took the Arnolds years of menial and back-breaking jobs and numerous setbacks including the loss of their rented house and all of their possessions to fire, before they finally achieved what we’d think was, at best, modest success.
They had their moments of despair, when they’d have given anything to go home again even if it meant swallowing their pride before the stern mother-in-law who’d smugly predicted they’d fail in the “colonies”.
But they didn’t fail; they stayed, they endured, and they succeeded.
Theirs is the story of millions of other new-Canadians. At least the Arnolds had the advantage of being able to speak English as a first language and to be of the ruling class. Heaven help those who were of “other, lesser” nationalities and races.
Yet they, too, endured, survived and succeeded.
Personal disclaimer: The closest I’ve come to frontier living was as an infant when my father was away in the navy and my mother lived for nine months in a three-room cottage in Parksville. I was really young but I still remember outdoor plumbing and the wood stove because we again “suffered” both amenities in a second, rented house, in Saanich where it was my lot to lug in the firewood in a wheelbarrow. I still remember the slivers.
My point is that, the vast majority of modern Canadians are blessed to live in a country that, for all its flaws, is heaven on earth when compared to, say, third world countries and much of the world’s population. (Don’t believe me? Check out the news.) For most of us, including me, hardship is something we read about or watch on TV.
(I should probably close by saying, here’s hoping that it stays that way.)
Climbing down from my white horse, I’m pleased to report that all 39 miners who were trapped underground as much as 1200 metres deep in a mine near Sudbury, Ontario, have reached safety. What makes their escape so unlike the mining disasters of the past on Vancouver Island is that they climbed to safety by a series of ladders.
Think about that for a moment.
Escape beckons you, you just have to climb ladders with only the light from your headlamp, 3600 feet—well over half a mile—almost straight up! No wonder it took some of them hours to reach the surface and that some had to be helped to safety.
(Sort of shoots down my rant about us modern-day weaklings not being able to cut it when the going gets tough, eh?)
On another, happier note, a documentary film on pioneer Victoria photographer Hannah Maynard (1862-1918) is showing until October 11th at the Vancouver Film Festival (viff.org). What a remarkable woman!
Pioneer Victoria photographer Hannah Maynard. —Wikipedia photo
Among her many accomplishments, she served as official photographer for the Victoria Police Department—hence the VPD’s collection of historic mug shots. Many of her portraits of the city’s leading merchants and citizens of her time are the only photographic record of them we have today, which makes her work all the more historically significant and valuable.
Another memorable achievement was her collage of 20,000 individual children’s faces which she photographed, developed, printed then pasted together. Can you imagine it—20,000 photographic prints? (I can; I worked in a darkroom for years.)
When I said Hannah Maynard was a remarkable woman I wasn’t whistling Dixie!
* * * * *