Taped interviews and transcription: Ghislaine Mercier
Serialization for publication in Journal Patrimonial Le St-Patrice Autrefois (the heritage newspaper of St-Patrice): Rosario Bilodeau
Translation into English, Mary Joan Roy-Gillon, completed December 2000
First printing of English phamplet, Dec. 2000. Revised with slight corrections, Feb 2002. Converted to html, 2020-01-04.
In 1983 Pointe Claire resident Ghislaine Mercier decided to enter a history contest being held for the Province of Quebec. She choose as her subject her next door neighbor, Georgian Roy. Georgina, who was 90 at the time, had lived in Quebec most of her life and her family had been one the of large land holders in the province. Ghislaine conducted a series of interviews with Georgina asking her questions about her life. Since Ghislaine was French and Georgina was bilingual the interviews were conducted in French.
Unfortunately Ghislaine didn’t win the contest because her submission was entered past the deadline but a local historian heard about the tapes and with both women’s permission Rosario Bilodeau edited the transcriptions Ghislaine had made from the taped interviews and turned them into a series of articles which were published in a local journal, journal patrimonial LE ST-PATRICE autrefois(the heritage newspaper of St-Patrice).
In 1999, armed with a computer, several dictionaries, and great determination, Mary Joan Gillon began translating the articles from French to English so they could be read by Georgina’s family, most of whom only speak English. It was a labor of love, particularly since some of the French terms used by Georgina were so archaic that they are no longer listed in contemporary dictionaries. Help was given by family and friends, who used their contacts in Canada to research a few of the terms for Mary Joan and returned that information to her by email.
The translated articles are reproduced here much as they were published with the editor’s notes and interjections included in italics. December 2000.
Vol. 3, No. 5, August/September 1985
Here is the first in a series of exclusive articles on the memories of Mrs. Ross-Roy retold by our chronicler Rosario Bilodeau taken from interviews done by Ghislaine Mercier-Lamontagne whom the author thanks. The St-Partice is very grateful to Mrs. Ross-Roy for consenting to have her Memories published.
Mrs. Georgina Simpson Ross-Roy is the daughter of Mr. Arthur Davidson Ross and of Mary Clarke Simpson Ross, the last Seigneur and Seigneuress of the Seigneury St. Gilles de Beaurivage. Mrs. Roy was born July 4, 1892, married to Mr. Carlyle Roy in 1921,has been a widow since 1974. Mr. & Mrs. Roy have four children, three girls and boy. At the age of 93 Mrs. Roy never sees a doctor and when asked why she replied, “Why see a doctor? I am well.”
My ancestors all came from Scotland. The first ones came to Canada with the army of General Wolf for the battle of Quebec in 1759. It was Captain Alexander Fraser of Lovat. I do not know much about Alexander Fraser. He possessed property in Scotland and was related to Lord Lovat. He would have become the next Lord Lovat but in staying in Quebec in Canada he had to abandon his property. A cousin inherited in his place. Mr. Fraser had only two daughters. One of them, Jane, married Arthur Davidson who was a judge on the King’s Bench about 1800. A daughter of Mr. Davidson, also called Jane, was the wife of David Ross my great grandfather.
Here in Quebec, Alexander Fraser acquired two seigneuries including the seigneury of Saint-Gilles de Beaurivage. He gave it to his grandson who gave it to Jane Davidson, married to David Ross, as I already said. Thus it was that the seigneury came into the hands of the Ross’s about 1825. Alexander Fraser had bought it form a Mr. Rageot de Beaurivage about 1780 but never lived there. He had a manor house at St.-Gilles. It was destroyed by fire. I do not think that David Ross, or my grandfather, ever used the seigneury. They never lived there. My father, meanwhile, lived on the seigneury, at Beaurivage (which later took the name of Saint Patrice). He was the first to live there. He built the house, the Manor House of Beaurivage. He did not rebuild it at Saint-Gilles because he felt the location was not close enough to the center of the seigneury. He chose the replacement at Beaurivage about ten miles from Saint-Gilles. It is there that my parents brought up their three children: Dorothy, Arthur Cecil and myself.
My sister was born in Montreal, me at Beaurivage. I was only two when my father died at the age of forty-seven. Therefore it was my mother who brought us up. She had all the responsibility for the farm and the seigneury.
My mother was born in Inverness in Northern Scotland. She came here at the age of ten. Her father died when she was two or three years old and her mother when she was ten years old. She had three brothers and the executors said “We have enough money to put the three boys through school but what will we do with the girl? What can we do with an orphan?” So they sent her to Montreal to a cousin of her father. They were great friends, these two cousins. They had promised each other should something happen to one the other would help out. This cousin was George Simpson in Montreal. He sent money to Scotland to bring my mother out saying, “Send us the girl. We will bring her up.” Therefore the executors put her on the ship and after a trip of three months my mother arrived in Montreal. She does not remember the details of her trip, except that is was a sailboat. She remembers the death of her mother and that is all.
George Simpson and Lucy, his wife therefore brought her up. After her husband lost a lot of money, on the stock market, Lucy Simpson, who had always been interested in the education of young girls, started a boarding school for daughters of employees of the Hudson Bay Company in Montreal. This school became, as years went by, one of the most prestigious private institutions in Montreal. It was a school for the people with money. Mrs. Simpson, who brought up my mother as her daughter, worked very hard for the recognition of women’s rights to a higher education. Before that women were nothing. Nothing at all. Good only for housekeeping and cooking. It was not necessary to send girls to university. All they needed was to know how to write. It was during the years 1875 to 1880 that we discovered that girls could do other things but work in the house. Lucy Simpson realized that girls could do more than they were doing. In those times women didn’t have the right to vote. We couldn’t do anything. We could not have a bank account even. Everything was for the men. Therefore she worked hard for women, especially in education, to give them an advantage. She herself received her education in England and spoke very good French. She believed that women could go out of the home and do other things. Her ideas were not well received at that time. She was ahead of her time. But she contributed greatly to having girls admitted to McGill.
My mother was of the first class of McGill girls. She did not attend Mrs. Simpson’s school. She went to another small school for girls only, taught by two schoolteachers of Mrs. Simpson’s. This school was at the corner of Sherbrooke and Stanley opposite the homes of two well-known persons, Sir William Van Horn and Lord Athelston, owner of the Star. There were about 100 children in this school. After her schooling, my mother was a schoolteacher for two years, at Dunham, in the Easter Townships, and then returned to McGill University. It was the first time, I repeat, that young girls were admitted to McGill. She studied in the faculty of arts, the only faculty that admitted girls. To study medicine they had to go to Queens University at Kingston or overseas. That was 1884. My mother studied two years at the university. She was married before finishing her studies and came to live at Beaurivage on the seigneury.
My father also was brought up in Montreal. Then he studied at the University of Queens in Kingston. He was a civil engineer, but is was the land that he liked, he wanted to be a farmer. Therefore when he built the house at Beaurivage and when they were married they went to live there. Summer, not winter, because it was too hard in the winter. They returned to Montreal. My father lived only seven years after his marriage. Therefore it was my mother who became Seigneuress.. (Next – the marriage of my parents.)
Vol. 3, No. 6 October 1985
I was born at the manor house as I have already said. The day before my birth the doctor, Doctor King an Englishman – there were several English doctors then – came down from St. Sylvestre, a distance of seven miles, and he stayed with my mother until I was born. My mother told me that he stayed 24 hours before I was born. That’s all that I know about my birth. It was in 1892, the fourth of July. In those days there was no question of hospitalization for births; people stayed at home. The doctor came the day before, with his horse and wagon. Sometimes, it was necessary to go get him because he didn’t always have a horse ready. He went also to see other sick people and then came back. Births went quite well. There were midwives, who were very used to labor, who looked after us after birth and aided the doctor. These people always came to the houses for the labor to the farms all around. The midwives stayed at the house to help the mother also, as was the custom.
About the Manor House, it was a house of wood with five stoves, I think, heated with wood. There was a large hall and a large foyer; on each side were antlers of deer, large antlers. It was lovely. Then, we came into a large living room with a stove in the middle. On the other side, in the dining room there was also a stove. Then we came to a room used exclusively for dishes because we had so many dishes at that time. From there we came to the kitchen with a big stove, a stove with two levels followed by another small kitchen, which was used only in the summer. Nearly everyone had a summer kitchen, which was closed in the winter. Upstairs we had five bedrooms, a stove in the bedroom of my mother, and another in the hallway. The rest was heated by pipes, which came from downstairs and came through the hall. One had to leave all the doors open. It heated but it was not very hot. When I was little we brought up water in pots. We washed, but it was very cold, in the basins. Anyway we had five stoves in the house. It was necessary to get up in the night to keep them going. It was my brother who got up at night in the winter. But we were not often there in the winter.
At the other side of the house there was a staircase for the servants and a large room for the two girls. We always had two maids. Also a small room for a man because we always had a man in the house. Between the kitchen and the dining room was the office where my mother kept all her books. It was there that the farmers came to pay their rents and exact accounts were kept. In the beginning the accounts were kept in English money, that is pounds, shillings and pence. My mother told me that my father spent many weeks after their marriage to change the books to dollars and cents. Living on the farm, that was always my life. My brother and I always loved the farm, but not my sister, she liked the city. But one had to go into town because there was nothing at Beaurivage. Nobody taught anything except the priest and my mother. There was a small convent, it was Catholic and French, and therefore we could not go. Not because we couldn’t talk French: we spoke French as well as English, but because we were Protestants. The Irish who were there had to speak French. Of the four sisters who lived at the convent there was one who spoke English, therefore my mother decided what to do. She decided to live in Quebec during the winter. My sister went to school; my brother and I had a governess, therefore when my mother had to return to take care of her affairs there was always someone with us. I don’t remember very much about those days because I was too young.
But what I remember, was called Scarlet Fever. My mother was away from the seigneury, and an epidemic had been declared. My mother told the governess not to go to the stores because almost all the children had been affected. But the governess went to see some friends, took me with her in a little shawl, where I got the fever. When my mother returned I was very ill. I was taken to the hospital for contagious diseases.
There was a hospital exclusively for these diseases in Quebec. It was in lower town near what is now La Palace Royale. I was there for six weeks. It was there that they kept people with scarlet fever. Also there were patients who had diphtheria and whooping cough, but in different rooms. And my mother had to stay with me during the six weeks, completely isolated with me. She always wore a white smock. The children, victims of scarlet fever, all had their mothers with them because there were only two or three nurses. That’s the way it was then. My mother could only go out in the evenings for a short while to get some air. No visitors were allowed. Nobody came into the hospital. Everything was left at the door. Those parents who came to see their children could only see and talk to them through the window. That is how they controlled the illnesses, and being extremely clean.
After six weeks I was better. It left me with weak eyes. My fever was at 104–105 for five or six days. Before leaving, one had to go through a special room at the entrance to the hospital. There they had a bath full of disinfectant. We took off all our clothes. We left there all our toys, dolls, books, which were all burned in a great big furnace. Nothing could go out. I was four years then and I remember very well that winter in Quebec.
Later, my mother decided to go to Montreal for the winters because she had more friends in Montreal than Quebec and she had lived there when she was younger. When I was ten years old we took an apartment on Tupper Street close to Atwater. In the winter we went to school. In the summer we returned to the country, to Beaurivage.
My parents were married in Montreal at the Anglican Cathedral. It was a grand marriage. The maids and the cook told me that my mother was so beautiful that the church was filled with people wanting to see the wedding. At that time it was the custom for people to attend weddings just for fun to see the wedding, to pass the time. She had a lovely white dress with a long train. It took eight small children, cousins, to hold the train. To the end of her life my mother kept her wedding dress. It was in a deep drawer in the hall, I saw it. It was of white satin.
The two families were well known. Both families were in the public eye, the Ross’s and the Simpson’s. The house of the Ross’s was among the most elegant in Montreal, on St. Gabriel Street near Beaubien house. It has since been demolished. My father had one brother and two sisters. His brother, George, was chief of the General Hospital, and a renowned diagnostician. He was dean of faculty of Medicine at McGill for three or four years. Like my father, he died young, in his forties. Curiously, men in those days didn’t live long.
Vol. 3, No. 7, November 1985
There we read and did our sewing. Remember that we had to do everything by hand. Our undergarments, our shirts, our pants, our pajamas and our nightgowns, we made them all ourselves. And all with buttons and button holes and there was a lot of work in that. There were also a lot of repairs, hems to take up, etc. Everything was of cotton or linen, no nylon. We played a lot, too. We had a lot of games; we played Whist and Euchre. We played a lot of cards. That pleased me very much.
I was also very young when the gramophone came out. In those days it was quite a thing to have a gramophone. One listened to music. My sister and I danced together. We put on the gramophone and we danced tangos and all the dances. We also walked our dogs a lot. We walked two or three miles with them and we always had friends who came and spent a week or two.
We read, we read a lot. My mother also read a lot. We did a lot of embroidery. We made our presents ourselves. Every year I made a nightgown for my mother and I embroidered a border in color on white cotton. We had no bought clothes. My mother and I made pajamas for my brother, in the summer of cotton, in the winter of flannel. We could not buy them ready made, we bought the material, and it was a lot of work. My sister made dresses. She was very good at sewing. She had a pedal machine. It was very hard on the legs but it was good exercise.
Also we went bathing often in the river. We had to make our bathing suits. I had a duster, I sewed it between the legs, and it was pleated above the knee as we see in movies. We went there, my sister and I, by pony. We tied him up, then we undressed and went bathing. We had water up to our knees. We couldn’t swim, it was just for fun. One of the nice trips that we took was a boat cruise on the Canada Steamship Line. We went down the river to Tadoussac then we up the Saguenay River to Chicoutimi. It was a lovely trip. We did it two or three times with my mother. It was usually an excursion of five days. There were also boats that went down the river from Toronto to Montreal and others from Montreal to Quebec. We passed the time.
Vol. 3, No. 8, December 1985
At Beaurivage we played croquet and badminton. We gardened. My mother was very fond of her garden. She had a large garden where we grew all our vegetables for the summer. Also fruits, raspberries, gadelles. We ate better than today. It was more natural. We had no chemical ingredients. We used animal ingredients.
And later we went by horse. I went riding often. It was between 1907 and 1909. I had my very own horse. He was born on the farm. It was a pony but not a small pony. It was a western pony, almost as big as a horse. I guess I trained him myself. That was difficult. They used to say I’d get killed but I survived. I went all over with him. He was sort of brown.
I don’t remember what I called him. We also had a carriage to go promenading. The pony for the carriage was called Mouche [Fly] because he went fast with his little feet. I took riding lessons in Montreal. There was a school on Hutchinson Street. We started the classes in the stable and latter we went up on Mount Royale. In those days girls always rode sidesaddle. I had trouble with my back and the doctor thought it would be better if I rode a horse like the men therefore I was the first in Montreal to ride a horse like men, astride. But I had to have a special outfit. I had to have it made at Morgan’s. I couldn’t wear pants. We could not appear on the street in pants. That was not for girls. At Morgan’s they didn’t know what to do about it. But they came to this solution; they made me a special outfit. It was like culottes, or like a skirt divided in half and closed with buttons. When I got on the horse I buttoned the outfit to be pants. When I was finished I buttoned it differently to make a skirt. In this way I could walk to the house, but not with pants, the police would have stopped me. There were policemen all over in Montreal to keep the peace. There were robbers, they took our purses.
Before 1911 we could walk on the Mountain, then they did a lot of work on roads and many Italians came. After that we could never walk safely on the Mountain.
We had five farms. The farms measured five acres, about thirty acres in all, and were adjoining. We had dairy cows. Each morning we took the milk to the buttery in the village. We also had pigs. Pork sold well at the markets in Quebec, the grain market. We always had hens. My mother always took care of the hens. She was like that. The little hen house was beside our house. My mother collected the eggs. Sometimes we did too. There were always five or six horses. Large horses for doing the work in the fields. Also horses to pull carriages.
My brother worked on the farm. He had only one wish, to finish his schooling and become a farmer like his father. He went to school in Montreal, where he finished high school. I think that in those days school only went through 9th grade. He finished at about sixteen years old. From then on he always stayed at the farm until war broke out. My mother, my sister and I traveled. But my brother always wanted to stay there, in the winter also naturally, even though he was there often all by himself. He had a riding horse and a carthorse. He went off to the station in St. Agapit, 18 miles, or to Scott junction, 12 miles. He liked to play hockey. He was a member of a hockey club in Quebec where he went by cart or by train. He played until hockey became commercial, after that he would never play.
The trains were important. We could only travel by train. It was too long to go by cart to Quebec. When coming from Quebec to the Seigneury we crossed the river and we took the Grand Trunk from Levis to St. Agapit. From there, a carriage or a sleigh took us to Beaurivage. To do the eighteen miles in winter it took us almost five hours. It was a long trip. My mother did it two or three times in the winter. Me, too, and I liked that.
To come back to my brother, he lived the life of a real farmer. He was outside for five or six hours in the morning looking after the machines.
There were many machines, reapers, harvesters, etc. They were not big machines like today but we had many of them. We also had employees who helped and did other necessary things. In the spring we tapped three hundred maple trees and we had a sugar house. We also had oxen. We used them when there were no roads in the woods to bring out maple syrup to the flat area. Later, about 1910, my brother built a large sugar cabin. In the summer we took hay rides and we drove the horses while the men loaded the hay wagons. We liked that.
Vol. 4, No. 1, January 1986
When I was young, during the winter holidays, we stayed in Montreal. After the First World War we spent the winters at Beaurivage. We had a large toboggan slide. Also, we skied. Skiing had just started at that time. And we played cards. We did not play Bridge, we played Whist.
I remember that, close to the manner house, in the garden there was a little house for ice for storing the meat. In the month of January men went down to the river and cut large square blocks of ice with special saws. They took them in through a large door in the icehouse and covered them with bran to better preserve them. We kept our meat in sacks during the summer and we took ice from the icehouse into the house. In the winter we kept our meat on the gallery in a covered area.
I always liked the country with all the animals, walks in the snow with my dogs. It was nothing to walk five or six miles during a day. The dogs were free, but we kept them on the road. We climbed toward Ste-Sylvestre. The hills were difficult. Or we took a tour to the little river. There was a road on each of the two sides of the river Beaurivage.
My sister and I took walks and stopped at houses. Sometimes the people came to the door when they saw us going by and invited us in. We talked to them. They were always happy to have us come in. It was a great visit. When they saw us coming they opened the door and said, “Come in Madame, Mademoiselle.” Then we entered into the drawing room, not the kitchen, into the drawing room. They opened the drapes to give us a surprise. If they were Irish they always gave us a cup of tea. The kettle was always on the stove. The tea was always hot. They also offered cake or bread.
My sister, I am thinking in passing, taught sewing and knitting to the girls of the village. She gave them the wool and the needles. She sewed very well and showed them how. At that time she was 15 or 16 years old.
You see the people didn’t pay for their land. They did not buy it. When the seigneur conceded, they paid nothing. But they paid a land tax, which they called rent. This rent depended on the size of their land. It was $4 a year for a land of 90 arpents. The least was 75cents for little lots, little points, or little abuts, called gores in English. The farmers had the right to buy their piece of land once a year, between the 1st and 7th of March; this purchase did away with their rent. The price of the purchase was based on the annual rent. There were not very many who bought their piece of land. But it was necessary that my mother be at the house from the 1st to the 7th of March each year. If she was not it was the priest who occupied it. But she was almost always there. It was announced from the church “Mrs. Ross will be there on a certain day at a certain hour,” so that all could come to pay their rent. They came there in the morning and during the rest of the day. She kept the accounts but when she was away it was the priest who kept the accounts for her. She was the only educated one. The farmers who worked on our farms barely read and wrote very little more. They went two or three years to school, that’s all. I think that the most that they could go to school was five years. Therefore, they barely read and wrote.
In the autumn my mother went to each village after the harvest, when the people had more money. She went to seven villages, I think. They were Ste. Agapit, Ste. Gilles, Ste. Agathe, two Ste. Sylvestre – east and west, Armagh, St. Patrice de Beaurivage and also Ste. Narcisse. Our seigneury was next to the seigneury of Beauce, and that of the Sisters [Ursulines], and the seigneury Ste. Crioux. On the south were the townships. About 1860, all the land that was not ceded belonged to the seigneur. She had a stand of wood and harvested the trees for paper.
Vol. 4, No 2, Feb 1986
The farms of the ceded lands had cultivated fields and gardens. Most of the farms measured five arpents by thirty. They were also much smaller farms because they couldn’t pay much. For the little points or gores, the rent was about a $1.27. If they did not pay my father could sell the land, but he could not keep the land for himself. But that didn’t happen very often. If we let five years go by we could not collect the arrears. I do not know how many farms were ceded, but the seigneury was approximately 300 miles square. In 1936 it contained approximately 500 farms. Each parcel was much deeper than wide, to give better access to roads. On the seigneury we had one river. At first everybody wanted a piece of land with a river front. If they didn’t get on the river front they got it on the road.
It happened that farmers came to the house and said they couldn’t pay. Sometimes they brought a bag of potatoes or apples. From Ste. Severin others brought nuts. They also had a tithe to pay, I think. I think the tithe came first. It was always like that in the province of Quebec.
In 1936 (actually 1940. MJG), the government paid on the basis of the land value. We sent all the papers to establish the value of each farm. The government paid us and adjusted the old rent to a municipal tax if they had not already bought the land from us. In that way all the farmers now owned their land. My mother was happy with this law. It was a lot of work for her to keep the books and the government was very generous in it’s application of this law. In this seigneury were contained the parishes of Ste Sylvestre, and Ste Sylvestre west, farther west, Ste. Severin, the furthest from the center, our village, Beaurivage, Ste. Gilles, Ste. Narcisse, Ste. Agathe, Ste. Agapit, Dosquet.
During French rule, and later during English rule, the seigneur was obliged to build a grist mill and a saw mill for the land owners and farmers. There were also carding mills. In the time of my father they were also required to keep registered animals, a bull and a stud pig.
When they came to the house they talked to my mother and asked her counsel about what they should do and what their children should do. They came through a door at the back where my mother had an office. They did not come in the front door. It was the practice of the time. They would have been shy about going into the drawing room. But when we went to their houses they always opened the front door for us and ushered us into the drawing room, as I have already said. The advice that they asked was if they should leave the farm. Also, often, when the mother and the father were elderly, they gave their farm to one of the boys who was obliged to keep them in their house. They came to consult and see if there was a good idea or if they should, rather, sell the farm, and what they would do with their children, if the children needed instruction.
The oldest of the boys very often became priests. The oldest of the girls often became sisters. This is not the case now, I think. It has changed, has it not? They also consulted my mother when they were sick, when a girl, not married, was pregnant and they didn’t know what to do. And then, they came to talk to my father or my mother rather than the priest. But for marriage counseling they went to see the priest. And after that they went to the notary public for their papers. There was one at Ste. Sylvestre, four miles away. They always had marriage contracts. And as for mail, there was mail every day in that time. It came from Ste. Agapit, 18 miles away.
Vol. 4 no. 3, Mar.1986.
Beside our farms was the refectory farm. The Catholic Church and the Presbytery were on the front of the farm. We were always friends with the priest. When my father, and later my mother, were away, they always left the seigneury books of the land, with the priest. He always took care of them. The people could pay their rents at the Presbytery. When they had one, two, three or four dollars they would come to pay their rent.
From time to time we went to mass. We had a pew at the church because the priest did not pay any tax on his land; therefore we did not pay for our pew. The priest had the first small pew and we had the second. It was only for us. If we were not at church no one could use our pew. It was reserved for the seigneur. Our servants could sit there, if we were not there. In those days everyone paid for his or her pews, in all Catholic and Protestant churches
The service naturally was in Latin. The parish priest, O’Reilly, spoke both English and French. One Sunday the sermon was in French, the next Sunday in English. That was curious because the French and Irish didn’t get along well. Therefore when the sermon was in French, the Irish left the Church before the sermon. They didn’t want to listen. But the French didn’t do that.
We went to church for the special holidays, such as Christmas and Easter, or on other special occasions. There was no Protestant church at Beaurivage. We had to go to Ste Sylvester West, which was 8 miles. The priest came from the district of Leeds. Therefore we went to the Catholic Church when there was something special like baptisms of someone we knew. An Anglican priest came two or three times in the summer to give us communion in our home.
When I was young ,I really liked going to see the sister of the priest. We often went to supper at the presbytery. The two sisters of the priest, the Misses O’Reilly, entertained at the presbytery. They were good cooks and made good meals. They invited us for supper and always made us good things. But we never had supper with the priest. Mr. O’Reilly was served in the dining room by his sister. As for us, we ate in the kitchen with the two Misses O’Reilly. The priest, that was something else.
They were big houses, those of the priests. I think that in that house, there were eight bedrooms, because they often had conferences and all the priests from the neighbouring parishes came. In almost all the parishes, the houses of the priests were large. And it was almost always the relatives who were the servants. But the priest always ate by himself in the dining room. I don’t know why, but it was like that. If my mother went to supper, she would eat with Rector O’Reilly, but not the children. My mother also always went in the front door. We, the children, always by the back door. It was only at the presbytery that it was like that. At the farmers, we always went in the front door. That was the door they opened for us. Times have changed, haven’t they?
I also remember a special holiday when they built a new church. They wanted to consecrate the bells. Therefore at the time of the service, they asked some to be godmothers for the consecration of the bells. My mother, my sister and I were godmothers. My brother was a godfather. One had to give money for the bells. My mother gave, I think, one hundred dollars to that cause. It was very interesting. When the bells had been blessed, it was a great service, a big holiday. The bells were rung for the first time. The bells were rung for a half-hour. It was a grand ceremony, followed by an evening party. Everybody from the parish took part. The young of the village had put out the tables along the side of the road and had made food. There were drinks, no shortage of drinks, of whisky. I was about ten at that time. I remember well. It did something for me, you know. I was a godmother and I had something to do at the church. It was an honour for us because only a few people were invited to be godmothers or godfathers.
Vol. 4 No. 5. May 1986
As soon as war was declared, that is to say two days after war started, my brother went to Quebec quickly to enlist. However they were not ready to enlist people. They told him when they were ready, they would tell him. Then they telephoned him, I think about three weeks later: “You may come and enlist now. Bring nothing with you. You will get everything, clothes, everything you need.” He left then for Valcartier and all the family escorted him.
During this time, Todd Lewis, my sister’s fiancé, came from the west to enlist also, and his brother, so there were the three of them. My sister was married during the war. My brother enlisted as a regular soldier. Later he was sent to England to get his officer’s commission. Then he was sent to France, where he was during the whole war. He fought at the Somme. He died at Amiens almost at the end of the war.
As for me, in 1915, I went to France as a volunteer. There were novices, like you wouldn’t believe. There weren’t many nurses in the hospitals in France. One of my friends had a friend, a lady, who lived in Cannes and she told her that there weren’t many girls who worked in the hospitals. That wouldn’t do. Soon there were girls, not well educated, but who had an aptitude. They made good nurses.
I enlisted. In order to go and work in the hospitals, we had to have enough money to sustain ourselves. We had to pay all our expenses, even our food. It was not to be at a cost to the government. We were seven, who left under those conditions, in 1915, in April.
We left New York for Bordeaux. We were not afraid. At the time there were not yet submarines. Later it was worse. Also, when we are young, we are not afraid. We were seven Canadians, as I said, including two boys. They were not strong enough to go into the army and they wanted to do something; so they came with us. They worked, as we did, at the hospital.
Vol.4 No. 6, June 1986
When we disembarked at Bordeaux we took the train to Cannes. Mde. Ridet, to whom we had spoken about our needs, met us at the station and settled us in a small hotel. After that, two others and I went to the hospital of Gallia. It had been a big, deluxe hotel. It had belonged to a German. The government of France had taken all the hotels that belonged to them (the Germans). The Germans, themselves, had taken the hotels and turned them into hospitals. That is where we worked; it was not an army hospital; it was a civilian hospital. It depended on the government, but it was civilian.
We got many wounded from the war while I was there. I was not trained as a nurse; I did not know what to do, but I spoke French. I was the only one who spoke French. The others did not speak French. So they did different things: making and cutting bandages. We didn’t have bandages, so we bought lengths of cotton and muslin, cut and rolled them around a small wheel. It was a lot of work. There were three or four who did only that during the length of our stay. Others worked in the pharmacy, distributing medical supplies. But I, who spoke French, was told: You will go to the patients and do the dressings. I did not know what to do, so I asked them, once I got there, what would I do? They told me: go and see, do what the others do. But when I was with a patient for the first time, it was very apparent. But the soldiers said: it is not like that; you must do it the right way. They, themselves, knew how to do their own dressings. They showed me how to put on the bandages. This was not their first test. Therefore they helped me in my training. There was one large room for dressings. The wounded entered this room in turn. Everything was very proper. It was much more correct than in our hospitals today. Everything was disinfected. We wore white, a white apron and a small veil on our heads.
The most striking memory was when they sent me to help prepare the dead. At that time we had to dress them, after their death, in their soldier’s uniform. Then a nurse met me and said: there is a death downstairs, will you come to help me put on his clothes? I stood at the door for two or three minutes before going in. I had never seen a death. That was very hard. Later, we abandoned that practice. There were too many deaths. We could not provide enough. We put them in sheets.
The first time I went into the operating room, because they were short of help, it was for the amputation of a leg. I had to hold the leg while the doctor cut it off. It was a little frightening. The doctor asked me: “Are you going to faint?” I said, “ No.” The wounded man had got a shell fragment in his leg. Therefore they cut above the knee. He survived. I have a photo of him.
The patients were mostly French. There were also Blacks from Senegal. The French had not enlisted; they removed them from their villages and took them to the front line. There were hundreds who were killed there. It was to the sick and wounded that we said that the Senegalese, themselves, were the ones we could relate to. If you asked me why they accepted that, I don’t know; I had the impression that they accepted it as if it was inevitable. Senegal belonged to France, therefore they had no choice. There were also Algerians, but it was mostly volunteers, who came from Algeria. Others came from Morocco. We also got German prisoners. They were difficult because we couldn’t talk to them. We kept them only a few days, and then we sent them to special hospitals. There was only one who spoke to me. He gave me his marriage certificate to send to his wife. I told him “No, I can’ t do that, but don’t be upset. All your personal belongings are carefully guarded and would be sent to your wife, if something happens to you. She would get everything.” As soon as a soldier died, everything was sent to his family. You know we had no right to touch any personal belongings of a prisoner. We would have been put in prison. I spoke a little German, but not enough to talk to him in German. However I understood a little. Moreover he did not speak English. I couldn’t talk much to him. He died in my arms. We did not put him on the bed. We put him on a stretcher and took him to the cellar. It was there also that we changed the clothes of the wounded that came. There were those who had not changed their clothes for several days. We also changed their dressings, which sometimes had not been changed for days.
There were also Russians. They were difficult. We had to be careful and keep the French at the hospital and not anywhere on the streets, because they fought with the Russians, in the taverns, when they went out. Probably also with the English. As for the Americans, they were not there yet. I am talking about 1915–1916. That was before the arrival of the Americans in 1917.
Vol. 4, No. 7, July 1986
After that, I went to the north of France. I felt I was too far from the battles. I wanted to get closer to the front. I stayed a few days there. Then I left for a few days of holiday in England and I met the Marquise de la Panouse. She had started the task from a taste for milk. It was a canteen, a job where we gave coffee to the men, to the troops who were boarding the trains. When they stopped at stations, we passed them coffee. They had started that in England. Sometimes the soldiers did not eat during the trip, two days, on the train. So I asked Mme. de la Panouse if she had a place for me at Meaux. Meaux was only thirty miles from Paris. To start, I went there, to Meaux. It was only there that the men on the trains were given coffee as they passed.
My work, in total, was comprised of preparing special diets, also the kitchen, the care of the recreation room, and the preparation of the coffee to take to the station. When trains arrived, we were notified when a train of wounded came to Meaux. We took coffee to the wounded and gave it to them in their coaches. Each had their own cup. Therefore we only had to refill their cups. We didn’t have enough cups for everyone. Each man had a cup, a plate, a knife, a fork, and a spoon. After that I started cooking, not in a kitchen, but in a room in the interior of the barracks. I was set up there with two English girls, two Canadians, ladies from Meaux, who came to help me serve the men who had special needs. We had some dieticians among us. We also had sick people there. We served the greatest possible number, before sending them on to England; but there weren’t enough trains to take them. Therefore, we had to keep them there. Those soldiers came directly from the front to Meaux. We also looked after wounded horses, there in the barracks. Not us, but in sick bays for horses. There were veterinarians, older men who couldn’t go to war. Thus they were sent there. There were many wounded horses. We used horses only. There were no motor vehicles. There were also mules, which carried goods towards the front, to go right to the front. They did very well in the woods, better than the horses.
Apart from that, there were doors, large doors, on the two sides of the barracks, off the large yard. From there, they were taken to the first floor, where we got the sick soldiers and the wounded, the badly wounded foremost, who had come directly from the front, lying down. If they had no chance to survive, we settled them at Meaux. Those who had a chance, we sent further, by train, to more distant hospitals. There was an emergency operating room, one big operating room only, not too well equipped. The doctors did the best they could. At that hospital there were only two floors. The ground floor was for the sick, wounded horses, and the first floor for the soldiers. There could be a hundred to a hundred and twenty-five horses. As soon as they were healed, they were sent back to the front. If nothing much could be done for them, they were killed. Sometimes, if we had the means of transportation, we sent them further like the men. But there wasn’t much means of transportation, not enough trains ran.
At the front the horses pulled the canons. My husband, for example, needed six horses to pull a large canon. They had to take all the food to eat, huge things, which they had to put in front. The men were not too burdened, the horses carried as much as possible. Horses transported but not all the men. There were some who walked. It is difficult to recapture that reality today. One cannot understand. I ask myself: is it true those things, which happened? One hundred men sleeping almost on the ground on straw mattresses. Things were not as well organized at Meaux as at the hospital at Cannes. At Cannes, far from the front, we had time to organize and do things. But there, at Meaux, we were in the war zone. At the same time, when I left England, one had to have permission from the minister of war to go there. At that time the front was at Chateau-Thierry.
There was also near us a small airport. The planes were very new; they were very small. They had to be cranked, to activate them by hand; it was hard.
It was very difficult, a rope was tied to a horse and the horse pulled it. The brother-in-law of my sister, a Mr. Lewis, was killed. He was a pilot. He was taken prisoner-of-war in France and after that, we never heard of him. I tried through the Red Cross. His mother tried to get news. We think he was a prisoner of the Germans. We know nothing more. In a small plane, without a roof, only two in the plane and sometimes only one, they left like that.
Remember. . . Mrs. Georgina Ross-Roy is the daughter of Dame Ross, the last Seigneuress of the seigneury of Saint Giles of Beaurivage. Mrs. Ross-Roy has been telling us of her memories which are linked to the great events that have happened in our century. Mde Ross-Roy recorded her account on tape to Ghislaine Mercier during interviews. Our chronicler, Rosario Bilodeau, adapted the accounts to the requirements articles in the journal.
Vol.4, No. 8, August 1986
But, after that, about a month later, I had the notion that the men had nothing to do. I told myself: this cannot be. There were those that were well enough to do things. They had nothing to read, nothing to do. They were discouraged. Their morale was not good.
I told myself: I must do something. So I sent a telegram to Madame de la Panisse asking her if, possibly, she could send me some books, some games, some playing cards, not important how they were, some buttons, thread, some yarn, so that the men could go into a room to repair their underwear. So she sent me all sorts of things: cigarettes, candy and I asked the administration to give me a large room on the first floor beside the room of the sick and I told them: I am not asking for money, nothing; give me a room, give me tables and chairs and I will do the rest myself. I organized everything in a couple of weeks; in two or three weeks I had a recreation room where the men could go. Each day I paid for the newspaper, a little Paris newspaper, to find something to read.
We were sent books. That was great for the men, a distraction. That room was on the ground floor, beside the sick horses.
As for me I did not live at the barracks. I boarded with an old lady. She was alone in a house; she was a widow and her son had been killed in the war. This lady, because she was over seventy, could get a little extra coal to heat her house.
So, I said to myself: this is good for me; because there were many houses where there was no heat. The ration of coal was two small sacks. The houses were heated with two or three kilos of coal. With that lady, I was well off. But I ate at the barracks. We were allowed to eat there. Also, I made my coffee. Food was rationed. The same for the men. There was practically no meat. For the horses also, oats was rationed. As for the sick or wounded horses, we did not give them a human diet. It probably would have been too dangerous for their illnesses.
But the food was very bad for the men who were diabetic. For the diabetics, I have not told you what they gave them. They were given potatoes, peeled and mashed, with a very little bit of salt, because salt was in short supply, and sardines, sardines in boxes. They had large quantities of sardines.
We sent to England those men, who were sick, for nursing. That was the noon meal. In the evening it was potato soup. We mashed the potatoes in water, with a little salt and a tiny bit of butter and we gave them a little piece of cheese. The dieticians, later, returned to a regime for the diabetics. As for me, I ate the same food as the men, when I had no other. Sometimes I went to the bakery and bought my meal. It was always difficult. We made coffee.
The very sick were served on the 2nd. Floor. There was a special menu for wounded soldiers. When they were very ill, they had meat. They all had wine every day, Pinard. It was like vinegar, but they liked it. They couldn’t drink water. We could not drink water in France at that time. It was not drinkable. In the morning we served coffee and tea. In the evening we served a bottle of Pinard. It was not very strong.
Others went down to a dining room, on the floor with the horses. The food was very bad. The officers had a different table. There were not many. At that time, during the Great War, officers were not sent to the same hospitals as the soldiers. From custom, they put them in other hospitals, better maintained. It was yet a gentleman’s war. I was rather annoyed! Because I knew, I was told, that the manager, who was an officer, a lieutenant, who was allotted the money to buy the food and I knew that he put some in his own pocket. Then I was shocked. Then one day, I heard that a general was coming to inspect the hospital. “Ah, ah.” I thought. “I will do something.” I dressed carefully and I went where the general was set up. I opened the door and a soldier demanded to know why I was there. I said, “I am the superintendent of the cafeteria, I am a Canadian civilian, I wish to see the general.” The soldier asked, “Why?” I replied, “ I have things to talk about.” Then I went in. I told him that the food was very bad and that I had heard said that the manager put money, which was to go to the nourishment of the soldiers, in his pocket, and it was up to him, the general, to do something because the moral of the soldiers was very low and they were very restless.
Then he stared at me. Then he said to me, “You are very young, aren’t you?” I said, “Yes.” “You don’t know much about the war.” I replied: “Perhaps I know more than you think. And I know about the men. You must do something.” And I explained. I said, “All my relatives are in the war; the Canadians are at the front and here is a man who steals from the soldiers: that should not be. You must do something. I demand it of you!” The next morning he came during the men’s breakfast. He did an inspection, unknown to the others, of the dining room and the kitchen. After that, the food was better. He had to do something, you understand. Even a woman could do something.
Vol. 4, No. 9, September 1986
Coming back to the wounded, one day I looked out the door and I saw men, perhaps thirty, I think, that I counted, that were coming towards the hospital. The first soldier had his hands on the shoulders of a sergeant, who was walking ahead. Following, each man had his hands on the shoulders of the man who preceded him. It was gas that had hit them. They were all blind. It was a gas, which was put in the shells; they exploded and blinded those who were hit. It was the Germans who used them first. The gas was called mustard gas. It blinded the men in a couple of hours.
These men came from the war. We kept them two, or three days, and then we sent them to hospitals further away when there were available trains. There were those hospitals all over, in hotels, all over France, in large houses, in offices converted to hospitals. Those gases also caused stomach pain, vomiting, choking. Some died.
Do you know what they told the men to do? My husband told me this. When they were told that gas might come, they told them to take a handkerchief, or if they didn’t have a handkerchief, to tear a piece from their shirt, cut it, urinate on it and put it over their mouth and nose. It was a big help. Something in the urine protected against the gas. My husband told me that he had to do that several times, also.
My husband was studying at McGill when war broke out. I don’t remember that moment. He wanted to enlist, but he had typhoid fever. He couldn’t enlist until 1917. Then he became part of a regiment, made up of young men from McGill, the McGill Siege Battery. They sailed from Halifax on June 23. One of his buddies was Brooke Claxton.
He was a sergeant in the army, and after that he became a lawyer, later a minister in the federal government at the beginning of 1950. My husband was then a part of that group. They went to England where they spent some time. They were in the artillery. The group was made up of five officers and 197 men. In sum, a battery, a unit of the artillery, where they combined pieces of artillery and material necessary for their function. And it also included the men that made it up. My husband didn’t tell me many of the details of the way in which the unit was sent to the front.
Then, my husband became part of the infantry. He was sent to the front, to Mons in Belgium, towards the north. He served in the trenches with the rats. He told me of one night, he was in bed there, towards the side to try to sleep, and a shell exploded. His buddy, beside him, was killed and shortly after the rats ate him. [Here Mrs. Roy could not stay her tears.] It was sad; because it was then that we should have known to stop the war. It was because of those things that I was for peace. The war did nothing for anybody. Not even for the winners.
When they were weeks in the trenches, they couldn’t always wash themselves. They found little potholes for their toilet. What was the most difficult for the men was removing the lice and fleas from their clothing when they were in the trenches. They bit, those little bugs. The men slept in the trenches on the ground also. There were also many rats. They carried illnesses such as cholera. My husband did not suffer but others around him were affected. There was a hospital for those who suffered from cholera. My husband did not receive a single wound. But it was from the fleas that the soldiers suffered the most. The trenches were very narrow so the men could hardly move. They were just big enough for a man to hide in.
As for me, the last three weeks that I spent in Meaux, we could not go to bed. We had to go to the basement because of shells. Planes came over every night. That should not have been. All hospitals had to have a red cross painted on their walls to indicate they were not to be bombed. But it didn’t always work. There were shells, which burst just outside our barracks. I spent the last three weeks that I was at Meaux without going to bed, without undressing. We washed our hands and face in the morning, but that was all. It was not that the noise or the work stopped us from sleeping. It was because everybody was in the basement. Some nights I went up to see the wounded with my lantern, my flashlight. We could not have a light. Everything was in darkness. The men talked, then cried, and then demanded things. We could not see to pass. They wanted a glass of milk, something to eat, but we couldn’t do anything. We couldn’t see them. We fell on a man sleeping on the floor then again on another.
Even in the operating room all was in darkness. One evening there was a big operation, an amputation. But when the alarm sounded, there was no light; they had cut off the lights completely in the whole town. Therefore the amputation, a leg of a wounded, was stopped right in the middle of the operation.
I was in an adjoining room and I came out with my flashlight to go see the men. They told me “You will be put in prison if you don’t put out that light.” Soldiers patrolled all the streets and if there was a light on they entered the house and it was prison for the people who were there. Security measures were strict to avoid bombings.
After those three weeks I left because my brother was dead. I knew I had to go back to Canada to be with my mother. I therefore went to England because I was too tired. I was not able to do more. So they told me to go to England for a few days. I took the train and went to London. I was in a little boarding house, whose name I had been given. It was there that I understood that my brother was dead. It was in 1918, in the month of August. The war was to finish. If the war had continued I would have returned.
My mother accepted the death of my brother with great anguish, as all mothers did. I think it was worse for the mother than for the children. At the beginning, in 1915, we got letters from my brother nearly every week. We received packets each week. We knitted socks and mittens. We made cakes, candies, and maple cream and we sent them all. There were some that they didn’t get, but usually they received them. They were stolen perhaps by someone hungry enough to do that. And my brother couldn’t say much because of being censured. All letters from the men were opened. Many military persons were given that task. Sometimes there were pieces cut out or lines erased. There were specialists to erase certain passages. They did not have the right to talk about what went on at the front. Only about the temperature, about good and bad times, and a little about themselves, of their health. Nothing much.
When I left in April 1915, my mother already had a son at the front. But she accepted well that I go. She agreed with me. I would not have gone otherwise as I did not have the money. She gave me money to go and sent me money every month. My mother was already very “feminist,” ahead of her time. There was no question of a person to stay without heat at a house. We would help them; do all that we could to get help. Much more than during the Second War, I think. During the Second War, we knew more of what war was like. We were more afraid. In1914, we didn’t know what war was like.
I must add here, before ending this period, that I made friends in Canne outside of work. There was there a lady, very interesting, who lived on a large property. As soon as she heard that there were Canadians in Cannes, she came to meet us. It was the Marquise of Morris. She asked us to visit her. We went sometimes for lunch. She had a car and a chauffeur, a man of seventy therefore too old for the army, so she could hire him. Sometimes he came for us and we had tea or we went on a car tour of the Maritime Alps. She was a very wealthy lady. She had a husband who explored in Africa before he died. He disappeared before 1900. Her sons had also explored and had been killed by native Africans. Therefore she had no one. She was all alone. She lived in a large chateau, with a big garden. Only three servants remained of the fifteen she had before the war. She had a guard dog. He always stayed in the entrance to her room. She said “If the Germans come, my dog would not let them into my room.” He was a vicious dog, like a big boxer. Her husband had worked for a count in the French government. Africa then was little known. She did not know herself where he died. He was reported missing and the government informed his wife. We had, as another distraction, some movies, pieces from the theatre played by troupes from Paris. There was a large hall in Cannes. And then, as you know, we worked all the time. It was not five days, it was seven days a week of work and we didn’t have many holidays. We availed ourselves a little from the Mediterranean to go swimming in the summer.
Vol. 4, No 10, October 1986
When we called a hospital English, some didn’t know the difference between English and Canadian. We were not well known at that time and when I told them I was not English, but Canadian, they said “pardon,” they were excused. They were ready to substitute the word English for Canadian. I told them that it was not necessary.
It was in September 1918 that I returned to Canada after the death of my brother, as I already said. The war ended the following November. Then on returning, we disembarked at Montreal. My sister, who was married, was with me. Her husband was still at the front. She was pregnant and was made to return from England according to arrangements. Therefore we came back, both of us. My mother joined us in Montreal. It was a sad meeting. My brother had been dead for a month. My mother greatly hoped that he would come back alive. All the young men that I had known and my cousins, all were dead. There were none left.
As for my brother he died after the battle of Amiens. Once the battle ended, my brother went back in for the wounded and a shell exploded near him. He was wounded on the 8th of August. They took him to where there was a hospital, previously a hospice for old people, which they had turned into a hospital. He died on the 10th and was buried in the cemetery behind the hospital. The front was now moved several miles from Meaux. It was when the Germans were marching on Paris. They had been stopped before getting to Meaux, a little closer to Chateau-Thierry.
When we were returning, the war was on still, so we had to be very careful. We had war ships all around us. We traveled very slowly. On board, there were many officers, and politicians. The mail also. Ministers were going to America for conferences. On the ship it was difficult enough. All the time we had to wear our life preservers, except when we ate. At night we could take them off and put them beside our bed. There were no lights at night. We spent the whole night without reading, in darkness, because of submarines. We were told they were around us, but we didn’t encounter any, thankfully. Among the passengers there were soldiers, who had been seriously wounded and were being returned to their families. During the trip I was not sick. I like traveling by boat. The voyage was calm.
While I was at Cannes and Meaux, I got news from my mother every week. She sent me food, maple sugar, maple syrup, cakes, socks and mittens for the men. They needed them. And that was in addition to all the money she sent me. At the hospital, the men knitted, when they were able. These things served them well when they returned to the front. Many returned to the front when they were well enough. It was cold, you understand, in the north of France.
I also got news from my brother. He sent me telegrams on my birthday and at Christmas. We also met in England at Christmas 1916. My brother enlisted as a regular soldier. After having been at the front, he was sent to England to take courses to become an officer. That was why I was able to spend Christmas with him. It was at Tunbridge Wells, south of London. There, there was a large military camp. He took courses for three months. After that I went back to Cannes and he to the front, as an officer, as lieutenant. That was the only time that I saw him.
And now about my sister, she came to visit her fiance and they were married in England in 1916. Her fiance remained a soldier and served at the front in France. I did not participate in her wedding, because I was already serving in France. Her husband could only get leave for the weekend. He left on Friday, they were married on Saturday, he returned on Monday. She did not see him after that until the end of the war. My sister came to Meaux with me for a while. Later, she was sent back because she was pregnant. She couldn’t stay in France. They made her return to England.
Vol. 4, No 11, November 1986
As for the civilian population, I think they suffered most from the cold. Coal came from the east of France. All was rationed and especially coal. The fighting was around the mines, it was the battlefield. Butter, meat and milk were rationed, cheese less. The refugees, those from Belgium, could die from hunger. The Germans, when they entered Belgium, took all the supplies. Many of the Belgians took refuge in France. One time, about twenty Belgians, men, women and children, arrived at our barracks at Meaux, and they asked if they could stay. I asked them what they had. They replied that they had been walking for ten days. Their only nourishment had been beet roots, which they had pulled from the ground. They had to eat. Then the doctor came and called me. He told me,” Be careful not to give them too much to eat because it will kill them”. Their stomachs had shrunk. They cried for more to eat. We made them go to bed and told them that the next morning we would give them more to eat. They were dying of hunger. They walked continually for ten days. Their shoes were worn out. They had nothing on their feet. At night they had to hide. They slept on the ground. In the morning they had to try to walk. Later they went to the town hall to get accommodations. The French welcomed them. There were houses for the children. Sometimes, they were the children of refugees. Other times it was the children whom the refugees picked up during the march. We never knew their parents. They were placed in orphanages.
To come back to my husband, at the time of the war he was studying science, particularly chemistry. He had finished two years of studies and had started the third year. He did not finish his studies after the war. He married instead. He had spent most of the winter of 1918-19 in France, near where the war ended. I don’t really know what he did there. The treaty had not been signed yet. They had to wait until everything was signed and that kept the men at the front. Also they had to transport them. They didn’t have enough ships to transport all the men. He left to return to Canada on May 3, 1919 from Southampton in the south of England. In his diary he wrote. “They gave each of us one pound to pay our expenses on board.” One pound was worth about one dollar in 1919. They played bridge. They arrived at Halifax at the end of May. But not the same group as at departure. But, by chance, there were some of his friends on board. Of their group, sixteen were dead.
Among the happenings on the return trip was a large concert. The officers wanted to organize one. My husband was a musician, as was a friend, Dave Williams, an organist. He also wanted to get an organ; I think because there was a piano. So the officers came to ask him [Dave] if he would compose music, because he was also a composer, also if he would sing – he had a good voice. He said “yes,” and asked where they would like the concert. They replied, “in the officers Quarters.”He remarked, “I cannot go there. I am only a soldier. I cannot go to the officer’s quarters.” They replied, “That is all right. It will be overlooked.” He retorted, “No, I will not play. The others, my buddies, my friends could not go there. Therefore, I will not play, if we cannot be all together.” Then they said, “ We will let all the men come.” Thus, the concert took place. He composed the music, he played the organ and he sang in front of all those men. It was the only day that they could go to the officer’s quarters. It was very strict at that time. Perhaps it is the same today …
That Dave Williams took his doctorate at New York, at the University of New York, I think, in music. He was an organist at large churches in New York and Toronto. I went once to meet him with my husband. It was at a church on Fifth Ave. But later, sad to say, he lost the use of his hands. He had an illness. It was cured some fifteen years later. He couldn’t play at all.
Mrs. Ross-Roy finishes in this issue the story of her recollections of the war of 1914–18. Remembering these horrors, illustrates the gist of this great lady, who spoke for peace. Bringing back these tragedies to each one’s conscience would sew the terms of peace. That no doubt is the message that Mrs. Ross-Roy wished to make. In the next issue; the Spanish flu.
At the end of the war in 1918, I was in Montreal. We had an apartment, my sister and I. Her husband was still at the front. My mother lived with us in the winter. My sister was pregnant and wanted to have her baby in Montreal. When I heard of the end of the war, there was great joy. But for me it was something else. I thought of all the dead, the wounded, of all those I had cared for.
The end of the war was expected. We had heard said. All of a sudden, about seven at night, all the bells of all the churches were ringing. We heard them all over the street. People came out onto the street. My sister was very happy, also, because she didn’t know where her husband was. He was at the front. There were several, who were killed just on the last days, and she had not had news in quite a while.
In Montreal, there were all sorts of demonstrations to emphasize the end of the war, on Mars Field, on Fletcher’s Field, on the side of Mount Royal.
Before things got back to normal, and all was orderly, it was into winter. My husband, for example, did not get back until the end of May. He arrived at Windsor Station. It was there that the men arrived and where they were given information, on what they could do, the schedule of the trains. That was called Traveler’s Aid. I worked there and also in the men’s dining room of the Y.M.C.A.
They had put up a large temporary building in Dominion Square, having dining rooms for the men who came there. Because most of the men could not pay much. They didn’t get much money. Their parents were in the west, in the south, in the United States, all over. They were given a complete dinner for twenty-five cents. They could not live in the temporary building; it was only a dining room. There was music and they sang. We tried to get them cigarettes. That was what they needed most. It was very expensive for them to buy them, I don’t know much. There were those who were too poor for that. It was organized by the Y.M.C.A.
The Y.M.C.A. did a lot. They had offices in France. There was one at Meaux. There was also the Salvation Army in France. The Salvation Army was at Meaux. The Y.M.C.A. sold things, while the Salvation Army gave things away, such as cigarettes, candy, chewing gum, tobacco. The Salvation Army gave them free, while the Y.M.C.A. sold them. It was the same for us, at Meaux where I was.
The publication of the recollections of Mrs. Ross-Roy will resume in January. Mr. Rosario Bilodeau, a renowned historian, has written the text from interviews taped by Mrs. Ghislaine Mercier.
Vol. 5, No 1, January 1987
It started, as I have said, with the American soldiers. The outbreaks started before I left Meaux. Trainloads of those ill with the Spanish flu arrived. We didn’t know what it was. We didn’t know either what we could do for them. The doctors put them to bed and they died a few days later. There was nothing to do.
When I got home from the war, there were many cases in Beaurivage. I looked after all of them. I never lost a person. I went from house to house to see them. Sometimes they came by carriage to get me. They asked me if I would go to see their baby, who had flu. I told them: “yes, I will try to help.” I went with my suction cups. The baby was convulsing. I asked for hot water and I put the baby in a tank of hot water. There, the convulsions stopped. That was all I could do. I told them to give him only liquids. The baby recovered. Those people were very happy. The girl from the seigneury had saved their baby. That’s what they said. The baby had pneumonia. It was a different kind of pneumonia. The temperature went up, up to 104,105F. That was serious. And then it was necessary to bring the temperature down. It was at that time that I used the suction cups. I don’t know exactly what they did, but they did something. I learned, in France, to use the suction cups. I didn’t have small glasses; they had little glasses to apply suction. I took all the wine glasses, which my mother had, and I used them on their backs. They were dense enough. They had to be heavy enough to stay on. We did not heat up the glasses before putting them on the skin. What I did, I put a little alcohol into the glass, I light it and I put it quickly on the back of the patient. That is how we used suction cups. I went also into the village and the surroundings. I cared for twenty or twenty-five people that way.
People died all over of the Spanish flu. The farmer, beside the presbytery, by the name of Croteau, who had a family of eight children, came out of his house at five in the morning, to milk his cows then went back to the house saying to his wife “I am not very well.” He went to bed without undressing and a few hours later he was dead. That came fast. Everybody was afraid. The doctors could do nothing. What do you want? There was no medicine for this flu. Only aspirin, that’s all. There wasn’t enough aspirin at that time.
People returning from Europe brought this illness. It spread. Many Indians in the Canadian west died. All of a sudden a village would be hit, without apparent reason. It was like that all over Europe. About Africa and South America, I don’t know.
Vol. 5, No 2, February 1987
Mrs. Ross-Roy starts in this issue another stage of her life when she was a young wife and a young mother. Professor Rosario Bilodeau from interviews conducted by Mrs. Ghislaine Mercier, has recorded it for us.
At the start of this time, we were married, Carlyle and I. It was the 28th of February 1921. My husband did not wish to finish his studies because he wanted to work on the farm for my mother. And because he had not studied for so long, he found it hard to return to this work. He was afraid he would not do well in the German exam. He was taking courses in German, but he was afraid of the exam. So he said “I am quitting.” At McGill, at that time, the science classes were in German.
We were married in Montreal at the same cathedral where my mother was married. A small wedding. He had his father, his mother, his brother, his sister, and a couple of aunts. As for me, I had my mother. My sister was out west with a young child. And anyway she would have had to come by train and that was very expensive. My mother liked my husband very much. We had a small wedding because that is what we wanted. After, we spent a month in Bermuda. It was a present from my husband’s father, William Roy. He lived in Montreal. He was in charge of the Mount Royal Cemetery. He managed the Protestant cemetery.
In my in-law family there were five children, including twins. The first two were twins, a boy who died as a baby, the girl was named Violet. Then there was Carlyle, my husband, then Wallace and his twin, Gordon, who died at sixteen. My in-laws were generous and wanted to give us an unequaled wedding present. It was very nice for me. I remember my mother-in-law: she was like an angel, the best wife, I think, that I ever knew in my life. Her name was Charlotte. She was full of life until her children were grown up.
I was 28 when I was married and my husband was five years younger. The trip to Bermuda was very nice. At that time, from New York to Bermuda, was three days on the ship. We were very happy. Then, on our return, we went to my mother’s at Beaurivage. We lived there for two years. After that we went to the United States. At Beaurivage, my husband helped my mother keep the books. He researched ways to improve the yield of the farm by better cultivation. There was also on the seigneury, pulpwood. It was he who busied himself selling the wood. There was a large demand for that kind of wood, at that time.
As for me, I was at the house. My baby, the first, was born in December 1921, in a hospital in Quebec, at Jeffery Hale. It was then close to St. John Street. Anne was also born in Quebec and my other two children in Montreal, at Victoria Hospital. Between Mary Joan and Anne, there were only fourteen months. Later, after one and a half years, Ross came and, after five more years, Barbara.
Vol. 5, No. 3., March 1987
In 1923 we left for the United States. My husband was working for Henry Ford in Michigan. My father-in-law was a friend of Henry Ford and he told him that his son wanted work; he wanted to go into the woods and learn how to manage a lumberyard in the States. Thus, in January or February, my husband went to Iron Mountain. And after that to the north in the state of Michigan, to go into the lumberyards. At that time Henry Ford had large lumberyards. He had bought large stands of wood. The north of Michigan was all forest at that time, in 1923. The men spent the winter in the lumber yards. Winter over, they closed the yards. Then my husband came down to Iron Mountain and he was given work in the research laboratory where he studied possible uses for wood.
Ford was ahead of his time. He, my husband, worked in the lab on the manufacturing use from the exploration of the coal-mine for Ford, at Iron Mountain. It was a little village. It is now a large town. In that lab, it was my husband, who invented wood briquettes for heat, Kingsford briquettes. He perfected them in his lab in Michigan. At that time, one must remember, that the floors of Ford cars were of wood and the lab studied the properties of wood, its durability in cars. The use was intended only for the floors of autos. He had large piles of wood, a field full of little pieces, about eight inches square. They didn’t know what to do with them. They were afraid of a conflagration if they burned them. So my husband’s boss said to him “We must do something with that. Mr. Ford could not burn those piles of wood. We must get an idea, find a way to use this wood, and I ask you to see from your research, what we can do.” My husband worked on that research project for two years and, in the end, by the controlled burning of the wood, they produced briquettes. My husband got no thanks. His boss got a job promotion for that. The success was attributed to the lab. My husband got no acknowledgment for the invention, nothing. Mr. Kingsford was a cousin of Mrs. Henry Ford. Therefore all stayed within the family and they got the patent for that invention, naturally. They have it still, I suppose.
When my husband came from the timber yard, he bought a little house, so that I could live there, at Iron Mountain, more precisely at Kingsford Heights, very close. Kingsford, as I have said, was a cousin of Henry Ford and he had bought all the land around Iron Mountain because he knew it would be a large manufacturing plant, employing many people. He then sold these properties to building contractors, who built little houses to sell to men who came to work for Ford. About two thousand men worked there. My husband bought for us one of those little houses. It cost $2000, that was the price. It was a bungalow, a nice little house with two bedrooms and a bathroom. It was heated with a wood stove. I went, therefore to join my husband in May 1923. From the beginning of the year, during the absence of my husband, I had been living with my in-laws.
As for my husband, he didn’t know where it would lead, but he did know that the experience in the timber yards of Ford, could prepare him for the timber yards that were on the seigneury, in the forest preserve of the seigneury.
So I left in the month of May 1923, with two babies, who did not walk yet, to take the train. It took us twenty-seven hours to get there. Luckily I had a room on the train; therefore I was not too tired. We went past Sault-Sainte-Marie. We left at eight in the evening and arrived at midnight the next day. My husband had to go twenty miles to meet us at a place, the closest to his house, where there was no station for those travelers who came or went. It was at this little place that we could send a telegram to the conductor that we were arriving or wished to depart. My husband came by taxi to get me. It was midnight when we disembarked from the train, the conductor asking me if I was sure my husband would be there. “ I can not leave you there alone at midnight with two babies and your luggage.” When I got off I did not see my husband. I was afraid for a moment. But the conductor reassured me saying, “The train will not leave before your husband comes.” Then, all of a sudden, my husband came. At that moment the train could leave. As for us we got into the taxi.
The first thing I saw in the car beside the driver was a gun. He had told my husband “Me, I will not go there to get your wife unless you have a gun and I will bring mine because one never knows if we would be stopped.” We could carry them there. It was not because economic conditions were difficult, but it was the west. It was not too civilized in those days. Men fought Saturday nights amongst themselves. Women could not go out alone in the evenings in Iron Mountain. Men fought, as I have said, and there were almost always dead men in the streets. They played hard. In our house, with the children, I was not timid. One had to be careful just the same. But we were outside the town at Kingsford Heights. It was five miles from the town. There was a minimum of transportation. One had to walk. The only store that was around was one that Ford had built. It was like a country store. They sold everything and at a good bargain. The store in town was expensive. Nerveless to shop at Ford’s, one had to be employed by Ford, and to show our card. It was there that we bought all that we needed, groceries, hardware etc., not furniture, but shoes for the children, things like that. It was the general store. One had to walk a mile and a half to get there. I took the two babies in the sleigh.
There were a dozen houses around us. Our next-door neighbor was Jack. He came from Three Rivers. They were Canadians, who spoke little English. There were also other Canadians, Italians, people from all over because Ford paid much more than other employers. Mr. Ford always thought that men who worked should be well paid. At that time wages were about three dollars a day. But all who worked for Ford started at five dollars a day. And, after 30 days, it went up to $6. After that period salaries went up more slowly. Those, who were better educated, had some advantage, but not much. My husband, when he left, earned $7.25 a day, I think.
The depression set in. When Ford saw that the depression was coming, he started closing his plant and laying off the men. Then we realized it was time for us to leave. We had bought a small car and returned to Montreal by car. We took about two weeks to return from Michigan. The roads were not very good. From Michigan we went to Ontario. Also at Sault- Sainte-Marie my husband was ill. He had an asthma attack and I looked after him for two days in a small hotel. We had three children. Ross had been born. I had gone back to Montreal for his birth in 1924. My father-in-law and my mother-in- law did not want me to have a child born in the United States. He must be Canadian. Therefore, as I said, I went to Montreal, where I stayed a couple of months. I also had my two girls with me and we stayed at my in-laws. My mother-in-law took care of the children while I was in the hospital. After that I returned to Michigan.
We returned then from Michigan with our three children. From Sault-Sainte-Marie, we headed for Toronto. There, at Toronto, we put our car on a boat of Canada Steamship, to Montreal. From Michigan to Toronto, we had a tent and we slept in our tent two or three times. The children liked that. Also the roads in Michigan were more reliable. They had become not bad during our first two years of residence.
As for our house in Iron Mountain, we closed it and gave the keys to the town hall. We couldn’t sell it. There was nothing to do. Everyone was leaving. We gave it away. After two years, I think, it was sold for taxes.
While we were in Iron Mountain, we didn’t make many friends. Each family was busy with their own affairs, with children in the house. We had no washing machine, so I had a lot to do. I had one of the first electric stoves. It was the start. The others all had wood stoves. There wasn’t much to do on the outside. And since we had no washing machine, we washed the diapers, and all the clothes in the bathtub and we hung them outside in the trees. I made all the pajamas; I knitted sweaters, socks, toques, and mittens for the children. We were busy. My husband worked on shift, from 7-3, from 3-11, from 11-7 in the morning. He worked one, two weeks on each shift. He had to walk to work. There was no transportation to the plant. At the plant, four kilns had been built, after their experiments making briquettes, large kilns. But during the first experiments done with two small kilns, my husband sometimes had to spend two eight-hour shifts overseeing the experiments. He had to know exactly how long to leave the wood in the kiln because no one had ever done it before. My husband was happy in his work. He liked it a lot. Then when leaving Michigan, we sent all our belongings by train to Montreal and we went to live with my in-laws.
Vol. 5, No.4 . April 1987
My husband helped his father, here, in Montreal, in the growing of peonies. We sold the peony blooms. My father-in-law, as I have already said, was the manager of the Mount Royal Cemetery. He was a landscape architect and he grew fields of peonies in Montreal East, in Champlain, and in the south of the United States, in Alabama, where he had a small farm. We sent the peonies by refrigerator car to several places in the United States. We wrapped the peonies in paper, by dozens, and we sent them to New York, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Boston, Detroit, Chicago, Duluth, and within Alabama. My father-in-law went all over to find a place where the climate was most favorable to growing peonies and he bought a piece of land, not too expensive, at Uniontown, Alabama. It was about the size of a farm here. It was mostly in peonies. There was a small house and he kept the man who had farmed the land before. He worked for us. Apart from him, it was almost all Blacks that were hired to cut the flowers. Sometimes there were fifty or sixty. They had to cut the flowers at the right time. When the flowers were ready to cut in the morning, they could not wait until the next day.
When we went to work there, for five or six weeks, we did not live in the manager’s house. We lived in a room in another private house that belonged to a widow. We had our meals at another lady’s. There wasn’t a restaurant. It was just a small village.
We went down there, sometimes by train, sometimes by car. The best year, we cut 500,000 peonies. Sometimes my husband went alone; other times with the children and me. We also had a maid who looked after the children in a flat in Notre-Dame-de-Grace where we lived. We had lived in several places: in St. Lambert, in Quebec, and again in Montreal. Later, my mother gave me a house in Hampstead, and then in 1949, we came to live here in Pointe-Claire. After the time of the peonies, we lived in Quebec. My husband invested in a small lumberyard in Saint-Raymond of Portneuf. He rented land from the government and he built a small sawmill and he made pulpwood for two years. Then the mill burned. Two days before the mill burned, the insurance was terminated and we had to renew it. Therefore we had no insurance and we did not rebuild it. It was about 1939-40.Other than that, my husband worked almost every year for his father.
Vol. 5, No .5., May 1987
During the years of the depression, after 1929, we lived in St. Lambert. We did not experience poverty. Even in those year’s pulpwood sold well. My husband worked now with my mother, now with his father. And during the depression, curiously, flowers sold very well, in the United States and in Canada also. We always need flowers, don’t we?
But everyone had a hard time. There were poor people all around us. In St. Lambert, I always kept some frozen meat and bread in the house. When the poor came to our door asking for food, I gave them sandwiches. Often the young people came to the door, usually the men, to ask for food. They said to us “Would you give us something to eat? We have nothing to eat for the wife and children”. That would not happen today. They were of all races, English, French, and Italians. I think the years 1930 and 1931 were the most difficult. Other years, there were slight improvements. At that time I had a family, I had my children. They were adolescents.
Ross, my son, went to the second war. At the start of the war he was not old enough to enlist. But as soon as he turned 18, he enlisted. He wanted to be a pilot. However he couldn’t become a pilot because of his eyes. The doctor told him he could never be a pilot. So, he became a navigator, and went through the war as a navigator. He enlisted at the same time as my son-in-law, Bill, who was also our neighbour in Hampstead. The depot, the center for the enrollment of airmen, was at Lachine. They stayed at Lachine for about a month, and after that they were sent to Malton, near Toronto, My son, Ross, was sent almost immediately to England and Bill was sent to Nova Scotia, then after a while to England. They took classes to become officers. It was not like my husband, who was just a soldier. Ross had already taken classes during a year at McGill. He was part of the Royal Canadian Air Force stationed in England. At the beginning, during the first war, all were part of the Royal British Air Force: the airmen of Canada, of Australia, of other colonies in a united Air Force. During the second war the Royal Canadian Air Force was formed. My boy was put on a troop transport for France, via Africa. When he turned 21, he was in Africa, at Khartoum. He went with the troops to the front and was a paratrooper. They also parachuted at the Somme. He also went to India, to Pakistan.* All mail was censored, but I had news.
Mrs. Ross-Roy approaches in this volume the end of her taped memoirs. We want to disclose the sacrifice, which characterizes these sentiments during the second war.
*In correction to some of the information above this account of his service was provided by Ross Roy.
He joined the RCAF two or three days after his 18th. birthday. Trained in Montreal and Toronto as a navigator ― because of eyesight he was not eligible to be a pilot. Graduated with a commission ― about the top third of a graduating class was commissioned, the remainder became sergeants. Shipped to England in 1943; in England and Scotland he was trained in towing gliders and dropping parachutists. Sent to 437 squadron, attached to 2nd.Tactical Air Force, which participated in the D-Day landings [towing gliders] and the disastrous Arnhem drop where nearly 50% of the squadron was shot down. After operational tour, sent on “rest” tour to Africa. Stationed in Khartoum [Sudan], and was on his way back to the UK to join a squadron when at Malta word was received that Japan had surrendered. Could have been repatriated immediately, but realized that it would be too late to reenter university, volunteered to join a transport squadron flying between UK and India. Saw much of the Middle East on trips taking replacements to India and returning with veterans. Back to Canada in June 1946 and discharged.
Vol. 5, No. 6.June 1987
As for me, I busied myself with a large organization called “Bundles for Britain.” We did all we could to help them. People brought us clothes, old things. We mended them, we put them in large packages and we sent them near the areas, which had been bombed in England. We did that while we were living in Hampstead. I went and got the clothes: they were all torn. I brought them home, I washed them, I mended them and I took them back to an office in Snowdon.
My son, Ross, transported troops right to the end of the war. Their plane never had bad problems. As for the end of the war, I think no one saw it coming. I was in Montreal when it ended. Anne was at McDonald, Mary Joan was in Ottawa and Barbara was still in school. My son came home a while later. He arrived in Montreal, was sent to the depot in Lachine and was finally released.
I had an operation on my eyes, an operation for a detached retina. It was the result of an accident. I started having trouble seeing and the problem got worse. One had to wait at that time because the doctors were busy with the military. Finally I got one, but the operation was not successful; the retina did not hold. A second operation did not get better results. But a year and a half later, another operation was successful. I often had people at the house, friends of my son, pilots, whom he had known during the war. During those years, we were living in Hampstead.
We came to live in our house in Pointe Claire in 1949. We wanted to be more in the country. There were too many, too rich people who came to Hampstead. It became a well-to-do community. Before it had been like a small village. During the war, people changed also. There were those who made a lot of money, as in the manufacture of munitions. They became millionaires. Money changes people also, you know. The government paid a lot of money for munitions, as was known.
There were other changes. For example, men demobilized after the war replaced women and girls who had worked in the factories during the war. It was hard for the women to be let go after two or three years of work. Companies like Singer did that. Also Bell Telephone. Singer had big contracts also. That situation was seen as an injustice to the women. During the war, the day nurseries were organized for the care of children during the work hours of the mothers. As for me, I worked in those nurseries at Pointe-Charles. I went two or three times a week. Our center was not far from Northern Electric. We busied ourselves with the children, we gave them their dinner and the mothers came for them about six o’clock, or at the end of their shift. We were all volunteers, unpaid, except one lady, who was paid by the government. The government organized those nurseries.
My husband had a talent for invention, it is true. My second girl Anne walked late. Really, she didn’t walk. She dragged on her buttocks. She was nearly a year and a half when she walked. Therefore my husband made her like a wooden sleigh on wheels, and with that could go all over the house without wearing out her clothes. My husband then thought that invention could be sold, that he could get a patent for it. He went to the patent office in Washington. It was necessary for an attorney to do the research, but that was too expensive. So we didn’t do it. That was about 1925 when he made it. We were then in the United States. My husband had left papers, plans in Washington. Others took them. The mechanics today use boards on wheels to work under automobiles, a kind of little cradle on which the mechanics could lie down while working under cars. Those dollies appeared in the stores in the United States a few months after my husband left his plans in Washington.
Vol. 5, No. 7.July 1987
My husband also had the idea of freezing peony roots to conserve them during the winter. We took the seeds from the peonies in the fall, we wrapped them in plastic sacks, and we took them to Eaton’s. There they froze them and kept them frozen until the spring. Then we sorted them and at the time of the sale of the Trans-Canada, we sold them frozen and the buyers could plant them immediately. Otherwise we couldn’t plant peonies in the spring. It was my husband who started the system. He had the theory that one could freeze many flower seeds. The opening in the spring was faster if we left the seeds in the ground. That way people bought more. It spurred the sale. Once, we had in the basement a couple of thousand seeds, which we sold at Eaton’s, so they could be immediately frozen. It was a new idea of my husband’s.
For our house here, at Pointe Claire, we got our inspiration from a plan in a magazine, which intrigued us. But my husband redrew the plan to find a place for our old furniture. In the living room, he worked into the plan a place for the piano. He found it a hindrance in the middle of a room. So he made an arch above; it was decorative. He did the same thing in the dining room for the buffet. It was Mr. Brunet who built the house.
My husband was not in good health. He suffered from asthma all his life, mostly in July, sometimes half of June and in the autumn. In the winter he was well. But curiously, when he was at the front, he never had asthma. Probably because there wasn’t much grass. He was allergic to certain grasses. He retired in his sixties because he wasn’t too well. After his retirement, we traveled. We went to California a couple of times. We visited our children. We gardened. What else? We were busy and we were happy. My husband died in 1974, at the age of 77. He was sick during the last two years before his death. Nothing was working any more.
After his death it was very hard for me to live alone. I loved him very much. The most difficult was to be alone. I was already eighty-two. The most difficult, I think, was eating alone. When one is used, for over fifty years, to have someone with us, it is not easy to be alone. And also for a widow, one of the troubles was that the stores wouldn’t give us credit. I tried, for example, to get an account at Sears. They said, no. “Is it because I am a widow and because I am older that you can’t accommodate me?” I replied to them. “My grandchildren can get these cards, but not me!” That’s shocking, isn’t it?
I kept the house all the same. My husband always said, “ Keep the house as long as you can. It was home for so many people.” I have that house still and I live in it. It was one of the last wishes of my husband.
What about me, when I am asked about myself, I have been active all my life. Even when I was very young, I got up at four in the morning to milk the cows. That’s what I liked to do. All my life I have worked. All my life I have been interested in people, especially the sick. I wanted to be a nurse, but I was refused because my family was of average means. It was a lack all my life. I got the idea for that career from my uncle, I think, who was a doctor well known in Montreal, and I had the same ideas as him. My uncle, George Ross, was on the faculty of medicine at McGill. He was, for many years, the head doctor of the Montreal General Hospital and professor at McGill. He was in a magazine of the time, where a biographical note appeared in the Montreal Star of July 27, 1909, that he was a great professor. He was brilliant, having been given a gold medal at the end of his studies. That uncle was for me a source of inspiration. I did not know him. I was too young when he died. But I knew of him, I was influenced.
Vol.5, No. 9. September 1987
Note: Mrs. Georgina Ross-Roy, this month, takes leave of the readers of the St.-Patrice. In this last discussion, she talks discreetly of her wishes and of her dreams, which she could not achieve. The journal again thanks her that we were able to keep alive the past. We had much evidence of the effect, which she vividly captured for our readers over the course of the 24 months of her memoirs [the first article was August/September 1985, vol. 3 no.5]. We wish to express our gratitude to our writer, Rosario Bilodeau, also to Ms. Ghislaine Mercier, who produced first the interviews on tape, further the transcript. The interviews were conducted in 1983/84. Also note that Mrs. Ross-Roy presently lives in Pointe Claire.
About my leisures, I most like walking. If people walked every day it would do them good. They would have a good heart. It is the primary exercise that I do. Also I try to read. I read the newspaper, magazines, and books. I don’t like television very much. I listen to music on the radio and I went to concerts when I could. Each year I go to Stratford to concerts and to the theater. Last year they put on Henry IV. They also put on some of Noel Coward.
I do not always eat all alone. In the summer, I eat outside with the birds, the squirrels, the bees, and the wasps. I always have a wasp that comes to eat with me: I am happy. I think also that it is better for older people to stay in their house rather than to go to rest homes. I have seen some of my friends who went into rest homes and who were not happy. Among the most important things in my life, I would have liked, when I was young, to have become an actress. After that a nurse or a doctor. I would have liked to have been a doctor, but I was not well enough prepared to succeed in the classes for medicine. And it was also difficult for a woman to pass the courses to be a doctor. In my time, but not in that of my mother, I might have been admitted to medicine at McGill. Those were ideas that I did not attain. In fact, in looking back, I report that I never was what I wanted to be. During the war I worked, worked. In the end I had to leave. Had I been able to stay, I would have had the Croix-de-Guerre. They wanted to cite me for the Croix-de-Guerre. My brother died; therefore I was obliged to leave. I was short by three weeks.
I would have liked to have read more, too, read all day, but my eyes did not allow me to read as much. As for gardening, it didn’t always go as one wanted. My eyes are really not that bad. The other day my daughter, Barbara, let a little needle fall on the floor. She couldn’t see it. It was I who saw it and picked it up.
But I come back again to what I would have liked most, to live on a farm, to have been a farmer like my father and my brother. To live with horses and animals; we always had dogs and cats. That I didn’t realize either. What is important to me today is my children and my friends, rather my children, my grandchildren and my great grandchildren.
Arpents: an ancient French measure, about 192 feet.
Censitaires: The term “censitaire” designates some one who actually works the land and lives on it, but does not own it, the bottom of the ladder in the feudal system. The word is rooted in the same Latin base as the word “census.” The censitaires are the people, the ones that are counted, the peasants, the “habitants.”