A Family History

November 2020

Grandpa Bill. My memory of him is so fuzzy. He died when I was in Kindergarten, or maybe it was grade one. I remember it was movie day at school. The sound of the projector clicking and cooling. Sitting in the dark cross-legged on the floor, the teacher crouched beside me to whisper my father was waiting for me in the hall.

But I can see Grandpa right now sitting in his spot; chair next to the kitchen table by the basement door. Grandma Ethel looked after my sister and I during the week back then and we spent every day at their house. Ethel used to shout everything at Bill. My mom would explain to me that Grandma had to yell because her Dad was hard of hearing. Mom also told me when Grandpa had come back from the war he was never the same. I learned the term shell shocked , but didn’t - or couldn’t - truly understand what it meant at that age.

When I got much older I found out Grandpa Bill had been part of the Medical Corp. during WWII. He had been shot through the neck by a sniper in Paris. It was miraculous he survived. Bill returned to Canada and started a family with Ethel. They had two daughters: my Mom and my Aunt Margaret.

I’m not sure what it was like for them growing up with their father. I know they loved him. Remembered him fondly. They told stories of attending The Canadian National Exhibition as kids and the time he accompanied Margaret on The Zipper — the ride spinning topsy turvy as coins flew out of his pockets showering the crowd below.

Theirs was also a shadowed family history. It’s secret story was something we didn’t talk about. In recent years I learned something about Grandpa Bill - a kindness so simple and pure in it’s act - I wish I owned my own remembrance of him.

But I love him for this.

When I was little Grandma Ethel would also tell me stories about her brother, Willie. You could see the love in her eyes every time she spoke of him. A hero in their reflection. That’s what he was to her. He enlisted in secret. Great Grandma MacDonald (his mother) had no idea his casual Sunday afternoon drive was headed straight to the Armoury to sign up.

Willie was captured at Dieppe. Placed in a POW camp: Stalag VIIIB.

I know this because of his Wartime Log. Journals were issued through the Canadian YMCA to prisoners overseas. His book was given to Grandma Ethel, then to my Mom. I am its keeper now.

The journal is filled with all sorts of writing. Poems. Photographs. Willie was an artist. Untrained. But an artist just the same. Illustrations and paintings, cartoons and portraits. Some are his sweetheart, Olive. One is of (grandma) Ethel. There is also another portrait, in a different style from the others, accompanied by a note top of page:

Drawn by a German Sgt. who was Hitler’s Sgt. in the last war 1914.

The pages are brittle. They stick and I gently peel them apart to reveal Willie’s record. His memories. I hope to come up with a better way to preserve his story.

My memory of Grandad Vic is a little more clear. I can still recall the slight gravel of his voice. The faded tattoo on his forearm. Grandma Bernice would be preparing Sunday pot roast with yorkshire pudding, while my sister and I ran our pre-dinner errand for Grandad. I was always reminded to hold her hand when we crossed the main road at the end of the street. Back then convenience stores sold cigarettes to kids no questions asked: A pack of small Player’s Light please.

Grandad spoke - and also never spoke - about the war. Even now, I question my memories of when or how certain stories came to live in my mind.

During WWII, Grandad Vic was part of a motorcycle brigade. It sounded so cinematic. I’m not sure my sister and I were supposed to hear the rest. Riding through occupied villages. Discovering German soldiers had booby-trapped toys and handed them out to children to take home. The aftermath. The most hazy and hushed memory. Had Grandad Vic been part of a division that helped liberate the camps after the war ended?

This could be the single most important reason why we were told not to directly ask him questions about the war.

A thought has occurred to me over the past couple of years. Now today more than ever. I am part of the last generation who has any tangible connection to this past.

Lest we forget.