“Don’t look at me,” Jim said. “I have no intention of enlisting. I have important dental work to do, don’t I, Father?” Jim was about to enter his last year of dental studies. Father nodded in agreement. “The war will be over before I graduate, I expect.”
“Like our friends,” Ina added, in response to the “like who” question. Her voice was timid, her tone melancholic, her gaze distant.
“Yes,” Roy said, laughing, attempting to raise the mournful drift of the conversation. “Your friends may be worth worrying about!”
“It’s true,” Bill confirmed. “I know most of them. Many are uncoordinated dullards! Hardly worthy of your friendship or mine!” He threw his napkin at Ina, laughing the entire time, expecting his action to lighten her mood. She instead used the napkin to wipe two tears falling down her cheeks.
This, then, summarizes the views of my entire extended family but for two of its members. The first, my grandfather, Jesse Brady, was not with us that night. He often spent time in Toronto while the Turners were visiting us, allowing a little more room for the accommodation of the four Winnipeg guests between our house and Aunt Rose’s house. But Grandpa had made his views known over the preceding months. Though he was born and raised in England, and though he understood the legal niceties, Grandpa considered this war to be Britain’s war and not Canada’s war. In this way, his views at this time diverged from those of the Brampton establishment, though not for any of the reasons Father might advance. Grandpa, at seventy-eight years of age, held no property and thus paid no property taxes. The war would not materially affect his personal finances. He took no particular delight in taking views opposite to those of the town’s establishment. England had not been unkind or unjust to him. He had arrived in Canada at the age of twenty-two, ten years before the country of Canada was formed. He came to forge a new life. He no longer felt any allegiance to the old one.
The other member of my extended family whose views on the war had not been presented that evening was my Aunt Lillian, Father’s eldest sister. It would have been impossible to state her position with certain knowledge, since she was as unpredictable as Father was contrarian. Her disdain for Brampton, the place of her birth, including her refusal to visit her home town more than twice a year, meant that we were all truly surprised when just before dessert was served and shortly after Bill was scolded by his father for throwing a napkin at his cousin, a persistent halloo issued from the front foyer.
“I think that’s Lil,” Aunt Rose said, rising from the table. She walked through the sitting room and the parlour before returning a few minutes later with the suspected guest. We naturally rose when she entered the room, but instead of rushing to embrace our favourite aunt as my siblings, my cousins and I would ordinarily have done, we froze in place.
“I’m sorry,” Aunt Lil said in a halting voice as she entered the dining room. She was clearly distressed. Her long red hair, which when not captured in a large hat was always worn loosely down her back, was tied that night in a long braid. The green of her blouse and skirt (the only colour she ever wore) did not match. Her face was ashen and her eyes were bloodshot. She was shaking. What had happened to our favourite aunt, I wondered, the aunt whose zany ways and eccentricities always made her lively company? We loved her for that, for her disregard of convention (which made her a lenient chaperone), and for her inability to tell even a white lie (which made her a trusted source for the truth from which other adults often sought to shelter us).
“Lillian, what is it?” Charlotte asked as we sat back down. “What has brought you all this way? Why didn’t you let us know you were coming? We’d have had someone meet you at the train station.”
To our utter horror—at least to the horror of the younger generation of the family—our favourite aunt began to cry. None of us had ever seen our consummately steady aunt dissemble. We all rose to go to her before Father stopped us.
“Sit down, all of you!” he commanded. “None of you has been excused. Charlotte, Mary, will you please take Lillian away from the table and help her calm herself.”
“No. No, Jethro,” Aunt Lil said, putting her hand up in his direction. “I’m sorry. I will be fine. I don’t want to be away from the children. They are the reason I came here tonight. It’s the children. My boys.” Jim pulled a spare chair from its resting spot next to the wall. After placing it beside Aunt Rose’s chair, the two ladies sat down. We all turned to her.
“The children? The boys? What about them, Lil?” My father rarely had patience for what he considered to be the very odd ways of his eldest sister, who he sometimes referred to as “Lulu”—though never to her face. That night was no exception. “What the deuce is wrong with you?”
“With me?” she asked. “Not with me. Nothing is wrong with me. With the world. With your world,” she said, confirming the other worldliness to which we children all knew she belonged. “Your world. Your way. Don’t you know how many lives are going to be wasted on this war?”
“Wasted? What do you mean wasted? Lil, for once we are almost on the same side of an argument. I don’t think we should have our boys over there, but I agree with what William said earlier.” He then repeated it for her benefit. “If our troops do go, they’ll be back quickly. With a minimal number of losses. Please, you must see this.”
“I don’t,” she said. “I don’t see that. Quick? It won’t be quick. This is not South Africa—though that was not particularly quick either. Both sides have machine guns. And aeroplanes. There is no quick solution to this. And a minimal number of losses? You are thinking we will send twenty thousand men. We will send ten times that number. Or more. And they will not all come back. So many of them will not be back. My nephews, my boarders, my students, so many of them won’t come back.” She was crying, but she inhaled deeply before asking no one in particular, “And for what? What is the point of this war?”
No one had a reply. Eventually, Aunt Rose put an arm around her.
Finally, Roy stood up. “I’m coming back!” he said with all of the confidence of the unknowing.
“And I’m coming back!” Bill said, standing too. “If the war is not over before I can enlist.”
“And I’m coming back!” said John, rising as well. “If I ever get over there.”
“And I’m not going at all,” said Jim from his seat. There being no suggestion that Ina, me, or our cousin Hannah would go to war, we too remained seated.
Aunt Lil, who had almost regained her composure, lost it again. “All right, you are all excused,” Father said. “But Hannah, John, Jessie, none of you are to go out tonight. It’s a night to be with family, those who are dear to you. It is not a night for frolicking.” As he said that, we saw through the room’s large picture window three young men walking down Wellington Street toward Gage Park, carrying a Union Jack, singing “Rule Britannia” at the top of their lungs.
* * *
“It’s all that history,” Father groused to Uncle William as I cleared the table. Mother and my three aunts were in the sitting room. “She spends too much time in the past,” he continued. “She should know by now that she is knowledgeable about the past, not the future! She’s a history teacher, not a prophesier! This is why I urge all of these young people to study sciences, not history. What can we learn from history?”
“Well, there are probably a few things we could learn from history,” Uncle William conceded in defence of a course of study enjoyed by many members of our family.
“Yes. Some things. But not everything. Really, what does Lulu know about war?”
Uncle William had no answer to that. The two men rose to move to the verandah, where they could take in some fresh air and smoke their pipes. Those permitted to leave the house followed them out the door.
Jim