Mary never remarried or even dated another man after Al died. She had a good life, a good marriage and good children. She never regretted her decision to come to Canada, but once in a while she entertains the notion that she should have moved back to Quebec after Al died so the children would have had more opportunities. Now that she’s in her eighties she’s content to be in Truro with three of her children and their families living close by.
Postscript: Mary Gero has fourteen grandchildren, nineteen great-grandchildren and one great-great-grandchild.
No Harmony in Harmony Junction
Elizabeth (Kelly) MacDonald
Elizabeth (Kelly) MacDonald was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1920. She married Addison MacDonald of Souris, Prince Edward Island and ended up in Harmony Junction.
My mother and father met on a blind date while he was on a furlough in Edinburgh. She actually had two dates that night but after being introduced to Addison MacDonald she never bothered with the second.
My father was a farmer from Souris, Prince Edward Island (PEI), a small island province made famous by author Lucy Maude Montgomery in the children’s book Anne of Green Gables. PEI is in the Northumberland Strait off the coast of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and the only way to get there until the government built the Confederation Bridge in 1997 was by ferry from the mainland.
My mother came from a family of nine children and so did my dad. His father died in a tractor accident when he was four years old so my grandmother in PEI was widowed with a large family to raise. She never remarried.
My parents went on three dates and married on their fourth. Before the wedding, my grandmother in PEI wrote to my mother and, invoking the uncertainty of the times, implored her to delay marriage until the war was over. But my parents adamantly refused – my mother found out later that his family had a hometown girl in mind for him and that was the real reason for the letter.
They remained in Edinburgh for most of the war. In between my father’s war assignments my mother lived with her parents except for a short period in London when dad was stationed there.
My mother’s home in Edinburgh was often filled with my father’s brothers and friends who would drop in to visit. For some it became a home away from home. Five of my father’s brothers served overseas and two of his sisters also joined up – one brother died and is buried in Holland. My mother’s sister and three brothers served as well, one brother spending time in a prisoner of war camp. His wife told me that the only person her husband could ever talk to about his experiences was my father.
As was common among veterans, my father never talked about the war. He would talk about people he met, the food he ate, and the beauty of the countries he was in but not what happened to him while serving his country. I learned a number of years later that when he was quartermaster in Italy, he lost his stripes for shooting another soldier who was raping an Italian girl.
My sister Elizabeth Anne was born in December 1942. She was adored and pampered by all her grandparents, aunts and uncles. She and my mother came to Canada via Pier 21 in 1946 following my father’s repatriation. Mum never remembered much about the voyage on the Queen Mary because she spent much of it seasick – another War Bride took care of Elizabeth.
My mother and sister were met in Halifax by my father, his brother and two of their friends. They continued on by ferry to PEI where they lived for six months in Harmony Junction, outside of Souris with my grandmother (Nanny), my uncle and his wife.
Mum in her hat, heels and fur stole was not prepared for what awaited her in Harmony Junction: it was a very unhappy time for my mother because she missed her large rambunctious family and she was scorned by those she lived with.
Mum was a city girl who loved clothes and was used to city ways. I believe PEI was insular and not terribly forgiving of those who ‘came from away’. When she dressed up for church, Islanders took it to mean she thought she was better than them. When she tried to cook, her in-laws (except for Nanny) laughed at her and set her up to fail. She was used to certain standards and Islanders thought of her as strange and uppity. If Mum washed the floor my aunt would rewash it. If she did a washing my aunt would complain about the quality of her work.
My grandmother taught Mum to cook and bake. One day Mum baked ginger snap cookies and was so proud of them. Another uncle came for a visit and after trying one he took the cookies outside and buried them before the other aunt came home and made a fuss.
Nanny would wake Mum up when the others were in bed and teach her how to cook. She had to do it when my aunt and uncle were not around because my aunt would criticise and lie about ingredients. Finally after months of this covert operation Nanny announced that Mum would be cooking dinner. The relatives were gleeful, looking forward to her failure and an opportunity to yet again make her the target of their vitriol. Much to their chagrin, and my mother’s surprise, dinner was a success.
My mother did make friends and she loved Nanny but living with my aunt and uncle was excruciating for her. She would often trudge down to the next farm, even in deep winter, and visit with her friends despite the two-mile walk.
My father opened a butcher shop in Souris and they moved to a house just down from the Catholic church. Here she was under less scrutiny and made new friends. She and Dad loved to dance – he was a great mimic and loved to laugh. My mother’s new friends discovered she was a gifted singer and soon she was called upon to sing at ordinations and country fairs.
My brother Richard was born in 1947 and I followed in 1949. My grandmother Kelly came for her first visit to Canada when I was born and it was a wonderful thing for Mum to have the support of her mother.
The only other problem was the amount of drinking of my father and his friends. My mother did not drink at all, which was unusual given her parents owned a spirits store in Edinburgh. Dad came home one night to find her sitting up at the kitchen table with boxes packed. She said she couldn’t stand it anymore and was going home to Edinburgh.
That was when they decided to leave PEI and Dad went to Ontario to find work. In no time he had a job with Ontario Hydro but it took one and a half years to save enough money to send for my mother and the children.
During this time my mother was alone on the island; she lived for Dad’s letters and watched while his business was sold. She also had to put up with a few men trying to seduce her and some nights had to barricade the doors of the house.
My father asked her to come to Ontario to look for a house and she was gone for a month. My parents asked the relatives to look after us but aside from eleven-year-old Elizabeth – who went to an aunt so she could babysit the kids – they refused to look after Richard and me so we were sent to the orphanage in Charlottetown to be cared for by the nuns.
One oft-told family story was that I had long strawberry blonde hair that Mum would put in braids. When she returned from Ontario and collected us from the orphanage she burst into tears when she saw me because the nuns had cut off my hair. The nuns could not understand why she was upset as they saved my braids for her: it was the first thing they did. Mum kept the braids for years.
After we left PEI for good my father’s family sold what was left of our belongings and we never received a cent. My mother was happy to be gone from the island and began to make a new life for her family in Ontario. The only person Dad and Mum wrote to was Nanny. Dad used to say that when he retired they should go for a visit and not tell anyone they were there. It never happened.
Through Dad’s job we traveled the province of Ontario: Chippewa (now part of Niagara Falls) where their youngest Mary Estelle was born in 1954; Whitedog Falls (on the Ontario Manitoba border); Red Rock Falls; Little Long Rapids (north of Kapuskasing) and finally Pickering.
When we