Their first child, Malcolm, was born in March 1947 and Linda in July 1948. Harold was working in construction and like many other women whose husbands worked away from home, Mildred was left to raise the children mostly on her own. It probably wasn’t what she expected out of marriage but she made the best of the situation by being the best mother she could be.
She had an uncle, George Young, who lived in Toronto and he visited New Brunswick occasionally. During the summer of 1958 Mildred’s parents came over from England and they all had a reunion in Sheffield but Mr and Mrs Young were alarmed to see the very harsh living conditions their daughter had to cope with in rural Canada.
Moving to Fredericton in 1960 dramatically changed life for everyone; the new house had modern luxuries like indoor plumbing and television, though Mildred still cooked on a wood stove. Malcolm and Linda attended a large school in the city and it wasn’t long before they made new friends and had lives of their own. Harold was still employed with the same company but was working in an office now and had time to socialise as well.
Mildred wanted another child but had several miscarriages; finally in 1961 she became pregnant again. Susan was born in September and she was thrilled, focusing her attention on the new baby. She often wrote to her family about her little daughter, hopeful they might come to Canada again to see her.
Mildred’s father died in 1962 but she could not afford to attend his funeral, which was a great disappointment. Uncle George died a few years later, leaving her a small inheritance so she returned for her first visit home in May 1966. Mildred spent two nostalgic weeks with family and old friends in familiar places. It was a wonderful visit but she was glad to return to her family in Canada. She said that she could not live in England again. Canada had become her home.
Shortly after Mildred’s return her daughter Linda got married. It was difficult for Mildred to accept, soon followed by the news that she and Harold would be grandparents.
As the year drew to a close, personal circumstances had clearly begun to affect Mildred. On 16 December 1966 she wrote a letter to her brother Lawrie, in which she told him, ‘Time is short, so a brief letter will have to do. I’m not looking forward to Xmas too much. If you were here, you would understand.’
It was obvious from the melancholy tone of her words that Mildred was not her usual cheerful self. She ended her letter by saying she was going to town later that afternoon. Mildred had no way of knowing how short time really was, or the tragedy that awaited her before the day was over.
Later that evening, Mildred and Harold were returning from a Christmas party when Harold lost control of their car on an icy bridge and crashed. Mildred was in a coma for several hours and passed away the following day, 17 December.
Contributed by Susan Willis, Mildred’s youngest daughter. Susan moved to England in 1998. Today she lives in Essex and works as Domestic Violence Services Manager for the national charity Refuge.
A Union Jack on Her Grave
Mary (Fletcher) Sheppard
Mary (Fletcher) Sheppard was born in Liverpool in 1921. She married George Sheppard of Corner Brook, Newfoundland in 1940. George served in the Royal Navy as an Able Seaman on a number of ships including the HMS Nelson and the King George V.
Crossing the ocean in 1947 as the wife of a Newfoundland sailor was the single defining decision of my mother’s life.
Until she met my father when she was eighteen, she was a giggly factory worker in Liverpool who loved to dance, see the latest films and ride her bike down to the docks to see the ships moored in the Mersey.
Seven years later, she was the mother of two girls, very pregnant with a third and on a ship going to Newfoundland. She thought she had extracted a promise from my father that he would stay in England. And he did try. They stayed two years after the war and were making a go of it, just barely, when a telegram came from home to say his father was ill and he wanted to see his eldest son one last time.
Granddad met them at the train station, healthy as a horse and they both knew they’d been had. But they agreed they would wait until the baby was born to see what was to be done.
She stayed. The facts were simple. England was absorbing hundreds of thousands of men home from the war and jobs for foreigners were scarce. Meanwhile, Bowater had promised any man who volunteered to fight that his job at the paper mill was guaranteed when he came back home.
But her heart never settled. It was always understood in our household that ‘home’ was not the house we lived in. It was that mythical place across the sea where roses bloomed in May, houses were built of brick and rainwater made the softest hair on earth.
This business of ‘home’ not being where her children were raised and not being the house that she and father had bought and finished, furnished and refurbished over the years was a constant threat to us bonding as a family. How could we be a family like in Father Knows Best when our mother’s home was somewhere else?
Like the other War Brides, she had to start again. She had no mother to confide in, no sisters to console her or to help with babysitting, no lifetime neighbour who knew her as the cute kid from Fortescue Street or teacher who knew of her academic successes. She was her dad’s little princess when she stepped on that ship, and while she didn’t know it then, she would never see him again.
We lived in a newly built postwar veteran enclave. The house had four walls and not much else when they moved in. There was no running water, the road was barely passable and the veterans’ houses were built on top of a hill that was swept with deep snow and high winds most of the long winter.
She had never seen snow and with three small children, twins on the way, no family support, no road and water that had to be hauled up the hill by the buckets, snow was hell. She never did get to like it. In winter, it kept her prisoner; in spring, it kept her garden from blooming well into June.
The common ground for War Brides was the Legion. It was there, at Branch No.13 that my mother felt comfortable talking with the other War Brides and raising money. She must have helped cater hundreds of dinners and weddings and auctioned off dozens of novelty cakes made in our kitchen.
I think it was the volunteer work at the Legion that brought her out of her domestic cocoon. And once that happened, she became a force to be reckoned with. Sure, there were now nine children underfoot, but there was greater work to be done.
I was in grade three the year my mother went on a campaign to get water and sewers to the neighbourhood. She did radio phone-in shows, wrote letters to the editor, talked to politicians until she was blue in the face. And finally, the diggers moved in and after more than ten years of community water tap at the bottom of the hill, we could turn on hot and cold water and flush a toilet.
She went on a mission to get my father’s war pension sorted out. That took her twenty years, but in the end, she got what she felt my father deserved for his many wounds. Over the years, she learned when to call the Premier’s office and how to get action.
I think that eventually, say after forty years of marriage, my mother finally accepted that marrying her Newfoundland sailor was indeed a good thing. By that time, she’d gone ‘home’ a few times and compared the cost of raising nine children in England versus Newfoundland. The Rock won out, hands down. She was shocked when in the 1990s, her sister was robbed of her TV while she was asleep in her bed in a little village near Liverpool. That wasn’t her England. But she never stopped referring to England as home.
She’s dead now. I sometimes think we did her an injustice by burying her on an isolated hill overlooking the Bay of Islands. I keep meaning to buy a British Union Jack to put on her grave so there’s a reminder that here lies a woman who is forever far from home.
This article is used with the permission of CBC.ca