| INTRODUCTION BY MELYNDA JARRATT | |
| SHE DID THE RIGHT THING | JOAN (SMEDLEY) LANDRY |
| SHE FINISHED WHAT SHE STARTED | HENRIETTA (STEVENS) PRONOVOST |
| SHE MADE HER OWN BED | JOYCE (HILMAN) BEZEAU |
| POSTMAN DO YOUR BEST | MORFYDD (MORGAN) GIBSON |
I’ll certainly be glad when this is all over
(A.L. Jolliffe, Director of Immigration Branch, as quoted in a 1945 letter he
wrote about English War Brides going to Quebec)
British women who married servicemen from Quebec during the Second World War faced a unique set of circumstances that set them apart from other War Brides who married into English families in Canada.
It was difficult enough adjusting to married life with a husband you barely knew, coping with the loneliness of rural life miles from the nearest city, and learning an entirely different way of running a household with wood stoves, no electricity or running water. But to be faced with the additional burden of learning a new language – and in many cases, a new religion – would have been a test of any woman’s resolve, not to mention her coping skills.
One War Bride came to an isolated island of less than a thousand people where she was the only person who wasn’t French.‘If I wanted to speak English, I had to talk to myself,’ she says of those first few years in Quebec.
Another complained that ‘Even the dog spoke French’1 – which may seem funny when we think about it now but it probably wasn’t then – especially for a young woman from a relatively sophisticated background who was faced with some extraordinary challenges in Quebec.
Map showing location of Quebec.
It’s hard to say whether War Brides who married into French-speaking families in Quebec knew what they were getting into. If a couple made their way through the bureaucratic process of filling out forms, getting permission to marry, meeting the padre and passing the necessary medical examinations, one would assume that the issue of language must have come up at least once. On the other hand, young lovers aren’t likely to listen to anyone’s opinion – especially when the opinion is that they shouldn’t marry because of language.
There is no doubt that Roman Catholic chaplains actively discouraged marriages between their Catholic soldiers and non-Catholic women; even commanding officers in the French regiments did the same. In January 1943 there had yet to be a marriage of a member of Le Régiment de la Chaudière in Britain – and the regiment had been there for two years.2
War Brides who came to a traditional, French Catholic family in Quebec did their best to fit in but what they soon found was that being accepted wasn’t simply a matter of learning the language or taking Holy Communion every Sunday. The famous Canadian novelist Hugh MacLennan described the tensions between prewar French and English Canada in his landmark of nationalist fiction The Two Solitudes. While many War Brides probably never even heard of Hugh MacLennan or his prize-winning novel before coming to Canada, if they had read his book it may have prepared them for what to expect when an English woman and a French Canadian man fall in love.
The Magdalen Islands are a tiny cluster of islands located in the Gulf of St Lawrence off the coasts of Quebec, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick. Although the Islands are part of the province of Quebec, many of its inhabitants are of Acadian descent.
The more MacLennan’s two characters love each other, the more the prejudice against them increases. This leads them to the discovery that ‘love consists in this, that two solitudes protect, and touch and greet each other.’3
The Canadian government was not unaware of the problems which these marriages presented for British War Brides. Language, culture and identity are still a hotly contested issue in Canada and always have been. So when the inevitable began to happen and French-speaking Canadians started marrying British women, the alarm bells went off. It was especially worrisome for those headed to rural Quebec. How are these English women going to manage?
It was the responsibility of the Immigration Branch to investigate the settlement arrangements of all War Brides coming to Canada. As the correspondence shows, in 1944 and 1945 some concerns were being expressed at the highest levels about how to deal with the sensitive issues raised by a number of British wives – three in particular – who were preceding their husbands to Quebec. The problem seems to be that nobody spoke English in the homes where the wives were supposed to settle. The Directorate of Repatriation (Repat) wanted direction, knowing full well there would be a lot more cases just like this to follow.
It was out of individual cases that policy was developed and from what we can see of the response that Repat got from A.L. Jolliffe, then Director of the Immigration Branch, language was certainly not going to become a political issue when it came to the War Brides.
In a perfect example of bureaucratese, Repat was going to have to figure out a way to tell English War Brides what they were headed to in Quebec without actually saying that language might be a problem:
[Y]ou raise the question as to whether English is spoken in the household … We think that it would be inadvisable to the language question with relatives at this end … [and] it would be unwise to refuse to permit women to sail on the basis of difference of language. We will make sure they are informed in general terms of the location of the husband’s home and the fact that the same is a French-speaking community. Such intimation, together with the information obtained from the husbands, should be sufficient to enable the women to decide whether or not they wish to proceed in advance of the head of the family to Canada.4
Interestingly, on the back page of this same letter is one single sentence, typed in the middle of the page, which doesn’t appear to be intended for general consumption but must have summed up the Director’s feelings about the whole War Bride transportation and the headaches it was starting to cause for him: ‘I’ll certainly be glad when this is all over.’5
Of course, some Quebeckers spoke English and a few English War Brides were bilingual; and there were English enclaves in Quebec – especially Montreal – so some British wives actually married English-speaking Quebeckers and came to live in an English environment. Their difficulties with the French language began when they realized that they were a tiny dot in a sea of French. According to the 1941 census, of the more than three million people living in Quebec eighty-five per cent of the population spoke French; sixty per cent spoke French only; twelve per cent spoke English only and twenty-seven per cent were bilingual.6 It was a rare British War Bride in Quebec for whom language didn’t become an issue, either in learning it, or learning how to cope with it!
Joan Walker was a British War Bride who ended up in Val Dor, Quebec, a northern mining community. Trained in Parisian French in an elite Swiss finishing school, Walker was a self-professed city slicker who had worked as a journalist on Fleet Street in London before marrying a Canadian. Inspired by her experiences settling in to life in Quebec, she wrote a hilarious novel for Harlequin called Pardon my Parka which won Canada’s highest award for humour, the Leacock Award, in 1953.
In a chapter called ‘Icit on parle Quebecois’ (translation ‘We Speak French Here’) she describes her rather embarrassing introduction to a Mr Boisevert, a local man they hired to build their house:
During