Prompt # 12 - The Year I Was Born

Prompt # 12 - The Year I Was Born

Research tells me that the year I was born, the tape recorder, transistor radio, 33 &1/3 RPM long-playing record, fax machine, and zoom lens were invented.

Louis St. Laurent replaced William Lyon Mackenzie King as Prime Minister of Canada. Newfoundland became a province and Joey Smallwood its premier. Tommy Douglas was already premier of Saskatchewan. Harry Truman was re-elected president of the USA and he desegregated American forces. In Britain, London hosted the first Olympics since Berlin in 1936, the Labour government implemented the National Health Service, and Charles, Prince of Wales, was born. In Europe, the Berlin blockade was followed by the Berlin airlift. In the Middle East, the British withdrew from Palestine and the Jewish National Council proclaimed the state of Israel. It immediately went to war against aggressive neighbours. In Asia, rumblings began in Korea, Mao Zedong was marching in China, and Gandi was assassinated in India. The International Court of Justice opened in The Hague. And on December 10, the United Nations proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Popular songs that year include: I'm Looking Over A Four Leafed Clover, Buttons and Bows, My Happiness, Now Is the Hour, and The William Tell Overture (which I suspect has something to do with the popularity of The Lone Ranger.) Movies made that year which I have since watched include Olivier's Hamlet, Key Largo, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. George Orwell wrote 1984. James Mitchner and Tennessee Williams won Pulitzers, Hugh MacLennan, A.M. Klein, and Thomas H. Raddall won Governor General's Awards for Literature, and Paul Hiebert won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, for Sarah Binks, Sweet Songstress of Saskatchewan. T.S. Eliot won the Nobel Prize for Literature. No Peace Prize was awarded.

In our family, my parents married on Easter Monday (the minister made them wait until Lent was over.) In December, my cousin Lew was born in Peace River, Alberta about twelve hours before I was born in Rivers, Manitoba. Borne in rivers.

Prompt # 11 - Service

Prompt # 11 - Service

This year's poppy was grabbed by the wind and blew from my shoulder across the driveway. It lodged in tall grass in the neighbour's field, buried under pellets of snow. My efforts to retrieve it failed. Grieving my poppy, needing ritual on this cold November day, I returned forlorn to my empty house. I scanned the radio to find a service, the television for the wreath-laying from Ottawa. I turned at last to the piano and my stiff fingers stumbled through:

     O valiant hearts who to your glory came

     Through dust of conflict and through battle flame . . .

 

Old Dave Mason used to bring the poppies to school every year to sell to us there. Wearing his Legion blazer and crooked beret like my dad. Walking with an old soldier's pride. His eyes were watery; his ears were shot; his hands trembled as he pinned the poppies to me. On the last year that I saw him there, when he asked me about my trip to Quebec, I told him how much I had loved Montreal. He had not liked it one bit, he said. “They made us march,” he said, “from Union Station to the other depot. I didn't like it at all!”

     “Was that on your way to France?”

     “No,” he said. “On our way to South Africa.” France had been later. I reached to touch his hand that day—this man who, as a teenager younger than I, had fought in the Boer War, and again, as a young man, in Europe.

     Proudly you gathered rank on rank to war

     As who had heard God's message from afar

     All you had hoped for, all you had you gave

     To save mankind, yourself you scorned to save.

 

Dave and my dad were in different wars but in many ways their experiences were similar. Rank on rank. The troop ships. The different campaigns and battles. They respected each other. They knew things that the rest of us did not know, and they tried to protect us from those horrors—to shield us from stories of inhuman deeds and shattered wasted lives. They never questioned their own participation when the winds of war had howled. And every year they pinned their medals to their shoulders and marched with the ghosts of their comrades who had not returned. As Dad read out each name on the Roll Call of the Dead, Old Dave's failing hands pinned a poppy to the white Celtic cross until it stood at last blood red.      

     Splendid you passed, the great surrender made;

     Into the light that nevermore shall fade;

     Deep your contentment in that blest abode,

     Who wait the last clear trumpet call of God.

“Let us ree-member,” Dad said, as if by remembering, we could put the pieces together again. Before the bugle sounded, grown men wept. And row on row of children with poppies on their shoulders, in silence, listened to the cold wind blow.

(Words to the hymn “O Valiant Hearts” by Sir John Stanhope Arkwright.)

Prompt # 10 - Unexplained Memory

Prompt # 10 - Unexplained Memory

 

My friend Elisabeth says that her recurring nightmare is that the restaurant is full, a bus load of tourists has arrived, she's taking their orders as fast as she can but at the same time tearing out her hair and crying: "There's no one in the kitchen!" She recognizes this, every waitress's worst nightmare, as stemming from the years she worked in food service. I worked for years in federal corrections, minimum, medium, and high security, and I don't have nightmares about that. Maybe I should, but I don't. But my own recurring nightmare, my unexplained memory, also has something to do with a kitchen. Although I was never really sure whether it was memory or premonition.

 

Everything is white, painted white. The counter is high and covered with old-fashioned kitchen tools--wooden bread troughs, a whole round of cheese, woven baskets, and things hanging from the ceiling. Red things. Black things. (Love that this dream is in colour.) And they're dripping. Dripping blood. A brace of something, like pheasants or fowl in old genre paintings. I am looking, but I cannot force myself to go in.

 

This dream recurs over the years. I try to parse it. Dead chicken? Blood? The day my mother chose to tell me the facts of life, as she eviscerated chickens, prepping them for winter food, and all I could do was try to keep control of the gag reflex. Kitchen dreams? Nigella I am not. A galley kitchen? My very first apartment, a studio with a galley kitchen so small you had to choose your task and turn to that side before entering. It was in an old building at River and Osborne in Winnipeg which has since been renovated into a trendy upscale shopping mall. I shared the bath, which was outside in the hallway, two separate doors, with the apartment next door which appeared to be occupied by a tall redhead in a raccoon coat who was only home when she brought "friends" up with her. Once I had a break-in but I suspected the druggie friend of a friend who knew when to target me. But why would this place haunt me? Perhaps there was danger lurking of which I was not sufficiently aware? The meaning remained a mystery.

 

Then, this summer, on my return trip to Portsmouth, UK, I was touring HMS Victory again, taking my digital camera and my tablet this time, because for some reason the first time I went (24 years ago) I didn't take pictures. And I didn't know at that time that I had relatives who had worked on the Victory. So back I went. Obediently following the one-way signs, middle, upper, top decks, gun decks, and below. Pausing to breathe. Hyperventilating. Accepting advice from concerned fellow tourists. And there it is. Literally. My nightmare. And it is, literally, a galley kitchen (although this is far from Winnipeg.) And there are dead chickens (mock, I hope) hanging. And old-fashioned kitchen utensils, wooden bowls, a wheel of cheese! So it was not a premonition, nor an admonition. My recurring dream was a memory, and the panic attached to it is the panic of the claustrophobia of this cramped vessel, once home to 800 souls at a time. I had been too upset to stop to take pictures back then. Too upset to recognize why. Too young to understand what my brain, my blood, had known. That I would have to return. That I would return.

 

 

So it's strange that this topic should come up just when the meaning of the recurring nightmare has been revealed as a memory which is no longer a mystery.