Karen and Susan

Susan and Karen

It was during this time in France, that my little sister, Susan, came into the picture. She was adorable with her blue-blue eyes and curly locks.  Everyone loved Susan.  She was always happy and so cute and besides, everyone saw her day after day tied up in the front of the apartment building, playing with toys and sometimes bugs.  My mother would lean over the balcony and check her out.  We joke that she lowered cookies on a string but I can’t be sure that is true. I think its true.

My parents would take her to the pubs in St. Avold and feed her beer.  The French aren’t as tied up as we are when it comes to drinking. Besides, she was so cute propped up on the bar table. 

Susan did have one disaster.  Not to do with drinking but with cigarettes.  She was  about one and a half years old playing in her play pen just within reach of an ash tray.  No she wasn’t smoking!  Just imagine a toddler pulling out her morning cigarette! “Think I’ll have a Gitain”.  No. The French weren’t that liberated and either were my parents.

After she ate a couple of butts, she passed out and turned blue.  A friend of my mom’s rushed the two of them to the hospital at the Base. After they pumped her stomach, she came around.  

I adored her. She was my real life doll. All she can remember about me is that I tricked her one time into eating burnt popcorn. Such is life.  You do the best you can and when you mess up once, that’s all others remember.

Karen was in my life but mainly to beat me up. She was always mad I arrived in the family.  Sometimes she would hit my arm so hard I couldn’t move it. I’d say, “Mom, Karen hit me and I can’t move my arm.” From what I can remember, that was the end of the conversation. Karen was strong and well built and I was a little wisp of a thing.

Dreams and flying

Dreams and Flying and Space Trips.

It seemed easy to me when I was going to sleep at night, to soar into the heavens.  I’d drop off a planet and fall into space. Sometimes I would want to float in the air and I would look at myself from a different corner of the room. 

I used to think of my mother’s voice and I would hear her as if she were in the room with me. I had all these abilities when I was young. I recollect thinking at one time, that others weren't doing the same things, so I stopped. 

The Farm

The Farm

Our PMQ building was on the edge of the PMQ development, situated on top of a very high hill that sloped to a valley like a green carpet.  In the valley was  a little town called ‘St. Avold’. 

Many things were observed on that greenery. Sheep grazed, kids swatted golf balls and cars wound around on the road circling the hill.  One day when we were looking out the window of our apartment, we watched an old lady walk down the hill through the little apple orchard to the side. She was all dressed in black but when she stopped to relieve herself, she revealed shocking pink bloomers.  What a kodak moment that was!  

At the bottom of the hill there was a beautiful old French country farm house with three charming young daughters. I felt so privileged to know these girls and to be able to play with them on their farm.  They only spoke French and I had no French at all. I was going to an English school the military had set up in the PMQ’s. It took me the whole time I lived in France to be able to understand them. This was the beginning of my passion for French.

They had chickens on the farm that would run freely in the yard.  Much to my horror, the chickens even ran around after their heads were cut off.  It was nothing for my friends to witness this as this was just the normal beginning of preparing dinner. 

They also had rabbits in the barn in cages.  I had had a pet rabbit that got too big for me and I asked if I could leave it with their rabbits and they could take care of it for me.  It was dark in the barn and all the rabbits looked the same. As the months became years, I became less and less sure which rabbit was mine and suspected it had made it to the pot as rabbit stew. But I couldn’t be certain.

The worst thing I ever did, I did on that farm.  I stole an egg from one of the chickens in the chicken house. I carefully carried the egg up the hill, coddling it in my hands.  When I got to our third floor apartment, I carefully laid it in the oven and turned the oven on.  I was sure I would have a baby chick!  Hours later, nothing happened.  It was so hot when I took it out of the oven, I thought I’d killed it when I opened it to find a hard boiled egg. 

I never really got over stealing from my friends nor the added injury of perhaps killing the baby chick.  I feel guilty about this to this day. This experience marred an otherwise wonderful gaggle of memories of my French friends and their charming farm.

Mac

Mac

The story of my life in France would not be complete without mentioning Mac Prescott. I fell ‘in love’ with him the day I saw the back of his head on the big green kaki bus going to the base.  He was my life line.  I followed him to his base ball games.  I watched him in the boys play ground every day at school.  I sat beside him on the bus.  I thought of him all the time. 

I was only 7 so I didn’t know what to do with all this luuvvv  nor did I know how to talk to him.  When I left France I was eleven, but my ardor for him lasted for years. The last letter I received from him, he too had returned to Canada and the family bought a bull dog.  He named it after me.

I never thought I could marry any one else at least until I saw him again. But how would that be possible?  We lost touch and life brought us further apart as time went on.

Years later when I was packing up my locker at Carleton University to bid my final goodbyes, something extraordinary happened.  As I walked down the empty hallways I passed a student coming in the other direction.  I remember yet the sound of my heels clicking on the cement floor and echoing off the walls.  This student  was carrying an armful of maps so I couldn’t really see his face and I passed him by.  Then I froze in my tracks, turned around and said, “Mac Prescott?” 

It was he!  I was incredulous.  How could that be?  How could I possibly have known it were Mac? I hadn’t seen him since he was eleven. We exchanged niceties, how are you? What did you study? Where are you going? Then we parted.  I wanted so much to tell him what a crush I’d had on him in France, but I didn't know if he felt the same way or not. I saw him two more times that week serendipitously, once at a discotheque and at another time at a restaurant. We didn’t speak; we just waved and acknowledged each other.

Years later, around 2004, there was a 2Wing reunion in Ottawa for the air force ‘brats’.  He wasn’t there, so when I got home, I put an alert out for him on the 2 Wing Brat site.  A year later, I got the email I’d been waiting for.  

We wrote profusely of our experience and about our feelings for each other when we were kids in France.  We kept in touch every year just to catch up and say hi.  This is the first year I didn’t hear from him and he doesn’t answer my emails. (2014)

The Forest and Ravine, The Bunkers and The Mines

The Forest and Ravine, The Bunkers and The Mines

I don’t remember having a lot of toys, but I didn’t need them as there were wonderful radio programs full of stories for kids, ‘The Shadow’, ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’, ‘Dick Tracy’, to name a few. 

One of my favourite pass-times was playing in the ravine in the forest beside the PMQ’s. There was a large fallow field lined with high bushes that you had to cross to get to the ravine.   The old bunkers that dug into the hills were my palaces and I fantasized of a different life. For a while, I could be a princess, the bare walls lined with gold and the dirt floors covered with fine tiles and tapestries.  Everyone would wait on me.

The stories I heard about the field mines left over from the war concerned me just a little.  Even though it had been ten years since WWII ended, mines were still being found all over the country, some by children playing in fields. When they stepped on the mines, they would blow up and kill them.  Even though I knew my parents were aware of this, I didn’t talk about it to them because I could’t bear the idea that my fantasy world would be forbidden to me. 

So between the ages of seven and eleven, my happy worlds were the  trips on the military bus to the base, Mac, and the magical forest and ravine.

Metz, Grotenquin and 2Wing

Metz

At first we lived in Metz, near Paris, for a few months.  I have vague memories of a small class room with diminutive desks and few students.  I could never get enough of the intoxicating scent of the large pink roses that traipsed over the walls and gates everywhere. The impressive Globe Hotel sticks in my mind.  Maybe I passed it every day on the way to the small classroom through a sea of roses. Mom says we ate there often. Maybe that’s why I remember it yet.

Grotenquin, 2Wing

My dad was actually supposed to be at  RCAF Base 2 Wing in Grotenquin.  The only trouble was, the airforce didn’t have accommodation ready. So Metz was a holding tank till they had some place for us to live. 

They finally engineered accommodation for the fledging families who were first to arrive at 2 Wing. They installed trailers for us, which were positioned on the airport tarmac, on what they called ‘buttons’.  These buttons were circular and had been used to park aircraft.  Each button had a number and the trailers were placed along the edge, forming an incomplete  circle in each button.

It was summer.  It was hot. There were no trees. We were all crammed inside the small space for sleeping and eating.  My mother was pregnant with Susan.  ‘Butch’, the bratty kid next door, would chase his mother around their trailer with a stick while his mother cried out, ‘Oh Butch, put that down Butchy’.  Even at that tender age of 7, I could figure out, what do you expect calling a kid ‘Butch’?

My father emptied the ‘honey bucket’ each evening.  He would go to the toilet in the trailer, haul out this pail and walk out of the trailer into oblivion.  I never knew where he went, but he always came back with a clean bucket for a fresh start the next day.  I thought it was a job only for fathers. I was glad I wasn’t a father.

The trailer period didn’t last long, as my mother was still pregnant when we moved to the PMQ’S [Permanent Married Quarters].  These were a gaggle of several, maybe ten,  four story apartment buildings, each with their own letter. I think ours was ‘C’ block. They were  located 17 kilometres from the Base at Grotenquin. 

The military supplied large kaki green buses to transport us back and forth to the Base for movies, skating, swimming. I have indelible memories of the fun we kids had on that bus I just loved singing the old camp fire songs.  

The Base even had a grocery store, hospital, church, and bowling lanes. It seemed they built all this for us in a farmers field.  There were few trees.  I recall the merciless heat of the hot sun pounding down on me as I went from one activity to another between the buildings.

I also remember well the huge blue sign outside the guardhouse at the entrance to the Base. It was a fresh sign RCAF BASE 2 WING GROTENQUIN with a jet painted on it, probably a CF 100.  This sign had historical significance and led us to an adventure, a coup, about 35 years later.

It was 1955.  Television had not arrived here yet.  No one had a phone at the PMQ’s.  There was one phone in the office which was located in one of the buildings and it was only open some of the time. No iPhones, no electronic games, no computers, no TV. What did we do?  Well, we were brought up by the out method… “OUT!”

To France: The Great Ship

Chapter 3

France: (ages 7-11) 1955-1959

The Great Ship 

Ships were still the main method of trans-Atlantic passage in 1955.  Air travel was just getting off the ground, so to speak and not a viable option for the military to transport families at this time in history.  I was only 7, but I was thrilled we were going on the big ship, The Homeric of Canard Lines. 

We left from the port of Montreal and arrived six days later in France at the port of Le Harvre. What I remember most about the experience on that big boat were the dinner mints on the table outside the dining room.  I’d take a handful of them and savour them as their soft creamy texture melted in my mouth.  It was an unfamiliar liberty.  

Another indelible memory is the scant railings on the decks. The hungry waters broke into enormous waves along the side of the ship.  They were way too close.  There seemed to be nothing between me and that deep foreboding ocean.   Mmmm, easy for a parent to rid of an unruly child.  Just a little push and that’d be it. I found it quite horrific. I stayed well away and tried to behave myself as best I could.

My parents told us of icebergs that were huge underwater, but just showed little peaks on the top.  They explained they were very dangerous for ships because ships could hit them even when they were far away.  So that is why I wasn’t ecstatic when an iceberg was sited.  Everyone on deck didn’t seem to know what I knew as they were waving excitedly and smiling. I never got sea sick, but this experience scared me deeply and all I could think about was who was going to be in the life boat with me.

The vast expanse of ocean gave me the impression that we weren’t really moving at all. I wanted to believe the adults who insisted that we would see land one day, but by day four, I had serious doubts. Waves, waves and more waves. From one horizon to the other, nothing but water. I could see me growing old on this boat.  I was starting to wonder where we would get our food.

Then one day, everyone was on deck again, pointing to land on the horizon.  I couldn’t see anything, but it wasn’t many hours later that I, too, saw it. Our long journey came to an end when we debarked at Le Harvre in France. We made it. The ice bergs didn’t get us and I didn’t get thrown overboard by angry parents.  We were in France, our new home for the next 4 years.