The Mending

By Lynne Golding

As the world settled the treaty to the recently concluded war-to-end-all-wars, and as the Canadian government repatriated the brave members of her expeditionary force, Canadians sought two things above all else: an end to the beleaguered state suffered during the war, and a return to the innocence that preceded it.

In the final book of the Beneath the Alders trilogy, Jessie Stephens discovers that neither is entirely possible. Set between 1918 and 1931, Jessie comes of age on the heels of the Spanish flu epidemic, in a time where skirt hems rose, marriageable men were in short supply, and compliance with temperance laws fell. As modern medical, dental, and training programs strove to restore the lives of the war’s injured, Jessie is a student at the University of Toronto, a mourner in the fields of France, a tourist in European capitals, a love struck guide in the hills of Caledon, and a devoted family member in her home town of Brampton. As she uncovers the secrets that have beset her since her earliest days, and others of more recent discovery, Jessie, her family, and her community begin to mend.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Blue Moon Publishers
• Release date: May 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9781989517567

Lynne Golding

Lynne Golding grew up in Brampton, Ontario, where she lives today. She obtained a BA in History and Political Science before studying law. She is now a senior partner at an international law firm, married with children, and the winner of the What's Your Story Short Prose and Poetry Competition.

Book preview

Chapter 1

THE SPANISH FLU

I lost my brother, James Gershom Roberts, on the tenth day of August 1918, although I was not informed that I had done so until eight days later, and I did not truly believe I had for a further eleven. Jim, as he was known, perished in the Battle of Amiens—the battle that became the final turning point in the Great War. The sincerely regret telegram announcing his demise was delivered to us on a warm Sunday afternoon. My sister, Ina, and I were sitting on the white-railed wrap-around verandah that adorned two sides of our large red-brick home, willing Mr. Thauburn, the approaching telegraph operator, to stop at another home—any home—rather than ours. His detour into the home of our aunt, just west of ours, brought moments of relief far exceeded by the lifetime of guilt they generated. Mr. Thauburn gathered reinforcements in the form of my aunt and cousin and proceeded to our house, his true destination.

The days that followed were for us like the days of any family suffering the loss of a much-loved son, grandson, brother, nephew, cousin, and friend. We were overwhelmed with food provided by neighbours, overcome with cards and letters of condolence from those we knew and those we knew not, and comforted by family and friends from near and afar. The moving memorial service held in our Grace Methodist Church eleven days after we received the sincerely regret was abundant in the Lord’s presence and provided me and the rest of my family the closure we needed.

It was the days that succeeded those days that were somewhat unique. The peculiar situation was the result of three circumstances: my father’s fury that he learned of my brother’s death from my mother; my mother’s fixation on the conditions of my brother’s death; and the outbreak of Spanish flu in our town. As it turned out, each state cured the one prior.

My father, a dentist, enlisted in the war in February 1916, ten months after my brother unexpectedly did the same. A major serving with the Canadian Army Dental Corps, Father worked out of Toronto, initially participating in the process to send other dentists overseas and then treating the wounded after they returned to Canada, first in the Central Military Convalescent Hospital and later in the Spadina Military Convalescent Hospital. His army life in Toronto so much of the week suited my father. His absence from our home in Brampton so much of the time suited me.

A strict disciplinarian with a commanding style, my father was not an easy man to live with. In our home, his views on matters—and he had views on almost every matter—were to be taken as edicts, to be heard and observed. While he claimed to like a good debate, to his mind a good debate was one among adults and one where his position prevailed. He had no patience for children, for whom he had an aversion in his dental practice (the feeling was mutual) and in our home. As a result, before he enlisted, my indoor social gatherings with friends were almost always at their homes. As to the identity of those friends, this too was a subject in which Father had a high degree of interest. Fortunately, with one notorious exception, the friends to whom he steered me were those I would have selected on my own. I had been subject to curfews before I could tell time. They were never to be missed, although they meant that I missed the ending of a good many concerts, films, and other social gatherings.

As a result, the years between 1916 and 1918—the years many Canadians would describe as the worst of their lives—were for me, in some respects, among the best. With Father not living at home, my life took on a previously unknown sense of ease. For more than two years, I attended teas, fêtes, and dances. I watched motion pictures and live entertainment at the Giffen Theatre. I attended evening concerts at Gage Park, in each case often staying until they concluded. I entertained friends in our home.

My father’s success in the army was a result, I expect, of some of those characteristics that made him difficult to live with. But it was the result too of other aspects of his personality. Father was highly civic-minded and experienced in directing many to a common goal. Before he enlisted, Father served as chairman of the Brampton High School Board and chairman of the Water Commission. For twenty-five years he led these organizations responsible for bringing good education and clean water, respectively, to our town. For almost as long, he served as the leader of our church’s choir, organizing and directing its members and others in weekly performances, practises, concerts, and cantatas, many of which he wrote. A great athlete, he was involved in the provincial lacrosse association and was the president of our local lacrosse club, the Brampton Excelsiors. In early 1914, he led the fundraising efforts to send our team, which included my brother Jim, west to Vancouver to vie for the Mann Cup. Perhaps the experience that prepared him best for the army was the position he created for himself in 1915 as leader of a self-styled cabal, a group that strove to increase military recruitment among Brampton men.

My father was also partial to status. Though he was never able to garner the support necessary to take on an elected office in our town, as two of his brothers-in-law were, he gained much of his self-esteem by being one of only a few dentists there. Indeed, I always suspected that he received more satisfaction from holding a position within the profession of dentistry than actually practising within it. It was a status he wanted his son, Jim, and his nephew, John, to enjoy.

Being a major in the army provided my father with the same exclusive status. While many Brampton men held positions in the army, few were majors and most were posted overseas. Father, being posted in Toronto, was able to return to his hometown, often in full uniform and sometimes being driven in a car. In his brown jacket, with its big brass buttons and four large pockets, the collar of his brown shirt and thin tie exposed, his wide leather belt and the leather bandolier across his chest, he cut a dashing figure. His pride in his uniform, his position, and, to be fair, the professional work he was doing, meant that when he came home for his short weekend visits, his spirits were higher, his disposition more generous, and his presence more tolerable than any I had previously experienced.

But when Father came home that day—a few hours after we received the sincerely regret—his spirits were far from high. I had never before seen my father cry—but he cried that day, as we all did. However, as our tears slowly gave way to mere numbness, Father’s gave way to anger. He was incensed that he learned of Jim’s death from the telegram Mother had dispatched to him. As an army officer, he had arranged to be the one notified should any incident befall Jim. That standing order had been observed two years earlier when Jim had contracted dysentery and nearly died while serving in Salonica, Greece. It was Father who received the telegram of that news while at his barracks; Father who shared it with us in Brampton later that day.

Father ranted endlessly about the incompetence of the army. Could they not keep track of a simple instruction? He railed against its insensitivity. He found it unimaginable that such a telegram could be delivered to a mother and sisters when a husband and father was able to receive it. He declared he would never return to the army. Having proudly worn his uniform on any occasion possible, over the course of the three weeks following Jim’s death, he did not wear it once. Wearing it would be a disgrace, he proclaimed. There was no consoling Father on these points, although many in our family tried to do so. When my Uncle William arrived in Brampton from Winnipeg, he made the mistake of noting the generosity of the army in granting Father three weeks of leave for mourning. Father rebuked him in a way previously reserved for Mother on nights when a meal served was not to his liking.

Fortunately, Father had the good sense to keep his views about the army’s ineptitude to those in the family. Having been a leading member of the cabal that encouraged the recruitment to the Canadian Expeditionary Force of Brampton boys and men, he realized that he of all people could not now speak ill of it. To do so would be to concede that he had been wrong in his earlier very public endorsements.

When non-family members were present—and that was much of the time—Father’s genuine feelings of anger were sublimated to his genuine feelings of loss. He truly grieved the death of his only son. Like Father, Jim was an athlete who played on local and university lacrosse and hockey teams. He was a debater, although unlike Father, Jim reserved his witty repartees for debating club halls rather than dining room tables. He was a dentist. But in many ways Jim was the better version of our father. Jim was kind and considerate. He never raised his voice or belittled others. He was a helpful son to Mother, a supportive brother to Ina and me, and a devoted grandson. He was brave and selfless in circumstances to which Father had never been exposed.

Jim also knew and appreciated humour, a trait of which Father was entirely devoid. Many times over the days of our mourning, townspeople reminisced about Jim and Eddie’s Folly, the sailboat the two friends fashioned out of an old row boat before sailing it down Brampton’s flooded Main Street. Standing behind a sail made of one of Mother’s sheets, each with one foot on the gunnel while waving at the assembled throng, they looked to all the world the seasoned seamen they most certainly were not. While Father resented any superior characteristics in his brothers-in-law, in his son they were a source of pride. Though Jim surely had faults, Father, like all of us, was blind to them, particularly following Jim’s death.

As we received occasional neighbours in our home, as we interacted with those delivering food to us, as we shopped in Robinson & Stork’s for our funeral finery, as we made our way through two at-home evenings and then Jim’s actual memorial service, we were relieved of Father’s anger toward the army. But once the memorial service was complete, when neighbours and friends moved on to supporting others with lost sons, our family received the full brunt of Father’s fury. His pre-army ways of interacting with us returned. However just as I reconciled myself to watching him badger and belittle Mother, restore my curfews, ban my friends from our house, and dictate my every activity, he left us. Once again, it was Mother that created the conditions for him to leave our home, to return to Toronto and the army.

* * *

At fifty-seven years of age, my mother Mary was at the time of Jim’s death still a handsome woman, though her edges were sharper than they had once been. The roundness she had acquired in the years before the war had vanished, along with the pre-war surplus of food. Four years of a mostly wheatless and meatless diet had thinned her now lined face and other parts of her frame. Her once lustrous thick brown hair was now thinner and streaked with grey. The passing years meant that the hems of her dresses were not as long (though not as short as Ina’s and mine) and that her necklines were not as high. As a result, when viewing Mother in her always brown dresses, we could now see a few peppery marks of aging in the slightly loose skin below her collarbone and her stylish shoes, her one concession to fashion.

Mother was a compliant woman. A devoted wife and mother, she put up with my father’s challenging personality, loving him in spite of it. Years before Jim’s death, she had suffered the heart-piercing indignity of her husband’s infidelity—an affair of a few months with a tenant in the building in which Father operated his dental practice. To facilitate his trysts, Father had insisted that I associate with the woman’s daughter, Enid. Father ended the affair and the woman’s tenancy at the insistence of two of his sisters. Enid and her mother left Brampton. Their parting public declarations added to Mother’s many miseries, that of public humiliation. Our family experienced a financial downturn as the ladies of the town diverted their family’s purchase of dental services to another provider. Mother bore all of this with grace and fortitude. My parents carried on with their lives. The betrayal was eventually seemingly forgotten as they returned to their regular routine: she, the dutiful mother to his children, organizer of his household and organist to his church choir; he, the community leader and breadwinner.

It was all very startling, therefore, when Mother, who never raised her voice at anyone, took to task the man to whom she had only ever shown deference. Few in the town could forget the infamous do-your-bit speech Father gave in February 1916 to the two hundred people who had assembled in our church for the purpose of attending a wartime fundraising concert. At the concert’s end, after imploring the assembled women to release their sons, brothers, fiancés, and husbands, he called by name eligible men in the audience and asked them why they had not enlisted. Those singled out included his nephew, John.

I could have heard every word of Mother’s reprimand when Father returned home that night, even if I had not covertly positioned myself to do so.

How could you? How could you do that? You misled people! You invited them to a night of music, not to a public shaming. And who did you shame: people who for reasons of which you are not privy have determined that they cannot now or will not now enlist. And you used me. You used our entire choir. She went on, clearly releasing nearly three decades of pent-up anger.

Father must have wondered whether her larynx, never having been so exercised, ached the next morning. He did not know. He was gone by the time she woke, enlisting himself, as his penance. The note he left Mother had the desired effect of leading her to conclude that he would be sent overseas and die in service. The authorities, my grandfather assured her, would not send him overseas. His fifty-three years of age, his seniority in the dental profession, and his organizational skills, meant that he would best serve his country and his empire closer to home.

What drove Father out of our home for the second time in the space of two and a half years was not Mother’s wrath, but rather her neurosis. Since the day we received the sincerely regret, Mother had been fixated on certain details pertaining to Jim’s death. She was not obsessed with how he died. In a letter written to us by an officer in the platoon to the rear of Jim’s, we learned that Jim had died in a battle fought in the Picardy Region, in the Department of the Somme, just outside a village called Hallu. Lieutenant Ryan, our correspondent, described how he took three of his own men and a stretcher, and, under heavy fire, lifted Jim and began to move him back from enemy lines. In that process, a shell struck quite close. The explosion wounded two of the three stretcher boys. Jim died immediately from the shock of the attack.

We also knew where Jim was buried. These details we received quite incredibly from Reverend Bruce Hunter, the former pastor of our church, one of the men who enlisted in response to Father’s fateful do-your-bit speech. Reverend Hunter was, at the time of Jim’s death, a captain serving as the chaplain of the 85th Nova Scotia Highlanders. In his written account, he told us of the third day of the Battle of Amiens. Reverend Hunter’s men were positioned on the northern flank of the battle lines, two kilometres west of Hallu. It was Jim’s battalion—the 78th—that was to take Hallu. As the padre, it was Reverend Hunter’s responsibility to stay at the regimental aid post of the battalion, well back from the front line of the attack. There he supervised the bringing in of the wounded. The night of Sunday, August 11, he led a party of thirty-two men through No Man’s Land with bullets whistling overhead. The next morning, he marked out a little cemetery in a field near his regiment’s aid post. There they began to bury the men under wooden crosses inscribed with each man’s name and regiment.

It was days after the attack on Hallu that he came across a new grave in his little cemetery. On a rudimentary sign were the words Lieut J.G. Stephens. He was totally stunned. He had not heard that our Jim had fallen. Nor did he have any idea how Jim’s body—an officer of the 78th Battalion—had come to be buried there among his men of the 85th. Reverend Hunter made some inquiries, and it was confirmed that Jim, like most of the senior officers and many of the lieutenants among the Canadian divisions fighting in the area, had been lost in the drive to take Hallu. No one knew how he came to be buried there.

What troubled Mother was not the mystery of how Jim came to be buried in that makeshift cemetery, but rather the fact that his body continued to be there. In a turnip field! she cried whenever asked about the circumstances of Jim’s death—and in the two full evening at-home visitations, in the reception after the memorial service, and in the countless encounters she had with friends and family who sought to console her in our home and elsewhere—it was a question she was asked a lot. Shot leading his men in battle, she would emit often through tears, and now left to rot in a turnip field. His great sacrifice, and that is where he has been left. Just as many family members tried to assuage Father of his fury regarding the telegram delivery, many tried to assuage Mother of her concern regarding the location of Jim’s body.

They are all buried in fields, Father would say, initially gently though firmly, and then as time went on, with a raised voice of exasperation. Where else would he be buried? he once asked, intending to be rhetorical.

Here, she said in a response that surprised him. Here. In Brampton. In the family plot in our cemetery.

Father thought the suggestion ludicrous. The government is taking boys to Europe, Mary, not bringing them back. Over. Not back.

They brought John back, Mother retorted as though bringing back a very much alive twenty-one-year-old man with a heart murmur was the same as bringing back the body of a bullet-ridden fallen soldier. Nonetheless, the response, which was uncharacteristically argumentative on Mother’s part, ended that particular conversation. The return of his nephew John after one year of service due to a heart murmur infuriated and flummoxed Father. He had no answer to either point. But Father was right. The Canadian government would not repatriate deceased soldiers while the war was being pursued. It was not clear it ever would.

We urged Mother to occupy her mind otherwise. It was to no avail. Playing the piano, which normally provided a distraction to any matter that perplexed her, brought no relief. No matter what she sought to play, her fingers eventually pumped out one funeral dirge or another. The exercise would end in tears and a soliloquy on the location of Jim’s burial. Cooking, which normally gave her pleasure, devolved into torrents and the same refrain whenever a root vegetable presented itself. No amount of reasoning, sympathy, or disregard eased her compulsion. It was the first thing she spoke about when she woke in the morning; it was the last thing she spoke about at the end of the evening; it was the subject she spoke about most throughout the day. It was what drove Father back to the barracks on the last day of his three week furlough; it was what pushed Ina back to her university boarding house; it was what led me resolutely back to high school.

Eventually, Mother lost her obsession. A switch was turned off, and her seven-week compulsive concern about the location of Jim’s remains was no more. I do not know the medical or psychological reason for that cessation, but I suspect it had at least something to do with the capacity of her brain. By early October, Mother realized her attention was required for a living member of our family.

Among the members of our family household was my mother’s father, Jesse Brady. Grandpa came to live with us for a short while in 1905—two years after my birth—and had never left. A builder of much of the town in his long working life, he was held in high regard by all within it. At eighty-three years of age, he was still an avid gardener, although the wartime food shortages required him to substitute vegetables for the roses and other thorny flowers he loved to tend. He continued to be active on the curling rinks, the lawn bowling greens, and in the halls in which he associated with the members of his clubs, the International Order of Foresters and the Odd Fellows.

The timbre of his voice, not quite the commanding baritone it once had been, still supported his presence in our church choir. The hair on his head (of which there was still much) was now decidedly more white than grey. In solidarity with those at the front, Grandpa’s square-cut beard had recently been shorn. In its place was an unfamiliar smooth chin. The fingers of his big, strong hands were starting to bend in awkward arthritic angles. But as for Grandpa’s wit, his judgement, his command of facts, and his character, nothing had changed. He was still the steadiest member of our family, continuing the role he had always played as the calm ballast to the rocky family ship commanded by my father. With Jim gone, Grandpa was the member of our family most dear to me, holding the position in my heart I, his namesake, always assumed I held in his.

I learned of the loss of Mother’s fixation one morning in early October. As with all meals in our home, breakfast was taken in the dining room, at a table formally set. Although Mother made two meals a day for our household, we were generally left to our own devices regarding breakfast and were free to take it as our schedule allowed. As a result of Mother’s mania, I had adopted a new approach to the first meal of the day—one that had me in her company for a shorter period of time.

Don’t you want to eat your apple at the table? Mother asked one morning after I had quickly consumed two pieces of toast. It had been my habit my entire life to end my breakfast with a piece of fruit.

No, thank you. I’d prefer to eat it later in the morning, between classes, I feigned. She did not question my explanation.

Grandpa adopted an entirely different strategy. The man who was ordinarily the first out of bed each morning had become the last. He had come to take his breakfast after Mother had vacated the dining room and begun her morning piano practice two rooms away.

On the morning of October 8, Mother began her familiar diatribe. I’ve been thinking a lot, she began. Eating my marmalade-covered toast, I prepared to ignore her, knowing exactly what would follow. But to my surprise, she identified the object of her concern otherwise. About your grandfather.

Grandpa? I asked. Though I loved my grandfather and could not bear the thought of any harm coming to him, I was almost happy to hear his name—anyone’s name—other than Jim’s. What’s wrong with Grandpa?

There is nothing wrong with your grandfather, Mother said, yet. But I’m worried there could be in the future. Have you noticed all of the cases of grippe being written about in the Toronto paper?

Is it really grippe? Yesterday, Mr. Cooper told us that the ‘grippe’ was actually a return of the flu that struck Europe in the spring. He doesn’t think that the provincial health officials are taking it seriously enough. Mr. Cooper was my science teacher. He told us that the provincial officer of health had declared the flu was not as dangerous as other infections like measles and scarlet fever and so had urged local authorities not to take measures that would irritate the public, like dislocating business and ordinary routines.

Mr. Cooper thinks that the flu is much stronger now than it was in the spring, I continued.

We don’t really have anything to compare it with ourselves, not having experienced it then, Mother said, but it seems that dozens of Toronto school teachers and hundreds of students have contracted it. And look at how long the obituary section is in the paper. If it is like that in Toronto now, Brampton won’t escape it. Mr. Cooper had said the same thing.

I’ll go to Boyle’s today and purchase some Taniac, Mother said, referring to our local pharmacy and a cure-all potion, and the dairy. My chief concern is Grandpa, given his age, but a good course of dairy products won’t hurt you either. I cringed at the thought of how much cream I would be required to consume. Many women recommended that cream be consumed prophylactically by children to counter acid imbalances that made the body more susceptible to viruses. I was certain that its lack of success in keeping scarlet fever at bay in my childhood would not deter Mother’s administration of it now.

Nonetheless, I left the table lighter than I had in weeks. I was about to start a course of treatment that made me nauseous even to consider, and our country was beset by a virus that was to kill thousands and infect even more, but the threat of it marked a wonderful turning point in the restoration of my mother’s mental health.

Father shared Mother’s concern. When he came home that weekend, he brought my cousin Hannah with him. The University of Toronto was in the process of closing all of its dormitories, including the one in which she resided. Hannah was glad to leave it and return to the comparative safety of her home. My sister Ina, also a U of T student, would not be budged. Suffering from both her hypochondriac and agoraphobic tendencies, she had shut herself in her room at the boarding house in which she lived and had not left it in over a week.

Poor Ina, Grandpa said.

Poor Mrs. Boyd, I said, thinking of the boarding house operator. I knew what it was like to live with Ina when there was even a whisper of a contagion in the air. I could not imagine how difficult it would be when the septicity actually existed.

I spoke to her through the door of her room, Father reported. She seemed calm. Mrs. Boyd has been taking meals to her. She’s willing to continue doing so as long as Ina stays healthy. But all of the other boarders have gone home, and so as long as Mrs. Boyd does not contract the virus, Ina should be fine.

We then learned that Mrs. Boyd’s boarding house was in a much better state than the boarding house run by Father’s sister, Lillian. As he settled into his favourite chair and lit his pipe, he told us that he had run into her as he left the Spadina Military Convalescent Hospital the day before. Aunt Lil’s home, a few blocks north of the hospital, housed six university students. Father reported that all of them had contracted the virus. Two had been retrieved by their parents in the early stages, two who had mild cases, had made full recoveries, and been sent home healthy, but two others were languishing in their rooms under Aunt Lil’s care.

It’s a good thing the high schools are closed, Mother said. In addition to running the boarding house, Aunt Lil taught history at the local high school, Toronto Central Technical Institute. So she’s fine? Mother asked.

As fine as Lulu ever is, Father said, applying a nickname that only he was able to use. It was not said in kindness. I stood a good deal away from her while we spoke.

But the situation continued to deteriorate both in Toronto and Brampton. In Toronto, it was reaching crisis proportions. Officials were forced to repurpose several buildings into emergency hospitals, including Burwash Hall at the University of Toronto, the women’s building on the Exhibition grounds, and several hotels. The undertakers could not keep up with the death toll. Cemeteries were ordered to stay open for Sunday burials.

Two days after Father returned to Toronto, high school was cancelled in Brampton. What are your plans for the day? Grandpa asked me at breakfast that morning. With the termination of Mother’s fixation on the location of Jim’s body, we had begun to eat breakfast together again.

I don’t have any plans for the morning, I said, but Jane, Frances, and I plan to do homework together this afternoon. Jane Thompson and Frances Hudson were my two closest friends. When we left classes the day before, our teachers provided us with two weeks of reading and exercises. I invited them to meet here. Is that alright with you, Mother? I knew she would be at her monthly meeting of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union at that time.

Is that wise? Mother asked. I stared at her, trying to discern her meaning. To meet indoors with your friends? I am thinking back to the days of scarlet fever. Whenever there was an outbreak in the town, none of the children were able to meet indoors. She was right. I recalled the outbreak in 1911. Not being able to gather indoors and not wanting to associate with the other children congregating at the flats surrounding the Etobicoke Creek, my friends, Frances and Archie, and I had instead walked to Derry Road. Archie convinced Frances and me that the walk was a short one and that we would be welcomed upon our arrival into the home of his aunt, a purportedly wonderful baker. We walked merrily for the first third of our journey, marvelling at the large, beautiful mansions that lined Main Street, and then once we were further south commenting on various aspects of the farms. I recalled the conversation as we passed the Bull jersey cattle farm. The Bulls were the largest breeders of jersey cattle in the world. It took us some time to walk that farm’s frontage. One day, Archie said, repeating to us a rumour his father had heard, Mr. Bull is going to build little houses on that land. We laughed and laughed at the notion that anyone would live so far from the downtown area.

Isn’t that why you aren’t in school, Mother said, bringing me back to the current conversation, to stop the spread of the virus? That was part of it. The other part of it was that too many of our teachers were getting sick.

Jane and Frances are fine, I replied, and we weren’t told to stay out of people’s homes.

Still, she said, I think that today would be a good day to work independently. Maybe you could go for a walk afterwards and discuss what you learned. She caught my eye. I recalled her concern for my grandfather’s health and agreed to her suggestion. Wanting to be equally vigilant, Mother decided she should not go to the monthly meeting of the WCTU. A dutiful, if not ardent member of the society, I knew that this was no great sacrifice to her.

The next day, the other Brampton schools were closed and Wednesday evening church services were cancelled. On Thursday, October 17, our local public health officer, Dr. Sharpe, released a statement officially closing all places of public gatherings. In addition to providing advice regarding how to elude the spread of the contagion, we were told to avoid all crowds, especially indoors. We were to avoid all visiting and entertainment.

I had better call Father tonight, Mother said after reading the declaration in the newspaper. Mother never called Father by his first name, Jethro. The only person in Brampton to do so was his sister Rose. Everyone outside the family called him Doc. I’ll slip down to the bakery tonight and call him. Our family did not have a telephone. Telephones had proliferated in the years since their first introduction in Canada a quarter of a century earlier, but they were still not widespread in homes. They were simply too expensive. While my father’s sister, Aunt Rose, who lived down the road from us, could well have afforded a telephone in her home, she did not see the point of having one in her bakery and another in her home. Whenever anyone in our family wanted to make a call—when a call was truly required—we went down to the Queen Street Bakery and used the telephone there.

What took you so long? Grandpa asked when Mother finally returned home, nearly three hours after she left. The bakery was only three blocks away. Could Doc not be found? Grandpa asked.

That wasn’t the problem, Mother replied. "It took me nearly two hours to get a line. The operators are so short-staffed. A good number of the girls are off with the flu, and so many