Love Before and After

By Ronald Gaffney and Cynthia Jean Gaffney

The story revolves around a First Nations soldier (Maliseet) who joins the Royal Canadian Artillery and is stationed overseas during World War II, fighting in both Italy and Northwest Europe. While in the United Kingdom he meets, then marries, a British girl who as a ‘war bride’ sails to Canada in 1946. The pair set up housekeeping on a First Nations reserve in northwestern New Brunswick and the story follows them and their family through their trials and tribulations both at Maliseet, New Brunswick and later in the capital city of Fredericton, New Brunswick.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781796098945

Book preview

Copyright © 2020 by Ronald Gaffney and Cynthia Jean Gaffney.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 04/21/2020

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CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PREVIEW

SICILY, 1943

SAMUEL PAUL, 1939

MARIE KELLY, 1939

ITALY, 1943

NORTHWEST EUROPE, 1945

COULSDON, 1945

MALISEET, 1950

MALISEET, 1960 (SAM)

MALISEET, 1960 (MARIE)

FREDERICTON, 1970 (SAM)

FREDERICTON, 1970 (MARIE)

FREDERICTON, 1980 (SAM)

FREDERICTON, 1980 (MARIE)

FREDERICTON, 1990 (MARIE)

FREDERICTON, 1995 (SAM)

LEGACY

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work of historical fiction is NOT the story of any persons living or dead. The names, characters, places and incidents originate only in the co-authors imaginations and should not be taken as resembling any actual person or persons, times or places. The work is, however, a written testament and ‘homage’ to the types of Canadian soldiers and their war brides who braved enemy action in Great Britain and elsewhere, crossed and re-crossed the Atlantic and built new lives together under trying circumstances in Canada. The work is especially dedicated to First Nations veterans who faced major obstacles at home and abroad in order to have their service to Canada properly recognized and acknowledged. My father, Charles Paul, was one such veteran, proud of his wartime service to Canada and proud of his peacetime service to Indian Peoples, including Indian veterans. My mother, Jean, was a war bride, one of the first non-Indians to make Tobique Indian Reserve her home, learn the Maliseet language and raise a family there.

I will love you Mom and Dad always.

Cynthia Jean Gaffney (Paul), April, 2020.

PREVIEW

Victory in Europe – finally! In May, 1945, the Allied Nations went wild when the fall of Nazi Germany and the death of Adolf Hitler were publicly announced. Churchill had steered the Ship of State through its roughest sees ever straight into the safe harbour of Peace and Security. There was the far-off Japanese to defeat, but for now it was time to celebrate. Mum agreed to watch Chelsea while I went into central London with my girlfriends. The place had gone mad. There were drunken servicemen everywhere, laughing and screaming women, people hugging and kissing total strangers and people just hanging from lamp posts. There was the occasional fistfight, but the crowds were remarkably peaceful considering their enormous size. It was unbelievable. We made it to Trafalgar Square and the crowd broke into renditions of God save the King and There Will Always Be An England. I looked at Canada House, an official Canadian residence that sat on Trafalgar Square and wore its scars from bomb damage during the ‘blitz’. It made me think of Sam. What must he be doing? Surely he knew that the war was over and we would be reunited soon. Surely he was just as happy as I was.

SICILY, 1943

The dust. The heat. The sweat rolling off my body. The ‘THUD’ ‘THUD’ ‘THUD’ of our 25 pounder inching its shells towards the Jerry positions in the hills. Our gunners moved like a well- oiled machine, having practised and practised again the routine of servicing our gun during the past three and one-half years in England and Scotland. Then I heard it. The scream of a Jerry shell tearing toward our ‘gun line’. There was a horrific explosion to our left and a massive fireball: Sandbags, ammunition crates, shrapnel and, yes, body parts were thrown into the air. All that remained of our sister crew and their gun was a twisted hulk of smouldering metal and rubber. Jerry had directed devastating counter -battery fire against one of our positions. Our sergeant, Bill Conner, roared at us to readjust our fire and with new coordinates we rained Hell on the Jerry positions in retaliation. Our barrage helped the supporting infantry of the 1st Canadian Division to assault those distant hills. With rifles, bayonets, machine guns and grenades, they dug the enemy out of their bunkers.

We finally got a water break while the mules brought up more shells for us to throw at Jerry. Again the endless THUD’ THUD’ ‘THUD’ of the gun. Eventually, we found time to eat our field rations, brew up some tea, and dig trenches strong enough to protect us from any new round of enemy shelling. It was considered bad luck to dwell on the loss of a gun crew and little was said about it. We spent the rest of the afternoon pulverizing Jerry. Night finally came, it turned bitter cold, the stars were brilliant and our crew talked in whispers about home, England, and what we would do after the nightmare of war was finished. And it would finish, but not in the way Herr Hitler had planned. Africa was ours once again and Mussolini was on his heels in Sicily. The Jerry units were fighting hard though, and they were some of the best that they had: The Hermann Goring Panzer Division, paratroop and elite ‘panzer grenadier’ infantry units. Even the Italians were putting up a tough fight, given that we were striking them on their home soil. But we had all of the advantages: We had men, material, planes, ships and tanks in abundance. Jerry would be lucky to make it back to the port of Messina alive and get across the strait into Italy proper.

We had left the familiarity of the sunny green fields of southern England for foggy, rainy and cold training grounds in Scotland in May, 1943. I left behind a new wife as well – my dear Marie from Coulsdon, a borough of Croydon, south of London. She was now pregnant with our child, the result of a whirl-wind wartime romance, then wedding, that I never anticipated in a million years but entered into willingly, regardless. The responsibility of staying alive for the family I left behind in Canada and my new family in England weighed heavily on me. No more lighthearted, devil-may-care days at dances and pubs as a single soldier out for some fun: The move to Scotland signalled the beginning of some ominous new adventure as a newly married man that could have tragic consequences. We trained hard for several weeks in Scotland — special training different from our routines in England. In Scotland, we learned how to better mass our artillery in support of infantry operations and we received new equipment to which we would have to adapt. It was quick learning, ‘on-the-go’, assisted by veteran British gunners of the North African Campaign who were familiar with the new tactics and equipment. Then it was on to the assault ships with all of our equipment. Top, top secret. Remember, Loose lips sink ships. We did not want to be sunk but were ordered to remain in uniform with our life vests handy during the entire voyage just in case Jerry U-boats hunted us down. Out from Scotland in June, 1943, past Ireland and then a rough sea voyage inside cramped hulls, straight for the Mediterranean.

The run-up to the Sicily invasion was something of a disaster: First, U-boats sank three of our assault ships with valuable men, vehicles and equipment-including artillery- being lost to the waves. Then, the British and Yank airborne forces were greatly dispersed by bad weather over their Sicilian drop zones, but quickly regrouped. Thankfully, they caused great havoc behind enemy lines. We arrived off of Pachino in southeastern Sicily in early July and went ashore to light opposition, except for periodic bombing raids by the Luftwaffe. We realized later that the light opposition was by design: Jerry wanted to draw us into rough hill country of their own choosing that favoured a determined defence. We were also soon exposed to two devilish Jerry tactics: Well-designed minefields and the practice of destroying perfectly fine villages just to create rubble to impede our progress and provide convenient hiding places for their troops. Once our equipment was unloaded, our vehicles were hooked onto ammunition trailers and then the guns themselves were hooked onto the trailers. We started off down virtually nonexistent roads, protecting the extreme left flank of our companions-in-arms, the British Eighth Army. The Yank Seventh Army was somewhere off to our West, rarely seen but often heard. We were the ‘meat’ in the middle of an iron sandwich as we pushed into central Sicily. We were not only wedged between two great armies, but between two strutting generals as well: The Tommies had their own General Bernard Montgomery, Hero of El Alamein, and then there was the cantankerous General George Patton of the Yank army who had saved the American position in Tunisia. Both these characters wished to be the first to the port of Messina in the north, to be hailed as the Conqueror who had cut off the Jerry retreat in Sicily.

It was not long after we started pushing inland that I saw my first dead enemy soldier. I think he was Italian, but may well have been a Jerry. It was a bit difficult to tell as he had been smashed flat, almost beyond recognition, by an advancing tank. I did not dwell on the scene but this squashed figure in the dirt brought it home to me that this war ‘thing’ was, indeed, a very serious business. Best not to end up like him. There was Canadian infantry out in front of us and some behind us in lorries. Some of those boys were from the Carleton and York Regiment whose ranks were filled with soldiers from along the St. John River, back home. Every now and then I saw a familiar face from Perth, Woodstock or Fredericton, New Brunswick and even my own brother, Xavier, was back there in the columns somewhere, serving as a cook in a field kitchen. We had tried to make time for one another in England. Now, as far as I knew, he was in the rear stirring up soup, making bread and taking crap from soldiers who felt that his cooking was the worst thing they had ever tasted and should be fed to the enemy prisoners as punishment, instead of to our own men.

Grammichele, Piazza Armenia and Valguanera : Just some of the villages the infantry and the Canadian Army Tank Brigade were able to take with the help of our gunners leveling their opposition. Our troops assaulted peak after peak of Nazi-held hilltop positions, fording raging rivers and climbing rocky approaches. Jerry made a particularly determined stand outside of Agira in central Sicily, beating back attack after attack by our forces until new troops and overwhelming air and artillery support was brought to bear. During the fight for Agira our convoy of vehicles was hit by a Jerry mortar team ‘walking’ their 8cm shells down the length of our line of ‘Quad’ vehicles and lorries, incinerating one transport after another. I told my best friend Frank Turner, I think we are going to get hit. He cringed and sort of rolled his head and shoulders forward towards his knees – as if that would help him in any way. I saw men in flames leaping from the burning vehicles, screaming horribly and collapsing in nearby ditches. I thought for sure I was a dead man as the mortars came closer to our vehicle. Suddenly, low over the hills, a lone Spitfire suddenly appeared out of nowhere and strafed the shit out of the Jerry positions. Their ambush evaporated in a hail of bullets. We came across a number of their dead mortar men later, their bodies torn to pieces, riddled with bullets. My sergeant yelled out to me, "Hey Chief, help us get these wrecks