My Mother's Story: North Vancouver

By Mothership Stories Society

How have 20th century women really lived? My Mother's Story asks people to write the story of their mothers' lives from beginning to end, without embellishment, telling "just the facts ma'am" in 2000 words. The 41 stories collected here were submitted for consideration to be in a professional theatre production in North Vancouver, Canada which u

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mothership Stories Society
• Release date: Dec 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9780987984463

Book preview

Olive, 1903

KATHLEEN HILL

MY MOTHER, OLIVE MAY SMALLWOOD, was born in Nottingham, England, on May 10, 1903. She was the youngest of seven daughters and one of twelve children born to John and Mary Smallwood. She began school at age four at what was called the Infant’s School. She stayed in school until she was fourteen, since to advance would have meant travelling to another village, which she could not have done. So she repeated her last grade, rather than leave school altogether, and became the most literate of her family.

My grandmother sewed all her children’s clothes and created wonderful hats for her seven daughters. The girls were beautiful, especially my mother with her curly auburn hair and bright blue eyes. The family had little money, toys were handmade and the children entertained themselves. Mum said she was never bored. Christmases were special, even though their stockings, hung at the foot of their beds, contained just an apple and a new penny. Her best Christmas was when a baby brother arrived unannounced!

The family lived in Nottingham until 1918, when Mum’s five oldest siblings immigrated to Canada. In 1920, with their help, the rest of the family sailed to Canada as well, eventually all settling in various parts of Ontario and Manitoba. She loved Canada as soon as she arrived. They settled in Winnipeg, which had none of the beauty of her English village, but it did not diminish her excitement of living in Canada. Though the family was separated by distance, they all remained close, exchanging letters regularly.

At eighteen she was happy to find work as an office clerk at the Elmwood Herald, a small, family-owned newspaper in Winnipeg. It was there she met my father, Robert McLean, 26, a linotype operator and brother of the two owners, all recent Scottish immigrants. My father proposed marriage many times, but she always declined, feeling she was too young to get married. Her favourite song was Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, and I wonder if it had to do with the fact that my father smoked, as many did then.

In 1922, while delivering proofs for the newspaper advertisers, she was struck by a government vehicle which severely injured her and crushed her knee. Hospitalized for many weeks, she refused surgery, which at that time would have left her with a stiffened leg. Recovering, she coped quietly with this disability.

She joined a United Church that was just being built, and my mother, as well as my father, became a founding member. Through the choir she met many life-long friends. In 1927, on Thanksgiving weekend, my parents became the first couple to be married in the new building. They had no honeymoon, but settled into a tiny rented house near their families and began their life together. Photos of them show a happy young couple with their parents and siblings, picnicking, travelling about in borrowed cars and on the local beach train. They enjoyed life, even though they had very little. Their first child, Hugh, was born in 1930, followed by Janet in 1933. I was their last, Kathleen, born in 1937.

Many Winnipeggers, to escape the summer heat, have cottages along Lake Winnipeg. My mother loved the train trips and the family gatherings at Winnipeg Beach and the other beaches surrounding the Lake. My mother knew a man who had a cottage at Sandy Hook that he seldom used since his wife had died. She asked him about renting it, and he said if she could pay him whatever she could when she could afford it, he would sell it to her. They settled on a price of $600, and my mother paid off the debt in about seven years. This was around 1939; we spent every summer there, my father joining us when he could. It was a basic cottage, furnished but no water or electricity, and we loved it.

In 1941, my father’s brothers decided they needed to have jobs ready for their sons returning from war. They asked my Dad to give up his job. This meant Dad had to get on-call shifts at the two major newspapers, going every day at the beginning of the three shifts, hoping to find work. Mum went to her mother-in-law and asked her to lend her $50, which Mum would use as first month’s rent on a large house she’d located. Though she hadn’t consulted Dad, he was relieved and proud of Mum for taking this enterprising step to help them through this difficult time. Later he acquired steady work at the Winnipeg Tribune.

Through neighbours and family, she acquired furniture for the five upstairs rooms and quickly secured five tenants, charging them each about $20 a month. Our family of five lived on the main floor, with just the kitchen, living/ dining room and a den to house us, and a toilet in the basement. My parents slept in the living room, my sister and I in the little den and my brother on a cot in the dining room. I never thought there was anything odd about this arrangement.

Most of the tenants were women working as teachers or in business. Some were a bit more interesting, with issues my mother would later recall in wonderful stories. One woman had a severe mental collapse, smeared herself and her room in cold cream and screamed at Mum saying, Look what they’ve done to me!! My mother said to her, No, you’ve done it to yourself, and called her son to collect his poor mother. Mum took in a young woman and her child. The woman’s husband was overseas. It was against Mum’s rules to rent to someone with a child, but she couldn’t turn them away. The little girl contracted diphtheria and our house became quarantined. When Mum explained this to her tenants, who now had to make other housing arrangements, they were outraged. My mother apologized, but left them feeling they had no compassion for the young woman and her child. Mum brought food up to the room, sliding it across the floor to their doorway, sterilizing their dishes on return. My Dad had to stay with his mother, so he would be available for work.

In the summer of 1947, the Winnipeg newspapers went on strike and Dad got little work. Feeling they could not wait for a resolution, they decided to move to Vancouver. Mum rented out our cottage and with the money brought my brother, my sister and me to Vancouver with her to look for a house and a job for Dad. We travelled by train, sleeping the three-night journey in our seats and eating from a box of food she had packed. We arrived in Vancouver looking as if we had slept in our clothes, which we had! She made her way to the Vancouver News-Herald and found they had an opening for a linotype operator. The manager said, Get him here and he has a job! We stayed in a rooming house in the West End for three weeks, loving English Bay and the surroundings. Returning to Winnipeg, she sold the cottage for $1200 along with most of our furniture, and in November we left again for the coast, travelling in the same style! Dad went straight to work and the cottage money was enough for a down payment on a little house in Kitsilano. We moved into our house just in time for Christmas. She did all this in a city she knew nothing about. From then on Dad worked steadily. Mum took pride in their first home, and they lived there for years, becoming fixtures of the neighbourhood.

In 1951, she and Dad visited my brother in Cambridge, where he had a scholarship. This exciting trip, travelling by train to Montreal and by ship to England, was Mum’s first time back since arriving in Canada. As planned, Dad returned home after a couple of weeks to make the money to pay for Mum’s return ticket. She did not get home for two months and was relieved when she did! Over the years they went again, each time renewing friendships with childhood friends and family. One exceptional trip included meeting the Queen Mother when my brother was presented to her at a musical event. Mum bought a special hat for the occasion and looked as lovely as the Queen.

Mum was a letter-writer extraordinaire, and her penmanship was equally impressive. She loved getting letters and always replied to them, rarely losing contact with anyone, even former tenants. She would talk to anyone, loved to hear their stories, made friends easily and kept them forever.

In 1963, I left home. I was 26, and my mother was upset: girls did not leave home unless it was to be married, which I was not. She avoided telling anyone I had moved out and would not come to see my new apartment. Eventually she realized that times had changed and was happy when I married a few years later.

From the late 1950s through to 1984, nine grandchildren arrived. She was extremely close to them all, and they to her. Dad died in 1980, which was a great loss. They had been married for 53 years.

In 1982, she and I discussed her knee injury that had bothered her terribly over the years, and as a nurse, I heard again her fears of decreased mobility. This time, however, she mentioned that she had been hit by a government truck. I knew she had been awarded a small sum at the time from the Workmen’s Compensation Board, but upon investigation learned that she should have also had a lifetime disability allowance. I arranged for her to see an orthopaedic specialist and her claim of 60 years was reopened. She was amazed when the doctor offered knee replacement surgery, something unimaginable in the past! She recovered quickly from surgery and was awarded her small pension, as well as time-loss benefits during her convalescence. And a note to let the board know when she could return to work! She was 79.

With her new-found agility and resources, she engaged in activities previously denied her. In her 80s she studied Ikebana, joined a flower club through which she won many awards for her displays, and met many new friends. She was a founding member of a seniors group who met weekly, travelled, held luncheons and celebrated one another’s birthdays.

My brother discovered a cousin she’d never met, and they flew to England to meet her, creating such a stir in the village that the local newspaper covered the story of new-found cousins. Her last trip was flying to Florida to see my brother at Easter 1996. She went alone, unafraid, and parted from us full of excitement. She was 93.

She had lost all her siblings and was now the last of the twelve children in her family alive. As family matriarch she corresponded and visited with all of their many children and grandchildren. Her memory never failed, and she could recall any event anyone asked about. In August 1996, she fell, breaking her hip, and felt she could not recover. She entertained many people at her bedside, telling each one she loved them. She took my hand and my sister’s, calling us her babies, saying for the first time how much she loved us, and asked if there was anything we wanted to know. She told me so many stories, many of which are recorded here. After she died, we found a letter she’d left for the three of us, telling us how much we meant to her. We already knew.

THIS PHOTO OF ME AT 10 YEARS, MY SISTER JANET WHO WAS 14 AND MY MUM AT 44, WAS TAKEN AT THE TRAIN STATION IN BANFF IN THE SUMMER OF 1947. MY 17 YEAR OLD BROTHER HUGH TOOK THE PHOTO WITH OUR BIG KODAK BOX CAMERA. THIS WAS MY FIRST SIGHT OF MOUNTAINS. I BOUGHT A POST-CARD HERE TO SEND TO DAD TELLING HIM HOW EXCITED I WAS ABOUT SEEING THE BEAUTIFUL MOUNTAINS AND BEING SO CLOSE TO THEM.

Lola, 1903

CONNIE FLETT

HER NAME WAS KAROLINA, BUT her close friends, those who knew her in the old country called her Lola. She was the second youngest of five children born to Anton and Mary (Baker) Schnurer on November 26th, 1903, in a small Polish town called Rownia. Part of the house that Lola grew up in was leased to the local police. Her father, a carpenter, died of pneumonia when Lola was only three years old. Her mother was a nurse and midwife. Sadly, when Lola was about fourteen, her beloved mother died of typhoid fever, which she contracted while nursing the sick during an epidemic. I have a picture of Lola with her mother and sisters, but she didn’t speak of them, so I don’t know what my mother did at this time. A family friend told me my mother delivered him, so maybe she took on her mother’s job as midwife.

What I do know is that my mother learned to cook from her mother, what we now call ethnic food. Fortunately, my mother passed on to me the secrets of making delicious perogies, cabbage rolls, borscht and the Christmas treat of kutya—a pudding-like mixture of poppy seeds, wheatberries, nuts, and honey. One of my favourite dishes was her plum perogies, a sweet dessert treat sprinkled with sugar and bursting with juice. She would get so mad at me when I would count out how many perogies she was making; her superstition was that they would then burst open when cooked. My other favourite thing to do, when she wasn’t looking, was to pinch out the raisins from her heavenly homemade doughnuts while they were rising.

I remember Mom telling me that when she was about sixteen, she wanted to become a nun; she loved to sing in the church choir. But then, during confession, a priest made a suggestive comment to her, traumatizing her so much, she renounced the Catholic religion and never even had us baptized. The only residual effect of her Catholicism was to eat fish on Fridays.

Although Lola was a beautiful young woman with dark eyes and thick, almost-black hair, giving her a gypsy-like look, an accident with a crochet hook, when she was very young, crippled her left hand, leaving it badly deformed. Somehow, amazingly, she didn’t let that stop her from doing anything she set her mind to, including knitting, sewing, crocheting and other needlework projects.

A fortune-teller told my father that he would meet and marry a girl with an injured hand. I think Michael knew he had met his destiny, when he noticed Lola as she prepared meals at the saw mill where he worked. He proposed marriage.

When Michael immigrated to Canada in 1925, their love endured eight long years apart. At that time, the Canadian government stipulated that a man had to own land with a house on it before he could bring a wife from the old country. Michael worked for the CPR and eventually bought some acreage about five miles from the village of Skiff, outside Lethbridge, Alberta.

Karolina came to Canada by ship with the equivalent of $10 and a photograph of her with her mother, her sisters and a niece. She arrived in Quebec and traveled across the country by train, at long last reaching the desolate prairie on November 24th, 1933. She and Michael were married the following day, on November 25th, the day before her 30th birthday.

The security of owning property was very important to my mom, and they worked hard together, purchasing more land when they could, eventually acquiring about 800 acres, She helped him dig out a dam by hand, tended the animals, planted wheat, and of course, cooked, not only for the growing family but also for the farmhands. Because Dad was afraid of heights, Mom was the one who put a roof on the chicken coop. Once, when Dad sliced his forehead open on a piece of farm machinery, Mom expertly stitched it up, as it was too far to take him to the doctor.

Their firstborn and only son, born in January 1935, unfortunately lived only a few days. By December of the same year, their daughter, Adeline, arrived at the farm before the doctor did. Two more daughters followed—Violet, born in June 1937, and Evelyn, born in February 1940. Some years later, Mom thought that she had a tumour; it turned out to be me! At the age of forty-four, she gave birth to her youngest daughter, Connie. Dad, forty-eight years old, and with three daughters already, told my mother not to come home from the hospital unless it was a boy. Over the years I learnt to live with the family joke of first being a tumour, and then not being a boy.

Growing tired of the cold prairie winds blowing through Skiff, Mom convinced Dad to move. She had figured out that by renting the farm they could afford to buy a place in Vancouver, and my father found a place that suited their needs. After canning all the fruits and vegetables they had grown on the farm, they packed up their pick-up truck and headed for the big city. In 1949, we moved into a big, Victorian-style rooming house with forty-three rooms on West Georgia Street. Suffice to say the area was much more residential in those days, and conveniently near downtown shopping, Stanley Park and the beaches. Many of the people who rented from us were Europeans and became close long-time friends. However, there were some men that Mom would warn us about, threatening dire consequences if we dared set foot in their rooms. With three lovely teenage daughters and me, Mom had quite a job keeping us safe.

Mom had a heart of gold. She was a loving, caring person and everyone who knew her called her Mom. However, she was an extremely formidable woman when necessary. When I was about eleven years old, my best friend and I went to the Hudson’s Bay Company to shop, or should I say shoplift a red(!) scrapbook for a school project. Could it have been any more conspicuous? The store detective, a gigantic man, said, I’m going to call your parents, and marched us down the street to my house. When we got to the door, Mom was waiting, with the strap of course. The detective tried to intervene to protect me from getting hit. My mother, who was about half his size, just said, You had better get out of the way, or you’ll get it too.

In the 1950s my mother, like other ladies, wore a housedress when she did housework. But when she went out, my mother would put on a suit or a nice dress, gloves, a hat and high heels, even to go grocery shopping on Robson Street. I especially remember her foxtail stole, the kind with the little face and beady eyes. She gave up her housedress for polyester pantsuits in the 1970s. Looking good was important to her, as was good manners. She would always badger us to act ladylike, saying, Don’t run down the street. or Don’t scuff your shoes when you walk. She would tell us to say thank you before we even had a chance to get the words out. Mom also had a beautiful singing voice and would often sing when friends and family gathered together. Surprisingly, not one of her four daughters inherited her vocal abilities.

Despite her many good qualities, one thing she could be faulted for was that she never apologized to anyone for anything. As a teenager I often thought that if she had an argument with God, He would lose.

She always came to watch my ballet classes. I would see her helping me by leaning this way or that and pulling her posture straighter as she sat on the sidelines. Years later, watching my own daughter in ballet, I found myself doing the same thing.

Mom was a very smart businesswoman, especially with regards to real estate. Despite not having a formal education beyond grade school, she and my dad eventually acquired, in addition to the rooming house and farm, two apartment blocks, a duplex, and several recreational properties near Blaine, Washington.

When I was thirteen, we sold the old house on Georgia Street and moved to a modern one near Oakridge. Six years later Dad passed away at age sixty-six. For someone who seemed to be such a strong person, I was surprised by how much this affected my mother. I was eighteen and living at home and happy to be a comfort and companion to her at this time. She often said she was glad that she had me late in life, as my sisters were all married by this time, and I kept her occupied.

Later that year, Mom and a couple of her friends took a trip to Radium Hot Springs in the Kootenays. There she met a nice Polish gentleman named Lucien. They seemed to enjoy each other’s company and corresponded for a year. The following year the chemistry was still there, and we were all happy when he became a part of our family. They were together for almost thirty years, loving and caring for one another. They spent summers in Radium Hot Springs and every winter somewhere warm—Mexico, Hawaii, Palm Springs, Arizona. I always thought Mom was so fortunate to have had two loving men in her life.

When I was young and heard her stories about farm life, I would roll my eyes thinking, Here we go again—blah, blah, blah. Now I wish I had paid more attention. Sad to say, during her late 80s dementia began to take its toll, and I was unable to ask her for motherly advice. Questions about what she was like as a little girl or a young woman; about life on the farm; or how she felt about things, how she learned what she knew without a formal education – all these questions are left rattling around my brain like skeletons.

Despite the dementia, Mom was a flirt to the end. She would flash her dark eyes and smile beguilingly at doctors or whatever man happened by. Lucien passed away in May 1994, and five days before Christmas, I was with my mom when she died at age 91. At her memorial we played her favourite song, You Are My Sunshine. I really miss my mom and wish my two children could have known her more in her better years.

THIS IS A PICTURE OF ME (CONNIE FLETT, NEE KALINOWICH) AND MY MOM KAROLINA KALINOWICH TAKEN ON GRANVILLE STREET NEAR ROBSON IN 1954 OR 1955. THE PHOTOGRAPHER WAS A MAN NAMED FONCIE (THAT’S ALL I THINK HE WAS EVER CALLED). HE WAS A VANCOUVER INSTITUTION, CAPTURING PHOTOS OF PEOPLE AS THEY SHOPPED ALONG GRANVILLE. WE HAVE OTHER PHOTOS THAT WERE TAKEN BY HIM AS WELL.

Pauline, 1904

FLORENCE NICHOLSON

PAULINE OLIVIA VERIGIN WAS BORN on December 11, 1904, on a homestead in south-eastern Saskatchewan, near Star City. She was the first child of newly immigrated Russian peasants Anna and Peter Verigin. Her father was disappointed she was not a boy to help with the harsh farm existence they were facing. He got his wish five years later, when her brother John arrived on the scene, followed in two more years by her brother Peter. Pauline’s life became one of obeying the whims of the three men in her world.

With her mother also out in the fields, Pauline was the chief kitchen and household servant for the family from a very young age. She also worked in the garden and looked after the animals, including cleaning out barns and coops and milking cows. Life was harsh, with little affection displayed from parents who had little education and who worked hard all their lives. Girls were expected to look after the men and never complain. If she did complain, her father was ready with a swat to the head without hesitation.

Pauline’s education was minimal. She attended elementary school intermittently until grade five. In spite of this, she was a gifted assistant to her teacher at the Prairie one-room school she attended. Grades one to seven were all in that one classroom. By the time Pauline was in grade three, she was assigned to teach reading to the younger children.

It was common at that time for Russian peasants to marry