War Brides. Melynda Jarratt
Carrying the snowshoes (one pair between them) they followed a snow track made by the mailman … They finally reached Pleasant Bay and went to a hotel … The next morning they gave their backpacks to the mailman (he had a dog team), left their snowshoes at the hotel and walked behind the mailman all the way to Cheticamp, crossing both MacKenzie and French Mountain. Quite a walk!
In Cheticamp they stayed a night at Aucoin’s Hotel, owned by a man nicknamed ‘Johnny on the Spot’. The following morning they took a large six passenger bus to the Strait (Hawkesbury), where they changed to an Acadian Lines bus. They had only gone a few miles when the bus had problems so the driver pulled into a hotel where they stayed that night. There was a dance in a hall close by, so the passengers all went. The bus driver got very intoxicated and couldn’t drive the bus the next morning. He was fired and another driver came to drive the bus. At last, they arrived in Sydney, only to find out that I had sent a cable to South Harbour telling Kendrick that the boat I was supposed to travel on, the Ile de France, had been wrecked in a storm and I had to wait for further notice about another boat.6
Beatrice MacIntosh’s experience aside, for most War Brides who went to the Maritimes the journey by train was not so important. Their biggest challenges lay in adapting to the cold Canadian climate and adjusting to a rural lifestyle far from towns and city centres where the things they had taken for granted in Britain, like shopping, transportation, and culture, were now but a distant memory.
The Only Place She Wanted to Be
Jean (Keegan) Paul
Jean Keegan was born in Coulsdon, Surrey, England in 1926. She married Charles Paul of the Tobique Indian Reserve in New Brunswick.
Jean Keegan was just a teenager from Coulsdon, Surrey when she fell in love with a young Aboriginal soldier, Charles Paul, of the Tobique Indian Reserve in northwestern New Brunswick.
One of four daughters of Charles and Mary Keegan, Jean came from a comfortable, middle-class background and lived in a large English city with all the modern amenities. No one in the family would have imagined that Jean would end up on an Indian Reserve in Canada but once she met Charlie Paul, that’s the only place she wanted to be.
Jean’s older sister Pat was stationed with the WAAF at the Kenley Aerodrome and she only came home to Coulsdon on leaves, but she remembers when Jean and Charlie Paul started going out together.
‘They met at a dance near the old Cane Hill Hospital in Coulsdon,’ says Pat, who is now eighty-three and lives in Warlingham. ‘There were a lot of Canadians around the area and my mother really liked “Buck”, as we called him, so she didn’t mind Jean going out with him. They all used to go to a pub called the Midday Sun where the Canadians and their girlfriends gathered.’
Jean’s father was only thirty-nine when the war started so he rejoined the King’s Own Regiment and was stationed in Formby, Lancashire. The three younger girls lived at home with their mother and when Coulsdon was under attack from German bombing the two youngest, Kathy and Mary, were evacuated to northern England. That left Jean and her mother at home so the two of them would go to the dances, her mother as the chaperone. Mrs Keegan was attractive in her own right and was often mistaken as a sister to Pat and Jean, to her great delight.
Pat says other people may have thought that Charlie was different but nobody in their family gave much thought to the fact that he was a Canadian Indian. ‘I remember after they married a girl came over to look at Jean’s baby Christine and said, “Oh she’s white!” I was amazed. I never even thought of Charlie or his brother Jim as not being like us.’
But in the weeks before Jean and Charlie married, her mother’s friendly disposition towards Buck had changed.
‘I was on my first leave home and Mum greeted me with tears,’ Pat recalls. ‘She said that Jean was pregnant, and what was she going to say to dad? What was she to do?’
The first thing they did was make wedding arrangements. Jean and Charlie were thrilled: they were in love and wanted to get married – everything was unfolding as planned as far as they were concerned – but Pat remembers her parents weren’t very happy about it and neither was the Catholic priest, Father Tindal at St Aidan’s Church.
All food and clothing was rationed so a friend of Mrs Keegan helped out by lending Jean a fur stole for the wedding ceremony and she even hosted the reception. Soon after, Charlie was sent to Italy with his regiment, the Carleton York, and after Christine was born, Jean went to Liverpool to stay with an aunt. Charlie contracted malaria and was diagnosed with arthritis that bothered him his whole life, but once he recuperated from his illness he was sent back to serve in northwestern Europe and at the end of the war he was repatriated to Canada.
Soon it became time for Jean to make her own travel arrangements through the Canadian Wives Bureau. Pat recalls that the padre of Charlie’s regiment tried to dissuade Jean from going to the reserve and so did the British Red Cross, but Jean wouldn’t listen to any of it. She was going to be with her husband and nothing would change her mind.
‘It’s what she wanted,’ Pat says. ‘Jean was very headstrong and always got what she wanted.’
In May 1946 twenty-year-old Jean and her daughter Christine crossed the Atlantic with hundreds of War Brides on board the Aquitania, arriving at Pier 21 on 21 May. From Halifax they made their way by train to McAdam, New Brunswick where they were met by the Roman Catholic priest, Charlie and Mrs Valreia Hunter, a volunteer with the Canadian Red Cross Train Meeting Committee who faithfully recorded Jean’s arrival in the diary she kept of War Bride arrivals at McAdam.
The priest, Jean, Charlie and Christine were taken by canoe to the Maliseet Indian Reserve above Perth, New Brunswick. Reserve life was a very trying experience for a woman from a fine home in urban England. The community was located at the juncture of the Saint John and Tobique Rivers where the people eked out a meagre existence from the land, relying on the seasons and nature to bring what they needed to survive. Jean adapted to this rough life: she learned the ways of the people and became fluent in the language and ways of the Maliseet tribe. It was another twenty years before she was able to return to England for a visit.
There was little or no employment on the reserve so Charlie found work as a river guide during the fishing season and a hunting guide during the hunting season. In the fall, they would pick potatoes and in the summer they’d follow the blueberry trail as had generations of Native Indians before them.
Their daughter Cindy remembers growing up with her three brothers and sisters in grinding poverty in a shack on the edge of the reserve where rats would scamper across the floor. They didn’t have a fridge or electricity and the bathroom was an outhouse in the back. When the Indian Agent would show up on the reserve to do his annual assessments he’d leave behind a barrel of flour and leftover army rations for every family. The convent school was run by nuns and they’d give the children a treat of hard tack and cod liver oil to battle malnutrition and rickets.
When Cindy was still a youngster her father built a small house for the family near the church. It was a step up and Jean was pleased with the new surroundings. When Jean’s grandfather died she was asked what she wanted from the inheritance; a bathtub and running water was her request, and that’s what she got.
Jean never complained about her life on the Tobique Reserve and her English family had no idea of the living conditions until her mother came to visit when the last child was born. It was quite a shock to see the way people lived on the reserve but Jean wasn’t asking for sympathy from anyone: her husband was good to her and even if they weren’t rich, they loved each other.
‘I didn’t know till years after what a brave and courageous woman my sister was,’ says Pat.‘She was always the bossy and daring one, but lovely with it. There is no way I could have done what she did, even for love, but I’m proud to have been her eldest sister.’
Over the years, their situation improved considerably. Jean’s younger sister Kathy married an American and moved nearby to Maine, USA, so for the first time Jean had her own family within reach. At one point, Jean’s mother even came to stay with Kathy in Maine but she ended up going back to England.