Nova Scotia Love Stories

by Lesley Choyce

  – Letters to a Young Poet,

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Pat and I were married for just over fifty-two years. Rilke describes how we lived and loved.

  Nothing I achieved after marrying Pat would have been possible without her love and support. Over our years together, we learned the wisdom of Mark Twain’s observation: “Love seems to be the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married for a quarter of a century.”

  While waiting to go north, I met Pat Wicks, who was doing her library practice in Montreal at the Arctic Institute of North America and had a job lined up in Vancouver. For me, it was love at first sight. Pat wrote to me during the summer, agreeing to marry me. We wed at Varennes on December 10, 1959.

  Pat and I married late – I was thirty, she twenty-nine. Set in our ways, we were very much alike: stubborn, impatient, self-reliant. Yet we were also very much unalike. After a rocky start, our love for each other flowered, broadened, and deepened. While pursuing our individual paths through life, we never stood in each other’s shadow. At the same time, a wonderful sense of oneness developed between us as if we were part of each other.

  Pat did a lot to smooth my rough edges, growing lovelier in my eyes as she aged. My beloved wife remained always a mystery to me, one that I knew I would never solve, but which constantly intrigued me. She turned the houses where we lived into comfortable, welcoming havens so that I could relax, think, and write in peace and quiet. We enjoyed the Canadian way of life, which avoided excessive individualism of the American kind and the antlike conformity of European society. We lived the life we wanted, joining with others in ventures of mutual aid and enjoyment, never worrying about living up to (or down to) the Joneses. We never sought to “make it big.” We concentrated on developing our potential in a very open society and on aiding that of others, without making nuisances of ourselves.

  Rising standards of living and our own efforts lifted us into the middle class, as we accumulated assets and moved from apartment living to our first house (304 Second Avenue) in Ottawa. We adopted some of the positive aspects of middle-class living, while rejecting others – such as conspicuous consumption, worry about abstract problems (world poverty, for example) about which we could do nothing, obsession with privacy and security, the endless quest for the exotic, the desire for niceness.

  We carried to Canada the frugal ways we developed in our wartime working-class homes, living well and simply and staying out of debt. Learning about ourselves, without becoming self-obsessed, and about other people, without insulting their identity and integrity, took central place in our lives. Our homes filled with books, magazines, records, crafts, artwork, manuscripts, diaries, notebooks, and Post-it notes (on which were written Hebrew and Greek words when Pat studied theology).

  We did not believe that we were entitled to the North American way of life, only to what we paid for or earned. We recognized that the first freedom was economic freedom, having enough to cover your living expenses and a little bit over, just in case. Had the Canadian economy relied upon our expenditures on goods and services, it would have been stranded in permanent recession. Nor were we interested in being instantly gratified. Pat furnished our homes with flair and very little money. She always looked elegant and well-groomed. If she saw an outfit she liked, Pat waited until it went on sale to buy it.

  Growing up in Britain helped us to avoid becoming involved in the Culture of Complaint, a feature of western society that emerged in the 1960s and has grown stronger since then. We learned during our upbringing there was little point in complaining about the absurdities, banalities, and stupidities of business and the state, because no one would do anything about them. Far better to concentrate on what you could do for your own benefit and that of others. Pat joined the Voice of Women in Ottawa and I served as chair for the Canadian Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. We soon tired of endless discussions and protests about abstract issues. In Halifax, we joined the Heritage Trust of Nova Scotia. It spent much of its time and money trying to protect old buildings, regardless of their condition or historical provenance. Pat and I sold the trust’s publications at Word on the Street, an annual bookfest, generating funds for the organization. Pat edited Affairs with Old Houses (1999), stories of people who had renovated their homes, for the trust.

  We raised our daughters (Annette, born 1960, Fiona, born 1962) in a somewhat casual manner, neither of us worrying about our parenting skills. We ensured that they were well housed, well fed, and well dressed, encouraging them to find their own way through life as they grew up, always assuring them of our love and support. Both daughters absorbed Pat’s kind and forgiving nature. While we lived in Antigonish, Fiona rescued a battered kitten from a nearby farm, cared for it with great tenderness, but was unable to save its life. The river near our house flooded from time to time, stranding fish in pools. Annette carefully carried them back to the river.

  The kids, for better or worse, picked up my bad habits, including a subversive sense of humour. Fiona upset a christening party by observing, as the priest picked up the baby, “This is where they break a bottle of champagne over its head and slide it into the water.”

  Annette and Fiona grew up in a house full of books, becoming avid readers and learners. Pat, a gracious hostess, taught them the first law of hospitality: “Guests come first.” Our kids learned how to relate to a wide range of people, from Inuit to Africans, and to be comfortable in their presence. They were always polite and well-mannered, treating those they met with respect and too often being exploited by them.

  We took Annette and Fiona with us on our travels to Europe, enjoying their company and perspectives on life there. Feelings of romanticism and realism that Pat and I shared rubbed off on our daughters. On Mull, in 1970, a truck carrying lambs passed us. Annette “oohed” and “aahed” about these cute creatures. Fiona remarked, “They’re on their way to becoming lamb chops.”

  Our eldest daughter picked up my love of travel. Annette joined the Canadian Armed Forces, serving on bases across Canada, in Germany, Italy, Greece, and Turkey with NATO. She died, courageously and without fear, in the Victoria Hospice in March 2002. After her death I discovered her diaries, and learned a great deal I did not know about my beloved daughter. Like marriage, your kids present a perpetual mystery to you.

  I found an entry entitled “Dad,” about a walk we took on Mull: “How can just one day show how much I owe to you? You are my father; my co-creator; my friend; a shoulder to cry on; and my role model whose footsteps I’ve been proud to walk in. When I was young, you showed me the various wonders of the places we visited. Since then I’ve had a curiosity about the world around me. The walk we did together in Scotland was a nature trip I enjoyed (even when we missed the bus), and will always remember. You taught me to accept people for who they are, and appreciate the diversity of the world.”

  I joined the Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources just before Annette was born in September 1960, plunging into a very different world from the one I had known while working as a physical scientist in the Arctic and subarctic.

  ***

  My life changed radically in 2006 when Pat developed dementia. In caring for someone with this condition, you have to create a life for yourself, spaces and places to which you can go to do your thing. Writing books helped me to retain my sanity while looking after Pat: I was able to keep her in Thorndean, the house she loved, until February 13, 2012, the day she died. I went to the gym each morning while Pat slept, came home, made breakfast, then spent three to four hours at my desk, drafting or typing manuscripts. If I was not writing, I was thinking about the book on which I was working.

  ***

  Looking back, I see how my working-class childhood, the experience of the Second World War, my time in the Royal Air Force, and other involvements led me to an interest in community development and service to others. Becoming a Canadian I learned to shed som
e of my old biases and dislikes and to never take counsel of my fears. My beloved wife helped me to do this. After Pat died, I wrote Pilgrim Souls: Caring for a Loved One with Dementia (Formac, 2013). It shares what we learned as dementia eroded Pat’s mind to give comfort and hope to others, as she would have wished.

  Pat’s intense spirituality, which I recognized when I first saw her, sustained me in difficult times. I had no name for this quality in this beautiful woman until I came across Yeats’ poem “When You Are Old”:

  How many loved your moments of glad grace,

  And loved your beauty with love false or true,

  But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you

  And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

  While writing this book, I realized that I too had to see my life as a pilgrimage, that Pat and I, each in our own way, had sought meaning and purpose in life, something beyond material comfort and daily routines. Pat and I loved poetry, found inspiration, solace, and direction in it. I ended Pilgrim Souls with the last lines of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18:

  Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,

  When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st;

  So long as men can breathe and eyes can see,

  So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

  That may sum up why I became a writer, to give some small immortality to those I met and admired and to pass on what I learned from them. My books have blazed a few trails through the confused world of community development, demythologizing it and perhaps re-mythologizing it. Who can tell?

  On May 22, 2013, after a spell in hospital, I was told I had six to nine months to live. As Dr. Johnson put it in the eighteenth century, of a Dr. Dodd who was about to be executed, “Depend on it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” Since the diagnosis, my mind has been wonderfully concentrated on ordering my affairs and writing this book. I have ideas for two other books if the doctors erred and I have a little more time on earth. As at other critical times in my life, words have given me comfort. In “The Garden of Proserpine,” Algernon Charles Swinburne expresses how I feel better than I can:

  From too much love of living,

  From hope and fear set free,

  We thank with brief thanksgiving,

  Whatever gods may be That no man lives forever,

  That dead men rise up never;

  That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea.

  So be it!

  A Child of Two Mothers

  Bruce Graham

  For the past few years Bruce Graham has been tracking the life of Alice Eudora Graham. He was led on a merry chase but gradually was able to put the pieces together for a forthcoming book. The details tell the story of an unusual woman: full of love and faced with tragedy. This story is true as told through the eyes of her stepdaughter.

  I don’t remember everything of course. Experiences and images now fade in and out in different perspectives, but I will tell you what I know for certain. We lived on Lynn Mountain, a hardscrabble place of scattered farms and stony fields intermingled with woodlands. To reach Lynn Mountain you had to travel over rocky roads of low-slung hills, climbing higher and higher from Lower Five Islands into the Cobequids, a mountain range that runs through Nova Scotia.

  I was about six when Alice Eudora arrived at our home and it was September. I know that because school was about to start. The first time my sister and I saw her, she was standing in our parlour. I liked her immediately. She was slender and tall with chestnut hair and very kind eyes. She put her hand in mine and told me we would be friends. My mother had seldom touched me in such a gentle manner and it made a big impression on me, as if I had won a prize or was being honoured as a princess. Alice was young and pretty and always had the ability to make people feel special.

  My mother was not unkind in one sense. She was not cruel but she was stern. Unlike Alice, Mother was a large, handsome woman, big-boned, with broad shoulders and a face that told you she brooked no nonsense. When Alice arrived, Mother warned me that just because the new schoolteacher was boarding in our house, “don’t think that means you can get away with anything here or in school.”

  My parents went out of their way to be nice to Alice. I think they found her enchanting. My mother, whose name was Gracie, would set out tea in the parlour and the two women would talk about their families or the day’s events. Alice had a laugh that reminded me of soft spring rain and when she laughed the music rang through our house. She was the type that naturally drew people to her. My father obviously liked her too. He would often join in the conversation with the ladies, and I never remember him being so animated with Gracie as he was with the two of them.

  My father was a travelling salesman and a horse man, what you might call an amateur veterinarian. He sold vet supplies, horse equipment and Dr. Chase’s Nerve Pills for farmers worried about their crops and for women worried about their husbands. They said he sold cures for the body and the spirit. He had a big wagon hauled by a white horse. The wagon was his travelling office. He was often on the road, away from home tending business, but when he was home he went out of his way to do little things for Alice: hitching the horse and buckboard and taking her to school on days when the weather was bad, or bringing her along when he took my little sister Ethel and me for a drive. We’d go to a high point where we could look over an entire mountain range and admire the hardwoods turning a multitude of golds and crimsons under the autumn sky. Gracie seldom participated in these outings, but she surely must have noticed how my father’s face lit up when Alice walked into a room.

  Maybe Gracie felt secure in her marriage, secure in the fact that my father was twenty-one years older than Alice. Maybe. What I didn’t know at that age and did not learn until well into my adulthood when I was trying to put these things together was that my father had a reputation as a ladies’ man. Worse, he had a rather sordid reputation as a lecher. It was something that only a husband would reveal to a man’s daughter, as my husband did to me when I was in my forties. There was a saying around the region when my father travelled the roads: he would look after a man’s horse and if the man wasn’t around, he would look after his wife too. Not the kind of thing you want to hear about your father, but I suppose I suspected as much. My father was D.B. Lewis, a rail-thin man of average height with a rather handsome sunburned face and flashing eyes.

  Just before the Christmas of 1909, Father drove Alice to Five Islands. She had secured a ride the rest of the way to her parents’ home in Lower Economy, where she would spend the holidays. I never knew what happened on that sleigh ride over the hills, but I suspect now that he pledged his love for her because when she returned after Christmas, something had changed between them and Gracie noticed it too.

  As the weather outside became colder and more inclement, so did the atmosphere inside. Even at my young age I noticed the shifting dynamic of the three adults. There was less tea and talk and laughter in the kitchen. Gracie cast accusatory glances across the table at both of them during dinner. I knew something was wrong but I didn’t know what. Gracie was increasingly irritable. She wouldn’t answer any of my questions, even when she quickly tucked me in at nights. There was just a rough “Goodnight” and out went the candle. The rare nights when Alice got to tuck us in, there were stories and hugs and kisses and kind words that let me happily sail off to sleep.

  Then one night the tension of the house erupted like a volcano. I was startled awake by the sounds. I heard my mother’s booming voice: “How could you? How could you!” The words held the hurt sounds of a wounded animal. I was alarmed because I didn’t understand.

  The next day, Alice was ghostly white. In school, she assigned lessons but didn’t read to her pupils as she usually did. That afternoon when we returned home, something crashed against the wall. My mother was howling at Father and Alice, calling them awful names.

  “You’re a whore, a whore!”

&n
bsp; I had never heard such language. She was castigating both of them. Alice was crying; it was the sound of shattered glass as if her heart was broken. My father, insulted by Gracie’s words, was trying to contain a rising anger. He demanded that Gracie stop her shouting. They hadn’t meant to hurt anyone, he said. Something else thrown then, dishes and a kettle maybe. I fled to my room to find my younger sister Ethel crying uncontrollably. We hugged each other and hid under the covers.

  During the next hour, my mother packed her suitcase. Her short, quick movements revealed she was in a high state of agitation and the scowl on her face showed rigid determination. She hugged my sister and took me by the shoulders and said very seriously, “I love you girls, but there is no place for me here.” As Gracie was packing, Alice kept following her around telling her she was so sorry. My mother paid her no attention and acted as though Alice wasn’t there. My mother left the house then with one suitcase and didn’t return until the afternoon a week from the following Sunday. She and her sister loaded a wagon with all her belongings and drove off without a backward glance.

  I remember that day, the last day my mother was ever in our house, mainly because I stood on our stoop and waited for her to wave, or throw us one last kiss. She did not even turn around. I can still picture in vivid detail my mother driving away without paying heed to her daughters. Ethel was sobbing. I put my arm around her, and Alice came out and put her arms around both of us.

  The scandal they had created came like a trumpet blast from the house of Gracie’s sister, the reverberations bouncing through the farms of Portapique into the village of Bass River – from house to house, from neighbour to neighbour, brother telling sister, sister telling husband. It went in every direction, sweeping through Five Islands and into Lower Economy and carried breathlessly by a relative into the Graham household at the end of the cove road. And there it paralyzed the occupants as if they had turned to stone.