Dear Granny
My maternal grandmother. Grampa is seated beside her, just out of frame – this story focuses on Granny!
My grandmother and I shared a special friendship. I wish I could tell her what I know now about the family stories she shared when I was young. So I wrote her a letter, for my relatives to read.
June 2024
Dear Granny,
I always remember sitting with you at your little kitchen table at ‘The 4300’, on those weekdays after school. I’d run track at Westmount High, then stop by for cookies and a Coke. You’d pour a sherry (from a bottle I’d pick up for you at the liquor store – soon young teens couldn’t do that, but this was Montreal in the mid-seventies!). I’d listen with interest to your stories, your face framed by the window and the patio hedge, your ‘kitchen dragon’ dangling above. Now that dragon hangs in my kitchen window.
The story I think you told the most – or certainly the one I remember most – was about the varsity football players hanging about on the veranda at Queen’s. No wonder you loved to watch college football, into your eighties! That must have been quite something for you to live in that big house on campus while your father was principal. And for you, as a teen, to have those lads sprawled on the porch on weekend afternoons, looking at their game photos and write-ups in the newspaper! They knew where the papers were delivered, and that they were welcome to drop by.
You probably didn’t mind bringing them lemonade or such (maybe it was Coke!). But I know that those years weren’t easy for you. You often said how you had to look after your younger siblings while your mother was long ill. Your eyes looked so big and droopy when you talked about that burden. I didn’t ask about your mother’s illness at the time. But I did notice that she was rarely spoken of in our family, or only in hushed tones. I got the impression that maybe she’d been in a sanitorium for TB, or suffered from mental illness. In recent years, I’ve learned more.
I think of you often lately, while I look into our family history. Being our most recent ancestor to have arrived from Scotland, you were closest to those roots. You sure had a fondness for “The Old Country” as you called it. Your eyes got a wistful faraway look. Forsythia, your favourite flower. Your name for your and Grampa’s place in Knowlton “Thistle Hill”. At Christmas, you’d raise one of those little thistle glasses with a moist-eyed toast “To Absent Friends”. Even as a teen, I thought it a touching remembrance. I didn’t realize it’s such a popular toast among the Scottish! I don’t raise many a wee dram these days, but I do have your lovely thistle-shaped glasses in my dining cabinet – ready for the right occasion.
My Granny's 'thistle glasses' from Edinburgh. Plus her wooden press to stamp a pad of butter with a thistle emblem!
Your reminiscing about Scotland would make me think you’d lived there a long time. But you were only twelve years old when you came to Canada with your family. I’ve seen a photo of the ‘SS Grampian’ vessel that brought you overseas, just one year before the Titanic! Thankfully, you were settled with your family in Montreal by then, while your father ministered at St. Paul’s.
Who would have thought that six years later you’d all move to Kingston, with your father serving as university principal instead of church minister.
You must have all loved the sailing on Lake Ontario. But there probably wasn’t as much time for that as you would have liked. I heard about your summer vacations as a family, sailing at your grandfather’s place in Garelochhead. But those were more easygoing times. Now your father had responsibilities to fundraise and entertain dignitaries, and your mother organized large social teas for the university. That big house did not come without a cost. I imagine your mother in the role of an ‘embassy wife’, not having signed up for that originally.
How do I know about these things and get this impression? Archives! I visited the Queen’s University Archives, where they have a fonds about your father. He wrote a memoir, and I was able to obtain a copy. The archivist showed us a write-up about your mother in the Alumnae News. It includes a poem she wrote, longing for a relaxed family life versus all this pomp. Also, I saw cards, letters, photos and more – including the actual porch!
Summerhill, as I now know the house is called, is very near where the archives are located on campus. It was under renovation, so I couldn’t enter, but I went up the steps and onto the broad porch. I took photos from there, and peeked in the door but could only see the staircase up. It was so neat to be where you once lived, and where your stories came from!
A century earlier, this porch bustled with children, a dog, varsity football players, and Canadian dignitaries – at different times of day! / Summerhill, Principal's Residence at Queen's University in Kingston, under renos 2019.
Also, sister Wendy later found your photo albums in her storage locker. We weren’t aware of these before. Thank you so much for making them, labeling the photos, and keeping the albums (also to Mom for hanging on to them)! It’s great to see pictures of you as a young woman, plus the ones of you all watching the regattas in Kingston.
And now I have a photo of your mother on the porch steps at Summerhill with your family dog, plus a photo of my mother as a toddler in the very same spot a few years later. The archivist was interested to see the dog was ‘related’, because they have some photos of the campus from those years, with such a ‘mystery’ dog on its own in the grassy courtyards! Ah, you would have known its name… By the way, it’s neat to see that the family stayed with that sort of breed or mixture-of, over the generations – from your family dog on Thornhill, to our mutt Frisky (just a city block away in dog-territory, but a human generation apart!). That’s what a family dog looked like to us, and people often choose the type they’ve come to know.
Great-grandmother and family dog, a few years before her young namesake – my mother Harriet – sits there.
The main thing I wished to tell you was that I read a letter that your youngest sister Lois wrote the university years later. She wrote that, while returning from a family vacation in Nantucket, your mother suddenly lost her memory, and never knew any of you afterwards. My dear Granny, I’m so sorry to hear of that. So scary, such a shock, and what a tragic turn of events.
Upon reading that part of the letter, “shellfish” immediately came to mind. Sure enough, I learned that there is an affliction, first identified in the 1980s, called Amnesic Shellfish Poisoning. It’s associated with the Cape Cod area (and other places where warm sea water can pool). I heard that your mother was brought to a leading medical specialist in Boston, but this was sixty years before such a diagnosis was possible. If a person eats clams or oysters that harbour toxins, they fall ill within hours and suffer sudden memory loss which can be permanent. Even now, there is no cure. Uncle Bruce said “I think you’ve got it” when I told him about this possibility. Now I think about how much my mother Harriet – whom you named after your mother – loved to eat oysters-on-the-half-shell. Thank heavens she never became ill as a result.
Your father wrote in his memoir how he and your mother loved to laugh together, sail together, and what a bright light she was. He said that she did contract tuberculosis, while on a business train-trip with him to the west coast. And that the isolation treatment depressed her, because she wasn’t even allowed to read.
But what about you? I saw a newspaper article, while your mother was well, that she took you to a gala in Kingston – was it like a debutante ball? Your dress sounded divine. I wonder if that’s where you met Grampa, given he’d been in the military? Or perhaps you met him whilst at McGill’s Macdonald Campus when you studied as a dietician? I hadn’t known he had served in WWI, with a McGill unit. I was intrigued to learn that, as an electrical engineering student, he was assigned to ‘signals’ or communications. Once home, he was hired by Bell and started his lifelong career. It makes me smile to imagine they figured if he could handle the lines in the trenches of wartime Europe, he could keep the phones running in the regions of Quebec!
I see from the dates, that you were married in Kingston just three weeks after your mother passed away. Perhaps after her years of illness, by then it was (as the minister said about my father upon his death from cancer) “what sweet release”. And by then, she’d been long away from home. The write-up in the Queen’s Journal says the football players showed up in numbers for her funeral, and were her pallbearers. She was highly regarded and fondly remembered. Still, such a sombre time.
What a huge difference to the gathering you had later that month, with folks all coming and going from that big veranda (and quickly indoors, in the month of January). Seems it worked out to pay respects to your mother first, then have a break, before you got to celebrate your new beginnings.
I’m sorry I didn’t write you more often from university (or did I, and I’m not remembering?). I saw the tears well up in your eyes when I said goodbye. After all our fun afternoons at your place – including you and I lounging on your patio with the ‘Bain de Soleil’ lotion I recommended. Later, we called it ‘Bain de Burn’, and now I only wear sun protection! But as you would have known, I got mono in frosh week and mostly slept until Christmas. I found an unsent letter to you that said “Granny, today I got up and opened the window by myself”. Sigh. I feel that once I got involved with all my school pals then went out to Calgary for work, I was much less in touch.
Now I think of you so often. I did make a brief trip to Scotland, and will go on a bigger ‘ancestry tour’ in the next few years.
Lots of love to you, my “Absent Friend”,
Barbara
written by Barbara L Campbell, 2024