“Thanks.” Mrs. Gage took one. As she bit into it, she looked over at the other mum and smiled.
“How is your group?” Miss Bishop was curious to see how Mrs. Gage was handling the boys. The girls were hard enough, but the boys were worse. She had been the head of a boys’ cottage until recently, and she found the boys much more difficult, and they were stronger — something that had frightened her at times.
“Oh, they’re fine, I suppose,” Mrs. Gage answered. “They’re not the happiest group of boys I’ve ever seen. It can’t be easy being an orphan and being sent away to a new country, I suppose.” The mum had found her group of boys hard to get to know.
“Oh, most of the children here are not orphans — only a handful. Most of them are from very poor families — bad breeding, you know. So, it’s not surprising that the children are difficult.”
Miss Bishop was trying to be careful how she worded things. She thought that the program was all wrong. They should have left the little guttersnipes where they belonged. Canada should be helping its own, she thought, not allowing the British trash to be dumped here and saddling the country with the problem. England should take care of her own problems. Well, that was her opinion, but she usually kept it to herself, as this was not the place to voice it.
“Really!” Mrs. Gage exclaimed. “I assumed they were all poor little orphans.” She looked puzzled. What were all these children doing here if they weren’t orphans? She went on, trying to clarify. “I didn’t mean they were difficult children, just hard to get to know, like they’ve always got their guard up. The boys don’t seem to trust me.”
“Well, I certainly wouldn’t trust them! You can’t trust that sort, you know. You can’t turn your back on them. I hope you lock your door at night.” Miss Bishop continued on, “Really, I believe anything we give them is probably better than what they left behind. I think they have it too good here most of the time, if you want my opinion. We should be putting this money and effort into helping our own poor children rather than bringing in these English slum children. It just waters down the stock, doesn’t it? We have enough of that class in Canada already.” Seeing the expression on Mrs. Gage’s face, she wondered if she had gone too far.
“But if they’re given a chance? Most of my boys seem quite bright and lively. There’s no reason they can’t be quite successful in their lives, really. That is, as long as they survive their childhoods. They work pretty hard for children.” Mrs. Gage was aware that they would not be able to see eye to eye.
“Well, I suppose the boys and girls at Fairbridge do work, but they have lots of time to play, and work is play to them, really.”[2]
“You sound as if you think these children are different because they come from poor backgrounds. That they should be treated like little workers, not children.”
“Oh, but they are different. You’ll see in time. Their expectations about life are different, too. It’s just the way they were born. The Fairbridge School is just training them to be farmers and farmers’ wives or domestics; that’s all their training will give them. They won’t be suited for much else, and we don’t want them taking our jobs. It’s what their class should be doing anyway. Don’t you agree?” Miss Bishop was getting riled. She wondered if this young upstart was baiting her. She wanted her to agree.
Deciding that it was best she not pursue the subject further, she asked, “Have you heard of the Fintry Fairbridge Training School?”[3]
“Well, just a little bit. Some of my boys will be going there next week for the summer months,” replied Mrs. Gage. She asked for another cup of tea.
As she poured, Miss Bishop explained what Fintry was about: “Well, a couple of years ago a man called Captain Dun-Waters left his entire estate — it’s in the interior of the province, right on Okanagan Lake — to the Fairbridge Farm School Society. We’re using it as a training centre for the boys. They learn all about the care of orchards — you know, pruning, picking, and packing, that sort of thing. Marjorie, one of my girls, is heading up there next week. She and a girl from another cottage will do the laundry and help with the cooking. She’s a handful; I hope they don’t send her back early!”
Mrs. Gage didn’t want to get into another discussion about the children and what was wrong with them. “If I had a fortune, I would certainly spend it differently, but that’s the rich for you. They’re different from us, and that’s for sure.”
“They sure are!” Miss Bishop was beginning to relax. She was happy; she felt that she had begun to sway Mrs. Gage over to her way of thinking.
Mrs. Gage grinned to herself. She knew that her host’s ancestors had come from Great Britain, even though she seemed to have forgotten that for the moment.
“More tea?”
Marjorie hurried through her after-school chores. If the weather was warm enough and as long as they did a good job with tomorrow morning’s chores, they could go to the swimming hole after lunch. They were already on their summer schedule: they divided the girls into two groups and they worked two different shifts. One group worked around the cottage while the other was assigned duties around the farm. The first shift started at 9:00, and then they worked until 10:15. Next came a short break, and then they would work from 10:30 until 11:30. Marjorie wondered which group she would be in tomorrow. She would either be shelling the early peas, weeding the garden, raking the pathways, cleaning the bell, knitting for the Red Cross, picking berries, polishing silver, or chopping wood. The amount of wood they had to chop was a lot less now that they didn’t need the furnace on so much, but the big tractors were already hauling in trailer loads of wood for next winter.
She hated chopping wood because it brought back a bad memory from last year. She thought back to that day. She’d finished chopping wood and gone in to change — and that was when she noticed the blood. How could she have cut herself and not know it? She would remember if she’d slipped with the axe. She used rags, but the blood was impossible to stop. She tried to see the cut, but it was too hard to see down there. Asking for help was out of the question. How could she ask someone to look down there for a cut? She found more rags and tossed the old ones in the very back of the cupboard so no one would see them. Fear accompanied her to bed that night. Would she bleed to death in her sleep? When she woke up in the morning, she thought the bleeding had stopped, until she stood up and it started again. Her stomach hurt inside, as if she’d cut herself, but she was alive. She found some more rags, and as she was trying to hide the soiled ones, the cottage mum found her. Marjorie jumped.[4]
“Oh, so you have your visitor, do you?” the cottage mum asked.
“My visitor?” Marjorie whispered.
“Your monthlies. You will be getting them every month now. Here are the supplies you will need.” The mum showed her a box of huge thick pads that she kept hidden in the back of the supply closet. The pads had tails on each end. She gave her a belt and showed her how to attach the pads. When Marjorie was done, it felt like she had a huge nappy between her legs. She walked funny, and she was afraid that everyone would know that she was bleeding from her private parts. No one told her why this was happening, just to expect it every month now. What had she done wrong to deserve this horrid punishment?
Marjorie put chopping wood out of her mind and thought about swimming. She loved going down to the Koksilah River swimming hole that ran through the bottom field. When she was down there, it seemed like she was in another world, far away from the farm and all its chores. A raft in the middle of the swimming hole allowed the good swimmers a place to jump and dive.
After dinner, Marjorie and a group of girls were washing up and chatting happily about the prospect of going swimming.
“I’m going to dive off the raft.”
“Will you help me swim to the raft?” Bunny asked.
“No. You know the rules. You have to get there on your own or you have to stay on the river’s edge.”
>
Marjorie looked at her sister. She was already ten years old. That was how old Marjorie had been when she’d left Whitley Bay. Now she was going to be fourteen after the summer. She would be up at Fintry for her birthday. They told her that the entire group would stay at Fintry until October. She had seen some of the pictures of the farm and the lake. There was a huge manor house and a funny-shaped barn. She hoped she liked it there. She knew there would be no way back if she hated it.
The next afternoon Marjorie stood and watched the group swimming. Bunny’s bathing cap was falling off. Why did they make the girls wear these silly caps? They had never worn bathing caps when they swam at the rock pools and beaches at Whitley Bay.
She had had her “visitor” last night, so swimming was out of the question. Of all the rotten luck. Oh well, she thought, at least I’ll be able to go swimming when I get to Fintry.
Marjorie shuddered as she thought of the other unwanted visitor they’d had recently. She thought she was seeing a ghost at first, but it was that horrible man from Newcastle who had been so mean to their mum when he came to their flat in Whitley Bay.[5] Marjorie would never forget his face. When he asked her how things were going, she glared at him.
“What did you do with my sister Joyce? Why didn’t she get to come with us?”
Instead of answering her, Malcolm Jackson looked at Kenny and said, “My, my, aren’t you a big healthy boy. This fresh air and farm work agrees with you, doesn’t it, sonny?” He turned and ruffled Bunny’s hair, and then he went to talk with another boy.
Everyone at the farm school was mingling outside of the dining hall. Malcolm Jackson wanted a photograph taken of all the children and all the staff. He said he wanted to take it back to England to show how wonderful the Fairbridge Farm School was doing. Marjorie wanted to shout at him that it was not wonderful, and wanted to ask again about her sister Joyce, but as she tried to find her words, her cottage mum grabbed her arm and dragged her away.
Fairbridge Farm School Group. Kenny is in the bottom row, eleven over from the left side, and Marjorie and Audrey are directly above him. Circa 1940.
The gnawing frustration that Marjorie had tried to mask for years squirmed around her inner being, threatening to explode. No one ever gave them any answers. Sometimes all they wanted to know was what was going on, yet the grown-ups simply ignored them or seemed frustrated and angered by questions. They had no one to turn to for answers. She just wanted to know what had happened to Joyce. What was he doing here, anyway? Did he come to spy on them? Was he going to go back and tell the king about the good little soldiers that he’d sent out here? Well, if he talked to her cottage mum, he might find out that Marjorie was not such a good little soldier, but what did she care? She hated being here, and she was tired of pretending that she liked it. They made her feel that nothing she did was right, no matter how hard she tried, so what was the point? Sometimes she felt that no one liked her here. She was glad she was going to Fintry. She wanted to get away from them all.
Chapter 9
A Bad Home Is Better Than Any Institution
Most of the children seem to feel cheated, and their allegiance is still to their own families back in England, poor though they may be.
— Isobel Harvey Report, August 1944
Home Sweet Home
They say Home Sweet Home
Is the place to be.
Well, I guess
That’s just not for me
’Cause my home sweet home
Is across the sea.
Home Sweet Home
Is with my family.
Marjorie thought back to when she was packing her bag to come to Fintry. She laughed now about how she’d worried she would miss a lot of good things by having to leave the farm school. For example, they allowed all the girls who had completed sewing their dresses to model them in the dress parade when the day school closed for the summer. She had taken extra care sewing her dress, and she was unhappy at the time that going to Fintry meant that no one would see what a good job she’d done. She was proud of her dress, but she no longer minded that she’d missed the dress parade. They were also going to have a session in school on painting fungi. She loved doing that, too. She had already found a great fungus in the woods, almost a foot across. She had planned to paint a beach scene on hers, with a lighthouse just like the St. Mary’s Lighthouse at Whitley Bay. She gave the fungus to Bunny before she left. She was a good painter. Marjorie could find another fungus to paint when she returned to Fairbridge.
She would miss swimming in the Koksilah River and the walk to the old Stone Butter Church this summer and to the beach at Cowichan Bay. She thought about those special things. That and hiding. She’d planned to hide so no one could find her, and then the truck would have to leave for Nanaimo without her. She’d had no idea how much better everything was going to be at Fintry. Now she could see that it would have been a disaster if she’d missed the truck.
Shortly after they arrived, they celebrated Dominion Day by going on a picnic to the high farm. The view of the lake was wonderful from the top. Imagine, a walk and a picnic all in one day! Now the group had been at Fintry for almost three weeks. Marjorie thought that it was the best three weeks ever. Once the farm truck pulled out of the farm school’s “Pearly Gates,” Marjorie began to enjoy herself. She wondered why she’d had such a hard time packing her bag. It may have been the uncertainty of leaving the farm school after being there for almost three years. She might not like it much, but it was also scary leaving it. Would she fit in or stand out and feel judged, just like when she walked into the shops in Duncan?
The carefree feeling as they drove away surprised her. It was as if she had left all her worries and fears back at the farm. She felt relaxed, and it was a wonderful new feeling. The ferry ride was exciting, too. She spent a lot of time outside on the deck, watching the seagulls following the boat. Then, it was magic! They saw some black-and-white whales. Someone called them orca whales. There were about five or six of them travelling together. They kept going down, then surfacing again, spouting large sprays of water into the air as they came up. They looked so unrestricted. There were no gates or rules to stop them. They could travel wherever they wanted.
Marjorie enjoyed seeing Vancouver again. She recognized the ferry dock and the train station. They boarded the train the next morning and settled into their seats. Mrs. Howard, the Fairbridge cottage mother who was travelling to Fintry with them, told them that they would arrive in time for a swim before dinner. She seemed to be as excited as the children in her charge. She had been at Fintry the year before, and during the train ride she told the eighteen boys and the two girls about all the wonderful things they would find at Fintry.
The day seemed to fly by in a haze of rivers, tunnels, trees, and lakes. Before anyone expected it, the train was pulling into Vernon Station. As they scrambled off the train, Mrs. Howard pointed out a rather large open-backed truck. “There is our ride to Fintry.”
They travelled the twenty-four bumpy, winding, narrow, and dusty miles down the west side of the lake in tired silence. Parts of the road were scary because the banks down to the lake were so steep. At one point they met a big truck carrying logs, and there was no room to go by, so they had to back up until the road was wide enough for the logging truck to pass by them. It was tricky to back up the old truck, but it was probably a lot easier than backing up the huge logging truck. Marjorie was relieved when they turned off the main road and headed down to Fintry.
The truck pulled over and stopped at the top for a moment so everyone could get a good look at the view. The driver pointed to the fields below. They could see the lake to the north and to the south. “That’s Fintry. Beautiful, ain’t it? You see that area where the hillside here slopes sharply down to the bottom area? We call that the Fintry Flats.”
The driver turned off the road and started down the hillside. The
road zigzagged down the steep bank to the bottom. The brakes squealed the entire way. Marjorie prayed for the brakes to hold, as it would be the end of them all if they failed. There was no need for her to worry; they got to the bottom in one piece.
As they passed through the gates, the driver opened the back cab window so the children could hear him, and he explained the layout to them: “There’s the ranch manager’s house. His name is Mr. Graham. He’s been here for ages. He was Captain Dun-Waters’ ranch manager, too. There’s the house that Captain Dun-Waters lived in after he moved out of his manor house. Unfortunately, he died last year. There is the packinghouse. That’s where all the fruit is sorted and packed. Look, a boat is at the dock now. The boats travel up and down the lake between Kelowna and Vernon, and they stop in between wherever they’re needed.”
The Fintry manor house.
He stopped the truck so the children could see the boat and the packinghouse.
“Now, did you know that Fintry was once a stopping place on the North West Company’s old fur trade route? No? Well, we have to get you up to speed on the local history. The Hudson’s Bay Company also used it later on. Yes, the Okanagan Lake is steeped in history. You see, before there were proper roads, the lake was the main travel route, especially for this side of the lake. People still use all kinds of boats, canoes, rowboats, paddle wheelers, you name it; every kind of boat travels this lake. The road we just came in on has only been there since 1909. Before that you could only get here by trail or by boat.
“Over there is the orchard; it is about one hundred acres. Captain Dun-Waters planted about five thousand trees. He planted mainly apple trees, but there are also twenty-two pear trees, over two hundred cherry trees, and over one hundred stone fruit trees, like apricots, peaches, and plums. It looks like we’ll have a good crop of cherries this year. The apples are ready to be thinned — so, boys, I guess that will be the first job on your list.”
Marjorie Her War Years Page 13
