and clearly agitated, “why did you insist I come to Brampton this summer? I told you that the war would be declared while we were here! I need to be home now. I need to be with my regiment. I have to leave tomorrow!” For two years, Roy had been a member of the Winnipeg militia. While completing his university education, he had been training for warfare in the evenings and on weekends.
“Roy,” Uncle William said, clearly repeating another mantra, “the militia has not yet been called up. There is no point rushing to return to the west tomorrow. When the time comes, your commanding officer may prefer you to go directly to England from here. Let’s wait and see.” Roy was only slightly mollified. Ironically, in any other year, the Turners would have been home by August 4th. It was the threat of war that developed in the last week that required Uncle William to stay in Brampton. His firm sensed that his presence in Ontario at that time could be extremely helpful. “We’ll leave next Sunday, per our current plans.”
Roy was an adult. He could have left without his parents—but he knew that it would break his mother’s heart if she was not at the train station when he entrained for England. His mother would not return west without his father.
Of the four remaining young people at the table, three were girls. Our strongest view was that no one we loved or cared about should get shot and killed.
“Like who?” Bill asked.
“Like….our fathers,” I replied. I couldn’t even bring myself to mention my brother and cousins.
“Don’t worry,” Roy said, “they are too old to enlist.” Father, then fifty-one years of age, and Uncle William, two years younger, scowled at Roy, but neither objected.
“Like our brothers,” Hannah said.
“Don’t look at me,” her brother John said. “Apparently I am too young to enlist.”
“Don’t look at me,” her cousin Bill said. “Apparently I am too poor to forego my tuition.” Uncle William scowled more.
“Don’t look at me,” Roy said. “At this rate the war will be over before I get back to my regiment. And if it isn’t, well then, I will be just fine. I have plenty of training. I can take on one, two, or three Germans at a time! They won’t know what hit them!” He ended his battle cry with a firm fist on the table. The cutlery around him leapt briefly above its station.
“Thank you, Roy,” Aunt Rose said, patting his hand before rearranging her dessert cutlery. “We don’t need quite that much enthusiasm at the table.” Everyone turned to my brother Jim, also then twenty-two.
“Don’t look at me,” Jim said. “I have no intention of enlisting. I have important dental work to do, don’t I, Father?” Jim was about to enter his last year of dental studies. Father nodded in agreement. “The war will be over before I graduate, I expect.”
“Like our friends,” Ina added, in response to the “like who” question. Her voice was timid, her tone melancholic, her gaze distant.
“Yes,” Roy said, laughing, attempting to raise the mournful drift of the conversation. “Your friends may be worth worrying about!”
“It’s true,” Bill confirmed. “I know most of them. Many are uncoordinated dullards! Hardly worthy of your friendship or mine!” He threw his napkin at Ina, laughing the entire time, expecting his action to lighten her mood. She instead used the napkin to wipe two tears falling down her cheeks.
This, then, summarizes the views of my entire extended family but for two of its members. The first, my grandfather, Jesse Brady, was not with us that night. He often spent time in Toronto while the Turners were visiting us, allowing a little more room for the accommodation of the four Winnipeg guests between our house and Aunt Rose’s house. But Grandpa had made his views known over the preceding months. Though he was born and raised in England, and though he understood the legal niceties, Grandpa considered this war to be Britain’s war and not Canada’s war. In this way, his views at this time diverged from those of the Brampton establishment, though not for any of the reasons Father might advance. Grandpa, at seventy-eight years of age, held no property and thus paid no property taxes. The war would not materially affect his personal finances. He took no particular delight in taking views opposite to those of the town’s establishment. England had not been unkind or unjust to him. He had arrived in Canada at the age of twenty-two, ten years before the country of Canada was formed. He came to forge a new life. He no longer felt any allegiance to the old one.
The other member of my extended family whose views on the war had not been presented that evening was my Aunt Lillian, Father’s eldest sister. It would have been impossible to state her position with certain knowledge, since she was as unpredictable as Father was contrarian. Her disdain for Brampton, the place of her birth, including her refusal to visit her home town more than twice a year, meant that we were all truly surprised when just before dessert was served and shortly after Bill was scolded by his father for throwing a napkin at his cousin, a persistent halloo issued from the front foyer.
“I think that’s Lil,” Aunt Rose said, rising from the table. She walked through the sitting room and the parlour before returning a few minutes later with the suspected guest. We naturally rose when she entered the room, but instead of rushing to embrace our favourite aunt as my siblings, my cousins and I would ordinarily have done, we froze in place.
“I’m sorry,” Aunt Lil said in a halting voice as she entered the dining room. She was clearly distressed. Her long red hair, which when not captured in a large hat was always worn loosely down her back, was tied that night in a long braid. The green of her blouse and skirt (the only colour she ever wore) did not match. Her face was ashen and her eyes were bloodshot. She was shaking. What had happened to our favourite aunt, I wondered, the aunt whose zany ways and eccentricities always made her lively company? We loved her for that, for her disregard of convention (which made her a lenient chaperone), and for her inability to tell even a white lie (which made her a trusted source for the truth from which other adults often sought to shelter us).
“Lillian, what is it?” Charlotte asked as we sat back down. “What has brought you all this way? Why didn’t you let us know you were coming? We’d have had someone meet you at the train station.”
To our utter horror—at least to the horror of the younger generation of the family—our favourite aunt began to cry. None of us had ever seen our consummately steady aunt dissemble. We all rose to go to her before Father stopped us.
“Sit down, all of you!” he commanded. “None of you has been excused. Charlotte, Mary, will you please take Lillian away from the table and help her calm herself.”
“No. No, Jethro,” Aunt Lil said, putting her hand up in his direction. “I’m sorry. I will be fine. I don’t want to be away from the children. They are the reason I came here tonight. It’s the children. My boys.” Jim pulled a spare chair from its resting spot next to the wall. After placing it beside Aunt Rose’s chair, the two ladies sat down. We all turned to her.
“The children? The boys? What about them, Lil?” My father rarely had patience for what he considered to be the very odd ways of his eldest sister, who he sometimes referred to as “Lulu”—though never to her face. That night was no exception. “What the deuce is wrong with you?”
“With me?” she asked. “Not with me. Nothing is wrong with me. With the world. With your world,” she said, confirming the other worldliness to which we children all knew she belonged. “Your world. Your way. Don’t you know how many lives are going to be wasted on this war?”
“Wasted?
