Remembering my Mother.
Eveline Jane was born on the family farm during a November blizzard in 1913. The call for a midwife had gone out on the party phone line and soon a neighbour arrived by horse and cutter through a blinding snowstorm to assist my grandmother, She was shivering from the extreme cold as my grandfather welcomed her into the house and she quickly asked if everything was okay. My grandmother called out that all was well and to warm up before coming into the bedroom. Finally, with hands warmed, Mrs. Powell entered the bedroom and found my grandmother holding her new baby girl. Unbeknown to my grandfather or Mrs. Powell, Eveline Jane had already arrived. In the years that followed my mother insisted she was a free spirit because she had come into the world unassisted
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| Shirley and Eveline |
Delivering babies on the farms in those days was often difficult and women had to rely on each other. When a birth was imminent, a call would go out and a nearby neighbour would have her husband quickly hitch up the horses to the cutter or the buggy depending on the season so she could midwife at the birth. Going out during a prairie blizzard or a dust storm was dangerous and when visibility was bad, there was always the risk of becoming disoriented and lost.. So real was the danger that during the winters farmers had a rope connecting the house to the barn to avoid accidentally straying from the yard during winter whiteout storms. The party line was the lifeline of the community and was the way people communicated with each other.
My mother was the youngest of three children and was born several years after her older brothers. The farmhouse where she was born was small with a kitchen/dining room, living room and bedroom on the main floor and two sloped ceiling bedrooms upstairs. There was a bathroom with a toilet built over a large bucket that my grandfather would empty in a back field. There was a bathtub but usually a bath was taken in a large tin bathtub placed near the kitchen wood stove. There was no running water or electricity and they relied on the wood burning kitchen range and space heater to heat the tiny home. The wooden wall phone was their connection to the outside world. My grandparents homesteaded in Saskatchewan in 1905 and my grandfather built their home with lumber transported from Eastern Canada along with furniture which included a piano and other settlers effects. His widowed father and their five year old son accompanied them as they headed west from Quebec to make a new life on the prairies.
Life was difficult as farmers learned to grow crops in western Canada and faced so many obstacles including grasshoppers, rust,frost, draught. The government set up experimental stations to try and find wheat that would be better for the prairies. The first world war started and many of the young men ran off to join the forces, some never to return.
As the war was winding down, the influenza pandemic of 1918 - 1919 was costing lives across the world including 30,000 and 50,000 in Canada. It was not uncommon to see people carrying an onion wrapped in a handkerchief up against their nose to keep the germs away. My mother who was five at the time came down with influenza and the doctor did not expect her to survive. My grandmother used the remedies that were available at the time - steam to ease the congestion and as my grandmother said, “white of egg.” Somehow my mother survived the influenza but was left with damaged lungs that required major surgery years later.
My mother attended a small school named Cleland located half a mile from their farm. Like the other children, she went to and from school on her horse and was taught in the one room school with children from grades one to nine. She was a natural on the piano and enjoyed her music lessons from Mrs. Turner. She had the ability to play by ear and could quickly play new tunes soon after hearing them which made her in demand for school parties and dances. Once she reached high school age her parents decided to send her to Saskatoon, one hundred miles distant, to finish her education. She stayed with the Arnold family in Saskatoon who had two daughters close in age to my mother and she attended Bedford Road Collegiate. After high school she entered nursing at City Hospital but at the time, the great depression was starting and her family was hard pressed to support her in Saskatoon. Finally she returned to the farm where the dirty thirties and the depression left Saskatchewan farm families struggling to survive.
