Captured Hearts: New Brunswick’s War Brides
by Melynda Jarratt
Imagine you’re a young British or European woman caught up in the dramatic reality of war. You fall in love with and marry a soldier from a foreign country. When the war ends, you leave behind all you’ve ever known — family, friends, and way of life — for a new life in Canada. This is the story of nearly two thousand war brides who made their way to New Brunswick to join their servicemen husbands at the end of the Second World War.

Melynda will be bringing Mrs Boone with her to the library, a wonderful women and war bride, originally from Scotland who has been living in Canada for over 50 years and is willing to share her experiences and stories with Glasgow Women’s Library.

This free event is taking place on:
Friday, 24 July 2009 at 2pm

For bookings and more information: please call 0141 552 8345 or contact Laura at the Library.

This event is running as part of the Women Make History project.

Poetry for me functions as a touchstone, something I turn to when I need to check out my understanding of life’s big questions of birth, death, loss, love, identity, cruelty, how we fit with nature, how nature fits with us… Poems provide me with little portals into this world from new angles that render all that’s familiar strange again. They make the ordinary miraculous and the miraculous ordinary.

Take the poem, The Barrel Annunciation by Kathleen Jamie, from Jizzen 1999. What’s the story behind it? After a spring storm, the poet finds she’s pregnant and imagines that it is the act of emptying the pail of rain water into the rain barrel that has cast a spell and caused her to conceive unexpectedly. Linking the two events, she instils in the poem a kind of fairy tale magic, full of wonder, but also a bit creepy.

When terrible things are happening in the world, Margaret Atwood’s poetry helps me to face them without covering my eyes and sticking my fingers in my ears. Her poem sequence, Four Small Elegies, from Two Headed Poems, 1978, has provided me with the words I quote most often when trying to comprehend human cruelty to other human beings: ‘Those whose houses were burned / burned houses. What else ever happens / once you start?’; ‘Again / those who gave the orders / were already somewhere else, / of course on horseback.’; ‘His hatred of the words / that had been done became children … he told them / one story only.’ The poems in the sequence are almost unbearable in their depiction of cruelty. And yet, Margaret Atwood must have had to imagine her way into the lives not only of the people who fled but the people who torched the houses. She allows the reader to feel sympathy for the Glengarry highlanders who, themselves victims of the Highland Clearances, emigrated to Canada where some of them took part in the massacre. It is her evocation, in simple, vivid detail, of the poverty and desperate hunger of the perpetrators that makes their cruelty almost inevitable.

I read this recently and was transported to Canada in 1867, to the wilderness and terrible weather which was endured by the many Scots who emigrated there. The book is mainly an account of a woman, regarding a mystery surrounding a murder, possibly involving her son. The author is a Scottish woman, it’s her first novel but you’d never think so.

This book came to me in a wonderful sequence of synchronicity and serendipity. Five participants of a book group I attend picked 2 titles each that they would like to read during the next 12 months. We have very eclectic tastes and there are no bounds on what can be selected. The titles were then randomly allocated into a sequenced reading list. This book, one of my recommendations, fell to be read directly after James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Amazingly, in The View from Castle Rock, Hogg, ‘The Ettrick Shepherd’ is revealed as one of Alice Munro’s direct ancestors.

Munro’s series of tales is full of such happenstances and fateful events. It tracks the migration of her foremothers and fathers from Illinois to Canada and these are stories rich in detail as Munro has a remarkable cache of writings that she has been able to mine. But this is not merely a series of real, stirring and sometimes harrowing accounts of pioneers. Munro has chosen to write short stories throughout that draw on this history but embellish the real with what could have been.

I found this book astonishing and poignant and one that will resonate with all those of us with migrant ancestors.