The Brehaut-Rutherford Extended Family
Red Car! Yes, Dad and I had many arguments/discussions about the color of cars. He would point out gray cars (really red) to me to show difference with our ‘red’ car. Over the years we would frequently remind each other by pointing our the gray/red cars we saw and have a good chuckle.
As for ‘Just around the next corner’, I remember it being used when we did our summer trips to Pine Lake for holidays. But if my memory serves me right, it ended with ‘under the tree’ at the end – ‘around the corner and under the tree’. The Pine Lake holidays were fun times of which I have fond memories.
Bragg Creek brings back a memory for me. I had received a toy tractor/excavator or some such thing. One of those larger metal ones intended for outdoors/sandbox use. I was playing with it in the muddy driveway at the cottage (mud being easier to manipulate than hard dirt) when Dad came home in the car. He stopped and waited while I moved my new toy out of the muddy rut I was playing in. Unfortunately I just moved it off to the side into a smaller rut or hole beside the main ruts. Then Dad continued on in the driveway. When the front wheel of the car hit the rut I had been playing in, it bounce suddenly out of the rut off to the side and rolled over my wonder toy. I remember being very upset with Dad and blaming him as I didn’t understand the dynamics of mud driving. I have been back to the trading post a few times and always enjoyed a visit inside.
I remember the first time I went back to the trading post in Bragg Creek on my own. Probably stopped in there once when I was in my late teens, I might have been in the neighbourhood scouting out a good place to take my scout troop camping. Or maybe it was some other time. I did not remember the place from my childhood, but as soon as I stepped inside, the smell made me feel right at home. No memories but definitely a feeling of familiarity, of cozyness, of peace and love.
“Just around the next corner.” A phrase that Dad used often over the years, so often it entered family folklore. It’s a phrase I still use today with my grandchildren and I put in mental quotation marks in Dad’s memory.
I remember vague stories of Dad’s use of it, but I didn’t know it dated to this trip. Nice to know its history finally.
My first memory of this snack (exactly as Kevan described it) centers on our move from Verdun to Lachine. I remember Dad and I were alone at the new house unpacking the moving boxes.Mum and the baby (probably Kevan, if I was 6 but, again, I may be misremembering were shopping for groceries; Heather was with Grannie, to keep her out of the way.
The house was brand new, I think, on a street of brand new houses backing onto, across the lane and row of trees behind, a working farm (but I could be mistaken, I was no more than 5 or 6 at the time). It was a bungalow (before and after this, at least until 35th Street in Calgary, we were always in 2-storey homes). At some point in our labours Dad decided it was time for a break, and as he was never one for showing any great skill in the kitchen, his go-to meal was maple syrup on bread. We sat facing each other at the kitchen table — sufficiently cleared of unpacked but not yet put away food or dishes or pots and pans to provide room for our cereal bowls — and enjoyed, probably two bowls of this treat, me feeling ever so grown-up to be eating a treat like this with Dad.
Thanks for the memory, Kevan. I had completely forgotten about that tasty treat. I don’t remember the cans, although I do remember the cakes of sugar. But I definitely remember dipping the bread into the syrup. Makes me smile just remembering the fun we had.
Ernest’s service in France was brief because he wounded (apparently not very seriously, at least I never heard that it was life-threatening, but enough to take him back to England for the duration of the war)
When the family arrived 1931, Ernest got impatient with the long line for immigrants and, because he had lived in Canada before, took everyone through the line for returning residents, an action that had repercussions many years later as Betty had a bit of struggle to claim her Canadian citizenship — she had never legally entered the country
In 1939 the whole family went back to England for the holidays (Jim came on a later sailing, I think because of his school not being quite finished). On the return voyage, Jim again lingered behind and took a later sailing — one that turned out to be the last passenger ship leaving before the outbreak of the war.
The family had made several trips to Victoria on holidays over the years of living in Calgary, and Betty fell in love with it, always vowing she would retire there. We were home from Saudi before she moved, but our entreaties for her to stay — what will our children do without their grandmother to visit? — fell on deaf ears, and she followed her dream to move to Victoria.
I seem to remember that I often forgot to yell "saved" and came back to having take a lesser seat. Sometimes even, it seemed that in the less than a second between getting up from my seat and yelling "saved", one or the other of my brothers had already grabbed it! That led to some interesting arguments about reality, that is, about when an action is seen to have occurred: at the start or at the end. Must have encouraged us all to develop our debating skills! So, not all bad.
One of the (I think, bad ) habits that we developed as a family, if I remember correctly, could be directly attributed to Walt Disney, for his Wonderful World of Walt Disney came on at Sunday suppertime, and we –over the objections of Mum, who really would have preferred us to grow up with proper manners and correct decorum — and aided by the TV trays Dad bought, started eating our dinners, on several good TV nights, in the living room in front of the TV. Those who did not want to use a TV tray ate with plates balanced on our knees and, when we went for refills, rarely forgot to yell “saved!”
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