Patricia

I grew up in England in an area where most of my mother’s family lived. I went to school with my cousins and we all went to the Catholic Church. I came to Canada when I was 10 years old with my parents on a ship. After the war, that was the least expensive way since Canada needed people to fill it up, so they would pay for half of your passage. Australia would pay for your whole passage, but my mother thought that it was too far.

It was an absolute shock coming here since we were leaving everybody and not knowing anybody. No one else immigrated to Canada from our huge family, so we’ve kind of been alone until I had my own children. It was also challenging because I had a very English accent, as I was from the north of England. We speak more like Scottish people. People in Canada couldn’t understand me, so I had to keep repeating myself until people understood what I was saying. I had to lose my British accent and learn to talk like all my friends did so I wouldn’t have to repeat myself so much.

You couldn’t immigrate here unless you already had a job in place. My father was an electrician, and he was able to get a job in Ontario working in an ammunition factory that was making ammunition for the Korean War, which was on at the time. But the war ended and my father was out of work, so we moved once every year until I was almost high school age, and we ended up in Ottawa.

Moving so much did have an impact on me because I had to leave any friends I made almost immediately. It was almost like leaving England again, but we could write letters. It’s hard for kids nowadays to understand, but growing up, we didn’t have a telephone until after we had been in Canada for a few years because we didn’t know anybody to call. It would have been too expensive to call back to England, and no one in England had a telephone except maybe the doctor and the taxi, because there was a telephone box on the corner of the street. We didn’t even have a television until I was about 14. We just played, built forts, picked bluebells in the woods, and did all kinds of exploring. Our parents never bothered what we were doing as long as we came in for our meals. I remember there was a movie that came out called The Greatest Show on Earth and it was about the circus, so the children in the neighborhood decided to put on a circus. We would swing from clotheslines like they were trapezes and would get the dogs all arranged to try and teach them tricks.

I went through high school taking all the sciences because I wanted to be a nurse. But by the time I finished high school, my boyfriend, who ended up being my husband, didn’t want to wait for me. In those days, you couldn’t live at home and had to live in residence during school to be a nurse. He didn’t want to wait three years for me to get a nursing degree and was being pressured into getting married, so that’s what I did — right out of high school. It’s one of my big regrets.

After I got married, my son came along a year and a half later, and then I was just a homemaker. Then my second child came along 13 months after, so I was just very busy. We didn’t have the conveniences that they have today. For example, we had cloth diapers that we had to wash and then hang on the clothesline. Sometimes we went camping, but that was never really a holiday for me because I still had to cook and get everything ready and look after the kids while my husband went golfing or fishing.

I moved to Kingston about 10 years ago from Quebec. My daughter was in Ottawa and my two sons were in Toronto, and it was a long way for them to come visit, so I just didn’t get to see my children as often as I wanted. So I thought, well, where is a place in between everybody? It happened to be Kingston.

I was always a knitter and a sewer. I used to sew my clothes and my kids’ clothes. In my 20s, I learned how to play Bridge, a card game. I still play it now. It helps your brain and gives you social activity.

I think it’s important to be resilient. I remember being in grade six and being a babysitter. I was invited to go away as a helper in the summer and my parents agreed. When I came back, my house was empty. There was nobody living there. My neighbour, Mrs. Russell, said, “Oh, your parents left an envelope in our mailbox and they’ve moved to Ottawa. We’re to put you on a bus and send you to Ottawa.” My parents didn’t have a phone and they wouldn’t have known how to reach me anyway. So I ended up at a bus station in Ottawa with a phone number to call to tell my parents I had arrived and to come and get me. I tried and tried calling it all day long and no one picked up. A lady decided to put me in a taxi to the address I had on the piece of paper, and I finally was reunited with my parents. You have to just deal with whatever it is. You have to be resilient.