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The Maypo Lea Forever: Stories of a Canadian Childhood

by Kathreen A. Nash

345 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #02-0916; ISBN 1-55395-202-2; US$28.50, C$32.50, EUR23.50, £16.50

A collection of short, frequently humourous, true stories, depicting a child's experiences of growing up on a Canadian prairie farm through the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II.

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About the book      About the author      Table of Contents and Sample Excerpts      Catalogue info

About the Book This collection of short stories, written from the author's own early experiences, gives a rare insight into a child's perceptions of adults, situations, and the world around her as she was growing up on a Canadian prairie farm through the years of the great Depression (1929-1939) and World War II. Throughout these entertaining stories the author remains conscious of her readers - who could easily range in age from adolescence to senior, providing them with intriguing descriptions of early farm equipment, and methods, where needed, as in Raised on Meat and Potatoes (page 32), "When I was about thirteen my father taught me how to operate a hayrake and I loved it! I had no problem at all driving a team of horses... and round the field we would fly on this lightweight contraption... gathering the sweet-smelling hay into the long row of semi-circular tines on the backs of our rakes, tripping our levers at the right moment to dump it, leaving field-width windrows of hay, ready to be picked up by pitchfork or by haybuck and made into large haystacks...." There is a deliberate and pleasing balance to this selection of stories, both in content and in style. Underlying Ms. Nash's frequently humourous presentation of her experiences, is an obvious awareness of the seriousness of the difficulties of the times of which she writes, and the particular impact those difficulties may have had on children, as, for example, in How I Helped Win The War(pages 222-223). "Just as war songs helped some people to deal with the war, so they helped me, and possibly others of my generation, to better understand some aspects of the war. ... Romanticized though the songs may have been, through them I began to visualize what might be really happening to the young men and women... who had left our community to go to war. ...There were no songs that told about the deaths and possible deaths." Kathreen Nash's insights into the early perceptions and the depths of children's imaginative play, so sensitively described in Yellowleg Hall, are reminiscent of Laurie Lee's Cider With Rosie (Century Publishing 1991), or Kenneth Graham's Dream Days, and, The Golden Age, first published in the late 1800's. Dr. J. B. London, of Classic Memoirs, and a professor at the University of Victoria, says of this book: "Kathie Nash has a way with words. A published poet, she looks for both sound and meaning in those words she carefully chooses to tell her stories. ... Ms. Nash is a consummate story-teller, and what is most effective about this book is the way she pulls her readers into the world of the little farm girl, and holds them there from cover to cover. Often poignant, frequently laced with gentle humour, the childhood vignettes she has collected here are delightful throughout. The author's ability to recall even the smallest details of setting, and recollect emotions arising from relationships at home and school are truly commendable." ---------------------------------- Review "The Maypo Lea Forever by Kathreen A. Nash is a most absorbing series of stories of rural child life in Western Canada during the 1930s and 1940s -- and it could be one of the few books which might simultaneously warrant placement in our school libraries while being of interest to a high percentage of adult readers." R. W. (Ron) Pogey appeared in The Calgary Herald March, 2003. ----------------------------------

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About the Author The fourth child of six, Kathreen Nash was born on an Alberta farm and grew up there through the Depression years of the 1930's, moving with her family during World War II to the Fraser Valley of British Columbia. After High School she completed training and worked as an Infant's nurse before marriage. When her own children were grown she continued her education and subsequently taught future childcare workers for fourteen years in a Fraser Valley community college, in the Early Childhood Education department. When illness forced an early retirement, Ms. Nash moved to Tofino, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, where she operated a Bed and Breakfast for eight years. She has been actively involved in amateur theatre and writing from the age of six, and has had a few of her stories and a number of poems (some award-winning) published over the years in such periodicals as Whetstone, A Writer's World, Event, Diversions, The Vancouver Sun, The Sound, and others. Kathreen Nash now lives in Victoria, British Columbia. This is her first full-length book.

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Table of Contents and Sample Excerpts

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Contents Acknowledgements Preface Our Gracious King The Pigpen Roof Little Red Lunch Pail Chickens Little - - and Big The Maypo Lea and the Pig List Raised on Meat and Potatoes Yellowleg Hall Go Bite Your Belly Button Earthquake at the Seepy Are The Kitchen Cabinet White Sheep, White Sheep, on a Blue Hill - - - Readin', Writin' and 'Rithmetic A Bottle of Pop Picnics and Politics The Parcel Weird and Wonderful One-Hoss Shays And Don't Go Through Jensen's Yard Of Hippies and Hoboes Aunties Are Coming! Headcheese, Lye Soap and Sauerkraut The Season to be Jolly True Confessions of a Five-Year-Old Runaway Fairy Godmother Medicine Men - and Women Mammy's Little Coal Black Rose How I Helped Win the War Prairie Ghosts L'Envoi	iii ix 1 7 15 23 37 45 71 87 103 109 119 127 147 151 169 187 203 211 221 235 255 271 277 283 299 317 342 345
Preface As my children and grandchildren were growing up, a realization crept slowly to my consciousness. I began to understand that, when I told them small anecdotes from my own childhood, they really had no way of relating to the early experiences of my generation. Our worlds had become radically different. If they asked why we didn't, as children, go to a certain event, and I replied, "We had no money," I could tell that they thought I meant we didn't have five or ten dollars to go out that Saturday night. How could they know about living with coal oil lamps, horse drawn transportation, food rationing and no telephones? To me, as a child, these middleclass children with coins in their pockets would have been "rich kids," far beyond reach of friendship with me. This revelation became the beginning of these stories, written primarily to provide a child's viewpoint of those years for succeeding generations who, it is to be hoped, will never experience first hand the desperate circumstances, and often hopelessness, that affected hundreds of thousands of Canadians in the Great Depression of the 1930's. ----------------------------------
The Maypo Lea and the Pig List (page 37)       The maypo lea, far emblem dear,       The maypo lea---forever!       God save our King and heaven bless       The maypo lea---forever!       What a wonderful song! And most of it made sense, too, in spite of Wolfe the donkless hero. At least by grade two I knew it was a maple leaf, and by grade five I understood a little of Wolfe and his dauntlessness. No cumbersome sentences here to bewilder young minds as in God Save the King and O Canada!       How I looked forward to the mornings when we got to sing The Maple Leaf Forever instead of O Canada! Not that I didn't like singing O Canada! I still do. I consider it one of the more attractive national anthems of the world. Well played, the music has a lovely flow to it that easily evokes visions of tumbling rivers and waterways, wide plains and mountains rising to open skies. A sense of pride in country was certainly instilled along with the learning of the song.       It always felt to me though, more of a "duty" song. Just look at the words "-True patriot love in all thy sons command." What could that possibly mean to a six year old? The only word in that sentence that caught was "sons," and it certainly made me feel left out. What about all us daughters? Didn't we count? Putting "sons" and "command" together, I decided they must be talking about soldiers. No less confusing was " -we see thee rise, the True North strong and free." Rise? Like the sun? Like bread dough? And the True North? Eskimos lived in the True North. We knew that because we had made a little flour, salt and water model Eskimo village in the sand table and learned all about them. Obviously the song was not written for us, a group of prairie children in the True West. Left out again. " -We stand on guard for thee." Well, that confirmed it. Who stands on guard? Soldiers, of course. So here we were, singing dutifully every day, a song that was written for Eskimo soldiers, and I had no idea why.       When our teacher was sick and Mrs. McMillan came to substitute, we always got to sing The Maple Leaf Forever. It almost made up for the thing we didn't like about Mrs. McMillan coming to teach. Mrs. McMillan always made a "Pig List." I think, besides The Maple Leaf Forever, she must have liked art and drawing very much, because on her first day she would come early, and on one side of the blackboard she would draw, in a variety of coloured chalk, the most beautiful fairy imaginable. On the other side she would draw a large and handsome pink pig. When we were in our desks she would come around to inspect our faces, our hands, our hair, and our fingernails for cleanliness. This was called "Health Inspection." She would also ask each of us if we had brushed our teeth that morning. Of course, everybody always said they had. In our family often nobody had, and I suspect it was so with at least half of the thirty or so children.       In town, though there were electric lights, nobody in the early years had running water. Those who didn't have their own wells got their water at the town pump with a bucket. On the farms there was no electricity. We used coal oil lamps for many years, and later gas lamps. Water came from wells, or sometimes from a fresh spring bubbling out of the ground somewhere on the farm. There was such a spring on our farm, a mile and a half away through the fields, and we were considered quite fortunate. Our water for drinking and cooking was hauled from this spring by horses pulling a "stoneboat," a large, heavy flat sled on two big wooden runners, on which three or four wooden or metal barrels could be placed. It sat outside the kitchen door and we carried water into the house in buckets as it was needed. Hauling the water took a lot of time and was very hard work, both for the people and for the horses, and we were taught early to make do with very small amounts.       Brushing teeth was a major operation. This is the way it was done at our house, after we got toothbrushes at around six years of age. In the summertime, just before getting ready for bed, we would get a tin cup and a half cup of water from the pail in the kitchen. We then got a bit of baking soda or salt in one hand (toothpaste was a few years down the road), went out and stood by the caragana bushes and brushed our teeth. I liked the soda, but the salt always scratched my gums and made them sting. One time my mother told us that the Indians used to use the charcoal end of a burnt stick to brush their teeth, so I got a piece of charcoal out of the ashes and tried it. Once was enough!       With five or six children brushing teeth and one or two tin cups, it took awhile. In the winter, of course, things got a little lax. Nobody was going out in below zero weather to brush teeth. It was bad enough having to go to the outdoor toilet, an exercise we delayed as long as physically possible. Sometimes, if our mother was not too tired to nag us into it, we would brush our teeth in the kitchen and spit into the slop bucket.       At school, however, nobody was going to be stupid enough to say they had not brushed their teeth, and deliberately get themselves put on the Pig List. The next hurdle was having to produce a clean handkerchief. While the motives were sound, the expectations were unrealistic. Who had handkerchiefs? Sometimes the girls got a box of handkerchiefs for a birthday or Christmas present, not a coveted gift, by the way, but they were kept for "good," which meant the Christmas Concert or the rare occasion when we managed to get to Sunday School or some other church function, and then we usually lost them. Living four miles from town, with horses for transportation, limited our social activities.       When we had colds, which were chronic winter afflictions, our mother tore up worn out flannelette sheets and nightgowns into squares for handkerchiefs. These could then be burned in the stove. Sometimes we managed to save or find a small white rag to take to school. Mostly we mumbled what everyone else mumbled, "I forgot my hankie," and we were let off with a reminder to remember tomorrow. Actually, the only person who always had a clean handkerchief was Jean Clarke, who always had clean everything, from her shiny hair and her pretty white blouse and tartan skirt to her knee socks and shiny brown oxfords. Little Mrs. McMillan, who, to us seemed very elderly, never put any of the girls on the Pig List anyway but I, at least, was full of terror at the thought of the humiliation if I should get put on it. The most fearful times were when the teacher let the children take turns doing Health Inspection. Then watch out for the ones who didn't like you!       The boys did not fare so well. I don't think they often got hankies for presents, and if they did they tried to be as vulgar as possible about them. They certainly never called them "hankies" except to mothers and teachers. As well, any of the farm boys over the age of seven, and some of the girls too, were out in the barns doing chores before coming to school. Nobody at home had time to clean or check fingernails and ears. Fingernails were often our downfall. I can't imagine that any of us had particularly clean ones -except Jean. Our mother had a nail file, but she guarded it pretty closely, no doubt with good reason. I don't remember a nail brush, and I do remember several brothers and sisters washing up in the same few inches of water.       So, what usually happened was that all of the girls got put on the Fairy List and most of the boys got put on the Pig List. This, of course, led to great persecution of the Fairy List boys by the Pig List boys. (They'd have a ball with it these days, wouldn't they? In those days "fairy" and "gay" meant what the dictionary said, and if the word "homosexual" had been invented I suspect that even some of our teachers had not heard it.) What I never understood then was that the Pig List boys didn't seem to care that they were on it. I knew I would have cared, and I also knew that I probably should have been on it lots of times, and that didn't feel very good either.       I guess the boys did care though, in spite of the way they acted, because one day they erased the Pig List. The rest of us were stunned. Some of us were also very scared about what would happen. I was in grade three, and even though it was the grades five and six boys who had erased it, we all thought that all of us would be punished. There weren't even any names on it yet, as the teacher had drawn the fairy and the pig the day before, after we had gone home. She was not at school yet when most of us arrived, and I watched with a mixture of anxiety and sadness as the beautiful fairy disappeared. I thought that they could have left the fairy. It really was very lovely. Mrs. McMillan must have spent a long time drawing it.       The teacher arrived and classes began. We waited in various degrees of the traditional fear and trembling. We waited all day. Not one word was said, at least to us, not that day or the next, or ever. There was never another pig on the blackboard, and though I waited with dwindling hope, not another fairy. Nor did we ever again, with Mrs. McMillan, have Health Inspection. I mourned the fairy for a long time, and I still think of Mrs. McMillan when I hear The Maple Leaf Forever. Mostly I hear it when I sing it myself, as it was banned from Canadian schools in the 1950's or '60's, because some French-Canadians objected to parts of its lyrics.       I was quite upset about that and I still am, and I have made sure that my children, and anyone else I could coerce, have learned The Maple Leaf Forever. There are some traditions that are a part of our heritage, and just because they don't quite fit anymore does not mean they should be thrown out. They fit once, and that makes them valid. (Lots of us don't fit so well anymore!)       The Maple Leaf Forever       In days of yore, from Britain's shore,       Wolfe, the dauntless hero came       And planted firm, Britannia's flag       On Canada's fair domain!       Here may it wave, our boast, our pride       And joined in love together,       The Thistle, Shamrock, Rose entwine       The Maple Leaf Forever!       The Maple Leaf, our emblem dear,       The Maple Leaf forever!       God save our King and Heaven bless       The Maple Leaf forever!       Now there's a song to stir the imagination and rouse patriotism in the heart of a grade one-er!
The following letter was received in response to Her Majesty receiving a copy of the story Our Gracious King
PUBLISHING HISTORY 1971 - 1999 WHETSTONE DIVERSIONS BLEWOINTMENT SEVEN PERSONS REPOSITORY EVENT ALBERTA POETRY YEARBOOK VANCOUVER CO-OP RADIO HEARTWOOD READER'S DIGEST THE POET'S PEN THE VANCOUVER SUN THE SOUND SCIENCE OF MIND MAGAZINE A WRITER'S WORLD PORTRAIT: V2K PROJECT AWARDS Burnaby Creative Writer's Society The Canadian Author's Association The Vancouver Sun Surrey Writer's Conference 1999	University of Lethbridge Burnaby Creative Writers Society B.C. Vancouver B.C. Alberta Douglas College, B.C (reading) B.C. Ontario B.C. B.C. U.S. B.C. Vancouver Museum, B.C. B.C. Edmonton Branch, Alberta B.C. B.C.

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Catalogue Information

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