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The Last of the War Brides

by Jacqueline O'Neill Dahm

267 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #04-2532; ISBN 1-4120-4724-2; US$20.69, C$23.79, EUR16.99, £11.90

Follow this diminuitive but determined woman through childhood poverty, youth in blitzed Britain, wartime romance and marriage, motherhood on Canada's still frontier prairies, and her subsequent world-wide travels.

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About the Book      About the Author      Table of Contents or Excerpts      Catalogue Information

About the Book

The Last of the War Brides takes the reader from 1920's Great Britain to the late 1990's in Canada. Author Jacqueline O'Neill Dahm's writing style reminds one of a Grandma Moses painting... simple, straightforward and always from the heart. Her journey starts in London at a time when some areas were still lit by gaslights and the cries of street vendors filled the morning air. Jaqueline's mother, a free spirited, green-eyed, black haired Irish woman disappeared shortly after the author's birth. The responsibility for caring for Jaqueline and her older sister, Mamie, fell to her father, a song and dance man, vaudevillian and time-to-time housepainter. After a serious accident he was unable to fulfill his parental duties and local authorities simply dumped the two young girls into a Catholic Convent. Readers will soon meet a plethora of characters that live through and in the ensuing chapters. Harshly disciplinary nuns, wealthy and tight fisted employers of Upstairs Downstairs scullery maids and virtually enslaved cooks. Ornery landladies, free booting gypsies and a myriad of England's hawkers of seaside entertainment and culinary productions. At the ripe old age of fourteen, Jacqueline, as was customary, entered the work force, just in time for the arrival of World War II. In those days of "This may be the last time to dance," and "Let's not give a damn about tomorrow," Jacqueline lived almost around the clock. What little sleep she did manage to get was generally interrupted by the nightly Blitz. In amongst it all she fell in serious love with a Catholic priest who was a Regimental Padre. She soon realized the impossibility of the endeavour, and moved on to other, more sane attractions. In 1946, after war's end, she married a Canadian soldier from Alberta. Her journey to Canada in 1947, as one of the last war brides to do so, began a whole new chapter in her life. A chapter that not only introduced her to the cold, wind-swept prairies, but also to some coldness of shoulder provided by relatives and residents of that new land. In her writing, Jacqueline does not waste a lot of time describing grievances, rather looking for and finding the goodness in mankind. In spite of caring for an ailing husband and spirited and growing children, Jacqueline has managed to travel to many far countries across the world. Her journeys thereto are twofold... a search for information about other civilizations... and a pilgrimage to find a spiritual pathway that really makes sense.

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About the Author

Jacqueline O'Neill Dahm was born in England. When discussing her age, the author admits to be "well past eighteen." In spite of a recent serious automobile accident, Jacqueline continues to be the vitally involved matriarch of her extended family, concerned with the well being of friends and those she visits at her city's senior care facilities. The book she has written represents a bursting out into the foreground, no matter how limited the emergence may be, after a lifetime of toiling as a wife and mother in the background. She acknowledges that this "backgrounding" was a condition of her times, and she hopes that the current freeing of women into a more balanced and actively fulfilling life continues to succeed. Christmas morning perhaps describes the span of Jacqueline's lifetime. She has gone from receiving gifts of "an orange and a lump of coal" to observing her grandchildren cavort in an orgy of consumer goods presents. This present-day aspect is not entirely pleasing to Jacqueline O'Neill Dahm.

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Table of Contents or Excerpts

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Catalogue Information

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