Cat Stretch

What can I say about this?

This stretch, this stretch of sunshine, this stretch of fur.

This stretch of Fern. 

"Cats can work out mathematically the exact place to sit 

that will cause the most inconvenience."

(Pam Brown)

Sanctuary

We had guests wander up to the apple bar overnight after the snowstorm. My husband has been storing bags of deer apples behind the chicken coop; he could have saved himself the trouble of lugging them back to the woods because the deer are more than willing to hang out there while we're all sleeping.
I know that deer sleep, if ever a prey animal sleeps, because we see their body forms left behind in the grass when we go for a drive on the four-wheeler. Perhaps they rest, that's it, they rest their eyes, they rest their muscles but their ears are always awake, alert, two thick furry antennae listening for warning signs.
There have been signs that they lie down in the field behind the chicken coop.
Do they know they are safe in our yard? Do they know the man who keeps heading out to "get a deer" comes back only with photographic evidence of them? Do they know we are their friends like the chickens know the osprey flying over the pen will not harm them?
Gather in, deer friends, be close, be safe, be the apples of our eyes.

First Snow

It's not going to last which is what makes the first snow storm of the season -- even before it's officially "winter" -- so special. Some of us wanted to get outside really early this morning to enjoy the new world. Once I was properly awake and no longer being hopped on, that was me too.

A Daughter Becomes the Voice of Her POW Dad

First published in The Oxford Journal on Wednesday, November 12, 2014 by Sara Jewell Mattinson.

Alice Dionne of Linden wants to share her father’s World War Two story because she has lived with the effect the war had on him. She believes her father suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after he returned from the war in 1945, and that he was bitter POWs were not acknowledged as they should have been.

“They might not have made the ultimate sacrifice but given what they lived, that was often worse than being dead,” she says.

Her father, Andrew Darragh, enlisted with the North Nova Highlanders Regiment in 1942 at the age of 18. On D-Day, June 6, 1944, he landed at Dieppe and the next day, he and 102 others were captured by German soldiers. He was a prisoner of war for 11 months.

“Over the years, we’d ask questions but he wouldn’t talk about it,” Alice told me. “We only knew about four things: that he never received a [Red Cross] care package, being shot at in the box cars, the forced marches and being in front of a firing squad.”

One evening a year before he died in 2007, Alice’s father told her the story of his war experience and she wrote it down; those notes along with certificates and newspaper articles she has collected are now in a large binder. 

 

Wanting to share her father’s POW experience, she read out loud the notes she made about his story.   

About his capture: ‘They were in a box car for 28 days. They had a ten gallon drum for a toilet. This was in July during very hot weather. They were shot at. They went down to Bordeaux, France, sat locked in box cars...for 11 days. They were fed once a day, part of a loaf of bread. The box car in front of them was full of sergeants and officers and they escaped by ripping up the floor of the box car. The Germans were furious.’

About life as a POW:  ‘From November 1944 to April 1945. They worked from 6 am to 6 pm along with the German coal miners. He was befriended by two German brothers who told him to sit. Whenever they saw the light coming, they told him to get up and work because it would be the pit boss coming. The only breakfast he would have had is if he had saved something from supper the night before. At night, they would get pumpkin soup, dog meat, and they would get one or two potatoes once a week. There were about 35 Canadian POWs and the Germans volunteered five to go in the mines. Dad was one of them. They had to go down 400 feet and there was hardly enough pit props and the roof was always falling in.’

About the night Andrew Darragh and three others escaped during a forced march (May 1945): ‘Towards the latter part of the war, when it became obvious the Allied troops were coming for the Germans, they marched the POWs out of Falkenau. They marched only at night and slept during the day wherever they could find a spot. They marched probably a week, he thought, then one night some of them just walked away...They were right at the border when they met the Germans who, when they found out they were POWs, let them go. They spent the night in a hay mow...’

The five escapees spent a few days at this farm, unable to eat the milk, pies, eggs and bread because the food made them sick. They listened to the sounds of machine guns and bombs and then a Sherman tank drove up to the farm’s picket fence.

This rescue by the Americans marked the end of the war as well. Alice’s dad was flown back to England and admitted to hospital weighing 100 pounds. He stayed there for ten days and when discharged, he went to stay with an English family Alice believes he met during the year he’d spent in England training for D-Day. After returning to Canada, to Cumberland County, he married Iona Read in 1946. Alice is the oldest of their four children.

“I’d like to have his experience recognized,” she says. “I just feel he suffered so much and we did, too, as a family because he couldn’t keep a job,” which she now attributes to PTSD. “We moved all over the place. I didn’t go to a school for a full year until I was in Grade Nine. I think Mum had a really hard time. If it hadn’t been for her devotion, they may not have stayed together.”

And that’s why Andrew Darragh’s war story didn’t end on May 7, 1945.  

 

First Snowstorm of 2014 Forecast

Archie decided to pretend that he didn't hear the weather report.

In Conversation With...Jim Halliday

First published in The Oxford Journal on Wednesday, November 5, 2014 by Sara Jewell Mattinson.

    There is a woman in the veterans’ wing of High-Crest Springhill Nursing Home who no longer can tell her own story. At 103, Vera (Carter) Kellegrew’s memories of serving in World War Two, and her reason for signing up in the first place, are fading along with her voice and her strength.

But her nephew-by-marriage, Jim Halliday,  and his wife Eva know enough of Vera’s story to put it in writing.

Jim Halliday with the medals of his aunt and uncle.

The Carter family emigrated from England and settled in British Columbia where Vera was born. She had three brothers; two sisters born in England didn’t survive infancy. Her father was killed in a car accident when Vera was young.

According to Jim, who was born and raised in Amherst but now lives in Trenton, when Vera graduated from high school, she went to work for Canada Public Works and was working on the Alaska Highway when World War Two began.

“Her brothers joined the service and went overseas,” Jim says. “One of them was a pilot and was captured in Germany as a prisoner of war. Dennis was being released so she decided to join the air force and go to England so she could find him.”

They had an aunt living outside of London who was a nurse so Vera took her brother to their aunt who nursed him back to health.

At the same time, Vera was posted to London where she worked as a stenographer until she became the private secretary to the commanding officer based in London.

“When she first landed in London, she had to find a place to live. She had to walk, carry her bags and everything,” says Jim. “Somebody told her about this room to be shared with another air force woman. Vera went to see her, this woman called ‘Mac’.”

(In one of those mysterious twists of fate, “Mac”, a nickname based on her last name, resides in the same nursing home as Vera in Springhill.)

“Vera said her mother would send her Red Cross bundles and she’d share her food,” Jim’s wife Eva recounts from her conversations with her aunt-by-marriage. “Toilet paper was very short, stuff like that. She could maybe get an egg at a grocery store. They weren’t allowed to use too much coal or too much water in their room.”

Like any war veteran, Vera didn’t talk much about the bad parts of her experience.

“There was a house in back of where they lived that was bombed and a person died in that. But that’s the only one she ever talked about. She did talk about going to the air raid shelters. You could hear the buzz bombs going over.”

Jim explains that a buzz bomb coming from Germany made a buzzing sound until it ran out of fuel. When it ran out of fuel, it dropped. 

“When you stopped hearing the buzz…” 

He trails off into a moment of silence.

 Vera’s official rank was Leading Airman Carter and she refused any promotions. 

“She was doing the work of a sergeant but just getting a private’s pay,” Jim explains. “They wanted to give her a promotion but she wouldn’t take it because she’s quite religious and if you get a promotion in the service, you have to go to the mess and buy a round of drinks for everybody. She wouldn’t take the promotion because she didn’t want to buy the drinks.”

It would be a tall, handsome soldier from Nova Scotia who would change her marital status, however.

Ray Kellegrew, 35 years old and six-foot-one,  had returned from a posting in Naples, Italy, near the end of the war and joined a group of friends ice skating at a rink in London. 

Vera was skating there, too.

Meanwhile, back home in Amherst, 10-year-old Jim Halliday was doing his part for the war effort.

“Airplanes were made in Amherst during the war,” he says, “and during the war, airmen used to come to Amherst from Scotland, England, Wales to pick up the planes. They’d be wandering downtown with their backpacks and at the time, I was only ten years old. I’d go down the street and see these airmen walking around and I’d say, ‘Where are you staying?’ and if they had no place to stay, I used to take them home to my mother. My mother would put them up for the weekend. It got so bad near the end, I’d have eight or nine of them so Mum would have to call up the neighbours to see if they could take them.”

Back in England, Jim’s uncle and Vera Carter were making plans to marry. 

Because of rations, “Their wedding breakfast was two eggs and some bacon the meat cutter saved for them,” Jim says.

While brother Dennis recovered and was released from the service to return home to British Columbia, the now Leading Airman Kellegrew remained in London after the war ended to help with the paperwork that went with getting everyone back to Canada.

Vera returned to BC and Ray fetched her back to Amherst where he returned to his job as a mail carrier and Vera worked off and on as a secretary. 

Married for 58 years, Ray and Vera did not have any children. Ray died in 2004 at the age of 93 and Vera moved to the veterans’ wing of High-Crest just two years ago. 

According to Eva, Vera “found it very exciting [in London]. She says it was difficult times but it was exciting. She never talked about the bad parts of the war.”

When asked how she coped, Vera would answer, ‘The good Lord will take care of it’. 

“Her faith was her strength and she was a strong woman,” says Eva. “If she set her mind to do it, she did it. She seemed to be able to endure a lot. I think it’s her faith that saw her through everything.”

Vera and Ray Kellegrew are the couple on the right. This is their wedding day in London.

The View From My Yoga Mat

Morning has broken

while I do Sun Salutations. 

Rather, from this angle,

I'm lying flat on the mat

looking up at the waking sky.

In this peace there is hope.

It is good to start each day

in the company of trees and clouds.

It is good to end each practice

in prayer:

Thank you for this day,

for this time on the mat,

for all the blessings in my life.