Bilingual Being (20 page)

I worry too much myself about making mistakes on important paperwork. I've always assumed that my excessive stress about it, often bordering on compulsion, stems from my chronic anxiety. It's the enduring symptom – the victim stigma – that I struggle hardest to shake. But maybe it's not that at all. Maybe small slips of attention are a family trait. Maybe it's possible to be the sort of person who makes errors on the minor stuff, and still be courageous when it comes to what's really critical. So he becomes my hero here, again and again, my inspiration. A voice that's no less potent for being imagined, and that says what I need to hear more than anything: “You're doing fine.”

LIFE IN THE MUD

My granny further notes the following in her memoirs, as a near-oversight: “Incidentally, before my marriage, I had become a Catholic, compulsory in those days if I wished to marry Leo.” She adds, “Mixed marriages were taboo! I remember going to the pastor of our Anglican church to ask if he would marry us, but the answer was a flat, ‘No!' I received the same answer from a Catholic priest in the neighbourhood, so the only thing to do was to convert to Catholicism … At our wedding ceremony, the little Catholic Church in Willesden was filled with family and friends, all Protestant … At the back of the church was the mother of the boy everyone thought I would marry. Such is destiny.”

More so-called “incidental” changes stemmed from the typical choices offered to a military commander's family, such as locations for settlement. Offered a life in India, Afghanistan, or Canada, they chose
Canada. It wasn't because of any wonderful fantasy my granny had of life here, which she clearly didn't hold, but because the doctors prescribed cooler air for a gas attack survivor. And so it was that my granny gave up what she describes as follows: “I, as the wife of an officer and being European, would have had a very easy life there, probably in Rawal Pindi or some such place, with plenty of servants and social activities.”

Instead, she found herself in Charny, Quebec, then in Edmonston, New Brunswick, for a few years, and back again deep in «la campagne» in Quebec. Her house in Charny was set off from the road by a field of mud, with a wood stove for limited heat – seriously threatening the wellness of the baby grand piano – and a backyard overlooking the cemetery where she'd bury an infant whose tiny grave she could see each time she washed her own dishes. Blaming the cold, the lack of qualified help – midwives, doctors – and low sanitation, she'd remain bitter as she raised five more children virtually as a single parent in this new land. In a rare betrayal of emotion, her memoirs state frankly: “For years, the phrase «Prends mari, prends pays» [Take a husband, take a country] was to remind me of the irreversible step I had taken.”

She was surely an oddity in her tidy blazers and a spoken French suited to the social set of a London evening rather than the life of common folk in rural Quebec in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s. She admits that she struggled to communicate with her francophone mother-in-law, “with a little sign language and a word here and there, but my French conversation at the time was very limited.” In another of her famous understatements, she adds, “I became quite a novelty among the people we met, as English war brides were not common in Quebec at the time.”

Like so many war brides, in fact, she'd left home and family for a husband who was away more days than he was home. Laying down railway throughout Quebec, he laboured for forty-two years – interrupted only by his military service – until he'd risen to the position of Superintendent of Terminals by 1950. She tried a few risky journeys back to England by boat, but more than once a tiny uncle was nearly lost to disease at sea, so there developed in my grandfather a strong attitude against her undertaking such travels.

Stuck in Canada, she tried to cheer up by surrounding herself with proper young women, starting Girl Guide companies in New Brunswick and Quebec, the first ones there. Here were girls in uniforms with well-organized goals and hierarchies, her past dramatized in her present. So it was that her British world was transposed as well as it could be to this “backwards backwoods” place as she called it. And this obsession with systems, regularity, processes, and sameness would give her the only local interest she ever really had, the Dionne quintuplets,
*
the perfect daughters she'd always dreamt of. “The Quints” meant so much to her throughout her life that there's a newspaper clipping about them from the
Montreal Star
, dated 28 May 1979, tucked away safely inside the pages of her precious memoir.

For his part, my Grandfather St-Onge was apparently a courageous and passionate man. His obituary states that he had a “great interest in young people” and that in 1926 he founded the first-ever French Canadian Scouts (the 1st CNR Troop). To his dying day, he remained a member of the Army, Navy, and Air Force Veterans and of the Quebec reserves of the Royal Canadian Signal Corps. In the course of his life, he received not only the Military Cross but also the Military Medal and the Mons Star Medal – and he'd had commissions as a second lieutenant, then as a lieutenant, and then as a captain. He was buried in St Patrick's Cemetery in a tiny family plot that overlooks the river as it narrows, beside a tree that was just a sapling in 1953. Four decades earlier on 22 April 1915, exhausted from battle, he'd fallen asleep for a few hours on a stretcher, covering himself with “the blankets of the dead,” until he felt a “padre” grasping his right arm and reading out his regimental number and name. But this time, he was really dead.

It must be obvious by now that I'm sad I never got to meet him. Other than his two documents in my possession, all I know of him is public record, hearsay. He first comes to notice in the press as a second lieutenant in the Rifle Brigade in the
London Gazette
of November 1917,
and by April 1918, he's already being cited for bravery: “For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty when in charge of a forward signaling party. He advanced with the leading waves and quickly established communication. As a result of his energy and complete disregard of danger, communication was maintained throughout the operations.”

Lingering gossip among family members, though, reveals that my Grandfather St-Onge found his wife emotionally remote and that he spent his retirement on the borderlands of intolerable stress. By then my granny had constructed a near-perfect English life for herself in Quebec, in the respectable city home where a family of their standing was expected to live. And in her husband's constant absence, she had remade herself as entirely English, quite uncompromising to the provincial setting. She chose only English neighbours for tea (not Scottish or Irish, goodness no), and she brought much of her ancestral home with her to Canada in slow instalments, including her unmarried brother and widowed father.

Before long, there were paintings of the Thames in the living room, crocheted doilies on every surface, and dark wood panels rounding off dark tapestries and furniture. English was the language of the household and the language of «ses garçons» [his “boys”], from whom my grandfather apparently grew increasingly distant. Then, perhaps dreaming of the open road again – the hills of Mexico, the beaches of France, or the rail lines of the Saguenay – he slipped into sadder spaces where he became vulnerable to “a brief illness,” as his obituary states, and succumbed on the operating table.

Granny dealt with it “remarkably well,” as they say, stiff upper lip and all, looking relatively unaffected, by all accounts. And she summarily unconverted from Catholicism back to Protestantism. A basic flip-flop. It was a war of culture on a miniature scale, where the French identity of that home eventually surrendered to the English one over the course of almost forty years of marriage, even in the heart of a francophone city. And even though the defender was a military man with the highest honours and proven bravado, he was powerless to stop it. English had trumped French in that household, silencing alternate tongues and views slowly, and then finally.

__________

*
As noted in the Canadian Archives of the Soldiers of the First World War, Regimental Number 23053, folio 843, RG 150, accession 1992–93/166, box 8601-19.

*
Five French-Canadian girls born in Ontario in 1934 (around the time of Granny's five surviving sons), they were the first surviving quints in the world and were raised as public curiosities through government control over the family's life.

Definitions

I am cut vertically:

right brain for symbols and early language;

left brain for complex language and writing.

I am cut horizontally:

top half links sensations to realizations;

bottom half mutes, subdues, attenuates.

I am cut psychologically:

an exteriorized self-sufficient intellectual self;

an interiorized emotional over-dependent self.

I am cut linguistically:

a mother tongue for the little girl I was;

another tongue for the woman I became.

I am cut socioculturally:

first two decades for the home soul of long ancestry;

next three decades for the nomadic, distant journeyer.

Theory is a sharp knife.

Read and learn enough,

and you will feel

like you are cut up

into minute pieces.

But the violence

is only apparent,

and a definition

is as good a place

to hide as any.

11

BATTLE LINES

S'ES PLAINES

On 13 September 1759, a pivotal battle in the Seven Years' War is fought on Abraham Martin's farm, in the heart of the new settlement, Quebec. British forces come stealthily up the river in the dark of night and dare to climb what is now Côte Gilmour – a rock face with a near-negative angle, an inconceivable feat. Local French forces are prepared for an attack, but not for tactical acrobatics from that foreboding place. The French general, Louis-Joseph, Marquis de Montcalm, awakens to the news, rushes to the front lines, and deploys cutting-edge manoeuvres. But the British general, James Wolfe, already has troops well into position by then, a horseshoe sweep of the entire plain. They fight.

Wolfe dies that very day, hit by three separate French musket balls – in the arm, shoulder, and chest. His last words are ostensibly, “What, do they run already? Then God be praised. I die contentedly.” From that day he will be immortalized in countless English Enlightenment paintings that show him looking like Jesus in a classic lamentation scene. He will be depicted breathing his heroic last gasps on the battlefield, surrounded by various allies and officers, his doctor, and “noble savages” – elevated beyond the ranks of ordinary men. His body will be returned to England to be buried in the family vault at Greenwich. Its location will, within the next century, mark the new centre of “universal” space and time.

For his part, Montcalm is hit by a British musket ball in the stomach and dies at a field hospital by midnight of that very day. His last words were reported as «Tant mieux. Je ne verrai pas les anglais à Québec» [I am happy I shall not live to see the English in Quebec], but the phrase will come to be engraved in English-language historical resources as the far less defiant “I am happy I shall not live to see the surrender of Quebec.” During his final hours, aware of his impending death and of the gravity of his defeat, he apparently asks to be buried unpretentiously – to be thrown into a cavity in the earth formed by one of the bombshells, folded into the land around him. But his lifeless body will be taken by the Ursulines to their small chapel, according to his death certificate, to be kept quietly for some 250 years and remembered as that of a solitary soul who fought with courage and faith. It will be the start of another millennia, 2001, before Montcalm is honoured ceremoniously, placed in a mausoleum at the cemetery of the Hôpital Général de Quebec. Here, his body will become the only memorial in the entire world to the Seven Years' War.

Ultimately, the (in)famous “Battle of the Plains of Abraham” – that decisive battle for Quebec in which French surrenders to English, changing the history of not only Canada but of France, England, and the United States – will last only fifteen minutes from start to finish. Fifteen minutes. In the time it takes to run the smallest errand, the battle will become one of the greatest military victories or losses in western history, depending on which political world one inhabits. It is a true story that, like my own, seems stranger than fiction. Trauma, as they say, makes as much as it breaks.

I won't venture further into ironic symbolism about how fifteen minutes can change a life. Or how the forced surrender of a linguistic identity can take so short a time, or even less, as tragedy freezes into psychic fields no one dares to climb. I know it all too well. But what happened there, on that day, actually can't be compared in the least to what happened to me – or to any individual trauma of any kind. It can't be compared to anything other than massive, communal traumas affecting entire traditions and their futures, battles in history where the fate of millions and millions of people hangs on an outcome that unfolds in the time it takes to have a shower or check email. Fortune can be harsh.

That's how this particular event – «la bataille s'es Plaines» – has been registered in the collective psyche, firm and immovable. And that's why even from a distance, ensconced in English Canada as I have been and still am, I seethe with personal rage – my own little impotent cauldron – when some new group in “English Canada” plans to re-enact that day as a tourist attraction. It's a nasty possibility that rears its horrible, hateful head every few years or so. That's when the electric current between my language selves completely reverses, a shift not unlike the bizarre physics of Magnetic Hill. Or is it metaphysics? For the battle is a profound wound to my core self, above and beyond my affinity for English.