Bilingual Being (19 page)

She was in a cultural quandary, barely understanding her two francophone daughters-in-law and even less so the children of one, who were becoming “altogether too French” in her mind, attending French
school and living their French lives above a «tabagie,» a tobacco store and barbershop in the heart of Saint-Sacrement that my grandfather had left as part of his legacy. Sadly, she turned her back on them early on, with the odd “Pity” muttered like a muted cough. Yet I had no time to feel sorry for them. I was too busy eating up my conversation about American politics, the Queen, the price of real estate, and the best tulip bulbs. It was delicious.

A MEMOIR

Just how it was that my granny reconciled this vision of herself with that of her husband's remains a closed mystery – not just to me but to all who knew her. It was beneath her station in life for a proper lady to discuss such matters. She was a well-educated woman born in 1897, beautiful in her time, the daughter of a teacher and homemaker who bought lavender, milk, and crumpets from travelling vendors on Kempe Road, in the Kensal Rise area of London. Granny was the granddaughter of Daniel Butt, the general postmaster of Hertfordshire County, and his wife, Jane Wilkins, who had married in 1875.

She'd spent her youth in an atmosphere of gardeners, cooks, and exclusive English schools (of course, not Catholic, oh my). She went first to Chamberlayne Wood Elementary School, then to Haberdashers Aske's Girls School, where she excelled as a scholarship student of great promise, commuting daily by train to a cottage home where French doors from the conservatory opened onto climbing roses and she could practise on the grand piano while dinner was prepared by the cook.

My favourite anecdote of hers is far more humble, though. The year is 1902, and she's five years old. She explains that her mother wanted her to get used to running errands around the community, so she was sent out to get “a pint of milk for her tea.” She carried her glass jug as she walked about the streets looking for the horse-drawn milk cart, and listening for his tell-tale cry, “Milk-ho!” Soon enough, she found the milkman and watched him ladle the milk into her jug. But on her way home, she was stopped by “a couple of naughty boys” who wanted to drink her milk.

She ran as hard as she could, but she fell, broke the jug, and apparently grazed her knee badly. I suppose the boys ran away then, because
she explains how she managed to get home, bruised and saddened, minus the pint of milk. When I think about this story, it seems incredibly salient. I see that day right before my eyes, the dirt road in front and behind her, the milkman and his ladle, and a diminutive blond curly-haired girl running for her life, falling and losing her precious charge – but at least incurring no further harm. And I can't help but wonder: simpler crimes for simpler times?

Of course, I wouldn't have known all of these details about her life – or remembered them, at least – were it not for the fact that she spent her final years writing a memoir that I inherited. She wanted to keep herself sane in those days, as she was “dying among those damned Irish,” to quote her. As a girl in her prime, she had attended the London shows with well-to-do, upwardly mobile youth and summered on the coast with cousins of equal standing. She attended championship games at Wimbledon in chauffeur-driven cars. And later, she had worked in a secretarial capacity for jewellery firms in London, including the Goldsmiths and Silversmiths Company on Regent Street which, she often mentioned, engaged in business with the queen and descendants of Norman nobles.

Then came the First World War. London was bombed by German Zeppelins, and she could see the searchlights and gunfire from her bedroom window. One day she witnessed a dirigible come down in flames so bright that it lit up the dome of St Paul's Cathedral beside it. It was a direct hit, she explains, in which the entire crew was killed. On another day a large piece of shrapnel fell on their roof; they kept the twisted metal for many years as a reminder of the danger.

Within a year, the home next door to hers was split by a bomb, and she writes about the peculiar sight of pictures still hanging on the walls of houses otherwise reduced to rubble. And so it was, is, with danger. It approaches from a distance, stealthily. First we see it from what we think is a safe position, and then it moves in to occupy that space of safety, leaving us no other. And then, it arrives, excessive and arbitrary. It leaves us in its dust, random pictures still hanging in our memory.

Responding to the escalating crisis, allied Canadian soldiers arrived in considerable numbers to assist “the Forces.” That was when my granny put to active use the ample French her elite education had provided her with and struck up a friendship with a young Canadian,
Joseph John Leo St-Onge, introduced to her by her cousin. He was soon deployed to the Second Battle of Ypres, where he barely survived, and then only because he bent down to pick up a religious scapula at the precise moment an explosion ripped his pack from his back. My granny kept that scapula all her life.

For various acts of bravery in that battle, the young man earned a military medal and admission to an officer's course at Cambridge – difficult for a French Canadian with only a sprinkling of English – earning his commission within six months. He became the very first French Canadian to earn entry into the 16th Rifle Brigade of the Imperial Regiment, “one of the oldest and most exclusive regiments of the British army,” according to my granny. From here, he was promptly redeployed.

GRANDFATHER ST-ONGE

Like something of a Forrest Gump, then, my grandfather was a manon-the-spot at some of the key flashpoints of modern history. Joseph Jean Léo St-Onge was born in Fraserville, in the county of Témiscouata, Quebec, on 21 September 1889. On 26 June 1906, then seventeen, he began working for Canadian National Railway as a transhipper, but he was readily promoted to “brakeman and yardman” within a year. In 1914, his attestation paper for the Canadian Overseas Expeditionary Force
*
records that he has already served five years in active duty. Unofficially, then, he'd been a soldier since 1909, apparently conscripted in some fashion for a purpose or mission that remains off the radar of formal government (or even family) registries. And that's how, just past the turn of the century, he found himself along the US-Mexico border as a member of Pancho Villa's revolutionary band, dressed in tattered khakis, sleeping in the open.

As to whether he went to Mexico really to work with Pancho Villa, or to track his movements for some authorities, or to use his position with Villa to report on other powers, there's an altogether different kind
of silence, an official stillness, a dead end. All that's certain is that my grandfather wasn't in Mexico on a young man's whim, the mere lure of adventure, for the national archive is clear. On the attestation paper, in answer to Question 9, “Do you now belong to the Active Militia?” the witness writes, “Yes.” And in answer to Question 10, “Have you ever served in any Military Force? If so, state particulars of former service,” the witness writes: “5 years [illegible] 10th
Q.O.C.H.
”

The Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders (
QOCH
) was a volunteer British infantry regiment originally formed in 1793 during the French Revolutionary Wars. It was in action for a hundred years prior to my grandfather's joining, in regions as far afield as Belgium, China, Crete, Denmark, Egypt, India, Malta, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sudan, the West Indies – and Canada. The regiment was apparently considered the “Queen's Own” from 1873 onward, and it was also associated with the “Territorial Force,” a volunteer infantry service across the United Kingdom from 1908 to 1920 – my grandfather's window of participation.

Throughout the century from its formation to my grandfather's entry at nineteen or twenty, the
QOCH
had countless opportunities to fight against France and its interests, including in the famous Egyptian Campaign and the Napoleonic Wars. But by the time of the Crimean War, the
QOCH
was involved in what were now considered joint French-Anglo campaigns with allies such as the Ottoman Empire. I can't resist the speculation that this is, oddly enough, precisely what my third marriage was – a French-Anglo campaign with an Ottoman ally. Life imitating life, again and again. At any rate, here was Grandfather St-Onge – «un originaire de Saintonge» – doing who knows what from 1909 to 1914 for a British military organization formed precisely to combat the French.

My granny has written about half a page in her memoirs about the Pancho Villa episode, with the flourish of an aspiring novelist. She explains, “While there, he decided to join the Mexican revolutionaires under Pancho Villa, who was something of a Robin Hood, robbing to the rich to give to the poor. Leo learned to ride a horse and luckily was never captured … Leo did leave Mexico with a price on his head, like any revolutionary. Somewhere in my collection, I have a photo of him in the uniform of Villa's guerillas.” Then, in the typical understatement
that marked her speech, she adds, “This experience might have helped him to get his commission in the British Army.”

A photo in the possession of an uncle now living in Connecticut (though I've never seen it myself, not that I can recall) apparently shows Grandfather St-Onge on horseback, dark-haired and blue-eyed, in the trademark revolutionary uniform. His modest French-Canadian frame, all five feet seven of him, disguises the considerable stature he'd soon acquire. There's also a trusted report that he escaped from Mexico by being smuggled out in the engine compartment of a train driven by a former buddy of his from his earliest work on the railroads.

TICKLER'S JAM

And that's how my grandfather ended up in a British uniform, having just survived Ypres purely by serendipity, smack on the front lines of the Battle of Passchendaele. He was badly gassed there, left to die on a wagon of corpses, pulled at the last minute when a private noticed him: “Gor' blimey, the bloke's alive, and he's sitting up.” My grandfather survived, overcame temporary blindness, and lived to see the Armistice signed, marrying two weeks later.

On onion-skin paper, using a manual typewriter, my grandfather hammered out his report on the poison gas attack of 22 April 1915 that nearly ended our family right then and there. It's a one-page account that I also inherited and keep in the binder of my granny's memoirs: “Like some liquid, the heavy colored vapor poured relentlessly into the trenches. The sweet-smelling stuff merely tickled our nostrils, we failed to realise the danger … It was in this last melee that I faced a six-foot Hun who succeeded, owing to my exhausted condition, in jerking my gun away from my hand. As he was lunging at me with his bayonet, I grasped his with my left hand and in doing so, slipped to my knees. The bayonet struck me above the knee-cap on the left leg, cutting to the bone.”

Yet within weeks, he was recovering, then back in service. For his efforts in battle, he was once again promoted, this time to the rank of captain, and he received the Military Cross at the hands of King George V himself, in the throne room at Buckingham Palace, with my granny
in attendance. The king apparently asked him where he was from, and when my grandfather told him that he was from Quebec, King George V answered, “Glad to have you here” – “though he seemed surprised to see a French Canadian in the uniform of an officer in the Imperial army,” my granny reports.

There are few other artifacts of his in the faux-suede covered binder in which my granny placed her meticulous notes almost three decades ago. His medals have been scattered among family members, and what photographs of him there were have escaped my hands. So I can only try to know this man by reading a bit more of his account of the gas attack. My entire relationship seems to hang on this one day, this one page in his own hand. I read that just before the bombardment started – the moment where he'd defend “King and country” and almost give his life for it – he was having “a cup of tea, a slice of bread, cheese, and Tickler's jam,” as it was 5
PM
.

What in the world was Tickler's jam? It turns out that it was a typical First World War ration – Tickler's brand of jam made from apples and plums. The jam apparently even had its own wartime song, according to several postings on the Internet: “One pint pot, sent from Blighty, / in ten ton lots every night. / When I'm asleep, I am dreaming, / I am eating Tommy Tickler's jam.”

There's something exceedingly powerful about that picture of my French-Canadian Grandfather St-Onge, in the trenches at the end of a day with his stalwart colleagues, likely wet, cold, and tired, perhaps even a bit ill, eating a modest English meal while singing an English jam song just before one of the key battles of that Great War. It brings his memory, and his reality, into my heart and wedges it there permanently. A grandparent I never met, yet I feel I know, in a sort of sensory fusion, a treasured soul. In my dreams, I dare to imagine his coming to my rescue during my troubles, had he been alive. I believe he would have. He was brave enough, and caring enough. It's my modest fantasy, my homemade legend. I love to tell it to myself.

The only other document in my possession that I consider to be his own is a copy of that attestation paper for the Canadian Overseas Expeditionary Force. He enlisted on 26 September 1914, less than two months after the declaration of war and five days after he turned twenty-five – and he's marked an “X” for Roman Catholic. The
document is signed in Valcartier nineteen days prior to the formation of the 22nd Regiment, the famous “Van Doos.” The numbers elude me – 19, 22, 25 – but my attention is drawn passionately to one thing. For whatever possessed him that day – be it nervousness, enthusiasm, or inattention – he's filled in his own name incorrectly as Joseph Henry Leo St-Onge. The witness's hand crosses out “Henry” neatly and writes in “Johnny” above it. It's a precious thought, my grandfather immortalizing his minor error in a public record like that. And changing his name back and forth like I've done too. For whether he was really Johnny Leo rather than Henry Leo, he'd apparently stopped being Jean Léo by then.