Ever the Optimist

Canada, here I come.

No bending the knee to some high and mighty landowner, like Dad. No working someone else’s farmland, like Dad. Nope, I’m going to have my own farm.

To do that, I’m leaving not-so-merry old England. Leaving my friends, too, but that’s a price I’m willing to pay.

I don’t quite believe the picture the agent painted of Canadian farms. I’ve worked with Dad long enough to know farming is hard work. You don’t just throw the seed in the ground and watch it harvest itself.

Tomorrow, I leave on Mr. Cunard’s Ultonia. My farm awaits.

#99WordStories #CarrotRanchFlashFictionChallenge #HighamFamilyHistory #ImmigrantFarmers  #WordPrompt_Optimism #Hope #SaskatchewanHistory #MargaretGHanna

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The Backstory

Caleb Higham, my maternal grandfather, emigrated to Canada in April, 1913, in search of his own farm. He did not want to be a tenant farmer like his father, and he knew that owning a farm in England was impossible.

Caleb landed in Montreal, bound for Regina, Saskatchewan. The Ultonia’s passenger manifest indicates he emigrated under the “British Bonus Allowed” program of the Canadian government. This program paid a bonus both to the agents who recruited farmers and to steamship agents. It also paid the immigrant farmer $10.00 if the immigrant purchased his farm land within six months of arriving in Canada.

Getting his farm wasn’t as easy as Caleb had imagined. By 1913, all the homestead land in southern Saskatchewan was taken up, and buying an existing farm was out of the question for someone who had arrived in Canada with only $25.00 in his pocket. He worked as a brakeman for the Canadian Pacific Railway for a time, then began work as a farm labourer for Will Grigg just north of Moose Jaw. There, he met Mary Appleton and, in 1915, they married .

He had to wait another nine years before buying his farm. First, he delivered milk for a Moose Jaw Dairy, then he rented a series of farms. In 1924, Caleb finally achieved his dream – he purchased a half-section (320 acres) of land north of the town of Assiniboia in southwestern Saskatchewan.

Caleb never did collect his $10.00.

Shadow Child

I wonder what she would have been like, my little girl that never was.

A mother’s worst fear, a miscarriage, a child born too soon.

People said, “But you already have three children,” or “You can always have another.” How could people be so cruel? No one can be the same as this child.

I sometimes dream of her, what she might have been. Sometimes when I’m in my garden, or sitting quietly embroidering a pillowcase, I hear her voice, her laughter, and I look up, but no one is there. Only a ghost of what might have been.

#99WordStory #HighamFamilyHistory #Miscarriage #InfantMortality #NonFiction #Tragedy #MargaretGHanna

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The back story:
Losing a child under any circumstance is a heart-rending event. My maternal grandmother, Mary Higham, had two miscarriages sometime in the 1920s, long before the advent of medical interventions that now allow premature babies to survive. Even though infant mortality, both premature and full-term, was more common then, it was still a devastatingly tragic event.

My mother and aunts didn’t say much about the miscarriages, just that they had happened, but their few words conveyed profound sorrow. They must have thrown a long-lasting shadow in the Higham home for my mother and aunts to remember them after all those years.

Sabbatical

John leaves tomorrow.

He’s been here a month. A month of spending time with his friends, smoking, drinking telling tall tales. A month of being swooned over by all the girls who think he is “so handsome!!!” in his RCAF uniform. A month of helping Cale with harvest. A month of teasing his sisters and kid brother.

But throughout the whole month, all I could see is Damocles’ sword hanging over his head. I wonder if he sees it, too. If that’s why he spends so much time “living it up.”

Tomorrow he leaves. For Europe. For the war.

#99WordStory #WorldWarII #HighamFamilyHistory #RCAF #MothersWorries #BomberCommand #MooseSquadron #NonFiction #MargaretGHanna

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The back story:

My uncle, John Brock Higham, “signed up” for the Royal Canadian Air Force in the spring of 1940, and was called up for training in September of that year. One year later, September of 1941, he came back to the farm at Assiniboia for a month’s leave before being posted overseas as a pilot in Bomber Command.

As happy as his mother might have been to have him home, Grandma Higham probably carried a heavy stone in her heart that entire month. It wasn’t her sabbatical, it was John’s, but she experienced it, too, just from a different perspective. The news from overseas during the Battle of Britain and the Blitz was nothing but doom and gloom, destruction and death. And her son was heading straight into it as a pilot in Bomber Command. How could she not worry?