I’m
not a party animal myself
by
Robert LaFrance
The April 12 Liberal riding
nomination convention held in Perth-Andover told me two things: (1) Many
persons want the present government out, and (2) If the present government were
tossed out in September, many persons would be happy.
“Bob, you said the same thing
twice,” said my former friend Flug, reading over my shoulder as I typed. A
quick scan of the page confirmed that he was, surprisingly, correct.
Not a supporter of any organized
political party (I’ve always been a Lib-Tory-NDP guy) I was really quite
surprised at the number of delegates who showed up to vote for the man who
would be the Liberal candidate in September’s provincial election. A total of
875 were eligible to vote, and this was just a RIDING nomination convention,
not a provincial one. Carleton-Victoria is a new riding created after one of
those endless committee studies determined that the present riding of
Victoria-Tobique, roughly the size of Saskatchewan, was not quite big enough.
I was at the event, not as one of
the 875, but as a member of Canada’s media. Apparently I am a ‘medium’ (the
singular of ‘media’) although the last time I bought a pair of trousers I was
clearly not.
The point in bringing up this
subject is that I rather enjoy attending those political conventions. I see and
chat with people I haven’t seen in months and years, and find out what’s going
on in the suburbs of Kincardine – Perth-Andover, etc.
*****************************
“A writer is working even when he’s
staring out the window.” – Burton Rascoe. Thanks Burt, old pal. I might add:
“Or enjoying himself at a political convention.”
*****************************
As a history nut – often so called
without the word ‘history’ – I enjoy hearing
about the old days (not to be confused with The Good Old Days of
imagination). My 95-year-old mother-in-law, Kathleen Morton, and I were talking
recently about the early 1940s, and rationing at home during the war.
“I was living right here,” she said,
referring to the house she still occupies near our estate. I asked her what had
been rationed during the war. “Oh, a lot of things,” she gave tires as an
example: “But we didn’t have a car anyway, so it didn’t matter.
“We had horses and we used them,”
she explained, “for going to the store (in nearby Kilburn) and so on. Wherever
you wanted to go, you took the horse. We had two horses at a time. We always
had pigs. We ‘did’ one of them in the late fall. We’d cut it up and put it
outside to freeze. After it froze we’d put it in seed bags and bury it in the
oat-bin so it wouldn’t thaw out. They were strong bags, cotton stuff. Stronger
than flour bags.”
She and her late husband (and my
father-in-law) Lloyd would take their eggs, butter and other produce to the
store and trade it in for groceries – tea, salt, sugar and other items. “People
bought some butter here and I used to pack jars of butter in the fall for
people. I always packed butter for Charlie Willett (Perth businessman). He
would get 20 or 30 pounds of it. Butter was rationed up there.
“We grew wheat and had our own flour
though,” she said, “and made maple syrup, just what we’d use ourselves. We grew
oats and buckwheat, wheat, potatoes. We took the wheat to River de Chute to
have it ground,” she explained. “We usually did that in the winter time,
crossing (the St. John River) on the ice.”
As to spices, they were not
rationed, but most rural New Brunswick families in the 1940s didn’t use a lot
of them. “Meat was rationed. We had a lot of ration cards ourselves. There were
stamps in them; we’d use them every once in a while. When you bought something
you had to have your ration book stamped or you didn’t get it. When you wanted
a new tube of toothpaste, you had to take the empty tube or you didn’t get a
new tube from the drugstore. Paper was not officially rationed, but we didn’t
have much,” my mother-in-law said.
Referring back to the late 1800s,
after her ancestors had come from Scotland in 1873 and had worked long hours to
clear the heavily wooded ground, she talked about the keeping of livestock: “They didn’t have any fences. The little
kids had to herd them, keep them from going where they were not supposed to go,
send them back again. They had a bull that they put a harness on and used him
as a horse. He (the bull) decided one time he didn’t want to do that and chased
Dad (John Ellis 1869-1935) up on a rockpile. He knocked him down and trampled
on his legs which were quite a mess for a long time. Dad was eight or nine
years old maybe. Mr. Davidson was going along on the road and saw him, then
scared the bull away or he would have killed Dad.
“They didn’t harness that bull any
more.”
-end-
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