My
mother ‘the doctor’ and spring cleaning
by
Robert LaFrance
It’s hard to believe, but once in a
while a television show depicts something true. On Thursday evening I must have
been hard up for entertainment and tuned in to a BBC program about rural England
in the 1940s and 1950s. One of the characters was my mother.
Well, not really my mother, but the
person was enough like my mother to give me pause, as they say.
Marjorie Wanda (Schriver) LaFrance
was born in August 1906 and died in May 1961. Back in 1948, after having my
brother Lawrence in 1939 and my sister Joan in 1941, she was the proud mother
of me. You may be saying that ‘third time conquers’ but in between me and Joan
was my brother David (1944-1947).
The TV show I was talking about
featured a rural woman named Joan who was a retired registered nurse, but who
was in reality the medical doctor for the whole community of Stansleigh,
England, which sounded an awful lot like (north) Tilley, NB, in the 1950s.
There my mother, a trained RN who had left the profession to raise a family,
was the resident doctor.
As I was growing up in that decade
(if I ever did grow up), there was what amounted to a steady stream of ill and
injured neighbours and friends of the family who came to see my mother in the
hope that she could alleviate their suffering. She usually could.
I saw people limping in or being
carried in with injuries ranging from bucksaw gashes, broken bones from being
hit by a tree, birdshot wounds or some dread disease that prompted Mum to send
us out of the house. Any intestinal problem was dealt with by an enema and
broken bones were set then and there or sent to Andover or Perth where two
medical doctors lived, Doctor MacIntosh and Dr. Earle.
People ask me why I have such a
strong stomach and I tell them it had something to do with my childhood, when I
was likely to come home from Block X School to find a bloody patient on
blankets on the kitchen floor and Mum patching him up for a trip downtown if he
could find a way. Ambulances, taxis and Medicare were all in short supply back
then, so it was a stressful time for the victim.
Mum died when I was twelve. She
didn’t leave any medical files so historians could write about the Nurse-Doctor
of Churchland Road, but I surely remember how much she did for her patients.
She was a midwife, GP, pharmacist and surgeon.
***********************
As one can imagine, our house was
often quite a mess when an injured party left, and that makes a good segue to
my next topic, which is spring cleaning.
Is there such a thing as spring
cleaning any more? When I was a kid (there I go again with nostalgia!) I
remember all the wives would start talking about SPRING CLEANING as soon as
April Fools Day (Poisson d’Avril) came along. When those women said those words,
they weren’t kidding.
It was like a tremendous religious
ceremony, spring cleaning was. The ‘housewives’ planned for weeks, gathering up
cardboard boxes to lug out the detritus of winter and take it to the dump at
the edge of the woods, or burn it in a field. The wives and mothers – and often
the poor schoolchild who couldn’t escape and I’m not mentioning any names – had
to gather up cleaning materials and get ready for the frenzy.
Once the weather got warm, the wives
found ways of washing huge and heavy blankets that had been in the house all
winter. We took our blankets down to Pelkey Brook where a nice deep swimming
hole was just the spot for laundering and rinsing the blankets. Once they were
on the clothesline or hanging on a fence, it was time for the real spring
cleaning to begin.
Picture how much soot and dust would
be on all the flat surfaces inside the house. All winter long the cookstove and
any heaters or furnaces had been depositing dust all over the house. Spring
cleaning was revenge against all the days when the house had been closed up.
The cookstove would be moved into the summer kitchen because otherwise the main
kitchen would reach steel foundry temperatures in the summer. My cousin
Elizabeth didn’t have a summer kitchen, so she got her poor downtrodden (much
as I am today) husband Ralph to move the cookstove out into the yard.
I recently read a book called
‘Harness in the Parlour’ by Audrey Armstrong. It described the tribulations of
pioneer men and women. Referring to spring cleaning, she wrote: “Despite the
hard work involved, pioneer women welcomed spring cleaning. It gave them a
chance to shrug off winter doldrums, and to literally work out their
frustrations…it was dreaded by men but thoroughly enjoyed by women.”
Funny, I don’t remember my mother
being giddy with joy at the idea or the job.-end-
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