(see Blacks)

(This is a paraphrasing of Mrs. Mark’s own words from an audio tape. Mrs. Cheryl Hann is a nurse and was looking after Mrs. Mark when they both discovered they were from Joe Rich. The interview took place in 1996. Mrs. Mark died in 2000.)

My first memory is of holding the lantern in the barn while father milked the cow. He wanted me to hold it in the right place. It was winter, night time and dark. He told me to open my mouth and he squirted some milk into it. I remember the smell of the barn and the cows chewing their cuds.

Leo Fazan lived across the creek from us. Allan Fazan went to Winnipeg for a while in 1923. I didn’t know him so well. He married and they had a lot of kids. Leo was a real fixture in Joe Rich and a good friend. When we went to town with the horse and buggy, it took a day and we sometimes stayed over night. He would milk our cows then. When he went to England for a visit, we milked his cows. His place was on the slope down to the creek; a cabin and a big barn with the meadow behind. The road ran along the top of the clay bank then turned and came straight over the fields to Fazan’s place. You had to go up the road along the creek to Weddell’s. We were between Fazan’s and the school house.

The Fazan’s had tried homesteading beyond Nicholases, but had given it up and moved closer to Joe Rich Creek. To homestead you had to put up a liveable structure and a barn and start farming the land. When you did that, you could get the land for nothing.

When the school was built Uncle Martin (Martin Band, her mother’s brother), dad and Jack Findlay did it. I can’t remember any others. I peeled logs.

I didn’t go to school until I was 8, because that was the year that the school was built. The next year, I had to go to Vancouver for 5 months to have my hand done. When I got back, I was 9 and in Grade 2. They pushed me ahead a year. The school classroom was spread out with all the grades in one room. It was very basic, but maybe it gave a better grounding in the basics than schools do now.

Winifred Lang was the first teacher. She was tall and she had shiny black hair done up in a bun. The first day, she wore a red and white gingham dress. She had lovely lady’s hankies, small with a wide dainty border. They cost $5 each. At first, she boarded at the top end of the valley, but then she moved to stay with us. She said that unless she could come to us she would quit. She told us they had mouse for breakfast up the valley. Mrs. Band wanted her to stay with them and she was very upset when Miss. Lang came to stay with us. It started a little feud.

The second teacher was Mary Shanks. She was very nice. At the Christmas concert at the school that winter, there was a play. Cyril Weddell and Mary Shanks were in it. We were all fascinated. At the end, they inched closer and closer together until finally they had their arms around each other and then the curtain came down. And later, they got married. Many years later, when she was very old, I saw Mrs. Weddell in Kelowna. She was very forgetful, but I think she knew she had seen me before. She talked to us very nicely. She was a wonderful woman.

When the school started, there were five Smith kids. They moved to Joe Rich from the Pyman Ranch because there was no school there. There were also five Philpotts and the Baillies. Mr. Baillie had no teeth. Once when they were eating a chicken pie that mother had made, Mrs. Baillie took out the chicken and ground it up and then she tucked it back in the pie and gave it to Mr. Baillie to eat.

New people were a big event for us. There weren’t many cars. When one was coming, we could hear it a long way down the valley and we kids would run to the fence and hung on it to watch the car go by. The road was narrow. Once we were all on the democrat going down the road when a car came. There was no room to pass so Dad drove the team off the road and up the bank to let the car go by. Mother was very upset because she thought we would tip over, but we didn’t.

In the fall, we went to town in the wagon to get extra hay, flour, sugar and yeast. We had to be sure to go before winter set in, because after that we might not be able to get there.

The school kids lived so far apart from each other that I didn’t play much with the others after school. I knew Audrey and Jenny Smith best. Gisel Baillie was the only other girl and she was too old. The rest were boys.

The animals were my closest friends. There were the cows, and all the other animals. We bought two baby pigs each spring. Even the chickens used to let me pick them up and I would take each of them for a ride on the swing. We bought about 20 chicks in the spring. They were happy chickens. There was always a hen setting on eggs too. When a hen got old Dad would say, “That chicken isn’t laying any more so we’ll have it for Sunday dinner.” I would feel so badly for the chicken and want to say, “He didn’t really mean that.” But on Sunday, I would eat the chicken too, because there wasn’t anything else.

We had mice and bush rats and gophers and squirrels and chipmunks. The squirrels and chipmunks used to climb up the barn wall, come in and steel the chicken feed. It was my job to trap them. When I got one, I told myself that I was doing it for Dad to save feed. I would throw it in the field. One day, there was a chipmunk caught by the leg in the trap. It was struggling to get free. I felt so bad. I let it go. That was the end of trapping.

When I think of my granddaughter now, I know that kids know so much more than I did, but they’re not so close to animals.

We grew nearly all our own food in the garden: turnips, potatoes, onions, carrots and parsnips. They all went in the big root cellar. When our cow, Bossie got too old, Dad killed her and Mom and Dad ground her up into meat patties with lots of spice. They stored the patties between sheets of brown paper in a large can to keep the mice out in the root cellar under the house. We canned a lot of the meat. Dad used to say that we ate, “Venison, venison, venison, rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, fish, fish, fish”, because we ate whatever was available and we didn’t have a refrigerator. Mother had a screened ‘cooler’ with shelves inside it on the bank beside the creek to keep things cool. There was a lovely clear cool spring across the creek. It had a barrel sunk into it. In the spring time, when the creek was muddy, we would carry our water by pail from that spring. When my brother and his wife were living there later, he shot a deer. They cut it up, put the uncooked meat in pint jars and stored it in the cool water of the spring.

There were a lot of fish in Mission Creek. We used to go there with a pole to fish. When we left the house, mother would start getting the vegetables ready and then put on the skillet to have it ready when we got home with the fish. We used to put out turnip tops. The rabbits would come and we could catch them.

Wild animals weren’t a big problem. There were bears, and I remember, when I was alone, running home yelling very loudly because I had been told that that would scare them away. We had coyotes and some lynx with tufts on their ears. There were cougars too. The Philpotts found a dead one on the way to school once.

Mrs. Nicholas was the angel of the valley. She was Jack Findlay’s sister, Margaret. They all lived together in their big house on their property. When the parents moved back to Winnipeg, Margaret stayed on for a while with Jack and then married Frank Nicholas and moved to his house. I think they were a little older. They didn’t have any children. Mrs. Nicholas was a practical nurse. When I got snow blindness and had to stay in the dark for several days, she came to visit me every day. She always went to anyone who was ill. She knelt by her bed each night and said her prayers.

Later, when her mother was old, she brought her back from Winnipeg to live. Mrs. Findlay was senile and would run away. Once in the winter, the Bands found her on their step. She was always looking for her home. She was very sweet. Once, we found her by a puddle on the road. She said, “See that house across the lake. That’s my home.” We didn’t know what she was talking about, but we pretended we did. When Mrs. Findlay had to be sent back to Winnipeg, Mrs. Nicholas was exhausted and she had a stroke then. She was put in the Kelowna Hospital. We were living down in Kelowna then going to high school and we went to visit her. We rubbed her legs. The next day she was gone. She died so suddenly.

When she was married, she would go back to her brother, Jack’s house to bake for him. She would stay there two or three days and make a supply of cakes and pies for him. Once she took me in the sleigh and the horse had bells. The sleigh tipped over near the North Fork Bridge. She let me lick out the bowl when she was baking and then she would wash off my face. In summer, she would take the ice that Mr. Nicholas had cut from Mission Creek and stored in saw dust, break it up and make ice cream by spinning the liquid sweetened cream in a container immersed in the ice.

She knit me a toque for Christmas. Each Christmas, she would get a package of shortbread from England. All the adults got a little piece, but I was too young. She played the organ for the Christmas party at the school. Mother and Mr. Nicholas sang a duet. Sometimes, we would go to Nicholas’ and everybody would sing. The grown ups played old fashioned games like ‘Hide the button’ and charades. I was too young. The kids would all be lying in a row on the bed.

When we were little, Dad would go outside and ring the harness bells and shout, “Ho, ho, ho” and we thought it was Santa. The traces hanging down from the whipple trees in the snow would leave tracks and they told me that these were the foot prints that Santa left when he was running beside his sleigh. I believed them. And all the neighbours were singing. It was wonderful.

I wish I could see it again just once more.

 

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