The Manx get everywhere.
4 Jan 2005 07:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
curiouswombatReading Julia_here, and thinking about her part of the world, reminded me of an elderly lady I knew, and the way in which we often presume that the older generations must be impressed by modern international travel
I used to visit this lady in the course of my work. She lived across the road from her local church here in the Isle-of-Man, and had told me that she had been married there, and her son and daughter had both been christened there. A typical old manx lady one would have thought - probably never left the island all her life BUT when I admired a picture on her wall her daughter persuaded her to tell me where it was taken, and the story behind it.
In 1924, when she was 19, this lady and her 17 year old niece decided to go to Vancouver Island, where her eldest brother had emigrated before her birth. (OK not quite Washington State where Julia lives - but about as far, and in much the same direction from here!)
They came from Sulby, a small village in the north of the island, and her niece had not even been to Douglas(main town - about 20 miles away.) They travelled to Douglas, and were seen onto the boat to cross the Irish Sea to Liverpool by their father/grandfather - after that they were on their own. In Liverpool they joined a ship to Newfoundland.
There was quite good company on the boat, she said, and some of the other young women travelling alone were rather too free with their affections! Presumably many of them were hoping to find a husband in Canada, but when the ship docked, some of these young women were not allowed to disembark - their behaviour had been noted by immigration officials travelling incognito on the boat, and they were refused entry on the grounds of loose moral values!! My lady and her neice were allowed in though.
Next came the journey by train across Canada. There was no such thing as a dining car, well at least in their class, and they were advised by other travellers on how to equip themselves for the 5 or 6 day trip. Like everyone else, they acquired a small camping stove (a spirit burner I think), also quantities of tea, sugar, bread, bacon, eggs and fat.
Sometimes the train stopped long enough for everyone to leap out and set up their stoves trackside, at other times they cooked as the train made it's way across the continent. At every small village halt the locals sold fresh supplies, and fresh water could be obtained. (I remember a terrible fire on a train in Asia somewhere a few years ago caused by fat splashing onto passengers' cooking stoves - I wonder if it ever happened on these trains?)
The plan was that my lady's brother, who she had of course never met, would meet them off the train in Vancouver. When they eventually arrived there, no-one met them. They were stunned - they had only thought this far, and now they didn't know what to do next. Then a woman approached them, she regularly met the train because this happened so often she said, and took them to the YWCA where she worked. Looking back my lady said that they just went with complete trust - it was a good job the woman was who she'd said she was, or they might have ended up in a brothel!
At the YWCA they were able to wash properly, which was a great relief, and then, she said, they lay down on one bed and held each other and wept for fear - they were so far away from home. Fortunately her brother arrived at the station some time after, his boat from Vancouver Island had been delayed, and he tracked them down.
Once on Vancouver Island, he had arranged jobs with local families for both of them, and also arranged that both would have the same day off to join him and the rest of the manx community at a social event. Here my lady met a young ex-pat manxman, who worked in forestry. Within a year she had married him, and set up home.
So how come she said she'd married in the local church on the Island? Well, after a couple of years of marriage, and two children, her husband was killed in a logging accident. His family, back in the Isle-of-Man wrote to her and said that they could do nothing to help her so far away, but if she could get back to the Island there was a home for her with them. She decided this was her best option, and so she made the whole journey again, in reverse, but this time without her niece for company, and with two children under three!
After a couple of years she did marry in the local church - to the brother of her first husband, and it was her second two children who were christened there. She went back out to Vancouver later to visit her brother's family, and her niece's, but never lived off-island again.
Nowadays we would take three plane rides, and still think of Vancouver as a long way from home, we rarely stop to think how many of the old people around us have made such major journeys in their lives!
I used to visit this lady in the course of my work. She lived across the road from her local church here in the Isle-of-Man, and had told me that she had been married there, and her son and daughter had both been christened there. A typical old manx lady one would have thought - probably never left the island all her life BUT when I admired a picture on her wall her daughter persuaded her to tell me where it was taken, and the story behind it.
In 1924, when she was 19, this lady and her 17 year old niece decided to go to Vancouver Island, where her eldest brother had emigrated before her birth. (OK not quite Washington State where Julia lives - but about as far, and in much the same direction from here!)
They came from Sulby, a small village in the north of the island, and her niece had not even been to Douglas(main town - about 20 miles away.) They travelled to Douglas, and were seen onto the boat to cross the Irish Sea to Liverpool by their father/grandfather - after that they were on their own. In Liverpool they joined a ship to Newfoundland.
There was quite good company on the boat, she said, and some of the other young women travelling alone were rather too free with their affections! Presumably many of them were hoping to find a husband in Canada, but when the ship docked, some of these young women were not allowed to disembark - their behaviour had been noted by immigration officials travelling incognito on the boat, and they were refused entry on the grounds of loose moral values!! My lady and her neice were allowed in though.
Next came the journey by train across Canada. There was no such thing as a dining car, well at least in their class, and they were advised by other travellers on how to equip themselves for the 5 or 6 day trip. Like everyone else, they acquired a small camping stove (a spirit burner I think), also quantities of tea, sugar, bread, bacon, eggs and fat.
Sometimes the train stopped long enough for everyone to leap out and set up their stoves trackside, at other times they cooked as the train made it's way across the continent. At every small village halt the locals sold fresh supplies, and fresh water could be obtained. (I remember a terrible fire on a train in Asia somewhere a few years ago caused by fat splashing onto passengers' cooking stoves - I wonder if it ever happened on these trains?)
The plan was that my lady's brother, who she had of course never met, would meet them off the train in Vancouver. When they eventually arrived there, no-one met them. They were stunned - they had only thought this far, and now they didn't know what to do next. Then a woman approached them, she regularly met the train because this happened so often she said, and took them to the YWCA where she worked. Looking back my lady said that they just went with complete trust - it was a good job the woman was who she'd said she was, or they might have ended up in a brothel!
At the YWCA they were able to wash properly, which was a great relief, and then, she said, they lay down on one bed and held each other and wept for fear - they were so far away from home. Fortunately her brother arrived at the station some time after, his boat from Vancouver Island had been delayed, and he tracked them down.
Once on Vancouver Island, he had arranged jobs with local families for both of them, and also arranged that both would have the same day off to join him and the rest of the manx community at a social event. Here my lady met a young ex-pat manxman, who worked in forestry. Within a year she had married him, and set up home.
So how come she said she'd married in the local church on the Island? Well, after a couple of years of marriage, and two children, her husband was killed in a logging accident. His family, back in the Isle-of-Man wrote to her and said that they could do nothing to help her so far away, but if she could get back to the Island there was a home for her with them. She decided this was her best option, and so she made the whole journey again, in reverse, but this time without her niece for company, and with two children under three!
After a couple of years she did marry in the local church - to the brother of her first husband, and it was her second two children who were christened there. She went back out to Vancouver later to visit her brother's family, and her niece's, but never lived off-island again.
Nowadays we would take three plane rides, and still think of Vancouver as a long way from home, we rarely stop to think how many of the old people around us have made such major journeys in their lives!
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no subject
Date: 04/01/2005 11:40 pm (UTC)So many people of our generation and younger do not know what to say when they're asked where they're from (although that may be more an American thing, I'm not sure; I know my children are the only ones of their peer group who have had the same address all their lives) that it's lovely to hear a story about going far way from home and coming back.
Julia, taking another warm-up between outside tasks
no subject
Date: 05/01/2005 12:02 am (UTC)This sense of being of one place and another people is very obvious in some of the songs of Runrig, who are talking about Scots Gaels, often in Canada.
By the way, they have some beautiful geographic/geological type descriptions in some of their lyrics - have you ever come across them?
no subject
Date: 10/04/2011 09:50 pm (UTC)In 1974, when I was 10, my family moved from Surrey, England to Hong Kong. Admittedly, we didn't travel directly. We flew first to Rome, where we spent a week. Then from Rome to Karachi, where we were accidentally overnight because the airport was closed and had forgotten to leave fuel for our jet. Then to Singapore, where we spent another week (at the famed Raffles Hotel), then to Bangkok for another week. I'm not sure why my parents planned it that way - were I relocating with two small children I'd want to settle as fast as possible. Or maybe they were thinking that as it would take 6 weeks for our furniture and stuff to arrive, there was no particular hurry.
Two years later when we had to return to sell our house, the best flight we could get required three stops for refueling and took about 44 hours. Perhaps my parents thought if we were going to stop anyway, we may as well have a look around.
no subject
Date: 10/04/2011 10:10 pm (UTC)My husband went to live in Malawi from the UK in the mid 1960s and then was sent home to school when he was 14 - they used to fly out making two stops en route - but on one occasion they sailed - it was seen as a sort of holiday adventure, going through the Suez canal and so on.
no subject
Date: 23/05/2011 10:02 pm (UTC)When he came to Canada in the 1960s, he made a very different journey than the one you described! He got a job offer while in the UK, hopped on a plane to Vancouver and worked here until he retired a couple of years ago.
He honestly can't relate to my brother and me having to go through long-winded job interviews and changing jobs so many times, lol. One time I had to go through an entire day of interviews, meeting one-on-one with seven different people (I got the job, but the company rescinded the offer days later when the company reduced headcount by 17%; this was back in 2001 when the dotcom bust was going on). In contrast, Dad just got a letter from his former academic advisor in the mail offering him the job he ended up taking after grad school. Dad didn't even have to go through an interview process, imagine that!
Also, back then real estate was super-cheap. My dad was a university professor and my mother a highschool teacher. In the mid-1970s, their combined income was about $20,000 and the house only cost $57,000 so they had plenty of money left to raise two kids plus send money to Dad's dad.
Now Vancouver is the third-most expensive English-speaking real estate market in the world, topped only by Hong Kong and Sydney.
My parents lucked out in terms of their timing, that's for sure. All that, AND they got to enjoy the 1970s fully before settling down ;-)
no subject
Date: 23/05/2011 10:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 24/05/2011 12:20 am (UTC)The first wave of North American baby boomers enjoyed all the same advantages -- a world without HIV or climate change! -- but younger generations have had more of a struggle.
Not that I'm complaining. Despite being GenX, the generation immediately after the baby boomers, I've been very lucky in my life, but I know that many members of my cohort have gotten the short end of the stick in terms of opportunities. That said, we're better off than the subsequent generations who will never really know true privacy and will be the ones who really have to cope with the damage to the planet, which is rapidly reaching a tipping point.
I'm living in low-lying coastal area, and it's hard to imagine that the very land this house is built on will one day be underwater, as sea levels continue to rise. I just hope it doesn't happen during my lifetime, but it's sobering to reflect on how much beach front has already eroded in recent decades.
Interesting times, that's for sure. And all the more reason to enjoy life while we can! Speaking of which, the sun is shining and it's absolutely lovely on my end so I'm going to head off to the beach :-)