Like many others of advancing years who were born elsewhere but came to Canada, I know with certainty that I’m a Canadian. However, I imagine all of us who came here as immigrants have had occasions of confusion and doubt as to our identity. My name is Paule, but many people have known me as Paula. As a teenager, I had to try to answer the question “Who is Paule?”, first for myself, then for everyone else.
Read an excerpt from this memorable historical novel:
I came to Canada in 1946 on a Trans Canada Airlines Lancastrian, the civilian version of the Lancaster bomber. It only carried a dozen passengers on a long, noisy flight from the just-opened London Heathrow airport. Heathrow was so new in October 1946 that it was a set of tents with wooden floors. Still, it served to launch us on a 15 hour journey with a stop in Gander, Newfoundland, to our new home in Canada.
The Lancaster/Lancastrian was particularly noisy because of the famous Merlin engines. They had 12 cylinders each, and on each side 6 exhausts without mufflers. Thus 24 exhausts were pointing towards the cabin. Conversation was very limited. As I recall, I tried to sleep as much as possible.
That I came from England suggests that I might have been originally English, but, no, I was born in France on June 5, 1933. My parents called me Paule, a name that gives the English some difficulty. They don’t want to say Paul, and the "O" sound in Paule seems wrong for the spelling of the name. So I was usually called Paula. In Montréal, I was able to resume use of my name.
My family name was Ronen. It’s a Polish name, but my father was also born in France. His father came from somewhere near Krakow and was Jewish, but had married a French woman and become a Catholic. My mother, Maria, née Richelieu, was not Jewish as far as I know. They both died in Nazi concentration camps. Mother, ironically, not far from Krakow in Auschwicz on Oct 31, 1943, possibly because she refused to abandon my father. Father, tragically, some days after Belsen was liberated on April 18, 1945, one of about 14,000 souls who died either of illness or the shock of too much food when it became available.
I left France in 1940. Well, I was taken away, just before the Dunkirk debacle. My great-aunt Matilda, née Moore – who I generally called Mathilde – had gone to France as a governess around 1890 and had met and married a lawyer named Charles Bonin. He was a bit older than her and died in the early 1930s. When she realized the Germans might succeed in invading France, she took me to Southampton. Unfortunately, she lost control of her property in France, and we were quite poor. Worse, though Southampton was her childhood home, her family had all died, some in the flu pandemic of 1919. Moreover, Southampton as a port and the site of factories for Supermarine and their Spitfires and Thorneycrofts for their engineering products meant we experienced a lot of bombing.
Tante Mathilde was already near 70 when we came to England, and her health deteriorated in early 1946. It didn’t help that we lived in a rather pathetic rooming house in a single room. On Good Friday, she had a fatal stroke. I ran to the telephone box and called the operator for an ambulance. 999 was just being introduced then. London had had it for a while, but we weren’t used to the idea yet. The ambulance came, as did Police Constable Murray.
Neighbours came out in the street as it was quite early in the morning. Some of them were probably just gawking, but Maud Crighton who lived a few houses away on Radstock Road knew me from Mass at St. Patrick’s. She’d had a tough time in the War. Her husband, Jeremy, served on HMS Hood and wasn’t one of the three survivors of her encounter with Bismark. Then two days before VE Day, her 14-year-old daughter Jenny was riding home on her bicycle with some shopping when an American dispatch rider who’d been in Britain only a couple of days came down the wrong side of the road and she was killed. Tragic.
At the time Tante Mathilde died, Maud had had to take in a lodger, both to help bring in some money and to avoid the Council saying she had more space than proper in a time of great housing shortage. Ted Newman worked managing logistics for Supermarine and had been seconded to the RAF to do the same. But while he was in Normandy in June, 1944, a V-1 flying bomb destroyed his house and killed his wife Agnes and 15-year-old daughter Margaret, who most people called Peggy. I knew them both from Mass, which was held in one of the classrooms at St. Patrick’s School because the church next door had been gutted by an incendiary bomb in 1940. Ted had only been demobbed in February 1946, and his duties until then meant he’d not been home at all before that. Essentially nothing to come home to.
When the ambulance arrived, along with Constable Murray, I stayed in our room after they took out Tante Mathilde’s body. Constable Murray let me sit on my cot and cry for a bit while he went outside. I learned later that he realized the people who could find me help and accommodation would not be working until the following Tuesday given the Easter holiday. Maud offered to take me in, at least until social services took over.
I said Maud took Ted as a lodger because she was afraid the Council would toss her out because she had a whole house and just herself in it. This wasn’t quite true – the front room on the ground floor was closed off because the bay window had been caved in by a bomb down the street, and the front bedroom windows were mostly boarded up too. Thus my cot was brought over and shoe-horned into the kitchen.
When Mrs. Carbury from social services came the next week, she really didn’t have anything much to offer. I was too old for regular orphanages. I had a tiny amount of money. I wasn’t a British citizen, but had a residency permit. Maud and Ted said I could stay.
At the time, I was grateful, but in retrospect I am almost overwhelmed to realize the magnitude of the generosity Maud and Ted showed me. Then the holier-than-thous started to grumble that two unrelated people of the opposite sex should not be looking after a 13-year-old girl.
Somehow in the short period of time I’d lived at Maud’s house, we’d started to behave like a family. A Sunday outing to Winchester, both Maud and Ted told me later, led to them seeing a reflection of us in a window. When Mrs. Carbury started to agitate that I should be moved to a hostel, Ted asked Maud if she felt they should get married so they could adopt me. They asked me if I wanted that, and we all went to see Father Walsh that very night to find out if it were feasible and appropriate.
The marriage of convenience created a loving family. Both Ted and Maud have told me separately how much more they found in each other than they expected. Love, support, sharing, partnership. And I was a great beneficiary. Being not quite an adult, they never treated me as a child, but more as a part of a joint enterprise, especially when Ted got an opportunity in Canada with Trans Canada Airlines.
But I’m getting ahead of my story, for which I fortunately have a partial journal that I started on April 19, 1946, the day Tante Mathilde died. I’ll explain as we go along, but I’ll probably repeat myself from time to time.
