Marie Blanche Poirier was born on January 19, 1890, and married Charles Joseph Gaudet, who was born on April 20, 1891, on April 13, 1915. Their first child was born in 1916, their last in 1934. In that 18-year span nine of them died dreadful deaths, mostly of tuberculosis.

Somehow, in this morass of disease and death five children survived and reached old age. I knew them all because they were my immediate family as I grew up. One of them, Frances, was my mother.

Mary Frances, (1918 – 2014
Annie May (1923 – 2010)
John Joseph (1925 – 1997)
Mary Susan 1928 – 2020
Joseph Gerard 1932 – 1999

 

Here is a picture of the five survivors from the 1986 – a very rare thing as they hardly ever came together.

May and Frances in the front with John, Susan, and Gerry, December 11, 1986.

 

To shorten the length of these family posts I have separated the brothers from the sisters. To make the transition from my mother to me a smoother one, in this post I am describing the lives of Susan and May, to be followed by Frances in a separate essay.

 

 

Mary Susan 1928 – 2020

Susan, like all of the five survivors was born in her Grandfather Joseph Isidore’s house, spending her early years in ever-growing poverty and surrounded by tuberculosis and the death of nine of her siblings. By the start of World War II, the grandfather was dead and his house, now seen as a hotbed of disease, was burnt to the ground. Here are Susan and Gerard, holding doll and teddy bear, standing in front of what must have been their home before it was torched. Susan was around 11 or 12 and Gerard was 7.

Susan and Gerard, circa 1938.

Susan, and Gerard moved to a new home up in Christopher’s Cross, a converted fisherman’s shack move there from the Tignish Run. Her mother, Marie Blanche, somehow, using cardboard boxes as wallboard, turned it into a home. I have no idea how they survived. In my earliest 1940s memories I see a vegetable garden, a pig in a pen, a few hens in a summer coop, barrels of pickled mackerel and herring in the unheated porch, and dried salt cod hanging on nails in the upstairs hall.

The next image of Susan to survive shows Susan holding her beloved cat, one of a series of tabbies, all called Nasai (pronounced nah-sigh), which were the love of her life. Susan grew up into a vivacious happy girl, full of affection, fun and laughter.

Susan with her cat, circa 1945.

 

From an early age Susan loved to dance and was a much sought-after dance partner. There would be dances in Tignish in the available public halls and the music would have been provided by fiddles and probably a piano. As they fiddled, the musicians tapped their feet as if they were step dancing, and that provided the necessary percussion.

All the dances were square dances, involving four couples facing each other in a square. It is a very ancient form of dance, certainly going back to the Middle Ages and there are over 100 different ways or sets recorded. The dances in Tignish would relate to the Seventeenth Century country dances – the quadrille and cotillions – brought by the Acadians who settled Tignish in 1799, and the partnered dances brought by the Irish after they arrived in 1811. As a result, Tignish had an extremely rich store of dance tunes to fall back on, tunes going back hundreds of years. Susan, and her partners, knew all the tunes and flew through the air in the ecstasy of the dance.

Susan’s life changed drastically in March of 1944 when my mother left me as a newborn with her parents in Tignish. At the age of 16 she became my surrogate mother.

The doll, but not the cat! was set aside and Susan overnight learned how to be a mother. She took care of all my needs, relieving my exhausted bitter grandmother of the responsibilities of a fifteenth child.

I adored Susan and she shared her cat with me, which was the beginning of my lifelong passion for them. She sang for me, and played favourite songs on the radio and, in that French domestic atmosphere I learned to make English sounds:

There’s a bluebird on your windowsill
There’s a rainbow in your sky
There are happy thoughts, your heart to fill
Near enough to make you cry.

My little mouth babbled away and Susan, in delight, sang along with me. I was most fortunate to have had Susan during those first years of my life.

 

But Susan grew up and had to leave home to find work. She went to Moncton where her sisters Frances and May had gone after the war, finding jobs easily at the great Eaton’s department store that lasted into my time. There they lived together, along with their old friends and neighbours, Joe Gaudet’s daughters who had grown up at the end of the Gaudet Road, between Routes 14 and 12.

Around 1950 a terrible tragedy befell Susan. She had come home for her summer vacation and was full of joy and stories and of course dancing. She brought life and happiness into the sour environment of my grandmother’s house. It all happened in the twinkling of an eye. One moment she was the laughing dancing Susan and the next she collapsed. My memory of what happened next is completely clouded by the horror of the event. She was taken to the hospital in Alberton and immediately transferred to the Moncton Sanatorium. The diagnosis indicated that death was on its way. She had tubercular meningitis of the brain and spine.

Susan at the Moncton Sanatorium, early 1950s.

There was no known cure for this terrible condition at that time, but an entirely new experimental drug invented by the great Russian Jewish microbiologist, Selman Waksman with the help of international colleagues, isolated a compound from soil fungi called streptomycin, the most powerful antibiotic known up to that time.  Since it was assumed that Susan was going to die, she was given massive doses of this drug, and possibly another, aureomycin of similar soil fungus origins, which had been discovered in 1945. Medical miracles happen and Susan’s life was saved. Finally, after several years in the San, around 1955, she was able to come home to Tignish for an almost full recovery.

The massive drug doses she received, and the medical experimentation on what was believed to be a hopeless case had quite severe side effects on Susan. She began to lose her hearing, and in a few years her aural nerves had ceased functioning. There were various hearing aids, and even, years later, eardrum transplants, called a tympanoplasty, were made. It was all to no avail and as time went on, she depended more and more on lip reading. Susan also began to put on weight, losing her beautiful girlish figure that was the pride of the dance hall. She never lost her sense of humour and joie de vivre. However, the drugs affected her mind to some degree, and arrested her emotional development, so that as an adult, she never fully matured. Her temper became unstable.

Susan in the pantry, Tignish, circa 1955.

 

What life could there be for Susan. She was extremely strong and full of energy and enthusiasm. I have lost the sequence of events that brought Susan back to Moncton and the beginning of a long career working in a care home in Lewisville as a care giver and increasingly, a cook. In time Susan would become obsessed with food. The owners of that care home, a Madame and M. Cormier were incredibly kind to Susan and treated her as one of their own. They had already adopted a boy of my age whom I met when I visited Susan. They had a tiny dog called Ginger with whom Susan fell completely in love. Cats were forgotten. She even brought Ginger home to Tignish with her when she came to visit her mother. Marie Blanche, who detested pets, endured the visit with trauma.

Susan with her mother, Marie Blanche, and her dog Ginger, circa 1958-60

 

Susan worked at the Lewisville Lodge with the Cormier family for many years. When Mr. Cormier passed away, the home was sold and Susan, as her companion, went to live with the frail Mrs. Cormier until she died. Her reputation as companion and cook had spread and Susan found another congenial elderly woman with whom to live and to take care of.

From time to time, she would come home to Tignish to meet with her sisters, Frances and May.

 

Susan never married. She became more and more isolated because of her deafness and days concentrated on cooking for a house full of people, caring for the elderly and infirm, and being part of the daily life of her employers. In her youth, before the onset of illness, Susan had many boyfriends – all dancing partners – and it was not until she went to live in Moncton, barely out of her teens, that she had a serious relationship with a sweet man who was a taxi driver. Of course, his greatest merit was that he was a great dancer. His most famous phrase was “OK Pal, let’s go dancing!”

 

Ernest is sent by Divine Providence

Heaven no doubt intervened so that she would have male companionship and love in her last years. She met a man called Ernest LeBlanc who fell head over heels with her. Susan’s sisters were horrified and did everything they could to break up this relationship. Were they jealous? Were they ashamed? Or was it because the bitterness of the years had destroyed all remnants of compassion? In spite of this, Susan and Ernest rejoiced and even lived together for a time.

They even visited me in far away Belle River and had a meal with me – a rich beef stew that was a great treat in our youth. Susan, of course, found fault with the dumplings!

With this new mobility Susan and Ernest were able to travel to Tignish to visit the family and stayed with her sister May, in her big house. Frances, the eldest sister, avoided them as much as possible and gratuitously criticized the excellent Ernest. It made me very sad and ashamed to be part of such a dysfunctional family.

However, Gerard’s daughter Donna, who was married to James Gaudet, ashamed of the horrid behaviour exhibited by her aunts, enveloped Susan and Ernest with love and affection. As this photo shows, perhaps the last time Susan visited Anglo Tignish, there was laughter and kindness everywhere.

Susan with her niece Donna, and husband James, late in her life.

 

Somewhere in this family narrative, formal thanks, long overdue, must be offered to Donna and James Gaudet for the YEARS of unrelenting love and care – in every imaginable form – that they provided to the three sisters in their last years. I am filled with shame by the callous way they were exploited, with rarely a word of praise and gratitude. Thank you, Donna and James.

 

Susan spent her last years in Saint Antoine, not far from Moncton, in the care home called Foyer St. Antoine. I wrote to Susan through a wonderful woman who was Directrice des activités. When Susan developed the condition of micrographia Nadia carefully took Susan’s dictation and sent me her answers.

Susan’s 85^th birthday, in 2013.

In her last years a woman appeared somehow, and took Susan into the bosom of her family, lavishing love and attention on her. By this time Susan’s only interest was eating, and these people made sure that she had all she could possibly consume – and more!

During this time Susan’s adoptive family took over all her affairs and assets completely, and with the help of an obliging lawyer somehow replaced me as Power of Attorney. In her new will – was she compos mentis? – Susan’s blood family was completely cut off.

Susan died July 25, 2020. With no consultation these people had the prepaid funeral I had arranged for Susan reversed and they used the funds to celebrate her passing in their local New Brunswick church. None of Susan’s remaining family was invited to the funeral. According to her wishes Susan was to be cremated and her ashes placed next to those of her sisters in the grave of their parents. As an afterthought, after the fact, I received a note saying an internment had taken place in Tignish, with an apology for having forgotten to tell me.

And so, Susan passed from our lives into eternity. She was a happy, cheerful, and generous person who loved life and was loyal to her family until, at the end, her life was taken over by strangers I never met. But she was loved.

Susan in 2020, before the end.

 

 

Annie May (1923 – 2010)

May, as she always preferred to be called was born in 1923 so was about 16 when her grandfather’s house burned down and, having moved to the fisherman’s shack at Christopher’s Cross was of an age to fly the coop.

Of May’s life for the first 25 years, we know almost nothing. She attended school until grade 6 and during that time developed a passion for reading romances. The only specific memory from that time comes from her sister Frances who, many years later, described May as the most beautiful child, not made to do chores or sent to work in fish factories, but left to herself to climb up into a favourite tree and there read novels.

When World War II began, May, her sister Frances and neighbouring girls went off to Halifax which was a booming war port with great demands for service workers to fill the demands created by the influx of thousands of sailors whose boats docked there. The Tignish girls found work easily and Frances and May were employed at a pharmacy/restaurant called White’s as waitresses.

May as a Halifax girl. Circa 1942-43.

Among their serving duties was the hand-tinting of little strips of photographs automatically produced by dropping a coin into a photo booth, strike poses, and wait for the photo flash to go off. With a grinding noise the strip would emerge. I remember this vividly from my teen years in Montreal and still have such photos in my collection. Here, from the internet, is a photo of such a machine.

Two such photos, cut off from the strip, show May as she looked in her early Halifax days. She sat in the machine and then tinted herself to achieve desired perfection.

May, photo booth photos, Halifax, early 1940s.

About the same time this photo was taken May came to Tignish to visit her family. In this charming picture we see May, her father Charlie with his pipe, and Susan and Gerard. May looks gracious and a bit grand with her stylish hair all brushed up in the fashion of the day. She had definitively rejected life in Tignish and would never look back except for her annual weekly visit in the summer.

Susan and her cat, May, Gerard and Charlie,
Christopher’s Cross, early 1940s.

The girls from Tignish had an endless supply of potential boyfriends to select from, especially if, like May, they were beautiful and charming. Having shed her Tignish accent with all possible speed May was ready to face the world of ardent sailors. Her ultimate choice was an extremely handsome young man called Earl Grandin whose family lived in Montreal, north of the Mountain in Park Extension. Earl had a younger brother Billy who, along with quite a few other young men and women formed the social core of the group that formed during shore leave in Halifax.

May’s Wedding Picture, probably in the Grandin dining room, circa 1945.

May married Earl Grandin, we believe, after the war, and their wedding took place in Montreal. An obligatory wedding portrait was taken presumably in the Grandin dining room. A copy of this photo, suitably framed, hung in her mother’s sitting room in Tignish until Marie Blanche died. A terrible anxiety was attached to this photo because May had married a Protestant. An elaborate story had to be constructed to placate her mother which involved a Catholic union in the sacristy of a Catholic church. This was all a fiction. May was married in the Protestant church the Grandin family attended regularly.

After the war the newly-married couple returned to Montreal where Earl got a job as a city policeman.

Earl Grandin as a Montreal policeman, circa 1950

 

For a few years all was merry and the couple lived on Querbes Avenue near Jean Talon Street. Then tragedy struck and this very young man died of a heart attack. May became a young widow, able to support herself only with the money she received as a clerk at Eaton’s Department Store in Montreal.

After the war May’s sister Frances went to work in Moncton, probably as a clerk at Eaton’s Department store. She, and friends of Tignish similarly employed, lived in a basement flat on Botsford Street in Moncton. Susan had been living with them there at the time she fell ill.

After Susan’s amazing recovery, and convalescence spent in Tignish, Frances moved to Montreal to live with the newly-widowed May. In that way it was possible to keep the convenient apartment on Querbes Avenue. Frances eventually got a job at the Credit Bureau of Montreal which she kept until her retirement in the 1970s.

They had made many friends during their years in Halifax, and most of them were from Montreal. They continued to see them after the war, and as well, a number of young people from Tignish moved to Montreal where a happy social life was established. Gerard, the youngest of the surviving five children, moved to Montreal in 1950 when he was 18, and lived with Frances and May until his marriage in 1955.

There are a few pictures that survive from this time showing the family gathered together with their friends. This one, from before Gerard’s marriage in 1955, show the happy times they had laughing and telling stories.

I visited this apartment during the summer of 1957 when, as a wild child from Tignish, I was brought to the city to see if I could survive in that milieu. For me it was a wildly happy time, full of adventure and discovery, and tasting Dairy Queen ice cream; for my mother and May it was a time of utter dismay at the realisation that, unwanted in Tignish, I was to be forced upon them. I arrived the next year after the sisters had moved down the block to an apartment with an extra bedroom.

My new life in Montreal, full of every possible rapture imaginable, will be told later in this blog. Life on Querbes Avenue, above the flat of Mr. Weiss our landlord, was strange and never for a moment felt like home. May and her sister began to quarrel incessantly, and I fell asleep each night listening to intense rows behind their shared bedroom door.

There were happy moments also when their younger brother Gerard and his new wife Vera came to visit. Gerard was well established as a machinist at Terry Machinery who made the famous Homelite chain saws. He played industrial hockey and was brilliant. He also learned to play the guitar well and was passionately fond of Hank Snow, whose songs we heard endlessly.

Other people from Tignish lived in Montreal at that time, and the finest was Arthur Arsenault, a fine talented man, full of music, who became a sort of surrogate father to me and often took me away from the endless fights on Querbes Avenue out to explore all the marvels of the city. He lent me his portable typewriter and, in the end, gave me his 45 rpm record player with a great stack of Gilbert & Sullivan operettas to play on it. He even introduced me to free weekly live orchestra concerts. Here he is being foolish with my mother Frances.

Because of the Grandin connection and their old pre-war friends, there was a happy circle of friends in Montreal who formed the basis of May’s social life. Frances kept more to the edge and was more frugal with her miniscule salary, having been struck with the burden of supporting me.

May and Frances, centre front and back, with wartime friends, c. 1959-60.

 

These friends would gather at the apartment from time to time and it was wonderful to sit unseen in the sidelines and listen to their happy talk and memory of the glorious war years.

Every year May would visit her parents in Tignish, as did her sister Frances, and our neighbour, Leo Gallant who had a horse and wagon, would bring May’s complete suite of the most fashionable luggage, from tiny to very big, in which an amazing variety of the most beautiful clothes were packed. May had a passion for fashion and the bulk of her disposable income went on clothing. Sunday was the moment when the Gaudet girls, formerly the very scum of Tignish society, would drift into church at High Mass, their feet hardly touching the ground, and dressed in high fashion the likes of which had never been seen in the village. Here is May in a pastoral setting, holding her sister Susan’s dog, sitting on the lawn of her parent’s house, now moved close to the village. The barn with the pigpen and the wood pile are in the background.

Life in Montreal continued as it always had. I continued to live with May and Frances as I finished high school and began my studies at Loyola College. May had met a man who became her suitor and, Querbes Avenue not being socially significant as a place to live, we moved to quite a large flat on Linton Avenue in the part of the city called Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, which was perceived as middle-class.

There life continued, but in a less claustrophobic manner. May had risen in status at Eaton’s to the point where she was a section head that dealt in leather belts and gloves and a variety of other things that came under the heading of ‘notions,” the American name for what the English call haberdashery. She was extremely successful at this and was made much of by the administration and the merchants from which she ordered her goods. Around 1960 there was an article in the Montreal Gazette about Eaton’s and May was selected to be the face of the establishment, with a very large photo.

Photo of May promoting Eaton’s,
Montreal Gazette, c. 1960.

 

May was heading into her late thirties and was still a very beautiful woman, full of charm, but with an impenetrable core of privacy. Even those who were closest never knew the essential May. This gave her a sense of enigma that she carried for the rest of her life.

May during her brief stay on Linton Avenue, just before her wedding.

And her life was about to change in a very drastic way when, in 1960 she met a remarkable man, a much-decorated pilot from World War II. His name was Frederick J. Benoit, who belonged to the Anglo middle class in Montreal, was well off and was looking for a beautiful ornament to his life as senior management at Fairbanks Morse, a company specialising in high quality weighing scales.

Fred Benoit, second from right, in a 1944-45 squadron photo.

 

Every weekend May frequented a Montreal nightclub with her old wartime friends. It was at one of these occasions that she met Fred and for him, it was love at first sight; for May a moment to enter another class and gain ultimate security.

Fred (left) and May (right) at a fashionable Montreal restaurant that drew customers with a series of baby pigs.

The wedding day, June 30, 1962. to 13 Oct 1971

 

May left forever the working-class apartments of Park Extension and moved to the Town of Mount Royal, the English-speaking nouveau riche part of Montreal adjacent to aristocratic Westmount on the slopes of Mount Royal.

The Apartment at 37 Roosevelt Avenue

Fred found a suitable flat in the very heart of the Town of Mount Royal, near the church, tennis courts, bowling green, the fire hall and City Hall. No expense was spared in filling it with all the necessary furniture in what was called the French Provincial Style, factory made in a debased Louis XV style. Paintings and sculptures were even bought. This was all new in May’s experience, and the process of acquisition must have been one of delight and stress.

The couple was photographed by one of Montreal’s finest photographers, Arnott and Roger, and these elegant prints survive.

May and Fred had a happy life there for nearly ten years. May became involved in community and social activities that she had never dreamed of, and, in her whites, joined other ladies at such august sports as lawn bowling. Pierre Eliot Trudeau was their member of Parliament at that time and he and May became cordial acquaintances, exchanging Christmas cards, until he died. She even on a couple of occasions babysat the young Justin.

It was all very grand. But then on October 13, 1971, Fred died suddenly of heart failure. May’s life fell apart, and there was no long-term income to support life in The Town as the Merry Widow. In spite of this May clung to her elevated lifestyle, moving to a cheaper flat in the building, until the mid-1980s. By then life in Montreal had become meaningless.

 

MAY CREATES A NEW PAST IN TIGNISH

After Fred’s death, and her continued residence in Montreal, May embarked on a couple of activities to destroy or mask the nature of her origins in Tignish. First she attacked the family collection of photographs and documents, containing images of her ancestors, and several very large albums of the happy war years in Halifax. In this rampage, consulting nobody, she destroyed at least 90% of our visual heritage. If she had been able to, she would have destroyed, or re-written her family tree.

The possibility that her Benoit in-law relatives might want to visit Tignish was terrifying, and steps had to be taken to create a more acceptable image of her humble origins. To that end she had the family home completely rebuilt, and doubled its size. There was a front parlour with picture windows, two kitchens and two baths with accompanying plumbing, which had not before existed. Bedrooms were filled with basic modern furniture and all the old Victorian and Edwardian beds were tossed out. The iron kitchen stove which had heated the house and cooked all our food disappeared and electrical appliances were installed in profusion. A huge amount of money was spent on this project. The Benoits never lived in it, or even visited it, and her sister Frances, revolted by all this fantasy renovation, bought herself a small cottage which she remodelled. The humble, but tidy house that I grew up in was replaced by a dysfunctional monstrosity with no central social focus point.

 

THE NEW HOME IN ANGLO TIGNISH

In time, life in Montreal lost its allure and the rising cost of living indicated that the best solution was to return to Tignish and build a fashionable new house on the edge of the sea. There was no question of ever going back to the now remodelled house of her youth on Church Street in Tignish. It was soon sold to recoup wasted money to put up a completely new house. With Fred’s generous life insurance, she bought land next to Baine’s Creek in Anglo Tignish and after filling the new house with the contents of her Montreal flat, she was all set to dazzle the local population.

She chose to settle not far from the inlet at the Green where her Acadian ancestors had settled in 1799. She spent a lot of money on quite a few acres of land which turned out to be geologically unstable. In geological times there had been a riverbed flowing to the sea between solid sandstone cliffs, which had solidified into a loosely cemented pebble stone called conglomerate. This is what she bought in in the 23 years she lived there she saw, with growing horror, over 50% of it erode away as the violence of the storms dissolved the rock that formed the basis of her property and created a lovely pebble beach.

The house was built by local craftsmen following a standard design that was popular at the time. It had a half basement with a front door at ground level that led, through the tiniest hall, down to the basement or up into a dead space where the main hall came to an end, leading into a sitting room with a picture window looking towards the harbour, and on the other side, the master bedroom.

The facade of the house, oriented towards Tignish Harbour vista.

In practical terms the house was entered by a massive stair leading to a large platform which led directly into the kitchen.

There May lived, and over the years a social life with the descendants of her parents neighbours developed. There were card games which culminated in what was locally called “lunches” but which were really high teas served on the best china. People who, in her youth, would never have given her the time of day, now flocked to be part of this extraordinary genteel coterie.

 

At the back of the house, facing the kitchen, was a tiny dining area tightly crammed with the French provincial table and sideboard, filled with the numerous sets of fine bone china May had bought over the years. In that tight space the family would gather at least once a year for the most splendid feast. May was a wonderful cook.

A typical feast. From the left, John, Frances, Gerard’s son Larry, Reg,
Tommy (Gerard’s daughter Donna’s boyfriend at the time), May, Gerard and Susan on the right. C 1985.

 

This may have been one of the last gatherings of the siblings for the 1994 Christmas. By 1997 John would have died, and Gerard would leave us in 1999.

Frances, John, Susan, Gerard, and May. Christmas 1994.

 

It was a time of dying when I last saw May able to walk around, when she came to celebrate a birthday party held for me at Donna’s and James’ house on November 23, 2009. Gerard had died only 10 days before. Lung cancer from a lifetime of smoking had set in and May’s time with us was short. She still maintained all the formalities and was carefully dressed to give me birthday wishes. She maintained her aristocratic demeanour until the last. She had been too weak to attend the birthday supper.

May Benoit, 23 November 2009.

 

By April the time to leave had come. I went to the Alberton hospital to see her on April 15, 2010. She was an unrecognizable wraith, withered away to nothing, bones with little flesh strewn across the hospital bed. We said goodbye. The next day I received news that she had died.

May was the only one of the five siblings to understand me, and to give me encouragement as I tried to carve out a life for myself. In my tumultuous lifelong relationship with my mother, her sister Frances, May was always there to offer discreet comfort and understanding.

And after all was done, and I had read from the Book of Revelations at her funeral, in time it became apparent that her legacy would make my life, fraught with disabilities, sweeter, and more bearable, as it ran its course. She was ever kind.

 

 

In the next blog post, I will describe the life of the eldest of the five surviving siblings, Mary Frances, who was my mother.