The CTR Anthology Page 23

  Strong woman: R.B. Bennett said nobody in Canada was dying of starvation and if he meant like Biafra kids with bloated bellies, no, not that kind of starvation. But I know one family which lost three children from hunger. Lack of food, malnutrition, then diarrhea which they couldn’t fight because they were so weak – and that to me is dying of starvation. They were my sister’s kids, and every day if Bennett is in hell I curse him a thousand times, even today, and if he is in heaven, I curse him a thousand times and wish he was in hell. I will do it until I die.

  Song: Bennett Buggy

  Get out the Bennett Buggy,

  Let’s go for a ride in the lovely countryside,

  Two horsepower, five miles an hour

  When Dobbin and Dolly get back to work again.

  Make your own Bennett Buggy,

  Put a tongue into the chassis, you’ve an oatburner classy,

  With horses pulling double you’ll have no engine trouble,

  And you’ll get back from town by next Monday night

  Oh … you don’t need no gas …

  Just slap that horse’s ass, R.B.

  SCENE THIRTY-TWO: OTTAWA TREK

  Farmer or Balladeer: I can’t remember exactly why we left that relief camp and went on strike in Vancouver, but it had something to do with chicken-shit regulations.

  Young man: I’ve never considered the Regina Riots and the box car march anything more than a skirmish.

  Farmer or Balladeer: We met Art Evans. He was a real hard nut, but he could organize. And he was doing something, and that was more than anybody else was doing.

  Young man: The communists thought they had everything going for them and really they had nothing.

  Farmer or Balladeer: He said: the only way to get anything done was to go down to Ottawa and see R.B. Bennett.

  Young man: Most of the Reds were Ukrainians and Jews.

  Farmer/Balladeer: So, about a thousand of us left Vancouver, and another thousand or so joined us along the way.

  Young man: They could change their names all they liked, but they couldn’t change the shape of their heads.

  Farmer/Balladeer: We spent one day in Kamloops, got a soup kitchen set up and tobacco passed out and it went OK.

  Young man: There were Jews, Kikes, Yids, Hunkies, Bohunks, Hoonyaks, Ukranskes, call them anything you like. They could be spotted a mile away.

  Farmer/Balladeer: We spent another day in Golden, a divisional point and the people were really nice.

  Young man: No damn bohunk is going to tell me to salute the Red Flag and sing the Internationale.

  Farm/Balladeer: Calgary was OK too. In fact, things were just going along just like free beer out of a spigot until the cpr announced they weren’t going to let us ride their freights any more.

  Young man: No Montreal Jew is going to push me around and say I have to spit on the Union Jack.

  Farmer/Balladeer: That was a laugh. Look, look at it this way. We were disciplined. Art Evans told us it had to be that way: that being polite and organized and neat even in our old duds was the way to gain public support. So I always figured the Regina Riot was what today you would call a snow job. A police riot and against us, the trekkers.

  Quiet man: I’m sorry the policeman was killed and some of our boys got arrested, and it made a lot of noise across the country, but it was a snow job. Old R.B. Bennett wanted a showdown and he got it. Guns were firing. Guess who had the guns? He wanted to discredit the trek and he did. Oh, yes, he succeeded. We were just a bunch of Reds, carrying the card. It wasn’t like that at all. We were just a bunch of ordinary guys, but Bennett stuck the label on us and it stuck. He did a lot of harm that day, that guy.

  Farmer/Balladeer: So the next year, along with dozens of boys from the Trek, I joined the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion that went to aid the Spanish Republic. Why not? Bennett had already taught us all we needed to know about fascism.

  Hobo: Too much has been spoken and written about us, and not enough, if you get what I mean. We were just a bunch of guys who got caught in the middle: the wrong war, no bands played for us. People got up in Parliament and called us Communists. Bolsheviks. One fellow said we had gone to Spain to fight for the Red Army, and Canada was best rid of us. Now, there were some Communists in with us, sure, nobody will deny that. But there were a lot, too, who just joined up for the hell of it. They were tired of bumming around the country without a bean in their pockets. But, if you take the lot of us, if there ever was a bunch in Canada at that time that had a social conscience, a unity of purpose, a sense of what was right and what had to be done to defeat wrong, then we were it. There’s no sense talking about it. Nobody remembers and I forget a lot. I remember a few names, the battles, and I remember we were treated like shit when we did get home. Here was a bunch of guys in 1939 who were the only soldiers in Canada, the only battle-tested men under modern conditions. Here we were in 1939, we were tough and we knew all the tricks, but they didn’t want us in the army, the Canadian army. We were subversives. Like the guy said in Parliament, we fought in the Red Army. That is pure bull. We were treated like rats. But we died like men.

  Salesman: Start soccer leagues right across Canada. That will get the young men out of the jungles and off the streets where they look bad for business. Get the lads out playing soccer. Then they won’t go round talking revolution.

  Strong woman: The Depression. William Lyon Mackenzie King. Sure I remember. They called him the father of Modern Canada. William Lyon Mackenzie King. Well I thought he was a rat. r.a.t.! I’ve never trusted a politician since – and I’m 85.

  Quiet man: Then there was this fellow going around Ontario with this economic theory that, if every family spent half a dollar a day more, then Canada would be able to spend its way out of the Depression. They booed him in Toronto, and threw tomatoes at him in Hamilton, and somebody threw a dead cat at him in Windsor. They sure were waiting for him in Windsor.

  Don’t rush, lads! There’s room for all of you! The army will get you off the street.

  Farm wife: There was every type. There were men out of the jungles. There was men in business suits and college kids. There was old guys just itching to get in, guys from the last war, and they was the ones who made sense. They knew how to carry out orders, how to form lines, and already they had a new look to them, straighter backs, you might say.

  Salesman (Singing:) Come on boys and join the army …

  Farmer (Singing:) I just want to get away from the wife

  Salesman (Singing:) Three square meals a day …

  Young man (Singing:) And that lousy job.

  Salesman (Singing:) No need to worry, nothing to pay …

  Hobo (Singing:) That shit of a boss.

  Salesman (Singing:) And some time tomorrow, we’re sending you away …

  Quiet man: I ain’t patriotic. I just want some good clothes and a hot shower and three decent meals a day and a few dollars for tobacco and beer, and that’s all I want.

  Salesman: For the war is sure to come …

  Farm wife: One college kid wanted to impress his girl and he was the biggest fool of all.

  Salesman: Bringing work for everyone …

  Farm wife: Who will fight the hun, hun, hun, hun.

  That morning there must have been 500 men or 1,000 lined up about three blocks of curbs away from the armoury, we housewives looked out our windows, and delivery men came and went while photographers took pictures and the men just sat in the sun, and talked. It was September.

  SCENE THIRTY-THREE: LINE UP FOR THE MAN

  Quiet man: I remember that line. We didn’t do much talking about the war and, if we had known what it was going to be like, I guess, we’d have taken off down that street like a cut cat. I remember how some of the city guys just couldn’t believe that we could live like we did on the road, in the jungles.

  Young man: Everybody got a ticket with a number on it so there’d be no muscling in on the line; you know, get in first, get the best seat, that sort of thing. If we
’d only known, we would have waited a couple of years and some of us would have missed that Hong Kong business, for sure, and Dieppe too.

  Farmer: I remember the little girls in their frilly little dresses, and the little boys too, as they went down the street past us guys to their first classes of the year at the school. And one of the guys down the line said to me …

  Hobo: They’re starting out on a new life, and so are we.

  Farmer: I remember that.

  Hobo: It was funny: lining up to get into a war to get yourself killed …

  Farm wife: Anybody who says the war wasn’t the end of the Depression just doesn’t know what he is talking about, because it was.

  Song:

  Come on boys and join the army,

  Three square meals a day,

  No need to worry, nothing to pay.

  And some time tomorrow we’re sending you away.

  For the war has surely come,

  Bringing work for everyone,

  Who will fight the hun – honey in the hive,

  A job for anyone – who’s still alive.

  Song: Memories

  Memory stains the pages

  Calling out the ages

  Time will not leave us alone.

  SCENE THIRTY-FOUR: MY SON RAOUL

  Quiet woman or Farm wife: My son Raoul came out of school in 1932 when he was 18, and that spring he sat on the verandah where we had a big swing, and I’d hear that swing going creak-creak-creak until it used to drive me mad. Raoul did that for five years, until he was a man of 23, and all the time there was no work. I don’t think he ever had a girl. I don’t know what he did. He was handsome as Jean Beliveau, and he did nothing. He was a vegetable. That’s what his sister called him, and it broke my heart. The ninth of September 1939 he joined the Canadian army. He was killed at Dieppe, the summer of 1942. He was a wonderful soldier, a very good soldier. You see, somebody wanted him. There was something for him to do.

  THE END

  Jennie’s Story

  Betty Lambert

  Born in Calgary in 1933, Betty Lambert moved to Vancouver to study at the University of British Columbia, and until her death in 1983 taught at Simon Fraser University. She was a prolific writer, whose work includes 75 plays for stage, radio and television. Her work expressed her passionate devotion to women’s issues and political justice, focusing on such topics as rape, abortion, and (in Jennie’s Story) forced sterilization. Her other works for the stage include the comedies Sqrieux-de-Dieu, Clouds of Glory, the widely produced children’s play The Riddle Machine, and a harrowing drama about sexual abuse of children, Under the Skin, which was produced posthumously to widespread critical acclaim. Jennie’s Story was short-listed for the Governor-General’s Award for Drama in 1983, and her play Grasshopper Hill won the ACTRA Nellie award for best radio drama in 1980.

  Jennie’s Story was first produced by the New Play Centre at the Canadian Theatre Today Conference in Saskatoon in October 1981.

  PRODUCTION

  Director / Jace van der Veen

  Stage Manager / Paddy McEntee

  CAST

  Sherry Bie / Jennie McGrane

  Pierre Tetrault / Harry McGrane

  Lillian Carlson / Edna Delevault

  David Ferry / Father Fabrizeau

  Laura Bruneau / Molly Dorval

  The CentreStage Company’s production of Jennie’s Story at Toronto’s St Lawrence Centre, April-May 1983, featured the following cast:

  Nora McLellan / Jennie McGrane

  Michael Hogan / Harry McGrane

  Clare Coulter / Edna Delevault

  William Mockridge / Father Fabrizeau

  Denise Naples / Molly Dorval

  Director / Bill Glassco

  Stage Manager / Sue LePage

  CHARACTERS

  Jennie McGrane, about 20 or 21

  Harry McGrane, about 35 to 39

  Father Edward Fabrizeau, about 35 to 39

  Mrs Edna Delevault, Jennie’s mother, about 48

  Molly Dorval, 15

  PLAYWRIGHT’S NOTES

  For the legal background for this play, see the Sexual Sterilization Act (Alberta, 1928), especially Section 5, which concerns “multiplication of the evil by the transmission of the disability to progeny.” In 1937, just before the time of the play, an amendment was passed, making it possible to sterilize a person without his or her consent, provided consent was given by the appropriate relative or, if the appropriate relative did not exist or was not a resident in Alberta, by the Minister of Health. This law was repealed in 1971.

  A similar law existed in British Columbia from 1928 to 1973. Also, sterilization is apparently still being performed in the United Kingdom on the “socially unfit” (see The Observer, 15 April 1981, page 6, “The Victims of Britain’s Secret Sterilisations”).

  See also the 1972 white paper on “Protection of Life,” working paper 24, chairman Francis C. Muldoon.

  The author of the poetry used in the play is Gerard Manley Hopkins.

  On page 217, the characters use a “waxing brick.” This is a brick wrapped in flannel, used as a buffer.

  The “Indian rings” referred to in the play are found in southern Alberta, and also in Saskatchewan, along the river, on buttes. As Harry says in the play, they are often found one day’s canoe trip apart. Archaeologists guess the age of the circles to be perhaps 100,000 years, and, because of the placement of larger boulders, that they were used as an almanac of some kind.

  Betty Lambert

  THE PLACE

  The McGrane farm, in the house. There is a kitchen, a porch, an upstairs bedroom. There is a door to the porch, and one to the pantry. A hallway leads to the upstairs and the front room.

  THE TIME

  1938-9

  ACT ONE, SCENE ONE

  We first see the bedroom. Jennie is lighting a kerosene lamp. She stretches like a cat. She gets out of bed unhurriedly, putting on Harry’s slippers. Then she puts on Harry’s kimono, which is much too large for her. Her hair hangs loose about her head. It is fiery, almost red, and curly; tendrils escape like halo flashes. Although her hair spreads about her face like a halo, there is nothing of the madonna in Jennie – everything she does is sensuous. She is a woman at one with her body. Now she smells the kimono, the smell of Harry. She straightens the bed covers, spreading and then folding back the quilt, ready for Harry in case he should come back to bed. Now she takes the kerosene lamp and comes down into the hall and then into the kitchen. At the entrance to the kitchen she looks at the electric switch, and then up to the bulb hanging from the middle of the ceiling. Emboldened, mischievous, she almost switches it on, then, scared, does not. She puts the kerosene lamp on the table, goes to the first of the two doors, opens it, and looks out toward the bunkhouse. Now she comes back to the range and moves the kettle to the hot part of the top. The range dominates the kitchen. It is big and black and shiny with stove blacking. It is always on. In general, the kitchen has a sense of sparse, spare, house-proud prosperity. There is a sink with a pump attached – very advanced for this time. There are electric wires running up and down the walls – hence the electric light. There is a wooden table, scrubbed bone-white. There is a big leather armchair, placed so Harry can look out the door. A book rack is beside it, with a very few old leather books. The door has two doors – in winter there is a storm door and in summer there is a screen door. Jennie lays a starched embroidered table cloth on the table. Now she goes to the pantry and brings back a tray with teacups, saucers, plates, etc. – the best china. She starts to go back to the pantry for the pie but then stops. Billy White has just died.

  Jennie: Domine Jesu Christem Rex gloriae, libera anima omnium fidelium defunctorum de paenis inferni and from the deep pit. Deliver him from the lion’s mouth, that Hell may not swallow him up and may he not fall into darkness, but may the holy standard-bearer, Michael, lead him into the holy light … Poor old Billy.

  (Now Jennie goes into the pantry to get the pie, heavy cream, suga
r, etc., all quite casually, in spite of the prayer she has just said for the dead. As she comes back, she thinks of Billy’s old dog.)

  Jennie: Poor Tuffy, poor old thing.

  (Offstage, two men are heard coming up to the porch – Harry McGrane and Father Edward Fabrizeau. The Father is in a navy blue heavy wool overcoat, black suit, and a collar. He wears slip-on rubbers over oxford shoes. Harry is wearing jeans, plaid shirt, a windbreaker, a farmer’s cap, and Wellington rubbers, which he carefully wipes on a boot scraper outside the door. As Harry comes in he takes off the Wellingtons and stands them on a piece of paper. The Father, however, goes to the table and sits. Harry peels off his windbreaker. The Father stays hot and sweaty in his overcoat.)

  Harry: (over the above) Didn’t I say she’d be ready? (laughs) Didn’t I say she’d know? Jennie always knows. She’s like an old pagan lady, my Jennie. I bet she knew before Tuffy did, didn’t you, Jennie?

  (Jennie is getting the tea ready. No sense of urgency. For instance, she warms the teapot against her own body, liking the feel of the heat, before she empties the pot and puts tea leaves in. Now she gets a bucket from the cupboard under the sink, pours some lye in, gets a rag from under the sink.)

  Harry: Oh oh, here she comes with her lye’n water, goingta wipe up your footprints, Father. Should’a warned you, take off your rubbers you enter Jennie’s kingdom.

  (Jennie wipes up the wet marks from the Father’s rubbers.)

  Jennie: (pleased) Oh, Harry.

  Harry: No, she knew before Tuffy did even. Like a cat. Cats know first, Father. Then dogs. I said to the Father, here, you watch now, Jennie’ll have something on the table for us, soon’s we come in, didn’t I, Father?