One Hero

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I wrote this for my students. The prose is pretty clunky in places, but it's a story I wish to share on this Remembrance Day.


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My mother's father, Bertie, was born near the village of Saham Toney, Norfolk, England, in 1888. I donʼt know anything about his childhood, because I never asked and he never volunteered to talk about it. It appears that he was born on a farm of sorts, and Iʼm pretty sure the family was poor.

As a young adult, Bert emigrated to Canada, settled in Edmonton, and became a baker by trade. He signed up for the army in 1914, at the outbreak of WW1. At one point during training, so the story goes, the men were lined up and asked if any among them were bakers. Bert stepped forward, an action he regretted for the rest of his life. He was assigned to be a baker for the troops on the front lines of Normandy. The “boys”, as they were called, wanted action, and Bert would never see action as he tended his ovens and made bread for soldiers. Being a baker might well have saved his life, of course, as so many thousands of men died in the trenches of that terrible war.

He told a story about Christmas on the front lines, when both sides lay down their arms and the Germans came over to eat and drink with the British and Canadian troops. Bert baked bread for them all. The next day, they were back to aiming bullets at each other.

Shortly after the war, while taking a leave in Maidstone, England, Bert met a pretty girl named Beatrice. She was a lady's maid for a wealthy family on vacation there. The two hit it off, apparently, as they married fairly soon after. Bert returned to Canada with Beatrice as his bride, one of many, many “war brides” - women who met soldiers serving overseas from Canada, and who then moved to the new country with their new husbands. Beat and Bert came all the way to Vancouver.

They never told me about it, but now I can imagine that voyage taking weeks and weeks, first by ship across the Atlantic Ocean to Nova Scotia, then by train across a country that must have seemed endlessly, astonishingly vast. They built a house on Pender Street, near Nanaimo. It is still there, and looks much like it did when I was a kid, a narrow house with a low basement and a room in the attic. The wood siding was painted pale green on the top half of the house and dark green on the lower half. Beat put a big vegetable garden in the back, and Bert planted an apple tree that bore yellow apples perfect for making pies.

Bert opened a bakery, the Vancouver Crumpetry, where he devised a method of making potato chips using Beatʼs ringer washer to rinse the sliced potatoes. His were the among the first chips available in Vancouver, long before the days of Lays and mass production. Bert and Beat had a baby girl in 1920, Peggy, my mother. Two years later another daughter, Renee, was born. They were a typical working family in the 1920s, just affluent enough to buy a Model A Ford, a luxury for most families, but necessary for the bakery's deliveries.

In 1929, disaster struck the world as stock markets crashed and a world-wide economic depression began, lasting throughout the 30s decade. The Crumpetry was depression-proof enough, it seems, for the family ate and worked and kept their home. There is a story about a young boy who would come around to ask for work, his family being desperately poor. Bert recognized ambition in the boy, and took pity on his family; he didn't really need the help, but gave young Harry Rankin a job and all the day-old bread his family could use. Harry grew up to become a well-loved, long-term Vancouver city counsellor who never forgot what Bert had done for him. Near the end of his career, Harry contacted Bertʼs daughter Renee and invited her to a celebration in which he honoured her for the kindness Bert had extended to his family in their desperate hour.

There was a dark side to Bert. He was an alcoholic. He would go downtown to the legion to drink beer with his cronies and come home roaring drunk. My mom told me stories of her and her sister hiding under the bed while he screamed at Beat. I have heard hints of Bert's physical violence towards Beat, but no one would tell me explicitly if that happened. Family secret.

The grandfather I knew still liked his beer. Occasionally, he would still go downtown and arrive home in a cab, stumbling through the door late at night. But he was never anything but gentle around me.

Bert had a tiny glass mug for me when I was little, which he would fill with beer foam for me to taste. He taught me how to roll his cigarettes with his cigarette-rolling machine, and though I wouldnʼt advocate now involving kids in anything to do with cigarettes, doing that job - he made sure to let me know I was most excellent at it - gave me a sense of competence and usefulness, the value of which I still feel. I knew I had a special place in his heart, as he had in mine.

Bert ended up with cancer in his bones, discovered only when he broke his arm in a fall on a drunken evening. Life seemed to fade from him within days of that incident. I was 14 years old when he died, and I remember sitting alone with my grief on the lawn of Shaunessey Hospital, his voice in my ears, and the memories flying past.

Bert was an ordinary man who did some good deeds in his life and marked the world in subtle ways. The deep faults running through him demonstrate to me that you donʼt have to be perfect to be great. He stands among the best as my hero.



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