A journey to the past...

Well coming home has felt distinctly like traveling, namely because 9 days after returning to Canada after a year of mad travels, and the night following my ‘surprise’ welcome home party (full with belated 30th birthday cake, embarrasing photos and stories, and about 75 people... I'm dreading getting married now that I have an idea of how much material is out there), I hopped on a plane back to England to proudly represent the Black clan at my Great-Aunt Doris' 90th birthday bash just outside of Bath. I arrived into London at 9.30pm, spent 1.5 hours clearing customs, B-lined it to Paddington on the Heathrow Express, and made the last train to Bristol at 11.30pm with a whole 5 minutes to spare. Landed in Bristol around 1.15am and was tucked into bed by about 2am. The kindly Afrikaans door guy apparently forgot to mark down my wake-up call time, and by the time I awoke and called the rels in Bath, I had missed the last transport to the party. So I ran out the door of the hotel trying to figure out what to do and flagged down the first bus I saw which miraculously was the public bus bound for Bath. Then by some equally freak miracle I managed to immediately connect with the Limpley Stoke bus that dropped me off at the bottom of this small English country-side hill. Wearing my favorite maroon skirt and my fabulous new 3-inch heels from Le Chateau, I walked the 750m up the hill in the rain to the hotel from the bus stop, while people drove by looking out with a confused look that hesitatingly said to me, 'should i offer her a lift??'. When I reached the top, everyone let out a bit of a hoorah, since almost noone knew I was coming. I also met the kind folks who passed me on the way up the hill and who turned out to be family I hadn't yet met.

The birthday celebration was a party that will be remembered for years to come, and it reminded me of some of the many incredible stories I have heard over the years through my family and in particular through the legendary Aunt Doris. Among the stories are incredible tales of heart-break, betrayal, an epic love story and adventures worthy of a Hollywood movie.

Doris is the matriarch of the Black family, and she is the last remaining member of her generation. My paternal grandfather Gordon, her youngest brother, had a stroke when I was 2 years old at the age of 64, and although he lived till I was about 16, he never really recognized me.

One of the great surprises of my life occurred about 2 weeks after his funeral as I was driving in town with my mom and one of her sisters, when she pointed to a woman on the side of the road and mumbled, 'c'est la femme de Gordo', meaning 'that's Gordo's wife'. Now of course I naturally thought my mother was a little off her rocker. After all, my grandmother Kerstin had died when I was 7. I discovered for the first time in my life that Gordon had divorced my grandmother in 1967 and had been married a second time to a woman named Natalie.

Doris and Gordon had three other siblings: Kaye and Eileen, who married and raised families in Halifax; and Bill, an RAF aerial photographer who was killed during World War II two weeks after he was married in July of 1944. Gordon was also sent away to war to join the RAF at the age of 18, and his plane was shot down over Germany a few months after he arrived. As with his older brother, no one knew if he was alive or was dead for some time. Eventually, he was able to send word that he was in a POW camp somewhere close to current-day Poland. From this camp eventually emerged the story of escape-artists digging 3 tunnels, named Tom, Dick and Harry, to break out and cause trouble for the Germans within their territory. Gordon was among those who helped to build these tunnels. In the end, he was transferred out of the prison about 2 weeks before the actual escape occurred.

If this story sounds familiar, it is because it was the subject of the heroic 1963 World War II movie 'The Great Escape' (starring Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, Richard Attenborough and many others). The plan was to free 250 prisoners, but in the end only 76 prisoners managed to escape before they were discovered, and of those, only 3 made it to safety. The rest were re-captured or killed trying to get away. Of those captured, 50 were executed en-route back to camp, a warning to those who remained.

The end of the war was unfortunately not the end of trauma for Gordon. Shortly after Germany had surrendered, he was being transferred with other POWs to another camp when the RAF struck not knowing that they were hitting their own men. Many were killed during this attack, including some family friends. A traumatized Gordon did survive and eventually ended up in England, where he visited with Doris, with whom he had kept correspondence for much of the last 3 years while he was a POW.

Doris' story is also a fascinating one. She discovered at a young age that she had a passion for sailing, but at the time, it was not normal for women to sail. Not only that, but to be a member of the Royal Nova Scotia Yacht Squadron, one had to own their own boat and a lady did not simply go out any buy themselves boats. Not to be deterred, Doris used the unique opportunity in the form of an inheritance to buy herself a sailing boat, which she named, 'Weatherall'. Now the only female member of the Yacht Squadron, she began racing and winning and has a number of regattas, trophies and cups to her name. She also got herself into the local newspaper on more than one occasion, the sole female in a sea of young men.

In the early winter of 1940, some of Her Majesty's Royal Marines were based out of Halifax for some time. One of her girlfriends had befriended one of the Officers from one of the ships and he had invited her on board for a visit. Afraid to go alone, she begged Doris to accompany her, and so the officer found another friend to join them for a double-date. That is how she met Patrick Campbell, and how one of the greatest love stories in the Black family began.

One Friday in March 1941, he received word that their ship might be sailing the following week. They were married on Tuesday. In the end, the ship stayed until the early fall and they lived with her parents during that time.

At that point, she had to figure out how to get to England. Somewhere between Patrick's naval connections, and our family connections to the Commercial Shipping industry through Pickford & Black, she managed to secure herself passage. In early 1942, in the midst of the Battle of the Atlantic, she boarded an American naval vessel bound for England with a trunk full of her belongings. On her first day on board, she made her way on to the deck of the boat, whereupon she was informed by one of the commanders that she must stay below for her own safety. She spent the remainder of the journey in stifling heat below deck with little or no access to sunlight.

When I try to picture her when she was young, the image that comes to me is of the one of her standing on the deck of this boat in the midst of the Battle of the Atlantic sailing to England, not knowing if she would ever make it there while U-Boats navigated the waters seeking their next target. I often wonder where my adventurous nature comes from, and I like to think that I got some of what she got.

She arrived in England penniless, and unable to locate her husband. When she called the barracks, they told her that there was no one there by the name Patrick Campbell. She luckily met a family friend who gave her a bit of money to get by for a few days. Eventually Patrick did get the message that she had arrived, and came to meet her.

In 1944, Doris was preparing to give birth to the first of 5 children. They had hired a taxi well in advance to bring her to a safe spot outside of the town to deliver her baby, as it was too dangerous to enter town, especially on cloud-covered days when bombers were most likely to strike. But the baby was late arriving, this was making her quite nervous because there was a shortage on petrol and she was afraid that their taxi driver was going to use up the petrol before she was ready to deliver. They called everyday to make sure that he still had enough petrol to get her safely out of town. In the end, she did deliver and the taxi was able to get her to safety, and Elizabeth was born.

When the war was over, Gordon made his way to England and spent some time with Doris and her new family. Gordon had not known the beautiful and determined Kerstin Hellstrom, whom he had met while studying law at McGill University in Montreal, for very long before he went away to war. They were both still very young upon his return. Doris recounts trying to talk Gordon out of rushing into marriage, but Kerstin's family were very favourable about the union and pushed it forward. Doris was not without reason in her concern. The two were fiercely independent characters, very witty and at times merciless. Gordon was an up-and-coming lawyer, and Kerstin was an up-and-coming socialite. They married in Halifax in 1946. The result of their union was 3 children, Pamela, who left for the West coast of Canada as early as she could, my father Bill and my uncle David. Kerstin and Gordon were known to party regularly with Halifax's elite, variously attending and hosting cocktail parties all over the city.

Every summer, Kerstin used to head to Lac Marois, Quebec with Gordon and whichever of the kids were still around to visit her family, where her parents had built a beautiful log house named Helga Hill. In the summer of 1967, my father was 17 and had secured himself summer employment and so was unable to attend the family pilgrimage. Gordon, Kerstin & David arrived in Lac Marois one day after the 14 hour drive and settled in for tea and a drink or two. Gordon eventually excused himself to run to the store to buy a pack of cigarettes. He never came back.

Days later, after much panic, it was discovered that he had driven back to Halifax and had moved out of the house they had shared for 20 years. It was also revealed that he had been having an affair for several years with the aforementioned Natalie.

I never met Natalie. She died a few years ago. I don't know if my father ever forgave his father for what he did. Being younger and a perhaps little more resilient than my father, David did befriend her, but she was never part of the 'family' that I came to know. My father's own family experience must have driven him to make sure that he did not repeat the mistakes of his parents. When he met my mother, his request and perhaps ultimatum was that she never ask him to attend a cocktail party. While we were growing up, he was away a lot on business, but few winter weekends went by that he was not taking me and my screaming brothers and whoever else up to Wentworth to ski while singing along to Mr. Mistofeles at the top of our lungs.

In some ways it boggles my mind that we are here today at all. Gordon had many close calls, and that coupled with Doris' warnings about his anticipated marriage to Kerstin make me all the more aware that its a small miracle that my family is here at all. Doris was also exposed to significant danger for several years, but persevered in the end, and has a wonderful group of kids and grandkids. Bill died without any children. I often wonder what and who they would have been like and what impact his surviving might have had on the family.

My own misadventures have only furthered the point of how lucky I am. I have survived a potentially life-threatening surgery, an attempted abduction, several not-particularly well thought out solo long-distance swims across large channels, several sky-dives, bunji-jumps, gorge-swings, rock-climbs, and bridge repels, a couple of car accidents and a particularly scary incident in Turkey.

But I am blessed by many fortunes, most importantly a wonderfully loving family. There is nothing particularly unusual about my family. But the stories from those who came before us are the stuff of legends. I hope they continue to be passed down for generations to come. I know I will do my part to keep them alive.