Myrna..

My youngest sister, her husband and their daughter have been travelling through Canada for the last month...Before they left I told my sister I'd send on the addresses of friends I knew when I lived there in 1975.

 

 I was 23 at the time. I’d left home early in '74 and gone to England to work and travel when the chance to visit Canada came up. Through a friend of a friend I found myself on a plane to Calgary.  We caught a couple of buses south and spent Christmas and New Year on a snowbound farm near Pincher Creek in the prairie lands of Alberta... I remember the night I went with Joe to check on a cow that was due to give birth ...He shone the torch on a creature with wild eyes and a quivering,pudgy hole, lying in snow in a paddock next to the barn. A little while later he went away and brought back a set of chains to hook on the thing that was poking out of that hole.. I never forgot how brutal the contraption looked nor how hard Joe wound the handle before the bag of calf slipped out.

While my friend went back to London I stayed on an extra week and during that time decided I'd try and get a job. Canada felt more like home than England did. Because Joe had connections at the Separate Schools Office in Calgary he and Teresa had an idea that I might find work at a school in that city. I went back to the flat in Battersea, packed up my things and flew to Canada.

I needed a work visa and went to the immigration office in   downtown Calgary to fill out a form...First up I was knocked back.  I wasn’t altogether surprised.   It was presumptuous to think I could just turn up with my passport and expect to get one. However, the man from the school board's office, the friend of Joe's wasn't surprised he was annoyed. An unqualified masseur from Germany who'd applied on the same day had been accepted. How did he know that? As I write this now I remember that it was me who told him. While we were sitting together waiting, the girl mentioned that she had no training for the job. The fact that an Australian teacher- for whom he'd guaranteed work -had been refused a permit angered him. I stood outside his office while he made a phone call, then walked back to the immigration building and took a typing test. Two hours later I had a paper in my hand that proved I had secretarial skills and was welcome to stay. The following Monday, I sat at a desk in the technology wing of the Bishop Kidd Junior High and looked out on a class of grade 8s. They were fooling around and though the teacher clapped his hands and told them to sit at a desk and work on their own they chose not to.  Instead they huddled around the book shelves and kept on talking. Mr Wojtkiw gave up and focussed his attention on the few students who did as he asked. Why do I remember what happened in the library that day? Because the first day was the same as every other day I was there. The kids ran the show. The school followed a curriculum based on a thesis the principal had written for his Ph D.  Each week visitors came to the school to see how the Individual Learning Program worked.

 It fell to the vice principal Stan Cecchini to keep up the façade of its success. Just before the visitors were shown around he’d do a lap of the school. The door would be flung open and he’d walk in.  All he had with him was a sentence but it was a sentence of power- and fear. "DUMMY UP YOU GUYS OR THERE’LL BE SOME HEADS ROLLING!!" When I first heard him shouting it I half expected a head to come rolling by my chair to prove how serious he was.    Kids went back to their desks and looked hard at their notes. No one said a word. A few minutes later the principal-whose name I’ve forgotten! - would come in and sweep through the room with the entourage in his wake.. Very good very good. And out they'd go.
The quiet lasted a few minutes then things would be as before.  It was a farce.   


What made my time at Bishop Kidd memorable though was the fact that I met Myrna. She was about my age and whilst I typed and kept an eye on class attendances, Myrna worked as a tutor with some of the students. She rolled her eyes whenever Cecchini came in and just kept on with what she was doing. He’s a jerk she’d say. Forget him.

 

Myrna was bright. She’d gone to uni when she was 15 or 16 and studied political science and was now doing her Ph D.    Myrna was vegetarian and owned a green sports car although that seemed a bit at odds with the sort of life she was living . The car went to school in the morning and home in the afternoons. . On the weekends she told me she didn't do much. The car looked like part of a life she didn't quite have. For much of her childhood she'd been ill and couldn't go to school. Books were her friends.. She knew about Borges and Hesse and raved about a French philosopher called Bergson from the 1920s. She told me I should read him. Myrna also told me she'd been married but that the whole thing had been a mistake. She seemed to know a lot about feminism. Men fell into two groups.. Those so dumb they weren’t worth bothering about –and we were surrounded by this lot at school- or the other group for which she had no name. Myrna gave me the impression that these males were so rare she’d never come across one. I knew they were real though.  When I told her about the boy I liked, really liked who lived in the house where I was staying Myrna listened thoughtfully then told me I had only one option.. I could jump him and that’d be that.

 

 

Myrna was good to talk to.  I told to her about how I felt being so far from home when my dad‘s cancer had returned and she seemed to understand.  Myrna had a sadness in her for which she had no words.

 

 Early in July when the school year had ended, I decided to leave Calgary and make my way back to Australia through the US.  Letters from Teresa and Myrna were waiting for me when I arrived home but it took a while before I could write back.

 

 When I did it was to tell them my dad had died. 

 I got married  and moved to the country and the correspondence fell away.  Now and again I’d think of getting back in touch but it just didn't happen.  

Last week when my sister was due to reach Alberta, I looked up those names from my Calgary days.  I found Joe and Teresa's phone number and even their farmhouse on Google earth as well as the name of the boy I’d liked at the time.. He’s living about 10 blocks from the house where we both stayed!    I typed in Myrna’s name  and found a reference to a book she'd written on Bergson.

There was another link too. Still in Calgary but this time not to a street address or a white pages connection. With one click I was taken to a funeral home and to a list of names under the heading Memorial Trees- planted 1999.   She’d have been about 50. Dear Myrna. What happened?  I could only see her aged 24 driving off by herself in that amazing green car.