Aunty Vi’s broken heart
By Ivan Morgan / July 7, 2023
I have a portrait of my great-great aunt Violette Macpherson hanging over my fireplace. It’s a pastel of her done when she was 16 years old. She was a young woman with long flowing red hair. She was beautiful, from a wealthy St. John’s family, was well educated and, if photos of her are any indication, she was a good humoured and fun person.
As the oldest of my generation, I remember her; she died when I was seven years old.
Every Canada Day I think of her.
In Newfoundland Canada Day is also Memorial Day. For younger folks, Memorial Day is when we remember the slaughter of hundreds of brave young Newfoundland men during the First World War at Beaumont Hamel, France on the morning of July 1, 1916. Eight hundred men were ordered to charge German machine guns. They were slaughtered. The next day 68 were left. The rest were either killed, missing and presumed dead, or wounded. They were all but wiped out.
The population of this place back then was roughly 240,000 people. No family was untouched by this immense tragedy.
That included my Aunty Vi, as we knew her. Family lore says she had four suitors – that’s four young men who were competing for her hand in marriage, rivals for her affections. All four were killed that morning. My Mom used to tell me Aunty Vi was so saddened by their loss she never married.
That tragedy scarred an entire generation, my Aunty Vi’s but one in a sea of broken hearts.
Now Canada Day is gradually moving Memorial Day aside in public importance. There are still ceremonies at war memorials, and while this year the Premier was at Beaumont Hamel in France for a remembrance ceremony, Canada Day is gradually becoming the big event.
I have never really warmed to Canada Day. It always seemed to me a top-down type of holiday, with a government in Ottawa pushing the whole thing on us. It doesn’t seem to be springing up from the populace, like Christmas, Ramadan, Diwali or even, for that matter, Labour Day. To me it seems more like various federal government agencies organizing and paying for celebratory activities and then reporting on them to us.
Maybe that’s because I was raised by people who were Newfoundlanders before they became Canadians, and were deeply scarred by world wars in general, and July 1st, 1916 in particular.
To them Memorial Day was a solemn day, and the Forget-Me-Not, the delicate blue flower that blooms this time of year, was the official flower that Newfoundlanders wore in remembrance. That tradition is now all but forgotten. The people who raised me taught me Memorial Day was recognized in the morning, and let the Canadians do what they want in the afternoon.
They wanted me to remember, and I still privately mark Memorial Day every July 1st. They are now gone, as will I some day, and I see little sign of younger generations feeling as strongly as I do about it. Today the loss of one young life is a tragedy. Will future generations even comprehend having 700 of their own senselessly being slaughtered on the same day? Should they have to?
Maybe that’s the way it goes. The pain so overwhelming inflicted on this place over a century ago has now diminished to a shared shudder of something awful that happened in the distant past – a faint echo of anguish, getting fainter each passing year.
And each year Canada Day gets a little louder, a little gaudier, a little more popular.
I am a proud Canadian. And I do what so many of us do on Canada Day. We mark the day privately, puttering around peacefully in our gardens, hanging out with family and friends, happy to be Canadians.
I don’t have much time for all the hoopla and flag waving and tub thumping. It doesn’t seem very … Canadian.
Ivan Morgan can be reached at ivan.morgan@gmail.com