The Nova Scotia Book of Fathers Read online

  Billy’s fatal passing-out parade was recorded as a sort of movie in the mind of his best buddy. Titus was haunted by the question of why, of all people, his life was spared. Moreover, through his recent promotions he was, at this point, one of the non-commissioned officers (NCOs) blowing the whistle – a strident shriek commanding men over the top. Failure to respond to the summons meant severe punishment or even execution by firing squad. In this role he bore responsibility in sending men like Billy to their deaths. Trench warfare held many private terrors.

  Of all weapons brought to bear upon the Allied forces, Titus feared the Moaning Minnies most of all. His introduction to the devastating blasts of these mortar shells occurred at Vimy. This I learned during one of our annual homegrown New Year’s Eve celebrations.

  New Year’s Eve was always a big event at home, measured by the number of Belsnickles (Lunenburg County’s equivalent of mummers) who turned up at the door. The practice used to be enthusiastically carried out from Christmas through New Year’s Eve, and a good deal of effort went into searching out an effective disguise. By the early 1950s, the advent of television in country homes pretty much brought this ancient custom to an end. However, Father always believed in bringing in the New Year with a bang. After all, it was his birthday. Without fail he would load up around midnight, step outside no matter the weather, and fire off a couple of blasts with his singlebarrelled shotgun.

  One year he suggested to me that we could set off a really big blast in order to use up a pound or so of old black powder that he kept on hand to load his own ammunition. A twelve-year-old, I was, of course, quick to agree. Normally, making a homemade bomb would be a challenging undercover job. To have parental initiative for such a project was unheard of. Noting my mother’s apprehension, Father quickly explained that we’d play it safe and set things up down on the shore.

  So off we went, loaded down with bomb-making material, shortly before midnight. I’d heard my father talk about Moaning Minnies and speculated whether the blast would be anything like the one a Minnie would make.

  “I doubt it,” he replied skeptically, “but it ought to make a fair bit of a racket.” Then, warming to the subject, he added, “There were a lot o’ Minnies fired off at Vimy. They were shot from huge trench mortars, kind o’ like artillery, except they were fired from huge muzzle-loaders aimed high in the air. That way, they could drop right down on top of you. Wasn’t much you could do about it, except maybe pray.”

  “Did you pray much?”

  “There were times that I did, but day or night, it didn’t really matter much, you could see ’em comin’, just like giant firecrackers, trailin’ sparks and moanin’ low, kind o’ like a ghost. Wooo! Wooo! Wooo! A feller’s hair would stand right up on end, an’ you hadn’t much time. You had to figure out pretty fast whereabouts it was headed.”

  “Why was that?” I asked, out of pure ignorance.

  “Well, this was a big heavy front-line gun, except I t’ink some of ’em were rifled. And Fritz generally angled ’em to shoot high. They come in a couple o’ different sizes. But no matter what, if a Minnie was headed your way an’ caught you in the open, best t’ing to do was to flatten yourself on the ground. At times like that, the ground was your friend – get as low as you could in the mud, dirt, water, no matter what – an’ quick about it, as far from the landin’ point as you could manage before it hit.”

  Our makeshift Moaning Minnie, set up near the high-tide mark, consisted of several cans of black powder, covered with a galvanized bucket and weighted down with a large rock. Everything was going according to plan, I reckoned. Getting a head start on the celebration, a few distant shotgun blasts sounded like firecrackers. Father lit the fuse, and the two bombardiers scuttled for safety behind some nearby scrub spruce. I led the charge into a camouflaged blind that I used to hunt black ducks. On the shore below Harbourview Cemetery, zero hour, according to our timing, rang in with a resounding Whump! Not quite the tremendous blast I had been expecting, but nevertheless a respectable racket.

  Unfortunately, there was little evidence of a crater, and although the bucket bore some impressive dents, there was no sign of shrapnel wounds. True to the Moaning Minnies legend, there was a most gratifying shower of sparks. But just as well the British Expeditionary Force did not have to rely upon Titus to supply innovations in weaponry.

  New Year’s celebration, 1947, also figures high among our family’s legends. This came about on the occasion of Father’s fifty-third birthday. That year, his wife, Helen, planned a proper surprise birthday party for her husband. Accordingly, the word quietly went out to friends and relatives. However, her scheme began to unravel when she entrusted Titus to deliver a note of invitation to his cousin Olive in Lower Kingsburg.

  Father became suspicious of the dispatch he was carrying. Why was it sealed? No recipe could be that secret. Anyway, recipes and suchlike women’s matters were never meant to be hidden in sealed envelopes. It didn’t seem right. So before passing the envelope over to Olive he insisted that the contents be revealed to him. Reluctantly she did so, after which his sporadic sense of good humour rose to the occasion as he suggested that they ought to organize a surprise of their own.

  That evening, the Belsnickles arrived in goodly numbers at the Mossman household. In fact, there seemed to be a great many more than usual. Some groups came and went, as good Belsnickles are expected to do. But others just sat round drinking, and eating up all the special goodies that Mother had laboured so long to prepare for the surprise birthday party. Chief among them, of course, were the invited guests. But she didn’t know that. And where was Titus anyway? He hadn’t shown up for dinner, and without a phone there was no way of checking up on his whereabouts. My sister Carolyn recalls that Mother was fairly beside herself with anxiety. Yet there was Titus, together with his cousin Olive, each well hidden beneath the garish rig of a Belsnickle, comfortably seated with all the others in the kitchen. Eventually, their identities were unmasked, much to Mother’s relief, and the surprise birthday party was rightly deemed a great success.

  For all of us, certain events, however trivial, stand out in our memories for ready recall of our fathers. I shall always remember Father’s classic tale of how he overcame a crisis at sea:

  “There was the time on that trip we run into some pretty rough weather. It was late in the day an’ the wind come up hard just as the dories were returnin’. I put a big stew together. There was, o’ course, a couple o’ dozen men. Two table gangs. A bad cross-sea was runnin’, an’ damn if the ship didn’t get beam ends on to a couple of big ’uns … took to rollin’ so bad that the pot tipped right o’er the railin’ roun’ the stove. All o’er the galley floor, you! Sloppin’ back and forth wit’ the roll. What was I to do? Well, I grabbed the shovel out o’ the coal scuttle and shovelled the whole mess best I could back into the pot, coal dust an’ all. The men was just comin’ down the fo’c’sle ladder. But they was so beat they never noticed not’in’ a-tall. Swore it was the best stew ever! An’ I never told ’em anyt’ing different.”

  No war story that, yet typical of the sort of acts of necessity learned under war conditions. Titus functioned in the close confines of the ship’s galley with much the same quick and efficient woof and warp that drove him to solve the do and/or die issues on the Western Front. Quite apart from the element of chance, in which all soldiers firmly believe, according to survivors like Will R. Bird and Erich Maria Remarque, a great deal of skill was required to survive at the Front.

  There’s little doubt that Titus’s spartan upbringing and sea-acquired discipline served as sound basic training for the military. His was an early start in a hard and dangerous occupation, and it helped to mold him as ideal NCO material. I seriously doubt he was born a so-called “natural soldier,” deriving satisfaction in the job, and killing if he had to, provided that it was morally justified within the soldier’s terms of reference. More likely, as his nightmares and recorded actions suggest, he struggled like the mi
litary figure in so many other Canadian family histories to resolve the conflict of pride of place and position with the wastage he observed, and was from time to time called upon to execute, under soul-destroying circumstances.

  One Tiny Tomato: How Small Remembrances Become Significant

  Janice Landry

  In our haste to plenty, one can easily overlook the things that will be important in the end.

  – Basil Landry

  In the end, we are left with memories, photos, mementos, and other cherished remembrances of our dead. I found the above words, the impetus for this story, handwritten by my late father, Basil (Baz) Landry, on a sheet of graph paper tucked away in a brown, hard-shelled briefcase he owned, typical of the kind that were in vogue in the 1970s. There was a whole page of such thoughts.

  I had no clue my father wrote at all; even discovering after his passing he occasionally put thoughts to paper was a shock and an eye-opener.

  Dad likely wrote these meditations during his final year of his life, when he came face to face with death more than a few times. The frail-like quality of his cursive writing suggests he penned them during 2004-2005.

  My father died ten years ago, on May 2, 2006, nearly one year after successfully enduring a four- to five-hour quadruple bypass open-heart surgery on May 21, 2005. The year that followed his surgery was challenging: he and I were in and out of the QEII Health Sciences Centre Emergency Room (ER) in Halifax seven times in five months.

  The emergency staff, who treated us well, eventually knew us by name. In fact, I was invited by one of the ER physicians, Dr. Janet MacIntyre, who is also a friend, to appear in a video highlighting the Department of Emergency Medicine for a QEII Excellence in Research Dinner held on November 3, 2006, exactly six months and one day after Dad died.

  I was still numb from his death when I did the interview. I have only looked at it once since it premiered, nine years ago. There are deep, dark circles etched under my eyes. I had unsuccessfully tried to conceal my pain and the strain with cosmetics. Baz’s death had taken its toll.

  Slowly, my family and I have forged on. I have learned to cope and how to live life without the one person who had consistently been my biggest supporter. Watching his struggles during the final year of Dad’s life has helped me learn to never give up.

  Baz was a fighter.

  To be more exact, he was a firefighter. Landry served on the Halifax Fire Department from 1957 to 1988, rising to the rank of captain at the time of his retirement, after thirty-one years of service as a first responder.

  Breathing was a struggle for my father in the end.

  I wondered, as I sat at his hospital bedside, if the many times he ran into fires without wearing any breathing apparatus had finally taken their toll. In the 1950s, firefighters were often called “Smoke-Eaters” because they typically and often did not wear air packs. Instead, some would carry wet washcloths and press them to their faces to help combat the flames and smoke. A thin piece of material would certainly not have stopped harmful chemicals and debris from entering the lungs, time and time again.

  That selflessness is extraordinary.

  Baz Landry may have fought fires until 1988, but he fought to live and breathe right to the bitter end. I was there, in hospital, inches from his face, talking with him, reassuring him, loving him, when he took his final breath. It is an image ingrained into my psyche. I am deeply grateful I was able to be there for him. Not everyone has this chance.

  Present in his room with me at the moment Baz died were my now eighty-three-year-old mother, Theresa, Baz’s wife of more than fifty years, his brother Ken, and Ken’s wife June.

  May 2, 2006, was the most difficult day of my life. Yet I can now see there were many gifts swirling around in the loss. I could not see any light then.

  Baz lit up a room and was a quality person, who led a full life, dedicated to his family and serving his community. By all accounts, of which I have accumulated many through my work as an author and journalist, he was a solid firefighter, a great teacher, and a staunch supporter of his peers. He always sang their praises. The other firefighters were like family to him. He told me that himself.

  Dad’s 1978 rescue of an eight-week-old boy, with the assistance of his fellow firefighters, was the creative and factual foundation of my book The Sixty Second Story and its follow-up, The Price We Pay, both published by Pottersfield Press.

  I am deeply grateful for the support of my father and the first responder community. Both works are primarily a tribute to front-line workers, but secondly, they also underline and celebrate ordinary citizens who also place the lives of others before their own, for a variety of reasons.

  Ten years after his death, I now value, greatly, all the stories shared and memories made, as well as the few physical things I now own belonging to my father, including his Medal of Bravery, (M.B.), which he was presented in 1980 by the Governor General of Canada at Rideau Hall, for that hair-raising rescue of the baby.

  During the emergency, Baz Landry became a “Smoke-Eater” once again – he wore no breathing apparatus whatsoever during the infant’s rescue. He described the rescue to me only once.

  At the rear of a two-storey row house, he scaled a trellis and jumped from it, sideways, out into mid-air, and clung onto the home’s gutter system. As he hung there, he made his way hand over hand, until he was just underneath the baby’s window. My father let go with one hand to take his helmet off and then smashed out the bedroom window.

  He somehow managed to swing and arc his body up and into the baby’s room, among the broken shards of ragged glass. In the pitch-black room, he literally could not see his hands in front of his face. He crawled on his belly into the abyss searching for a crib, while his oxygen levels were running out; he was in danger and discomfort in the smoke-filled room. The fire nearly claimed his life as well as the child’s.

  Mere seconds hung in the balance.

  Baz Landry’s Medal of Bravery is my most prized possession. I am immensely honoured he entrusted it to me, his only child. It will be passed onto my daughter, Laura Dauphinee, Baz’s only grandchild, upon my death.

  My mother has also given me Dad’s gold and diamond dinner ring, which he wore every day on his right ring finger, and which I now wear when I need a part of him with me, like on days I have important presentations, I am apprehensive about something, or just need a little boost.

  For example, I wore Dad’s ring when I took a special vacation in 2012. I was in Las Vegas with girlfriends celebrating a private milestone reached by one of them. While there, I took a day trip I had always dreamed of enjoying. It was on my “bucket list.”

  I had always wanted to visit the Grand Canyon. I bought a seat on a private charter and flew with two couples from the United States, via a Maverick Helicopters tour, into the western rim of the canyon, where we had a boxed picnic lunch with a glass of champagne. We ate right in the canyon on picnic tables near the landing site.

  The flight was forty-five minutes from the Las Vegas airport out over the Mohave Desert and into the magnificent canyon. I am afraid of heights and wore Dad’s ring for emotional support. I am glad part of him experienced the once-in-a-lifetime thrill with me. Baz loved nature and he would have appreciated the spectacular and breathtaking scenery. Dad would also have admired the fact I did not allow my fear to deprive me of this opportunity.

  Besides the medal and gold ring, I also now own a number of his painstakingly handcrafted boat and ship models – he made them all to scale. They are placed around my home; his intricate balsa wood creations inspire me to pay attention to even the tiniest details, which he did at work, in his hobbies, and in his practical jokes.

  Baz was highly creative on many fronts. That was coupled with his extraordinary work ethic. He consistently completed projects in a timely and efficient manner and did his best with every task, no matter how big or small.

  Not only was Baz an outstanding firefighter, but he was also a great carpenter and loved to b
uild or repair: cars, trucks, fences, houses, motorboats, rowboats, and, later, as he got older, the ship models. The little projects eventually became bigger pastimes.

  He passed his work approach, attitude, and philosophy onto me, and I try to do the same for our daughter and my students. I am a veteran member of the part-time faculty in the Department of Communication Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax. I also work as a freelance journalist, writer, and video creator. I have held both instructor and freelancer positions since 2001. The zest for my work comes, in large part, from Baz.

  Dad tapped into and honed his creativity right up until five days before his death, when he entered hospital for the last time. It was April 27, 2006. That day, before I drove him to the ER for the final time, our daughter, Laura, and I went to visit Mom and Dad at their apartment.

  I did not know it would be the last time Laura would see her seventy-three-year-old grandfather. I took a picture of the two of them. It is the last picture ever taken of him. Fitting that he should be in the photograph with the one person he loved more than anyone. Laura was six years old in 2006 and approaching the end of grade primary. She is now in grade eleven and has grown into a beautiful young woman.

  Baz is proud of her.

  I have struggled, and still do, with the use of present or past tense when writing about my father; you will notice my tense changes, depending on the discussion and my message. My father still has an impact on my life, and the way he lived his life still teaches me, a decade after his death.