I Remember Lesley

Every Remembrance Day, I am reminded of my mom’s first husband who literally gave me life through his sacrifice. His death led to my mother and father's marriage three years later.

When I was ten, my sixteen-year-old cousin told me that my father was not my dad. Of course at ten, a girl’s daddy is her hero, so I was wounded to the core. Pat showed me proof: a small, faded black-and-white photograph that featured a woman in a wedding dress with a man in a uniform. The only thing clear was my mother’s smiling face. Proof indeed.

That night, I flung myself onto my mother’s lap, sobbing, and through my tears managed to ask her if Dad was my real father. A trace of anger flashed in her eyes; she had to have figured out who the tattler was. But she reassured me that the timing was wrong: I would have to be sixteen, not ten, to be her first husband’s child. He had died in “the war”, she explained, and they’d had no children.

The only thing I knew about “the war” was that we got Remembrance Day off and my father and his brothers always paraded. Dad told us that, when Hitler found out he was coming, the dictator gave up and ended the battle. I even believed this tale when I was really young. So my real father was never sent overseas, unlike some of my uncles. 

For many years, I forgot about the man my mother first loved. It was only when my sisters and I were packing her belongings for a move to a retirement residence that I rediscovered the photograph. This one was much larger than the copy Pat had shown me. It's sepia colored, but very clear. This time, I could see that the man my mother had married was black.

In the 2000’s interracial marriage is not a big deal. In 1944, it probably was. I know this because I, a white Canadian, married a black Canadian in 1973 and it was a big deal then. In Canada we like to pretend we’re not prejudiced, but I could disabuse you of that notion by telling you my story – however, that’s not the point here. There’s also the issue of whether or not mom’s husband was in a segregated unit or not. He may have been “allowed” to fight alongside the whites by that time because enlistments were low.

The point is, my mother never told me. She never shared a thing about her first marriage, other than that they weren’t together very long before he was shipped overseas. However, the reality of his death had finally hit me, just as my mother’s memory was fractured by dementia. 

I sent for the marriage certificate. His name was Lesley Darby. Now I could do some online research. Their union began on April 22, 1944, and poor Lesley Darby was dead by February 8, 1945. That was about all I knew. A young, handsome man, by the look of his picture, he lost his life on a nameless foreign shore.

I began to pay a bit more attention to Remembrance Day celebrations. It feels odd to give thanks to a man for dying, not only for my freedom but also for my very existence.

A few years later, the Director of the retirement residence (Mom had moved on to long term care), contacted me and said my mother had left a package behind, one that gave the history of a Lesley Darby. She’d been sent the pictures of the cemetery because Mom was a sponsor in the past. Another thing she hadn't told me.

Lesley died in the “battles of the Rhineland”, his body left cold and alone until moved to the Groesbeek cemetery in March of 1945, when all the dead were moved and buried in “friendly territory”. He was a member of the Calgary Highlanders, who held the front line at the beginning of December 1944. 

When I looked up the places on the map, the fighting must have been along the border between The Netherlands and Germany. The strip where they fought and patrolled, mostly at night, was referred to as no-man’s-land. There’s a black-and-white, grainy picture of The Calgary Highlanders patrolling on December 4, 1944. The area looks bleak and bitter. “Accounts tell of mine fields and booby traps, mud and rain, frost and snow, dead and wounded.”

Did my mother write him letters to keep him warm? I guess I’ll never know. Nor will we know exactly where he died, though the articles I have seem to imply that he was killed inside the German border and was brought back to Groesbeek (The Netherlands) for burial. I have a colored picture of his burial plot & the directions to find it. Perhaps some day I’ll go there and visit. I’ll tell Lesley Darby how odd it feels to be thanking him for his sacrifice, since I am not only grateful for freedom, but for life.

 

Sweet Baby James

A year ago, I told you about our own family mystery, where my Mom’s first husband was killed in WWII. Well, my father, her second husband James, had a role in that war, too.

When I was a little girl, my Dad told me that he signed up for the navy and went through a rigorous training to become a fearsome pilot. As soon as Dad received his wings and the word went out that he was flying “over the pond”, Hitler gave up. Naturally, since my father was a hero of gigantic proportions, I believed him. 

I’ve still got my Dad’s story to tell one day. It’s one of those novels that will probably take forever to write, a multi-generational story, mixed with my mother and mother-in-law’s tales. After the comedic mystery, that is, and the two YA novels…gotta get the short story obsession out of the way first…anyhow, I digresss. 

My Dad always looked far younger than he was, which certainly pissed off my mother. But when he was a kid, the baby face was useful for begging groceries from the corner storeowner. My grandfather was an alcoholic who squandered his initial wealth, lost jobs on a regular basis, and drank up any welfare cheques he received. As a result of the Depression and my grandfather’s own depression, my father and his six siblings were often hungry. His mother sent Sweet Baby James out regularly to blink his huge blue eyes, probably shed a few tears, and garner a can of soup or two.

It’s a testimony, then, to how desperate the military was for new recruits that they took my father’s application at face value. Surely they could tell he was no more than seventeen, since he looked about twelve. However, his older brothers were signing up, as were all his friends. When I asked my gentle, pacifist Dad (later, after I stopped believing the Hitler thing), “Why did you sign up?”, he answered, “It was a way to get regular meals, plus I had a pay cheque to send back to my mother.”

Probably the best reason anyone could have to put their life on the line, to pledge to the greatest evil a human being can commit: killing another human being. Although my Dad didn’t see it that way at first, he certainly felt blessed that, in the end, he wasn’t deployed. By then he’d seen enough of the destruction, the death, the soul damage, the maiming, that Dad was thankful. He got the respect for signing up, but didn’t have to pay the price. A complicated bunch of emotions must have gripped him at the time, though he never shared that.

In the Toronto Star this morning, I read an article on a new book called The Angels of Our Better Nature, in which author Steven Pinker claims the world is getting more peaceful. Also read an article through the Internet that the average age of our military is nineteen. I can’t verify either of these statements, but I hope for one and shake   my head at the other.

 

The Fussy Librarian

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