Highlights In The Shadows: 31 - A Brief Romance
Owen Clement meets a girl who had been a regular dancing partner during his days in India. He thinks this is the “real thing’’, but disappointment awaits.
For earlier chapters of Owen’s life story please click on Highlights In The Shadows in the menu on this page..
While at Pacific Dress and Uniform a piece of satin lining I was cutting jammed in the circular cutter. I forgot to switch of the machine and as soon as I freed the material the blade began to spin again, pulling down the material I was holding. My instant reaction of pulling my hand upwards almost certainly prevented me from losing it. I had sliced through an artery and a tendon. Unable to use the cutter I became company’s receiver and dispatcher.
I happily resigned from Pacific Dress and Uniform in 1950 to join my father in his colour photographic business where we used the newly perfected Dye Transfer process. Colourgraph Laboratories handled freelance work for fashion and food magazines and designed labels for food manufacturers. After only a year of operation, new work dried up as our customers were able to rearrange and reuse the images we had photographed earlier. Sadly, Dad was forced to dispense with my services.
A few months after my leaving, my father closed his business and began working for Canada Chain, which was much more his line of work. During his very successful period with that company, one of his inventions was successfully patented and manufactured.
At about this time, Fay, a regular dancing partner of mine from the Railway Institute in Kharagpur, came from Kalamazoo, Michigan, to Vancouver for a short visit with her parent's and sister. Fay and her family had migrated to Kalamazoo to join her elder sister who had married an American air force engineer that she had met while he was stationed at an airbase near Kharagpur.
After my luckless affairs with Canadian girls, I found Fay fun and easy to relate to. As far as I was concerned, it was 'the real thing.' I am sure that Fay and I fell in love with nostalgia, rather than each other. We kissed passionately and planned on getting married.
When her brief holiday ended, I travelled with her and her family by train to Kalamazoo for a short holiday. It was an enjoyable visit catching up with my old friends, especially Fay’s father Harold, the man who called me “Winston”.
On my coach trip back to Vancouver I stopped off in Minneapolis and spent a couple of enjoyable days visiting my shipboard friend, Frank Cornelius and his family. Frank, one of the teenagers on the Empress of Scotland and I had corresponded ever since our voyage from India together.
The non-stop bus trip across the top of the United States from Minneapolis back to Vancouver gave me the chance to meet everyday Americans. I found them generally good-natured and gregarious. They helped make my three-day trip back to Vancouver seem shorter and less exhausting.
After my return, Fay and I wrote to each other almost daily. I missed being with her and being unemployed, I decided to move to Toronto where I could be nearer to her and where job prospects appeared to be better than Vancouver.
As the weeks passed, and my departure date for Toronto neared, Fay's ardour cooled. Her letters became less and less frequent. By late-December, when I boarded the train in Seattle for Toronto, I sadly realized that our romance was over. Unfortunately though, it was too late for me to change my plans. I decided instead to break my journey and revisit Frank and his family in Minneapolis. At Frank’s family’s insistence I spent a very pleasant Christmas with them.
It was the coldest weather I had ever experienced at the time (it went down to 50 degrees below zero Fahrenheit). Once the Christmas and New Year’s celebrations were over, I caught the train to Chicago where there was a delay of a few hours before the next train to Toronto.
During my stopover I decided to visit Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. Unfortunately the cab driver conned me out of sixty dollars for the fare, making a large hole in my savings. My return train fare to the station from the museum cost me a mere dollar fifty.
When I boarded the train for Toronto that evening, I found myself in a segregated ‘Blacks only’ compartment. Being a commuter train, there was not a single seat available. The other passengers appeared to be uncomfortable with my presence at first and covertly watched me to see if I showed any adverse reaction to being the only white person there. I ignored their looks and casually sat down on my suitcase in the aisle. When a seat did become vacant, a heavily built young man invited me to sit next to him. He knew, he said, that I was not a fellow American. He and I soon struck up a congenial conversation on the merits of living in Chicago.
I remember Chicago as a beautiful city with wide areas of parkland running between the whole length of the inner city and the shores of Lake Superior.
© Clement 2006
