Open Writing

Before I left Canadian Pacific Airlines, I lined up a couple of job interviews and was offered two positions; one was with General Motors as a storeman, the other, as a sales representative for Salada Tea Company. I elected to take the former because it paid better, which in retrospect was probably the wrong choice. If only one could predict the future!

At General Motors I also made some life-long friends and I was able to start saving money in earnest.

After working at GM for a couple of years I just missed out on a job managing a photographic business in Regina Saskatchewan. As part of my application, I took a series of psychological tests which, when I studied the results later, showed aspects of myself that I had never recognized before. As a result, I began attending night school where I finally received excellent teaching. After three very interesting though difficult years of study I passed my school-leaving certificate.

In 1956 I took out Canadian citizenship.

My plan was to go on to university and study psychology. Maybe now I thought I would find my vocation. Fate once again stepped in.

While I was attending night school I had fallen in love with Eileen, an airline stewardess with CPA. When she realized that I was becoming serious she let me know that our future together was not to be. I became deeply depressed and even briefly contemplated suicide.

I decided quite emphatically that I was never going to have anything more to do with women ever again.

Not long after my ‘ultimate’ decision my airline friend Stanley Nisbet invited me over to his house to meet some Aussie girls who were working at the blood bank with his wife Phyllis. After a lot of resistance on my part I was finally persuaded to go to his apartment. I spent the whole evening arguing in a sometimes heated manner with Irene Pratt one of the two girls. Stan and his wife Phyllis thought that we had hit off. In fact, I was more attracted to Jan Easy the other elegant young woman and we began dating. Six weeks after this visit I proposed and Jan accepted.

Before undertaking the major step of marriage, Jan insisted that we waited a few months. Our main consideration was whether our future lay in Australia or Canada.

My parent's were pleased to hear of our engagement, particularly my mother, as she was convinced that her son was becoming a confirmed bachelor.

We continued with our respective jobs, Jan with the Red Cross Blood bank and I in the General Motors parts warehouse.

We were married on the 28th of July, 1958, at St. Alben's Anglican Church in the suburb of Richmond, with Reverend McSherry presiding.

Jan insisted on doing all the wedding preparations herself. Any help offered by my family or me was politely and firmly refused. As her family could not be there to run the show, she undertook the sole responsibility herself. A decision she later regretted.

Our wedding went off without a hitch. We took an eight-millimetre film of the ceremony and the reception to send on to the Easy family in Australia. We included an album of photographs taken by a professional photographer and copies of snaps my father had taken.

All the strain of working at the Blood Bank and doing all the wedding arrangements told on Jan's health as she became slimmer, or should I say thinner and thinner.

After the ceremony we spent the first night of our honeymoon at a motel on the way to Twin Cedars Lodge situated near picturesque Shuswap Lake in British Columbia. Unfortunately the motel was at the bottom of a hill right next to a main highway. We were kept awake all night with the constant loud whoosh of air brakes and the change of gears of every large vehicle on its way north. This lack of sleep was the final straw that completely exhausted Jan. Our honeymoon became a sort of convalescent holiday for Jan to recover from the effects of her hard work.

We enjoyed our week away with other pleasant holidaymakers, playing games, floating around on air mattresses on the lake and doing what all honeymooners do. I remember Jan turning a bright shade of pink when the little tot she was carrying into a room full of people pulled the top of her dress open and looking down said, "You got milk!"

After our week away, we moved into a huge rented attic apartment on top of an old wooden house on Fourth Avenue just off Granville. The unit was within walking distance of the hospital where Jan worked. The interior decorations were done using wallpaper and paint bought at clearance sales. We would wake up in the morning to be greeted with bunches of strawberries inches away above our heads on the sloped ceiling. The doors, windows and windowsills were painted baby-poo yellow. The only thing I remember of our landlord was a large framed photograph of him and other family members standing around his mother laid out in her coffin. Nevertheless, it suited us, as there was plenty of space for us to stretch our long legs.

© Clement 2006