Living On Three Continents: The Canadians Are Coming
…Sharon and Dana stood on our front step, grinning and confident. Their red cheeks shone above their rainbow sweaters. They smelt of action and adventure. Their lilting voices rang around the lupins and bounced off the dustbins…
In this wonderfully evocative article Susan Siddeley recalls the time when two young Canadian girls arrived in a Yorkshire hill village.
For more of Susan’s entertaining words please click on Living On Three Continents in the menu on this page.
“They’re coming!”
Mrs Dyson ran through the passage waving a thin blue envelope, wiping her eyes on the corner of her pinafore. The passages dividing pairs of row houses on our street were dark and narrow, but as we all did, Mrs Dyson knew every dip and flag. Despite ample hips, she fairly flew through.
And, like meteors from the west - the west of Canada - they arrived three weeks later. Two girls aged eight and ten, strong-faced, athletic and laughing, dark hair bouncing round their faces. Sharon and Dana. What kind of names were those? Their mother, Mrs Dyson’s daughter, was a war bride.
They blew into their Grandma’s house, scattering cushions, crowding into the tiny kitchen, thumping upstairs and down, disturbing cobwebs and coal dust. That’s exaggerating. There were no cobwebs in Mrs Dyson’s house, but the exploring didn’t take long.
My sister and I knew about Canada. Mum had taken us to see Rose Marie. How could we forget the red-coated Mounties and the grizzly bears? Mum still trilled, When I’m calling you, you oo oo oo - as she washed up. But when Sharon and Dana found their way through the passage and knocked on our door, it was as if Walt Disney’s paintbrush washed over our world, infusing it with the green of the Saskatchewan forest, the yellow of the prairies and the blue of Moose Lake.
In Yorkshire, we had moors and scarps, overhung with cloud, not great Rocky Mountains, squat stone houses not sprawling ranches. And although we played out in all weathers, our coats were thin, and our wellies black. Our hats had pom-poms but they were made from curly rewound wool. We played in the back lane, constructing dirt roads for dinky cars, kicking a ball or skipping with an old rope. No canoes, no rapids, no romance.
Sharon and Dana stood on our front step, grinning and confident. Their red cheeks shone above their rainbow sweaters. They smelt of action and adventure. Their lilting voices rang around the lupins and bounced off the dustbins.
“Can you come out?”
“What to do?”
“Play baseball.”
“Okay!” I ran to fetch our cricket bat and found an old tennis ball. They laughed.
“These won’t do! We’ll use ours and we brought a glove.”
Gloves for a ball game?
They meant Rounders, only it turned out corners were called bases, the thrower was a pitcher and the back lane wasn’t big enough.
“Can we go to the Rec’ Mum?”
“With Sharon and Dana? Of course, off you go. Be careful!” In the name of international understanding, anything.
In the days that followed we slogged balls, skipped to new rhymes, played with enormous dolls and read big books. When we went to tea, thanks to recipes sent by their mother, we ate sausages called wieners and patties called hamburgers, and made from mincemeat, something our mum avoided because you never knew what they put in it. Hamburgers were served with chips that Sharon and Dana referred to as ‘fries’.
Within a couple of weeks, inspired by the novelty, and the raunchy cowboy hat the girls brought for their Granddad, and in which he swaggered to the corner shop for a paper every evening, half the street was planning to emigrate.
Mr and Mrs Dyson did.
For years, panoramic Christmas cards From Across the Miles, describing lakeside cottages, snowstorms, beaver-sightings and totem poles, landed behind our door. When Mum read them aloud, we were right there, in the canoe, splashing down the rapids of the Athabasca River with Ann Blythe, Howard Keel, Mr and Mrs Dyson, Sharon and Dana.
