The money at the hospital is decent, so I won’t be putting in for a clinic job anytime soon. Anyway, I still like the bustle of the hospital. It’s right in the middle of everything here and as crazy as the city. So many people, so many stories. When I first arrived, I thought everyone might speak French and that I’d be forever struggling to take notes from French specialists. As well you know, my spelling is rather atrocious – and sadly so it proves in French, too. I fudged my way through the interview with feeble school French and it was such a fluke they picked me up because officially, all the hospitals here are either French or bilingual. I was sure it would be just a matter of time until someone called my bluff and likely as not, it would come out in the middle of an emergency triage, some poor child’s life dangling and my incomprehension making a mess. But it seems not. Half the nurses at the General are as bad as me and the first question every single doctor asks is, Do you speak English?
I hope you aren’t too scandalized by all this. It might not be quite how you imagined this chapter of my life working out, but it’s your grandbaby, so I thought I should let you know how it is growing, and how I am, too.
I haven’t come up with a better word than it so far. He or she seems presumptuous and I don’t fancy cutesy pet names at this stage. What did you call me before I was born?
It’s taken some thinking but I might have a solution for the birth. Not the General, at any rate. I couldn’t face that. So, I’ve been asking around for other options. Margaret – she’s one of the girls in the flat – is active with the women’s movement on campus. She’s still a student herself – politics and art history – isn’t that a great combination? She told me about a place in the woods where girls can go to have their babies. Not a Catholic home for unwed mums or delinquent girls or anything. It’s really wholesome. A few families have built cabins by a lake and they are farming there, or at least gardening, and they welcome anyone who needs a place, and they look after you when your baby comes. She says they are amazing. A couple of McGill girls went there last year. I think I’ll look into it. My job won’t last too long at the hospital once the matron finds out the real reason for my snoozes, and I don’t want to skive on rent here with the others. I’m not coming home. I don’t say that to hurt you, just to be honest about how things are. I came over here and I got myself into this … I was going to write mess, but I can’t. I’ve got to keep my words precise and language like that isn’t loving and it isn’t positive and I can’t bring a baby into the world in that frame of mind.
I’m going to end here because I need to head home and forage in the fridge for some dinner. It’s my turn in the kitchen tonight and I promised them something better than tinned to-may-to soup. See, I can even talk Canadian now. I miss you both and I’ll write more soon.
Lots of love,
Felicity
* * *
Montreal, February 1969
Dear Mum and Dad,
The weather is still cold. I’ve been absolutely living in that mohair wrap you sent over for Christmas. Again – thank you. The colour is perfect. Like East Lothian daffodils against the old drab snow of Montreal. At Christmas, there was romance to all that white, but now it’s stale, scrubby grey and it’s hard to feel inspired. I haven’t seen the ground outside my building since November. Some of the doctors come into work in parkas with fur around their hoods. Wolverine, apparently, because it won’t freeze regardless of the temperatures. Others wear black fur hats, something between a tea cosy and a Russian officer’s hat. They are the senior doctors and don’t even speak to the junior nurses except about patients, and hardly then. The students who come around to our flat all wear camel duffel coats with floppy hoods and toggles and most wear black galoshes zipped over their shoes. They leave these in puddles by our door and they drape their coats over the radiator or on all the kitchen chairs. The students themselves pile into the living room with Jenny and Margaret, spreading out newspapers, smoking like forest fires and arguing about the salvation of Quebec. The air grows rank and it all sounds foreign and zealous and strange, but I’m happy here. I feel I’m settling into something entirely new.
The light here is amazing. Cold and white and blue. New snow brightens everything, and then there are layers of reflections – neon and shop windows and all the cars. The snow piles up in high banks along the streets and on the spiral staircases outside apartment buildings. From my window, the fire escape looks both laden and lightened with all the snow. The city trucks come by and scatter salt on the pavements to melt the ice, but they call them sidewalks here like the Americans, or les trottoirs. Mincing along, trying not to slip, I think of pigs’ feet. I read in the paper that there’s talk of heating them from underneath so that the snow will melt on contact. Isn’t that crazy? Very space-aged, like so many things here. Since the Metro system was built, there have been extensive expansions underground, so it’s like a brand-new city just under the surface. Shops and restaurants, even a church and a discotheque. Imagine all that under Princes Street!
Despite the cold, there is so much life in this city, so much feels just about to happen. And I love the mix of people. The whole world is here, all bundled up in a thousand layers against the freeze. French and English, obviously, and a fair number of Scots among the mix. But black people, too, with fantastic French accents, and Hungarians and Jews and even Chinese. I hope to go down to Chinatown soon to try one of the restaurants Jenny keeps talking about. I’ll let you know all about it when I do. I wonder if foetuses like ginger.
Did I write to you about Expo? I know I sent the book about it, but I can’t remember what I told you. Probably not much. I know I didn’t write much when I first arrived – I’m sorry for that. Everything was so new and I was so ready to be far from home, but I should have been better at writing. Anyway, Expo was amazing. Space-age for real, with real Apollo capsules and an American astronaut suit. I first went with Jenny a month or so after I moved into the flat. We took the Metro and stood all the way to Île Sainte-Hélène, which is an artificial island made of earth dug out from the Metro tunnels and deposited in the middle of the St Lawrence River. Then everything was built on top – all the buildings of the world. I loved the American Pavilion. A 200-foot geodesic dome covered with a shiny acrylic skin. Dad would love it: a great clear bubble filled with spacecraft and Raggedy Ann dolls, Andy Warhol prints and totem poles, cowboys and neon, and Elvis Presley’s guitar. Pure poetry. The Americans hated it. Not enough about technologies and arms, not enough about trade. Instead, it was all American imagination and so beautiful in its glorious gaudy way. But more than the exhibits, it was the space itself that I loved. A shining bubble floating above the island, the light shimmering in triangles. It was honeycomb and patchwork quilt and crystals and constellations all at once. A mini-rail train ran right through the building, and giant escalators climbed to the very top. Everywhere you looked, there were people moving, bright colours, and a sense of beautiful space.
Everyone came to Expo. All the languages in the world on one little Canadian island. Like the war was finally, finally over, and everyone was together in a place that was new and glowing.
It was all supposed to close at the end of October and all the countries were to pay for the individual demolition of their pavilions. But the powers that be changed their mind and opened it up again this summer. Renamed it, too. Couldn’t very well be Expo ’67 in perpetuity. Now it’s ‘Man and His World’, which ticks Jenny off no end. Margaret, too, but Jenny is louder. All this mind-expanding globality, she says, and they go for the archaic misogynistic tag. I can’t say I’m bothered, but she is, so we hear about it continually. It’s even worse in French, she says. ‘La Terre des Hommes’. And just when do we get our world, she asks over porridge and tea, waving her spoon about histrionically. I shrug and she says I’ve been brainwashed by the patriarchy and need to wake up, but I say I’m tired out by ten-hour shifts and a growing lump of humanity in my belly and I don’t feel excluded by an historically accepted inclusive noun. She’d prefer ‘Humanity’s World’, which suffers poetically, but maybe equality has