The Tin Flute

 

The story takes place in Montreal, principally in the poor neighbourhood of Saint-Henri, between February 1940 and May 1940, during the Second World War, when Quebec is still suffering from the Great Depression.

Florentine Lacasse, a young waitress at the "Five and Ten" restaurant who dreams of a better life and is helping her parents get by, falls in love with Jean Lévesque, an ambitious machinist-electrician. Wanting to satisfy his withered ego, he agrees to date Florentine. Quickly tiring of the relationship, Jean introduces her to a friend, Emmanuel Létourneau, who is a soldier on leave. Emmanuel falls in love with Florentine. Despite this, Florentine's attraction towards Jean will have important consequences in her life. A parallel thread in the novel is the Lacasse family life, made difficult by their poverty.

 

The Tin Flute (original French title Bonheur d'occasion, "secondhand happiness"), Gabrielle Roy’s first novel, is a classic of Canadian fiction. Imbued with Roy’s brand of compassion and understanding, this story focuses on a family in the Saint-Henri slums of Montreal, its struggles to overcome poverty and ignorance, and its search for love.

A story of familial tenderness, sacrifice, and survival during World War II, The Tin Flute won both the Governor General's Award and the Prix Femina of France. The novel was made into a critically acclaimed motion picture in 1983. It was originally published in French as Bonheur d'occasion (literally, 'secondhand happiness'), which represents the character's sense of rebound love in the novel.

Roy's first novel, Bonheur d'occasion (1945) gave a starkly realistic portrait of the lives of people in Saint-Henri, a working-class neighbourhood of Montreal. The novel caused many Quebecers to take a hard look at themselves and is regarded as the novel that helped lay the foundation for Quebec's Quiet Revolution of the 1960s.

The original French version won Roy the prestigious Prix Femina in 1947. Published in English as The Tin Flute (1947), the book won the 1947 Governor General's Award for fiction as well as the Royal Society of Canada's Lorne Pierce Medal.

Distributed in the United States, where it sold more than three-quarters of a million copies, the Literary Guild of America made The Tin Flute a feature book of the month in 1947. The book garnered so much attention that Roy returned to Manitoba to escape the publicity.

 

©2016 Linda Sullivan-Simpson
The Past Whispers
All Rights Reserved

Stanford Friends and Family Letter Project

 

By VJ PERIYAKOIL, M.D.SEPT. 7, 2016

Over the last 15 years, as a geriatrics and palliative care doctor, I have had candid conversations with countless patients near the end of their lives. The most common emotion they express is regret: regret that they never took the time to mend broken friendships and relationships; regret that they never told their friends and family how much they care; regret that they are going to be remembered by their children as hypercritical mothers or exacting, authoritarian fathers.

And that’s why I came up with a project to encourage people to write a last letter to their loved ones. It can be done when someone is ill, but it’s really worth doing when one is still healthy, before it’s too late.

It’s a lesson I learned years ago from a memorable dying patient. He was a Marine combat veteran who had lived on a staple diet of Semper Fi and studied silence all his life. A proud and stoic man, he was admitted to the hospital for intractable pain from widely spread cancer. Every day, his wife visited him and spent many hours at his bedside watching him watch television. She explained to me that he had never been much of a talker in their 50-plus years of marriage.

But he was far more forthcoming with me, especially when it became clear that his days were numbered. He spoke of his deep regret for not having spent enough time with his wife, whom he loved very much, and of his great pride in his son, who had joined the Marines in his father’s footsteps.

One afternoon, when I mentioned these comments to his wife and son, they looked incredulously at each other and then disbelievingly at me. They thanked me for being kind but stated that my patient was incapable of expressing such sentiments.

Continue reading the main story…

 

Stanford Friends and Family Letter Project

 

©2016 Linda Sullivan-Simpson
The Past Whispers
All Rights Reserved

Life On The Home Front: Montreal 1939 - 1945

The Second World War came hard on the heels of a devastating Depression in which families struggled to survive. Life on the Home Front paints a poignant portrait of a city coping with the demands of war. Montrealers, along with other Canadians, were being asked for more sacrifice but this time it would include sending their sons,brothers, fathers and husbands off to war.
Montrealers had to "Use it Up, Wear it Out, Make it Do, and Do Without" as one slogan cautioned, and this they did. Many women went to work for the first time and often enjoyed the heady success of doing "a man's job"and earning a regular salary.


Life on the Home Front describes how dissent was also an ever-present reality. Montreal was often awash with anti-war banners and angry speeches which kept the police and journalists busy. Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King had to walk a fine line in keeping the country together and united at a time of grave crisis.

All was not gloom and doom, however. Servicemen passing through Montreal as well as locals could enjoy the most vibrant nightlife in Canada. The cozy relationship between city officials, the police and the owners of "disorderly houses" as well as the shady characters who ran gambling establishments gave the name "Sin City "to Canada's metropolis.

(c)2016 Linda Sullivan-Simpson
The Past Whispers
All Rights Reserved

They Were So Young: Montrealers Remembering WWII

These gripping stories of young men and women who served in the army, navy, and air force during World War II are a testament to the raw courage, youthful bravado, camaraderie, and sacrifice needed to defeat a powerful enemy. Many who returned from the theatre of war were never the same again. Moving accounts by family members relate the impact the war had on their lives - the pain of losing a son, father, brother, or husband, and the welcoming of war brides into the family.

This is history that must never be forgotten.


©2016 Linda Sullivan-Simpson
The Past Whispers
All Rights Reserved

Quebec’s Secret Meat Pie – Cipaille

 

BRYSON, Que. — Ivan Saunders stood in the kitchen at the Lions Club, filling a metal bowl — a particular metal bowl, so big you could bathe a dog in it — with cups of flour and bricks of lard. He started to spoon in baking soda, then paused, nodding at one of the dozen other cooks.

“Would you —”

The cook walked to the kitchen’s electric panel, opened it and squinted at the faded label stuck to the inside of the panel door. Then he barked out the number of tablespoons of baking soda required and Saunders, 80, went back to mixing, spraying flecks of lard and flour onto his shirt.

Decades earlier, an old man who cooked at the logging camps in northern Quebec saw Saunders struggling with the dough and passed on his recipe. Ivan used a blue pen to scratch a few numbers and letters on the electrical panel as a reminder — more a code than a recipe. Those numbers have served ever since as the only written instructions guiding this contingent of amateur cooks in their summer ritual. They guard it carefully, always cognizant of their rivals in neighbouring towns.

Here, in Bryson, Que., a village of 647 people, west of the Gatineau Hills along the Ottawa River, the long weekend in August is reserved for the picnic. It is a festival with one purpose: to honour an extraordinary, endangered meat pie.

- See more at: http://news.nationalpost.com/features/inside-a-quebec-summer-ritual-devoted-entirely-to-cipaille-an-obscure-meat-pie-with-mysterious-origins#sthash.2pAiBCuy.dpuf

 

Enjoy!

 

©2016 Linda Sullivan-Simpson
The Past Whispers
All Rights Reserved

Atwater Market

 

 

Atwater Market is a farmers' market located in the Little Burgundy area of Montreal, Canada. It opened in 1933. The interior market is home to many butchers and the Première Moisson bakery and restaurant. 

The market's Art Deco building was designed by architect Ludger Lemieux, working with his son, Paul Lemieux. It is located on Atwater Street, near the Lachine Canal and the Lionel-Groulx Metro station, as well as Greene Avenue. A pedestrian bridge, which can also be used by bicycles, connects the market to Saint-Patrick Street and to a bicycle path in Pointe-Saint-Charles on the other side of the Lachine Canal.

The presence of this bridge explains the popularity of this market with bike riders, who often stop there, and greatly contributes to the great summer ambiance of the area. The bike path travels from the Old Port of Montreal to the Lachine Marina and is owned and maintained by Parks Canada.

The market is named for Atwater Street, named for Edwin Atwater (1808–1874), a municipal alderman of the district of Saint-Antoine. The street was named for him in 1871.

Builders

Ludger Lemieux
1872 - 1953

Born in West Farnham in the Eastern Townships, Lemieux studied at McGill University and worked in Montreal. He was associated for some time with Joseph-Honoré-MacDuff (1869-1918) but, in 1931, began working with his son Paul, with whom he designed the Atwater Market.

He was also responsible for the Tooke Brothers factory, the Workman Building, the Sainte Irénée Church (next to Atwater Market), and other buildings in Saint-Henri, including the fire station (no. 23) and the Saint-Zotique Church.

 

©2016 Linda Sullivan-Simpson
The Past Whispers
All Rights Reserved

Little Burgundy

 

In 1887, Sainte-Cunegonde (now familiarly referred to as Little Burgundy) started playing host to the majority of Montreal’s black community. This working class neighbourhood generated as a result of nearby industry along the Lachine Canal. Important railway lines also ran close to the municipality and recruited the American black community to serve as porters on its trains. Immigrants were mostly attracted from New York and Washington.

Gradually, the neighbourhood welcomed Afro-Canadians (from Ontario and the Maritimes) and those from the Caribbean, too. Women were mostly hired to perform domestic work. After two waves of immigration - at the end of the nineteenth century and during the First World War - Caribbeans represented close to 40% of Montreal’s black community and most of them chose to live in Little Burgundy.

Human rights movements characterize the history of Little Burgundy. In 1902, a social club was founded to create a sense of mutual responsibility between its members; this Women’s Coloured Club of Montreal helped to resolve lodging problems and encouraged exchange and donation to provide for those less fortunate.

Betterment of social conditions again spawned two other groups: Union United Congrational Church in 1907 and Negro Community Center in 1927. In 1919, a final organization, Universal Negro Improvement Association, adopted the mandate of restoring dignity, ending social isolation, and helping with the material needs of families.

People came to this area in hopes of a better future and yet had to be patient for three decades before certain rights were guaranteed. The general misery of factory work, the poor working and living conditions and the poverty affected the black community more given very present racism and discrimination.

Fortunately, those social groups and the subsequent closeness of the community overcame the threat of overwhelming hopelessness. Instead, their hope was often manifested in the form of music. Jazz was introduced to Canada through the influence of gospel singing and the importance of native songs to the Afro-Americans.

 

Atwater Market was the border between Saint-Henri and Little Burgundy.

The neighbourhood gave the world jazz legends Oscar Peterson and Oliver Jones.

Peterson was born to immigrants from the West Indies; his father worked as a porter for Canadian Pacific Railway. Peterson grew up in the neighbourhood of Little Burgundy in Montreal, Quebec. It was in this predominantly black neighbourhood that he found himself surrounded by the jazz culture that flourished in the early 20th century.

Oliver Theophilus Jones OC,CQ (born September 11, 1934 in Little Burgundy, Montreal, Quebec) is a Canadian jazz pianist, organist, composer and arranger.

 

©2016 Linda Sullivan-Simpson
The Past Whispers
All Rights Reserved