Written by Patricia (Pat) Simpson
As my Grandmother died five years before my birth, I remember only Kathleen's (my aunt) and Dad's stories.
Alice was an excellent seamstress who worked for a Montreal firm tailoring fine suits. Her wedding outfit was made there. She told her daughter that she spent all of her money on her trousseau, as she would have a husband to support her.
When Kathleen was ten months old, her Mother took her to visit relatives in England. She was considered brave to cross the ocean with a baby, especially as the Titanic had recently sunk.
Kathleen was not impressed when introduced to William, her brand new brother. She saw him having a bath and he wet her. She told her mother to give him to the junkman. Alice wrapped him up in blankets, but she said sadly that he was a pretty baby, who would be so cold in the wagon because it was January. K. changed her mind about keeping him.
Walking home after his first day at school, Dad threw away his pencils and books. He told his mother that he couldn't go back because he'd “lost” his supplies. She just bought more. This happened several more times.
One of Bill's first jobs gave him one morning off work. Then he and his mother liked going to a movie together. Later, when he went to sea, she attended daily Mass to pray for him.
After her death, the family found out that she had silently suffered a long time.
From Kathleen Perrault’s Reminiscences, 1979
When they were young, Alice and her sister Kate had to help out at home, as mother Elizabeth was small in stature and very frail in health. (Yet she bore eight healthy children and lived until seventy-two, a good age for those times.) From the age of eleven, Alice went to school half-time and worked half-time in a woollen mill, where the large noisy machines frightened her. No child labour laws in those days! Like most in those days, she began full time work at fourteen.
Shortly after Kate married and went to Pittsburgh, Alice came to live with brother George, whose wife Lizzie was expecting their fifth child, also George. (Their last child Winnie was born in 1915.)
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