Some time after the war ended and things were settling into place in Holland my brother Jaap emigrated to Canada, as farmland was still very hard to come by. That went well so I wanted to emigrate too. About two weeks before I was to be granted permission, I told a friend of my plans and he laughed at me and said I would never be approved because of my arm.

I decided then to take all of my military papers with me which showed that I served in the army for 3 years and more than 1 ½ years overseas and earned several commendations. At first, I failed the test but after they had discussed it together, they agreed to give me the stamp of approval based on my army papers, and that is how I was successful in being approved to emigrate.

I sailed on the Groote Beer from Rotterdam to Quebec City and then took the train to Toronto. My brother Jaap must have picked me up there and then took me to stay with him and Tante Riek at their place in St.Catharines. I found a job quickly at the same farm as Jaap, the Avondale Farms on the other side of the canal, owned by Mr. Stewart. Jaap had shown Mr. Stewart a picture of his brother milking cows but it was another brother, not me, but I was able to get a job right away. 

Mr. Stewart had fields on both sides of the canal and we had to take the cows across the canal over the lift bridge. It was not as busy then as today but there were enough cars that it was always a relief to get the cows safely over the bridge and back into the barns.

We had a lot of field work to do there as well. Mr. Stewart had hired other immigrants as well. I could not work as fast as one Italian, but faster than two when they worked together because they used their hands so much to talk. Later Mr. Stewart opened a large ice cream bar there. Many people thought he was crazy and that no one would bother going so far for ice cream, but it is still a thriving place today. It’s just more built up round there and you can’t see the boats in the canal anymore.

We lived just down the road from another recently immigrated family, the Brouwers. Tante Riek was quite anxious to be rid of her brother-in-law and knew that Trudy (or Geertje) was looking for someone to marry. Several times Trudy commented that she would never marry a messy man so Riek did her best to present me as very neat. She ironed my shirts, polished my shoes and picked up after me everywhere I went. After Trudy and I married she discovered she had been fooled by her sister-in-law and it took her awhile to get over that.

Most of the rest of my story is interwoven within the Brouwer book. I had hoped to farm but I developed hay fever quite quickly when I arrived in Canada. The Niagara area is quite bad for this and at one point it was suggested we move to British Columbia but by then we were firmly established within the Brouwer family and it would have been very hard for Trudy to take her away from them.

After working for Mr. Stewart at Avondale Farms, I took a job at Loblaws. This job helped me considerably with learning English. The Loblaws store is where Chapters is today in Fairview Mall. Then I started going to night school and trained to be an orderly, likely the equivalent of a PSW today. I worked for many years at the Hamilton Psychiatric Hospital, then at Bethesda, a home for people with special needs, and later at the Norris Wing of the St.Catharines General Hospital.

For several years I also worked in the Emergency wing of the St.Catharines General Hospital, helping to set casts, etc. and I really enjoyed that work.

I enjoyed this work although sometimes it was hard to see how much mental illness was connected to poverty or even criminality. I once heard two women comment that the colour of someone’s new dress was the same green as the inside of the prison door and wondered just how many people would know what shade of green that was. Every winter all the beds would fill up again, sometimes with people who caused their own injury or illness so they wouldn’t have to live on the street in the cold winter months. Sadly we are more accustomed to homelessness today than we were then.

I loved the outdoors. When our children were young and we went for walks or longer drives they didn’t always appreciate having to identify every kind of crop, whether the cows in the field were Holsteins, Jerseys or Guernseys, whether a tree was an oak , maple or poplar, identifying the constellations or knowing the call of a bird, but in later years some of that thirst for knowledge of the natural world became important to them as well. For many years, whenever one of them returned from a trip somewhere they would inevitably report on how high the corn was or whether they passed fields of wheat, rye or soybeans.

In later years Jacqueline would bring her students for a day out to explore Balls Falls and I became an informal tour guide showing the children how to identify trees by their bark, leaves or pinecones. While I enjoyed reading novels I found the most satisfaction in pouring through encyclopedias, nature books, travel books, commentaries and the Bible, and it was very rewarding when I could pass some of this knowledge on to children or grandchildren.