QAHN’S HERITAGE ESSAY AND PHOTO CONTESTS DESPITE THE LOCKDOWN $10 Quebec VOL 14, NO. 3 SUMMER 2020 News Covid’s Metamorphoses Exploring the Epidemics of History Quebec Editor’s desk 3 eritageNews H Old Normal Rod MacLeod EDITOR Letters 4 RODERICK MACLEOD Need to act responsibly Normal Lower PRODUCTION Satisfied customer Kevin O’Donnell DAN PINESE; MATTHEW FARFAN Epidemic Sandra Stock PUBLISHER Once Again 5 QUEBEC ANGLOPHONE HERITAGE NETWORK Chronicles of Deaths 9 3355 COLLEGE Epidemics in Bolton, 1867-1917 Serge Wagner SHERBROOKE, QUEBEC J1M 0B8 “A Very Singular and Mortal Disease” 11 PHONE Epidemic Meningococcal Disease Grant Myers 1-877-964-0409 in the Early 19th Century (819) 564-9595 FAX (819) 564-6872 Write Here, Write Now: Memoirs 16 Granny, Milia and I Phyllis Sise CORRESPONDENCE [email protected] Call me “Maxime” of Cybor Elementary Bernice Sorge WEBSITES Landmark of Learning 18 QAHN.ORG QUEBECHERITAGEWEB.COM Renovating the “Mother House” for Dawson College Gary Evans 100OBJECTS.QAHN.ORG 2020 QAHN Heritage Essay Contest Winners 21 PRESIDENT GRANT MYERS 2020 QAHN Heritage Photo Contest Winners 22 EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR MATTHEW FARFAN New Uses for Old Buildings 24 PROJECT & CONTRACT STAFF Anglican Church to Community Hub: Bethany Rothney CHRISTINA ADAMKO; HEATHER DARCH; Historic Canterbury Church GLENN PATTERSON; DWANE WILKIN BOOKKEEPER Settling Cherry River 26 MARION GREENLAY Internal migration in the Eastern Townships Jane Jenson in the 19th century and Juanita McKelvey Quebec Heritage News is published quarterly by QAHN with the support Let’s Talk of Graves 28 of the Department of Canadian Heritage. Remember Me As You Pass By Heather Darch QAHN is a non-profit and non-partisan organization whose mission is to help advance knowledge of the history and The Story Behind St. Marguerite du Lac Masson 30 culture of the English-speaking Joseph Graham communities of Quebec. Annual Subscription Rates: Individual: $30.00; Institutional: $40.00; Family: $40.00; Student: $20.00. Canada Post Publication Mail Agreement Number 40561004. Cover: Brooke Sitcoff, “Some Traditions Never Change” (Winner, 2020 QAHN Heritage Photo Contest) ISSN 17707-2670 PRINTED IN CANADA Old Normal by Rod MacLeod hen George Orwell re- my resident seamstress out of a pillow- trenches and the crackle of flying bul- turned to England in the case. Whenever I am outside, I avoid lets. Londoners during the Blitz got used spring of 1937 after fight- people, crossing the street if I see some- to manoeuvering around bombed-out ing in the Spanish Civil one walking towards me. Occasionally I buildings and racing for shelters in the War, he was seriously taken aback by have awkward conversations with neigh- dead of night, just as they got used to how normal everything was. He had bours, shouting from street to porch or having friends and family die. We learn been in combat in trenches and on across fences. The main topic of conver- to get by. mountains, gravely wounded, and then sation, equally true on email or over the Of course, there is a war going on hunted by the secret police – and yet at phone, is Health. out there right now. Part of my self- home there were still cricket matches This is life under the Covid-19 pan- isolation ritual is the nightly news re- and royal weddings, and the milk arrived demic. Wiping down packages of pasta ports, which show overloaded hospital on the doorstep every morning. England is the new normal. Washing your hands, wards with patients on ventilators and was still “sleeping the deep, deep sleep” wearing a mask, keeping your distance – health workers wrapped in hazmat suits. from which, he accurately predicted, all the new normal. It is astounding how In Italy and Spain the daily death count “we shall never wake till we are jerked easily we have adjusted to this bizarre is always in the hundreds, occasionally out of it by the roar of bombs.” routine, how readily we find not taking over a thousand, and caskets are piled at Orwell’s experience has been such precautions odd. Shopping without cemetery gates. In New York City they echoed by many others who have dug vast trenches in in- have escaped all kinds of dustrial wastelands to bury horrors and then suddenly re- the bodies. In Ecuador the alized how conditioned they bodies just lie in the streets. had been to lives of fear, Watching this grim narrative deprivation, and pain. In is for me a kind of penance: I Orwell’s case, however, it am safe, but I must not keep seemed to him only a matter my head in the sand, numbing of time before the horrors he though those statistics are. had escaped arrived on Eng- The people who do the work land’s shores and woke the of caring, curing and burying sleepy population up. The must also find it numbing. No “normalcy” of promptly ar- doubt they keep going by fo- riving milk was, he implied, cusing on the job in front of really a dreamy bubble that them, convincing themselves would very soon become on- that it is, however horrible, ly a distant happy memory. doable. They are, in effect, Indeed, to Londoners in the normalizing their tasks. When midst of the Blitz only a couple of years washing has now joined the ranks of the rate of admissions slows and the later, the England that Orwell describes biking without a helmet, smoking in death rate declines (as we must hope it on the last page of Homage to Catalonia restaurants, and throwing paper and will), these front-line workers, like sol- would have seemed a lifetime ago. plastic out with the trash. diers returning from war, will find it Eight decades after the Blitz, I sit on Then again, there is really nothing hard to adjust to what they used to think the floor in my hall wiping disinfectant astounding about this easy adjustment, was normal. over each item I pull out of my grocery since it’s the way humans have coped Even for the rest of us, the old nor- bag before putting it away. When I fin- with dangerous crises for millennia. mal now seems a distant memory, even ish, I wash my hands – again, since I Hand washing and social distancing may though it hasn’t actually been all that have already washed my hands as soon seem absurdly fiddly, but they are really long ago that we could go out for coffee as I came in the door. Before going into no weirder than the things people have and visit friends and watch movies in the store I had washed my hands in the had to do to survive wars or dictator- actual theatres – do anything, indeed, sinks provided, and then followed the di- ships or natural disasters. Queuing two without fear of infection. Like countless rection lines marked on the floor so as to metres apart to get into the pharmacy people before us, we look back from our minimize contact with other shoppers. isn’t that different from queuing at the current distress to a time that seemed While in the store, I’d worn a mask, butcher’s with a ration card. For Orwell, better, whatever its reality may actually which had been cunningly contrived by the new normal was the lice in the have been. That’s the way our minds Climate strike, Montreal, September 27, 2019. Photo: Elena Cerrolaza. work. We hope for bright futures, but it’s normal. That was a time, we realize, inably so, if we let another disaster catch the past that we draw on when envisag- when X was alive. It has become a gold- us completely unawares. We can certain- ing what we hope will happen. An un- en time, a lost time, an odd time – be- ly learn from the past when it comes to certain future is scary; we want it to be cause the world we now live in is one in determining the things we value in our like the good stuff we remember. During which X is not. lives, but we also have to recognize the Blitz, people dreamed of bluebirds The old normal is there to be seen in what we’ve been doing wrong and strive over the white cliffs of Dover but they endless photos, stock footage, and our to change it. If we think that we can go were mostly inspired by memories of own memories from not very long ago at on living uncritically in the past, then we cricket matches and royal weddings and all. The world we have left behind sur- are truly sleeping that deep, deep sleep. the milk arriving on the doorstep (hope- vives in these images of city streets fully intact) every morning. mobbed with people, many of them Wanting the future to be like the gleefully interacting with no social dis- LETTERS past is not simply an exercise in nostal- tancing between them whatsoever. It gia. The past is comforting, because it wasn’t so long ago that people were at Need to Act Responsibly seems normal. It is a time that we have political rallies, that Canada’s highways processed. We have filed away our expe- and rail lines were shut down by demon- riences, pleasant or not. They can hold strators going out en masse to occupy Thank you for your excellent article no further dangers for us. Whatever hap- space, that we mobbed our malls for on John Abbott College (QHN, Spring pened in the past, we survived. Even if it Boxing Week specials, for pity’s sake. 2020).