Prudence Emery - Nanaimo Girl

You get old and you realize there are no answers, just stories.

GARRISON KEILLOR

DAD WAS HUFFING AND puffing as he hiked to Mount Benson west of Nanaimo an anxious father-to-be while Mum was huffing and puffing in the Nanaimo General Hospital giving birth to me. The date was August 27, 1936. My birth increased the population of the town from 6,500 to 6,501.

My first real memory begins with me in a highchair. My parents were entertaining guests, all of whom were laughing uproariously. Through the din I was heard to say my first sentence and what was to become my mantra: Isnt it funny!

And it was funny, how I grew up in what was once a murky little coal town on lower Vancouver Island and behaved so badly that I was sent to a proper private school in Vancouver to learn my manners.

But Nanaimo is where I started. No big coal town, by 1936 it was moving into lumber, but for at least a hundred years, Nanaimo had been coal. In fact, one mine alone and there were about fifty-seven produced eighteen million tons of coal in total by 1937, the year that it closed, a year after I was born. By 1968, all the mines were finally closed.

The town was originally a handy little trading post on the inland side of the island. Then, in the mid-1800s, coal was discovered. The Hudsons Bay Company built a fort there in 1853, known as the Nanaimo Bastion. My junior high school featured a replica of the bastion, by then a symbol of the town. In 1887, Nanaimo experienced a blast in a mine caused by methane-infused coal dust that ignited. It was disastrous, and stood as the largest man-made explosion in Canadian history until the Halifax Explosion of 1917.

By the time I was in high school, Nanaimo had also come to be renowned for its many beer parlours. And since 1967, its annual highlight has been the Great International World Championship Bathtub Race.

I used to think that Nanaimo was the centre of the universe, and then I didnt. In fact, in a lifetime of rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous, almost no one I met had heard of Nanaimo, and they certainly didnt know how to pronounce it. So I became the girl from Nanaimo (wherever that was). And some eventually learned how to pronounce it: Nah-nigh-moe.

Nanaimo, although the coal was dwindling, still was rife with legend. Story has it that when white men arrived in boats in 1791, the natives ran up and down the beach shouting, Nanaimo! Nanaimo! (Snuneymuxw! Snuneymuxw!) The greeting was taken as Welcome! Welcome! But it was probably more like Bugger off! Bugger off! The newcomers may not have buggered off, but I eventually did, for a series of adventures that were often anything but prudent. But I had to try to grow up first, and Nanaimo happened to be the place.

How my parents got there, thats another curiosity. They travelled between England and Canada before settling out west. Somehow, Dad managed to begin his ophthalmology practice in Nanaimo a mere two months after they arrived and a month before I was born.

They were both from the prairies. My father, Edward Douglas Emery, was born in Edmonton, Alberta, on May 12, 1897, third son of a prominent lawyer. The Emerys had emigrated from Norfolk in 1840, settling outside London in Upper Canada.

My mother, Lorna Doone Saville, was born in Spy Hill, Saskatchewan, on October 24, 1910, fourth of eleven children. The Savilles went back and forth from Saskatchewan to Suffolk, England, farming in both places, until they finally decided on ranching and bought an eight-thousand-acre spread in the Battle River Valley in east-central Alberta.

My parents met in 1933. Dad was en route to Vienna to complete his studies in eye, ear, nose, and throat surgery. Youve got to meet the Saville girls, insisted Dr. McPhail, his host in Hardisty, Alberta, ten miles from the Saville ranch. So he did.

On his first visit to the ranch, he was attempting to play the piano when someone said, Puggy, let someone play who can play. Whereupon Mum hit the ivories with her usual style and captivated his heart. (Occasionally pugnacious, Dad was nicknamed Puggy).

Dad was smitten and, for the rest of his visit, courted Mum at the ranch, where her five brothers put the city slicker to the test. When they went riding, they loosened the girth on his saddle or rigged Dads stirrups to fall off. Fortunately, Dad didnt fall off. After he returned to Europe, he proposed to Mum via long-distance telephone from Birmingham Eye Hospital, where he was house surgeon. They were married in Bradford, Yorkshire, on April 4, 1934, and for a year lived in Stoke-on-Trent while Dad commuted to Birmingham.