A tale of the Colonel
and his two ladies

KIMBERLEY — ALL the world foves a lover so come
meet The Colonel who loved two women and must have

been loved by them.

He is retired here, a town that
is not a bad place in which to be
retired, and lives in one of the
houses Cominco built for
management people — modern in
its day but now a bit quaint. I is
filled, wall to wall, with
memorabilia and, as it happens,
with plain memories.

He is alone now, living on
memories and the occasiona! visits
of three sons,

In the Second World War,
when so many of us thought we
were going to solve everything, he
joined the Engineers. Just before
going overseas he married the love
of his tife. He insisted they
should not have children who
might be left fatherless in a very
short time, but his wife had other
ideas and eight months after he
reached Europe she bore a son,

While the Canadian Army
trudged north out of Normandy
and into the Lowlands, the
Leopold Canal, the Scheidt
Estuary, all the rest of the bloody
killing grounds, the Colonel
thought about the wife he had
known so briefly and the son he
might never see.

Engineers had a high casualty
rate in that war. He was shot .!
and hit more than once and un
that mantlepiece is a sniper’s
bullet that came out of him.

Toward the war's end, he meta
widow in a litle Dutch town and
they became friends, although, he
says in his stiff, mustached, britule
ramrod straight manner, nothing
more than friends.

She had a little boy who was
almost exactly the age of the Col-
oncl’s own son in Canada. Her
husband had been killed in the
war although not by the Germans,
but by the Canadians who had
been bombing and strafing one
day where he happened to be
standing. Death is the one com-

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Si. Pierre

PAULITICS & PERSPECTIVES

monplace of war and whether it's
brought about by friends or
enemies is secondary.

The friendship of the Colonel
and the widow was unimpaired by
that misfortune of war, It was
helped, of course, by the immense
goodwill of Netherlanders toward
Canadians,

That is a strange love story
itself. Gratitude between nations is
supposed to bc impossible yet to
this day there is no part of Europe
where a Canadian is more wel-
come than the Netherlands.

The wife in Canada and the
widow ir !olland exchanged let-
ters and phatas. They developed
an international companionship
that ended when the war finally
wound down and the Colonel
returned to the woman he loved
and the son he had never seen.

Happy days. He had his love,
his child and a job which would
now be called Yuppy.

Apart from the joy of not hav-
ing been killed, there was the
great sunburst of hope that spread
across our world in those first
post-war years. We had conquered
the enemy and disease and poverty

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would be gone preity soon also.

Two months later his wife was
diagnosed a victim of nephritis,
for which there was no cure.

The Colonel's marriage had
been happy but short — one
month before he went overseas,
two months four years later and
then a year of watching her slowly
die.

Before she died, she spoke to
her mother-in-law in Canada and
wrote to the widow in Holland
and, to make a long story short, a
few months after she was buried
the Colonel married the Dutch
widow,

My mother used to tc.l me
“When a man remarries very soon
after his wife's death, itis a
tremendous tribute to the first
wife.’* Her words came back, as
mothers’ words do, over the tea
and toast in the Colonel's living
Troon.

As the marriage with her first
love had been short, so the mar-
riage with his second was long.
They were together for 42 years.
They raised his son by his first
wife, her son by her first husband
and had a third son together.

The sons’ pictures as boys and
men are among those that cram
the walls and stand unon every
level surface. it is odd, but
noticeable, that they ali look very
much the same, clean, bold
features and straight eyes.

When it was time to go the
Colonel had talked very little
about the history of Sullivan
Mine, which was the original
reason for our meeting. He kept
remembering his loves.

“You know, when my second
wife was dying of cancer, which
took a long time, I said to her one
day ‘Tell me, why did you marry
me? I’m really not a very interest-
ing fellow.’ She laughed and said
‘You were the only man who ask-
ed me.” "’

Funny old world. Funny old
love stories.

Friday. September 6. 1991 - North Shore Naws ~ 9

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