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OLD STONES
Sometimes it's best to leave family stones unturned, but Anthea Penne, a teacher in Sechelt, decided she couldn't tolerate feeling half-Canadian, half-English any longer.
She interviewed her parents to understand how her mother's upper class English upbringing had meshed with her father's working class Canadian roots. The result is Old Stones: The Biography of a Family (Touchwood $19.95).
Eric and Elizabeth Brown, Penne's star-crossed parents, honeymooned for four short nights in Cornwall in January of 1944. As a Canadian airman, her father was transferred to Yorkshire when her mother was pregnant. After the war, they came to Vancouver, raised a family and separated by choice when they were 50 and 51 years old.
"Something happened while sitting with each of my parents individually, listening and watching as they answered sometimes very personal questions,"; says Penne. "Their difficulty in responding and the hardness of some of their memories helped me to understand how closely connected I am to their stories...Now I feel grounded.";
Nearly 50,000 women immigrated to Canada from Britain and Europe after the Second World War. The dual heritage bestowed on the children of their marriages made home a difficult place to define.
"As the child of one of these war brides,"; says Penne, "I was constantly aware my mother's background differentiated me from the other kids. From a very young age I wondered whether I wasn't more English than Canadian and whether an exorcism of one background or the other might free me to claim one single nation as home.";
(SUMMER 2003 BCBW)
She interviewed her parents to understand how her mother's upper class English upbringing had meshed with her father's working class Canadian roots. The result is Old Stones: The Biography of a Family (Touchwood $19.95).
Eric and Elizabeth Brown, Penne's star-crossed parents, honeymooned for four short nights in Cornwall in January of 1944. As a Canadian airman, her father was transferred to Yorkshire when her mother was pregnant. After the war, they came to Vancouver, raised a family and separated by choice when they were 50 and 51 years old.
"Something happened while sitting with each of my parents individually, listening and watching as they answered sometimes very personal questions,"; says Penne. "Their difficulty in responding and the hardness of some of their memories helped me to understand how closely connected I am to their stories...Now I feel grounded.";
Nearly 50,000 women immigrated to Canada from Britain and Europe after the Second World War. The dual heritage bestowed on the children of their marriages made home a difficult place to define.
"As the child of one of these war brides,"; says Penne, "I was constantly aware my mother's background differentiated me from the other kids. From a very young age I wondered whether I wasn't more English than Canadian and whether an exorcism of one background or the other might free me to claim one single nation as home.";
(SUMMER 2003 BCBW)
Submitted on June 2, 2003 in By David.
