The Serial: Far From the Rowan Tree Day 31 By Margaret Gillies Brown

This is just what we hoped he would say. I dreaded the thought of having to take the boys to some woman in Sandyhills whom neither I nor the children knew. Ronald was pleased also.

The next Sunday and I felt the first intimations of birth. Gentle at first and then more insistent.

The doctor had asked me to get into hospital as soon as I was sure the baby was on the way.

We all bundled into the car and flew along the gravel road.

“Not so fast!” I said, “there’s no real hurry and after three confinements you shouldn’t be nervous!”

“I’m not,” said Ronald nonchalantly, “not this time.”

We were now on the outskirts of Sandyhills. A car was swaying towards us, directly in our path.

“Then why are you driving on the wrong side of the road?” I asked as Ronald, with a screech of brakes, shuddered over into the opposite ruts and I curled up in pain as a new and more severe contraction took me by surprise.

Unspectacular

It wasn’t until I waved goodbye to Ronald and the family from the window of the hospital waiting-room that I felt really alone for the first time since coming to Canada.

Children weren’t encouraged into the maternity department and, as there was no one we could leave them with, Ronald had to go also.

Just what was I doing here, thousands of miles from the land of my birth, walking along the antiseptic corridors of a foreign hospital accompanied by a nurse who spoke a foreign English?

The maternity department had a wing all to itself. The lift that took us up to it ran as smoothly as silk. This new hospital was unspectacular to look at from the outside although it was three storeys high but inside it was bright, clean and shining, all tiles and bright paint.

I had the offer of a wheelchair to take me to my ward but I was feeling fine now and declined.

As I walked along I got glimpses through swinging doors of theatres, consulting rooms, plaster rooms, all glinting of steel from basins, trolleys and instruments and into pleasantly curtained wards.

Nurses bustled past, neat in white uniforms and doctors walked in and out of doors with stethoscopes hanging around open-necked shirts.

They were altogether more casually dressed than they would have been at home in the late 1950s.

Before undressing in the ward I was ushered into, I walked over to the wide window and looked out. A sense of unreality swept over me. I gave myself a pinch in order to make sure I wasn’t dreaming.

Beyond the window lay not the ancient Scottish town of Perth, where the three boys had been born, with its beautiful old trees, church spires, substantial stone houses rising against a backdrop of hills and a broad silver river but an entirely new and different place.

Sandyhills had sprung up comparatively recently, from a lonely, almost featureless plain and was completely alien to anything I had ever known.

Emporium

Built on the grid system it had one broad main street, unimaginatively called Main Street and other roads running off it at regular right-angled intervals.

The brand new hospital had been erected at the far end of Main Street.

At the back was a large expanse of ground for gardens (which hadn’t materialised yet) and car parks but the front was built directly adjacent to the sidewalk.

Main Street was very broad, as is usual in countries where there is no shortage of land but the buildings which ran along it on either side, looked as if they had all just happened as necessity dictated.

Most had flat roofs and were constructed of weatherboard.

Some were single storey, some double, like the hotel opposite, an uninspiring building used more as a rooming house than a hotel.

The emporium for clothes, the liquor store, the drug store, hamburger house, the bank, were all square or elongated boxes.

The beer parlour and barber’s shop had low slatted wooden doors that would swing either way in order to be able to push out drunken cowboys or soldiers.

On the far side of the hotel stood the untidy gas station with its tin signs that swung and creaked in the light wind and the used car lot where Ronald had got his car.

There was not the slightest hint of elegance here as there was in Red Deer with its green glass dome for a water tower and its rich Peacock Restaurant, nor could you imagine it ever coming.

There were very few trees and those that did risk raising branches to the enormous sky were as yet, small and spindly.

A fine dust hung in the air raised by the few cars that passed.

Below my high window a solitary figure strode purposefully by, wearing tight jeans that accentuated bandy legs, a fringed frontier jacket above a tartan, open-necked shirt and a wide-brimmed stetson.

Trustworthy

His hair, hanging well below his stetson, was dark and greasy, his skin swarthy. There was no spare flesh about him.

I guessed him to be a cowboy down from the north looking for summer work.

He had left his horse tied to a lamp post and was making for the barber’s saloon on the other side of the street next to the hotel.

Here, in this small cow town, everything looked very temporary.

A June sun poured in brightening the room. At least that was the same.

I undressed and put on the plain white nightgown which the nurse had given me and climbed into bed.

I had not long to wait. The nurse returned accompanied by the doctor.

He seemed pleased to see me. He was slim and handsome in an unassuming way with the reticence of a Scot that held an assurance for me as strong as my native hills.

Bred from people belonging to a land he had never seen, he was probably quite unaware of how typical he seemed and, in my eyes, how trustworthy.

(More tomorrow.)

It wasn’t until I waved goodbye to Ronald and the family from the window that I felt really alone for the first time since coming to Canada