The Daily Courier

100-year-old Christmas baby was named Noel, of course

- JACK Hard Knox Jack Knox is a columnist with the Victoria Times Colonist. Email: jknox@timescolon­ist.com

He was born 100 years ago on Christmas Day, so of course they named him Noel.

That’s not what his friends call him, though. To them, Noel Parker-Jervis is Bach, or Bachee.

The name comes from baba-kechee — or cute baby — which is what the staff called him at the Malayan rubber plantation his Englishbor­n father ran.

Maybe they should have gone with the word for vigorous instead. Since coming to Canada as a boy, the Oak Bay man has charged off in pursuit of his conviction­s. His son says the longtime leftist still rails against wrongs. He once got hauled off to jail for disrupting an Edmonton city council meeting to protest the election of the mayor, who had been censured over some shady land dealings.

Most famously, Parker-Jervis deserted during the Second World War — though he did so to get into the fighting, not out of it.

That part of his story goes back to 1939, when he enlisted in the Canadian Army as an 18-year-old. He was eager to join the struggle in Europe but, alas for poor Bachee — it sort of rhymes with Archie — he had lousy eyesight.

Instead of taking on fascists, he was posted to Yorke Island, a remote islet off the south end of Johnstone Strait, where he was stuck guarding the seals and salmon from a nonexisten­t enemy. He kept volunteeri­ng to go overseas, but the army said no.

Finally, Parker-Jervis took matters into his own hands. While home on leave in Vancouver, he left a note for his mother saying “Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine,” and hopped a train for Halifax.

From there he signed on as a coal trimmer on a cargo ship bound for England.

“I thought that was the only way,” he said in an interview a few years ago. “I had no fear

that I would be punished severely. I was trying to go toward the war, not away from it.”

In fact, he was barely punished at all. After surrenderi­ng to the military police, he expected to be chucked in the stockade. Instead, the authoritie­s assigned him to the artillery. “I was astounded.”

Maybe it was the interest of the press that tilted things in his favour; his story made the news on this side of the Atlantic. “Anxious to Fight” was the headline in the Saskatoon StarPhoeni­x on Sept. 17, 1941.

In 1943 Jervis-Parker was shipped out to Italy where, bad eyes or not (“By that time, they didn’t care if you had glasses as thick as a bottle”), he got his wish and ended up in the thick of the war, from Ortona to the Liri Valley to Ravenna.

He served in an anti-tank tank, one with a rear-mounted .50 calibre machine gun that would bang away right over his head. “That’s the one that gave me my deafness,” he said.

(Or, as someone observed to his friend Dianne Pearce, “he went to war blind and came out deaf.”)

Back in Vancouver, Parker-Jervis enrolled at UBC, which is where he met his wife, Betty.

In the late 1950s, they moved to

Edmonton, where he spent 30 years as an English professor at the University of

Alberta — quite a leap for the Malayspeak­ing boy who needed a crash education in English before coming to

Canada.

In 1987, retirement brought Betty and Bachee to Oak Bay, where both became heavily involved in community life. She died in 2017, but he lives on in the home they shared.

“He’s an incredible man, sweet and humble and very gentle,” Pearce says. That might sound like a contradict­ion to Parker-Jervis’s rambunctio­us past, but no, it’s all part of the same package, say those who know him. He’s just someone who does his research, forms his beliefs, then acts accordingl­y.

“People ask me what his secret is,” says his son, Jonty Parker-Jervis. “I think it’s a real drive to contribute, to make people aware of what he thinks the right thing to do is.”

At 100, Bachee remains a voracious reader. He doesn’t own a computer, but is a prolific writer of letters, including those to the librarians at UVic, suggesting books they might want to add. He’s knowledgea­ble about wine, but drinks little of it (which is probably better than the other way around).

Jonty says an active life — playing hockey into his 60s, squash in his 70s and badminton in his 80s — probably contribute­d to his father’s longevity. The boy born on Christmas Day a century ago isn’t finished yet.

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