Twins, 97, tell stories of days gone by
Between them, they’ve been on this earth nearly two centuries. What is more, Jerome MacNeil and Isabel Lewinskin are 97-year-old fraternal twins, which means they could be the oldest twins in this province — and that they may well have known each other longer than any two people now living in Nova Scotia.
So it is natural that they finish each other’s sentences and fill in the gaps in their respective memories, that they wink and smile, trade quips and jibes.
That when Jerome blurts out an incredulous “I didn’t know that” at some long-ago fact that Isabel has mentioned, she makes a face and, since she was born a few minutes before he was, says — in the manner of an older sister lecturing a younger brother — “because you never asked,” before the hooting and hollering began.
“If she goes before I do I will miss her terribly,” Jerome, who everyone calls Jerry, told me.
That was obvious when I picked him up at the Berkeley Gladstone retirement home in Halifax’s north end, and took a little spin out to Melville Lodge, the Spryfield nursing home that his sister calls home.
It was a long way from Shore Road in Harbourview, where they were born within minutes of each other in 1921, the last of six kids to grow up in a house overlooking Port Hood Island.
But some things you never forget. They were just 18 months old when their father went out on his lobster boat alone and never returned.
What Jerry recalls most is how hard their mother had to work after that raising her own chickens, then slaughtering them for Sunday dinner, splitting wood by lantern light, and how she still wouldn’t have had a penny to spend had relatives not sent money, and the owner of the local general store not advanced her credit, for which he was likely never repaid.
But they recall the good things too: piling into a horse-drawn sleigh, under thick blankets warmed with heating stones, to go to midnight Christmas mass; falling asleep looking out at the shimmer of the Port Hood Island light.
When the Second World War broke out, Jerry, who had worked in Truro and Halifax as a plumber’s apprentice, joined the 12th Manitoba Dragoons, which meant that he became a gunner in the 18th Canadian Armoured Car Regiment.
Overseas, he saw plenty of action, doing reconnaissance work from inside the cockpit of the armoured cars, but also in the field, where he was armed with a rifle and ordered to shoot anything that moved.
Jerrry lost friends and comrades to mines and German bullets. When he returned to Halifax he headed back to Cape Breton and spent a season helping a brother on his lobster boat.
“When I put the last trap down I lit out for Halifax,” he says.
By then Isabel was long gone too. She spent the first part of the war in Toronto working in a munitions factory then eventually ended up in Jersey City, N.J., where she was looking after a little boy.
There, at the home of the aunt of a friend from Cape Breton, she met a young man who worked the midnight shift as a photo engraver at a newspaper in New York City.
“He walked me home and the romance started right there,” Isabel said; the years, at that very moment, perhaps disappearing right before her eyes.
When Tom O’Connell, who worked at the New York Times for 30 years, died of cancer, Isabel came home to Cape Breton for a bit, then headed to Halifax where she took an apartment on Bayers Road.
One day she heard a knock at the door. There stood Morris Lewitskin, her one-time landlord in New Jersey who had apparently been so smitten by the woman from Cape Breton that, after learning of her husband’s death, he had come searching for her.
I’m not precisely sure how long it was before he asked Isabel’s mother, on a trip to Halifax, whether she would be “awfully mad at me if I married your daughter.”
I do know that her new husband, a property developer, wanted a place from which he could see the water.
So the couple moved to Heatherwood Court, overlooking the Bedford Basin — which just so happened to be several blocks from the house on Gottingen Street (later to be renamed Novalea Drive) where her brother Jerry, by now a fireman at the dockyard, and his New Waterford-born wife Mary had already set up house.
The brother and sister were different people: Isabel, harkening back to the dances of her youth in Judique and Port Hood, used to love to haul Morris to the Cape Breton club to dance to the fiddlers from back home.
Jerry curled in the winter at CFB Halifax and, when he finally retired, used to love to chase the golf ball around the Brightwood Golf & Country Club.
But just hearing them talk leads me to believe that their relationship deepened in Halifax and during the vacations they would take together to Florida, where Morris once lived.
Their other siblings are gone. So are their spouses.
Jerry has a daughter and grandkids, but, otherwise, it is just these two people who have known each other all of their lives, and who make their way to the nursing home door, heads down, leaning hard on their walkers, when it is time for the visit to end.
“Bye, Jerry,” she says.
“See you soon Izzy,” her younger brother replies, as he might have all those years ago, way back on the Shore Road.