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Until his death in 2000, Eric Roud spent many Remembrance Days parading with his fellow veterans, marching from the Royal Canadian Legion’s Branch 480, on Richmond Road, to the Westboro cenotaph.
“I’m not a hero,” his daughter, Cheryl Walsh, recalls him often saying. “I came back. The heroes are still there. This is to remember those who didn’t come back.
“This is the least I can do.”
Cpl. Eric F. Roud did indeed come back, but burdened with far more than any young man should have to carry. A 23-year-old vehicle driver with the RCA Service Corps, he was part of the second wave of Allied troops to land at Normandy on D-Day and, like so many soldiers who returned following the war, rarely spoke of the experience, except to say that it was “awful.”
Eric Roud.
Three months before his death, he went back to Europe for a visit. When asked if he wanted to return to Juno Beach, he was adamant: “No,” he said. “I’ve been there, and my comrades will understand why I can’t return.”
But if he was reluctant to talk about what he saw during the war, his family knew that it was never far from his mind. “He had nightmares,” recalls Walsh.
Soon after the war, in August 1945, he met Catherine Frances Minogue at a servicemen’s dance. It was, says Walsh, love at first sight, and the two were married that October. Eric and Fran got on the waiting list for a house in the newly built Veterans Housing Project, also known as Happy Valley or, more commonly, simply the Vets. It wasn’t until May 1952 that one became available, on Marshall Avenue, by which time the family had doubled in size, with the additions of Cheryl, in 1947, and Erica, in ’49.
Roud worked as an accountant at the post office, augmenting his earnings with such odd jobs as house-painting or drywall installation. He was extremely active in his new community, as a Cub master, church volunteer and rink shoveller. He also helped organize the Friday-night teen dances and the Saturday craft programs at the new Alexander Community Centre.
“After the war,” says Walsh, “a lot of returning vets became professional volunteers. I feel they did all this and more because they were the ones who returned. They felt it was their duty to help others. It was their penance.”
Eric and Fran Roud outside their new home, Marshall Avenue in 1952.
The Veterans’ Housing Project was built precisely for returning veterans and their families, one of numerous such projects across Canada as the federal government moved to mitigate the housing shortage created by thousands of soldiers returning to from Europe to start families of their own. Nearly 26,000 such houses — “Homes for heroes” — were built in Canada under the program; others in Ottawa included developments in Rockcliffe and Carleton Heights. Happy Valley, a co-operative effort between Wartime Housing Ltd. (which later merged with CMHC) and the City of Ottawa, was one of the larger developments, says Lee Wainwright, who was four years old when his parents, Bob and British war bride Ann, moved into their new home on Anna Avenue in the fall of 1946.
Today part of Carlington, the Vets was constructed on a railway spur line leading in and out of lumberyards owned by J.R. Booth, bound roughly by Merivale, Carling, Fisher and Shillington avenues. In its early days, it was not uncommon for youngsters playing outside to uncover railroad ties and spikes, reminders of its earlier incarnation.
Its street names hint at its military origin: Emperor, Marshall, Admiral, Veteran and General avenues. Crerar Avenue was named after Second World War commander Gen. Harry Crerar. Harrold Place was named for Pte. Ernest William Harrold, a former Ottawa Citizen reporter and editor who was gassed in 1917 in the Third Battle of Ypres. Tunis and Viscount avenues were named for Viscount Alexander of Tunis.
The houses were initially all rental units, but in the 1950s the vets were permitted to buy their homes, with all the rent they’d paid counting toward the down payment. This ultimately opened up the neighbourhood to residents without military backgrounds.
They were small homes — Roud’s was 650 square feet — with hardwood floors throughout, save for the grey linoleum in the kitchen and bathroom. Many had three bedrooms: one on the main floor and two above. Construction commenced in 1945, with the first occupants arriving the following year.
It was the beginning of the baby boom. On one side of the Wainwrights lived Alcide and Joan Labelle, with their six children, including Bob, Sandra and Martin. On the other were the Goodmans: John and Elsie and their seven progeny — John, Judy, Barry, Linda, Bill, Bob and Marsha. The 21 houses on Anna Avenue between Admiral and Merivale were home to upwards of 60 children. All the streets were like that.
Lee Wainwright stands in front of the house he grew up in on Anna Avenue.
“Television was just starting,” recalls Wainwright. “You had to find your own entertainment — marbles, cards closest to the wall, that type of thing. We invented bicycle polo. We used baseball bats and a softball in the schoolyard at Gowling.”
Another Vets resident, David Flatters, who grew up on Marshall Avenue with his brothers, Frank and Michael, recalled, “The streets were built for us, not for the cars. They served as road hockey venues, hopscotch pads, bicycle tracks, baseball or touch football fields.”
“But we were close-knit,” adds Wainwright, “by the fact that all our parents were military.”
The area was remarkable in that regard. The Vets was akin to a military base or a small single-industry town, but set within a larger city. More remarkable, perhaps, is how, more than 70 years after it formed, hundreds of its former residents remain in touch with one another, gathering for occasional group reunions or in smaller klatches, to shoot the breeze about the old days, good and bad. And at least one still calls the neighbourhood home: In 2000, when her father died, Cheryl Walsh bought out her sister’s share of the house and returned to Marshall Avenue.
“When I moved back to the street, I remember the elderly neighbours saying, ‘Oh, the kid is back,’” she recalls. “It was wonderful. I’d go and sit on the porch and talk with them. It was like coming home. I loved the house. I wanted to move back here and be home. And I’ve never been sorry that I did it.”
Today, hundreds of former residents of the Vets keep in touch and reminisce through a Facebook page — The Vets Neighbourhood Kids — started by Wainwright in 2008 after he received a message from a childhood friend asking him if he was that Lee Wainwright.
“And she was friends with Kathy Culbertson, who lived next door to us, and Pam Martin. … So it just went from there, and right now, although some were from Shillington, or from school, there are over 300 people who stay in touch.”
The nostalgic recollections posted on the site paint pictures of simpler, carefree times, with many moments of humour, such as when a dog, Queenie, got “stuck” to another dog, causing quite a commotion amongst residents. “It was a few years after the litter before I connected the dots,” wrote onetime resident Kevin Stewart.
But there were dark times, too. After the war, notes Wendy Murray, a former Marshall Street resident, many vets suffered PTSD, then referred to as shell shock, combat exhaustion or battle fatigue. “Some experienced claustrophobic episodes, nightmares, bouts of drinking and abusive behaviour. Our parents had no choice but to cope with the distress, and on occasion as children we were affected dramatically, too young to fully understand what was happening.”
Wendy Murray in front of the house she grew up in on Marshall Avenue.
Indeed, for the youngsters growing up in the Vets, any behaviour by an adult that today might raise warning flags was not viewed in any greater war-related context. “There was very little ever said about what went on overseas when they were fighting,” recalls Wainwright. “So the fellow on Marshall Avenue who had a complete breakdown and destroyed his house with a hatchet when I was 10 or 12 — he was chopping the posts that held the verandah up and threw the hatchet through the windows, and killed a kid’s pet rabbit on purpose — we didn’t know that that had anything to do with the war. We didn’t realize that it did.
“We just thought it was terrible and wondered what happened to him. Was he drinking? We didn’t know terms like nervous breakdowns. We lived with it, but we didn’t know what it was.”
Through the darkness was a pervasive post-war, post-Depression lightness and optimism that permeated much of Canadian society. Murray recalls the monthly parties held on her street, with parents taking turns hosting and all the children parked at one house for the night. Often extending until well into the morning, the celebrations, Murray believes, were a mixture of sociability and therapy.
“It was an outlet for them to party and have fun, and I think in some cases they were encouraged to drink to put their problems out of their mind.”
If it was an odd dichotomy; it certainly engendered solidarity in a community where neighbours could better empathize with one another than those in neighbourhoods without a common war experience. Murray’s father, Art Murray, a navy coxswain during the war, was an elder in the church who also, she says, “drank and swore like a trooper.” It was all taken in stride in the Vets, where they took care of one another as best they could.
Youngsters playing in the Vets neighbourhood.
So if, as a youngster there, you happened to find yourself at a friend’s house at lunchtime, well, that’s where you were fed. And if nature called while you were playing at the Harrold Place Park, the outdoor social hub for youngsters, you could always knock at Mrs. Drysdale’s door (No. 60) or the Sutcliffes’ (No. 34) and use their washroom.
“Everybody’s mother was everybody’s mother,” Wainwright recalls.
Walsh sums up the general feeling with an anecdote from the June 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth: “We had the first television at this end of the street,” she says. “That’s why we got the TV, for the coronation, and this house was full of people, and other people were standing outside, looking in the window.”
There were winter carnivals at the outdoor rink on Admiral Avenue, where parents dressed their children in fancy costumes. In fairer weather, some of the braver and more adventurous youngsters would undertake subterranean explorations. “Before they built Westgate (Shopping Centre, the first in Ottawa), Hampton Park was a swamp,” recalls Murray. “And do you know the hydro station across the street? There was a storm sewer there, and you could get through the bars, and they used to get candles and you could follow that storm sewer all the way to the Ottawa River, at Tunney’s Pasture.
The house on Marshall Avenue where Cheryl Walsh, nee Roud, grew up and now lives.
“And when it rained,” she adds, “we got on our bicycles and rode up and down the street. We played marbles on the gravel driveways, and football and baseball and catch on the street. We would go out and build forts, and our parents would be able to yell for us to come in. When the lights went on, you knew that was the sign to come home. We didn’t have babysitters; everybody just helped out.
“There was always stuff to do. Our parents would feed us breakfast and then they’d put us outside and lock the door.”
Members of the Facebook group have held a couple of reunions, and last summer dedicated a memorial bench in Harrold Place Park, to honour their parents and to provide current residents with a slice of the neighbourhood’s history.
The Vets neighbourhood today, says Walsh, is still a close community.
“There’s the same cohesion now. We started up a book club: There are about 12 of us, just on this street. When I moved back in 2000, there were still a lot of the original people, although their kids had moved off. So it was nice to going and sit on someone’s porch and just talk, or listen to Mrs. Joynt play the piano, or go for coffees or cocktails.
“As the old people died, new people moved in, and we’re getting kids back again. But it’s still close-knit. If you walk down these streets on a hot, summer evening, you’ll see these people sitting out on their porch or talking to other people. I think that’s because it’s still small. It’s not quite like it used to be, because there’s no similarity; they’re not all in the Forces. But because it’s a small area, I think you’ll still find it’s friendly.”
Cub master Eric Roud with the 43rd cub pack, St. Peter’s Church.
Wainwright says that the last of the original veterans that he knows of to live in the neighbourhood was Richard “Willie” Richardson, who died five weeks ago, just shy of his 103rd birthday. According to his daughter, Heather Hutchingame, Willie remained in his General Avenue home from 1946 until a year ago, when he moved into the Perley and Rideau Veterans’ Health Centre.
Heather Hutchingame outside the General Avenue house she grew up in. The dormer windows and addition on the left are new. Hutchingame’s father, Richard ‘Willie’ Richardson, was the last remaining original Second World War veteran living in the Vets neighbourhood.
After the war, the navy veteran remained in the Forces for a couple of years, working in the Maps and Surveys division of the Defence Department before switching from regular forces to reserve. He tended bar at the Prescott Hotel and ran the bar mess at HMCS Carleton at Dow’s Lake, and was also a mailman — in the Vets neighbourhood. Betty, his wife of 74 years, worked nights as a nurse at a private hospital.
As a youngster, Hutchingame accompanied her parents to Remembrance Day ceremonies at the War Memorial on Elgin Street, where, from the sidewalk, she and her mother would march alongside, trying to keep up with Willie as he paraded with the other veterans. She still recalls bursting with pride, thinking to herself, “That’s my dad!”
In later years, Willie would put on his medals on Remembrance Day and visit a Legion and old soldiers he used to know. “And then he got to the point where he couldn’t do that anymore,” says Hutchingame. “And he kept saying there was nobody left, anyway.
“And there wasn’t.”
bdeachman@postmedia.com
查看原文...
“I’m not a hero,” his daughter, Cheryl Walsh, recalls him often saying. “I came back. The heroes are still there. This is to remember those who didn’t come back.
“This is the least I can do.”
Cpl. Eric F. Roud did indeed come back, but burdened with far more than any young man should have to carry. A 23-year-old vehicle driver with the RCA Service Corps, he was part of the second wave of Allied troops to land at Normandy on D-Day and, like so many soldiers who returned following the war, rarely spoke of the experience, except to say that it was “awful.”
Eric Roud.
Three months before his death, he went back to Europe for a visit. When asked if he wanted to return to Juno Beach, he was adamant: “No,” he said. “I’ve been there, and my comrades will understand why I can’t return.”
But if he was reluctant to talk about what he saw during the war, his family knew that it was never far from his mind. “He had nightmares,” recalls Walsh.
Soon after the war, in August 1945, he met Catherine Frances Minogue at a servicemen’s dance. It was, says Walsh, love at first sight, and the two were married that October. Eric and Fran got on the waiting list for a house in the newly built Veterans Housing Project, also known as Happy Valley or, more commonly, simply the Vets. It wasn’t until May 1952 that one became available, on Marshall Avenue, by which time the family had doubled in size, with the additions of Cheryl, in 1947, and Erica, in ’49.
Roud worked as an accountant at the post office, augmenting his earnings with such odd jobs as house-painting or drywall installation. He was extremely active in his new community, as a Cub master, church volunteer and rink shoveller. He also helped organize the Friday-night teen dances and the Saturday craft programs at the new Alexander Community Centre.
“After the war,” says Walsh, “a lot of returning vets became professional volunteers. I feel they did all this and more because they were the ones who returned. They felt it was their duty to help others. It was their penance.”
Eric and Fran Roud outside their new home, Marshall Avenue in 1952.
•
The Veterans’ Housing Project was built precisely for returning veterans and their families, one of numerous such projects across Canada as the federal government moved to mitigate the housing shortage created by thousands of soldiers returning to from Europe to start families of their own. Nearly 26,000 such houses — “Homes for heroes” — were built in Canada under the program; others in Ottawa included developments in Rockcliffe and Carleton Heights. Happy Valley, a co-operative effort between Wartime Housing Ltd. (which later merged with CMHC) and the City of Ottawa, was one of the larger developments, says Lee Wainwright, who was four years old when his parents, Bob and British war bride Ann, moved into their new home on Anna Avenue in the fall of 1946.
Today part of Carlington, the Vets was constructed on a railway spur line leading in and out of lumberyards owned by J.R. Booth, bound roughly by Merivale, Carling, Fisher and Shillington avenues. In its early days, it was not uncommon for youngsters playing outside to uncover railroad ties and spikes, reminders of its earlier incarnation.
Its street names hint at its military origin: Emperor, Marshall, Admiral, Veteran and General avenues. Crerar Avenue was named after Second World War commander Gen. Harry Crerar. Harrold Place was named for Pte. Ernest William Harrold, a former Ottawa Citizen reporter and editor who was gassed in 1917 in the Third Battle of Ypres. Tunis and Viscount avenues were named for Viscount Alexander of Tunis.
The houses were initially all rental units, but in the 1950s the vets were permitted to buy their homes, with all the rent they’d paid counting toward the down payment. This ultimately opened up the neighbourhood to residents without military backgrounds.
They were small homes — Roud’s was 650 square feet — with hardwood floors throughout, save for the grey linoleum in the kitchen and bathroom. Many had three bedrooms: one on the main floor and two above. Construction commenced in 1945, with the first occupants arriving the following year.
It was the beginning of the baby boom. On one side of the Wainwrights lived Alcide and Joan Labelle, with their six children, including Bob, Sandra and Martin. On the other were the Goodmans: John and Elsie and their seven progeny — John, Judy, Barry, Linda, Bill, Bob and Marsha. The 21 houses on Anna Avenue between Admiral and Merivale were home to upwards of 60 children. All the streets were like that.
Lee Wainwright stands in front of the house he grew up in on Anna Avenue.
“Television was just starting,” recalls Wainwright. “You had to find your own entertainment — marbles, cards closest to the wall, that type of thing. We invented bicycle polo. We used baseball bats and a softball in the schoolyard at Gowling.”
Another Vets resident, David Flatters, who grew up on Marshall Avenue with his brothers, Frank and Michael, recalled, “The streets were built for us, not for the cars. They served as road hockey venues, hopscotch pads, bicycle tracks, baseball or touch football fields.”
“But we were close-knit,” adds Wainwright, “by the fact that all our parents were military.”
The area was remarkable in that regard. The Vets was akin to a military base or a small single-industry town, but set within a larger city. More remarkable, perhaps, is how, more than 70 years after it formed, hundreds of its former residents remain in touch with one another, gathering for occasional group reunions or in smaller klatches, to shoot the breeze about the old days, good and bad. And at least one still calls the neighbourhood home: In 2000, when her father died, Cheryl Walsh bought out her sister’s share of the house and returned to Marshall Avenue.
“When I moved back to the street, I remember the elderly neighbours saying, ‘Oh, the kid is back,’” she recalls. “It was wonderful. I’d go and sit on the porch and talk with them. It was like coming home. I loved the house. I wanted to move back here and be home. And I’ve never been sorry that I did it.”
Today, hundreds of former residents of the Vets keep in touch and reminisce through a Facebook page — The Vets Neighbourhood Kids — started by Wainwright in 2008 after he received a message from a childhood friend asking him if he was that Lee Wainwright.
“And she was friends with Kathy Culbertson, who lived next door to us, and Pam Martin. … So it just went from there, and right now, although some were from Shillington, or from school, there are over 300 people who stay in touch.”
The nostalgic recollections posted on the site paint pictures of simpler, carefree times, with many moments of humour, such as when a dog, Queenie, got “stuck” to another dog, causing quite a commotion amongst residents. “It was a few years after the litter before I connected the dots,” wrote onetime resident Kevin Stewart.
But there were dark times, too. After the war, notes Wendy Murray, a former Marshall Street resident, many vets suffered PTSD, then referred to as shell shock, combat exhaustion or battle fatigue. “Some experienced claustrophobic episodes, nightmares, bouts of drinking and abusive behaviour. Our parents had no choice but to cope with the distress, and on occasion as children we were affected dramatically, too young to fully understand what was happening.”
Wendy Murray in front of the house she grew up in on Marshall Avenue.
Indeed, for the youngsters growing up in the Vets, any behaviour by an adult that today might raise warning flags was not viewed in any greater war-related context. “There was very little ever said about what went on overseas when they were fighting,” recalls Wainwright. “So the fellow on Marshall Avenue who had a complete breakdown and destroyed his house with a hatchet when I was 10 or 12 — he was chopping the posts that held the verandah up and threw the hatchet through the windows, and killed a kid’s pet rabbit on purpose — we didn’t know that that had anything to do with the war. We didn’t realize that it did.
“We just thought it was terrible and wondered what happened to him. Was he drinking? We didn’t know terms like nervous breakdowns. We lived with it, but we didn’t know what it was.”
Through the darkness was a pervasive post-war, post-Depression lightness and optimism that permeated much of Canadian society. Murray recalls the monthly parties held on her street, with parents taking turns hosting and all the children parked at one house for the night. Often extending until well into the morning, the celebrations, Murray believes, were a mixture of sociability and therapy.
“It was an outlet for them to party and have fun, and I think in some cases they were encouraged to drink to put their problems out of their mind.”
If it was an odd dichotomy; it certainly engendered solidarity in a community where neighbours could better empathize with one another than those in neighbourhoods without a common war experience. Murray’s father, Art Murray, a navy coxswain during the war, was an elder in the church who also, she says, “drank and swore like a trooper.” It was all taken in stride in the Vets, where they took care of one another as best they could.
Youngsters playing in the Vets neighbourhood.
So if, as a youngster there, you happened to find yourself at a friend’s house at lunchtime, well, that’s where you were fed. And if nature called while you were playing at the Harrold Place Park, the outdoor social hub for youngsters, you could always knock at Mrs. Drysdale’s door (No. 60) or the Sutcliffes’ (No. 34) and use their washroom.
“Everybody’s mother was everybody’s mother,” Wainwright recalls.
Walsh sums up the general feeling with an anecdote from the June 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth: “We had the first television at this end of the street,” she says. “That’s why we got the TV, for the coronation, and this house was full of people, and other people were standing outside, looking in the window.”
There were winter carnivals at the outdoor rink on Admiral Avenue, where parents dressed their children in fancy costumes. In fairer weather, some of the braver and more adventurous youngsters would undertake subterranean explorations. “Before they built Westgate (Shopping Centre, the first in Ottawa), Hampton Park was a swamp,” recalls Murray. “And do you know the hydro station across the street? There was a storm sewer there, and you could get through the bars, and they used to get candles and you could follow that storm sewer all the way to the Ottawa River, at Tunney’s Pasture.
The house on Marshall Avenue where Cheryl Walsh, nee Roud, grew up and now lives.
“And when it rained,” she adds, “we got on our bicycles and rode up and down the street. We played marbles on the gravel driveways, and football and baseball and catch on the street. We would go out and build forts, and our parents would be able to yell for us to come in. When the lights went on, you knew that was the sign to come home. We didn’t have babysitters; everybody just helped out.
“There was always stuff to do. Our parents would feed us breakfast and then they’d put us outside and lock the door.”
Members of the Facebook group have held a couple of reunions, and last summer dedicated a memorial bench in Harrold Place Park, to honour their parents and to provide current residents with a slice of the neighbourhood’s history.
The Vets neighbourhood today, says Walsh, is still a close community.
“There’s the same cohesion now. We started up a book club: There are about 12 of us, just on this street. When I moved back in 2000, there were still a lot of the original people, although their kids had moved off. So it was nice to going and sit on someone’s porch and just talk, or listen to Mrs. Joynt play the piano, or go for coffees or cocktails.
“As the old people died, new people moved in, and we’re getting kids back again. But it’s still close-knit. If you walk down these streets on a hot, summer evening, you’ll see these people sitting out on their porch or talking to other people. I think that’s because it’s still small. It’s not quite like it used to be, because there’s no similarity; they’re not all in the Forces. But because it’s a small area, I think you’ll still find it’s friendly.”
Cub master Eric Roud with the 43rd cub pack, St. Peter’s Church.
Wainwright says that the last of the original veterans that he knows of to live in the neighbourhood was Richard “Willie” Richardson, who died five weeks ago, just shy of his 103rd birthday. According to his daughter, Heather Hutchingame, Willie remained in his General Avenue home from 1946 until a year ago, when he moved into the Perley and Rideau Veterans’ Health Centre.
Heather Hutchingame outside the General Avenue house she grew up in. The dormer windows and addition on the left are new. Hutchingame’s father, Richard ‘Willie’ Richardson, was the last remaining original Second World War veteran living in the Vets neighbourhood.
After the war, the navy veteran remained in the Forces for a couple of years, working in the Maps and Surveys division of the Defence Department before switching from regular forces to reserve. He tended bar at the Prescott Hotel and ran the bar mess at HMCS Carleton at Dow’s Lake, and was also a mailman — in the Vets neighbourhood. Betty, his wife of 74 years, worked nights as a nurse at a private hospital.
As a youngster, Hutchingame accompanied her parents to Remembrance Day ceremonies at the War Memorial on Elgin Street, where, from the sidewalk, she and her mother would march alongside, trying to keep up with Willie as he paraded with the other veterans. She still recalls bursting with pride, thinking to herself, “That’s my dad!”
In later years, Willie would put on his medals on Remembrance Day and visit a Legion and old soldiers he used to know. “And then he got to the point where he couldn’t do that anymore,” says Hutchingame. “And he kept saying there was nobody left, anyway.
“And there wasn’t.”
bdeachman@postmedia.com
查看原文...
