Sunday 30 September 2012

The Life of Jane continued

                               Jane Meets Two Ethnics - continued


         Jane stopped caring about Samuel. But the next year she met another man from another ethnic group. Ron Shapiro was sitting in the cafeteria of the Student Union Building one winter afternoon. The Student Union Building or 'The Sub' as students called it, was a scruffy three story Gothic style structure where some students hung out .
      On this afternnon just after midday, the cafeteria was crowded with people. Jane was holding a cup of coffee in her free hand. She sat down at a table  where a short stocky man was also seated.
    "Mind if I sit here?" she asked.
    "Be my guest," the young man replied.
    Ron Shapiro was wearing a dark suit and tie that matched his dark hair and brown eyes. He was studying to be a lawyer, he told Jane.
    "Yecch, literature," he said when Jane told him what she was studying. "There's no money in that. My parents don't have much and my dad was a poet. Now he's a cutter in a dress factory. Literature can't buy you much, that's for sure."
     Jane went out with Ron  a few times. But he never invited her to his home.
     One night they went to a poetry reading that featured the well known Montreal poet Irving Layton. Jane liked Layton's poetry but didn't care for his oversized ego. Ron didn't like Layton's poetry or Layton.
     On their way back to the residence where Jane lived, they discussed poetry while Jane held onto Ron's arm. It was springtime and the dark hid patches of ice that made walking tricky. "I'm not crazy about poetry," Ron said. "I guess it's due to having to listen  my dad recite his stuff when I was a kid and watching him sweating while he wrote it."
     "Where were you living then?" Jane asked.
     "Same place as we do now. Right near here on Clark Street."
    "That's right near here," Jane said. "Can I come and see your parents one day?"
     "Oh I don't think that would be a good idea."
      "Why not? Is there something  wrong with me/"
      Ron stopped walking and unhooked his arm from Jane's firm grasp. "Jane I - uh well here goes. You're a WASP Jane, a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, a goy. My parents would have a fit if I brought you home."
    "But we're not going to get married,are we?"
    "They'd think we are. My mother would have a heart attack if she saw us together. My dad might throw me out of the house." Then Ron told Jane how Jews and French Canadians had clashed in the l930's and 1940's. "The French would come down the Main, Sainte Lawrence Boulevard and hammer Jews, who soon were hammering them right back," Ron continued. "Those events are engraved on my parents' souls.
Then of course what happened to the Jews in Europe in the second world war.'
     "But so what?I'm not responsible for those things.'
     "Jane for my parents any Christian is responsible for them. I'm sorry that's just the way things are.'
      "Well in that case," Jane said coldly ."I think I'll spare you any more pain Mr. Shapiro. It was nice knowing you. But now goodbye and good luck." She stalked away into the cold night air and barely nodded at him when she saw him on campus again. So ended another brief romance.
     
     
     
    

Friday 28 September 2012

The Life of Jane continued

                    The Life of Jane continued - Jane Meets Two Ethnics


      Jane had a conscience. She was also interested in the larger world, probably because she spent her childhood in India. So she joined the United Nations Club at McGill University and there she met students from European-ruled colonies in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. One man she met at this club, shook up her view of the British Empire.
      "I've got no love for the British Empire," a brown-skinned man named Samuel Greenwich told her one night at the UN club."I come from Trinidad and I want to see us get our independence, just like Ghana in Africa has just done. "We need our freedom, not British rule anymore."
    These statements angered Jane.
   "I lived in India as a child," she said. "And the British did a lot of good there."
    "Oh come on," Samuel shot back. "They made a pile of money out of India and then when Gandhi and Nehru stirred up the masses, the Brits couldn't hang on to India anymore. So what did they do? They pulled out and left a hell of a mess behind them. Now India and poor Pakistan have to clean up the mess that the British left behind them. What good was that?
     "Nonsense," Jane retorted. "My father helped set up a health care system across India. The British established the first hospitals there. And where do you think Gandhi, Nehru and all their leaders were educated? In schools that the British set up, no less."
    And so the argument went on until Jane stood up and said, "It's getting late and I'm going back to the residence. I've got a class at eight thirty tomorrow morning."
     Jane was a little surprised when Samuel followed her out into the cold winter night, where  a  light snow was starting to fall. He walked her back to her residence she lived in and then said good night. She went out with him a few times, raising eyebrows of onlookers as they held hands and kissed in restaurants and on campus.
    But Sam , as she now called him, wanted to make love to her and Jane refused. "I don't  sleep with men," she told him one clear brisk afternoon after they'd seen a rerun at the local theatre of the movie 'Picnic' starring William Holden and Kim Novak. "I'll only sleep with someone I'm going  to marry and I'm not ready for that yet." Joan had told nobody about her promise tp John Tytherleigh.
     Sam, who was few centimetres taller than Jane smiled down at her as they made their way back to the women's residence. "Jane," he said in his Caribbean accent. "you'd be surprised at the number of girls I've slept with at McGill. There's only one problem though"
   "Which is? They got pregnant maybe?
   "No, they won't talk to me in except as workers. the daytime. they just want me as a nightime lover.
   "I wouldn't do that because I'm not going to sleep with you," Jane said.
    By now the couple had reached the women's residence where one or two other couples kissed and embraced in the cold winter afternoon air. No man was allowed in the residence except for male workers.
   "You can't come in here," Jane said sharply.
   "I know that," Sam said as he whirled around in the snowy sidewlak, like a brown top spinning on a white carpet. "See you again girl."
    But he never asked her out again.
   
  
   
    
  

Wednesday 26 September 2012

The Life of Jane continued

                         Chapter Five continued


     Jane loved to read and she did plenty of that at McGill. In first year arts she took latin, french, history and introductory english courses. She passed with high marks. She noticed when she came back to McGill the next fall, some people weren't there. They had probably failed three or more courses. If you did that, your university career was over at McGill.
    Jane ploughed on and chose to honour in English courses. She studied English literature and American literature too. Here, Hemingway, Faulkner, Melville and Hawthorne  took up a lot of space and time. In English literature, she studied authors like Jane Austen, D.H. Lawrence and Arnold Bennett. She toiled over term papers on books by Fielding, Defoe and Sterne. She read and analyzed poems by John Donne, Ezra Pound , T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden. Canadian novelists and poets didn't seem to show up on Jane's courses. Nor did women writers either.
    But then came time for fun. There was a winter carnival,dances and lots of movie dates that kept Jane  busy on weekends. She met boys in classes and on the campus. And though she was secretly engaged to John Tytherleigh, she went out with quite a few men.
     "My aim is to enjoy myself, get my degree, and then get married and have children," Jane told some of her friends one night as the sat in her room in the residence."Who knows what lies ahead after that." Most of her friends agreed with her. Career plans didn't seem to concern Jane's female classmates. As the 1980's women's generation used to say, "Back in the 1950's women didn't go to university to be doctors or lawyers. They went to university to meet and marry a doctor or a lawyer."

Friday 21 September 2012

The Life of Jane - Chapter Five

                                Chapter Five - Jane Goes To McGill

  
       In the fall of 1955, a young blonde 18 year-old woman walked along Sherbrooke Street taking in the sights and sounds of downtown Montreal. The day was sunny and warm and cars roared along, moving far faster than they did in Fredericton.
    Jane Sinclair was now a McGill University student registered in the first year arts programmme. She'd won a scholarshp into McGill. But she also needed money from her parents as well as some of  her small savings from summertime jobs to come to Montreal and enroll at McGill. The sights and sounds of Montreal at first overwhelmed her. Now she realized in this city of one-and-a-half million people, how small Fredericton was.
    By now, she'd visited Boston, New York City, and Philadelphis. But then she'd been with her parents. Now she was on her own. She stayed in the women's residence, a four storey brick building, right across the street from the McGill campus in downtown Montreal.
    "Where do you come from?" another young woman asked Jane, as she sat beside her in the women's dining room on the residence's first floor. Dozens of other female students were also eating a dinner served up by a white smocked staff who stood behind a counter.
     After Jane told this slight, brown-haired woman where she came from, the woman told Jane, "Oh I'm  from Albany, New York. I'm studying arts and I'm  in first year." After these introductions, she and Jane hung out together. They would stroll along Sherbrooke Street, gaping at the great mansions that had at one time lined the street. Now many of them were being converted into rooming houses. Two or three blocks away, lay Saint Catherine Street, which was full of well-dressed crowds and neon lights that flashed above store windows.
   "Wow, the people here sure move fast," Jane said at the roaring cars and hordes  of moving people. "The cars really speed and the way people dress up here. It's amazing."
    Nothing changed in Montreal in the four years she lived there, at least as far as the size of the crowds and the speed of the city was concerned. The city kept growing and Jane's interests grew too. "It was a nice time of my life," she recalled many years later. "I was a small-town girl coming to the big city with lots to learn."

Thursday 20 September 2012

The Life of Jane - Chapter Four continued

                        Chapter Four continued


      But it wasn't all work and no play for Jane. Despite her studying and reading, she had time for fun too.
      By her late teens, Jane was what boys back then used to call 'A blonde bombshell'. Her long blonde hair, slim compact frame, and height of 5.5 feet or 1.65 metres, turned  many boys on. And her grey  coloured eyes, short pointed nose,and winning smile encouraged many boys to overcome their adolescent shyness, and ask Jane out for a date.
       At her graduation dance in 1955, Jane didn't have any trouble finding a date. By now she was going around with John Tytherleigh, a tall dark-haired man in his early 20's. He was studying to be an engineer at the University of New Brunswick.
      "I don't know about that Tytherleigh boy," Jane's mother said. "His parents aren't much. And I wonder whether his father the plumber really loves his wife."
      But Jane didn't listen. For now she was in love with John, with his faint moustache, thick brown hair and his fun-loving devilish ways. And she loved dancing with him. In the early morning dawn after the graduation dance was over, the two of them sat in John's father's secondhand Ford and made a vow to marry, only not yet.
      Jane kept all of this from her parents. For now she was off to university and this was her first move away from her family.

Wednesday 19 September 2012

The Life of Jane - Chapter Four Continued

 

     Though Mr. Sinclair,the doctor, was nearly always busy, sometimes the Sinclair family did come together. For four weeks a year, in summertime the three Sinclair children went off to summer camp. This was in July. Then in August for four weeks, the family went away together. The doctor would drive his wife and three children in his Buick car to a small town on the south shore of Nova Scotia.
    There they stayed in a small house not far from the ocean. "It was wonderful," Jane recalled years later. "We spent days in the sun, running, swimming, trying to catch fish and just have fun."
    Whole sections of the doctor's family also flocked to this vacation spot too. At the age of 10 Jane realized that she belonged to a huge family. She met aunts, uncles, cousins and even second cousins. Here, too, her two sets of grandparents showed up - but only once apiece. Airline trips or boat journeys to Canada from Britain were, at this stage, beyond the budgets of most Britishers.
     Then at the end of August, the Sinclairs packed up their things and went back to New Brunswick, driving across the causeway. "A lovely way to pass the time," Diana sighed in the late summer of 1953 as the  Buick with the doctor at the wheel, chugged its way home. "I wish we could spend more time here."
    Her husband smiled while staring at the road  ahead of him. He sighed too but at the thought of the work he had to get back to.
    By now, in l953, Jane was becoming a young woman. Her hips had widened, she had already begun two years before having monthly periods, her breasts sprouted from her chest, and she could see hair growing above her upper lip.
    But Jane was not a typical teenager. She didn't scream or gasp when she heard Johnny Ray or later Elvis Presley on the radio, as many of her female schoolmates did. Instead she hit the books and studied hard, just as her sister Beatrice did. Jane was studying hard to win a scholarship to Dalhousie University in Halifax or McGill University in Montreal.
    Her sister Beatrice was already at Dalhousie studying to be a pharmacist or druggist as it was called back then. "We don't have too many women druggists," the male admissions officer huffed at Dalhousie. "Well you'll soon have another one," Beatrice shot back. "I'm going to be one."
    Jane preferred literature to science. She read Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's work 'Evangeline' and lamented the fate of the Acadians when she read how the British drove the French-speaking Acadians out of Nova Scotia. By this time also, she read about what later became known as 'The Holocaust' . From the age of 16 or so, Jane felt a great sympathy with Jews, and always defended Jews when anyone put them down. She also would bristle whenever anyone criticized Israel.
    "Israel is a democracy," Jane would say to critics of Israel. "Name me another democratic country in the Middle East. Besides the Jews deserve a homeland after the way they've been treated. And now they've got one, which is good." 
   

Tuesday 18 September 2012

The Life of Jane - Chapter Four

                         Chapter Four - Jane's Adolescence


      A few years later, Jane went off to a new high school called Claremont. Her past tormentors didn't go to this school. They vanished from Jane's life. Now the Sinclair family were still adjusting to the Canadian climate, which was another battle.
      Every late November the snows came and didn't vanish until April. In the winter with the snow on the ground, the mercury would sometimes plunge to fifteen below zero Farenheit. Then came the spring rains that washed away the snow. The rains were followed by moist heat and often torrential thunderstorms. The heat of India soon receeded in Jane's mind to a distant memory.
     Both Jane and Beatrice went to Claremont High School. They studied hard and were outstanding students. Their brother who now called himself, Tom, did well in school too. He liked to play hockey and listen on the radio to 'Hockey Night  in Canada'. Later in the 1950's the Sinclairs got a television and Tom was glued to it on Saturday nights watching hockey.
    "What's your favourite team?' Jane once asked him, Jane knew nothing about hockey at all
      "Why the Boston Bruins of course," he shot back."They'll win the Stanley Cup one day." At this point, in Tom's life that didn't happen. While the Sinclair children adjusted easily to their new life in Canada, Mrs. Sinclair wasn't happy in her new home.
   The family lived in a sizeable two story home on the ouskirts of Fredericton.  Mrs Sinclair hired a cleaning lady, a French speaking woman to help her with her chores. But she still pined for the Indian mansion with its 67 servants.
     "This is the provincial capitol, " Mrs Sinclair told Jane on one hot humid June day. "It doesn't seem like a capital city to me. But it sure is provincial. I do miss India. Fredericton is so small." Mrs. Sinclair may also have missed seeing her husband. For Doctor Sinclair now headed up the rehabilitative services in New Brunswick. He often worked more than ten hours a day. And neither  his wife nor his children saw him too much.

Saturday 15 September 2012

The Life of Jane - Chapter Three

                      
                        

                                                School Days - Chapter Three

       Four girls surrounded Jane one recess during her second week of going to King Edward primary school "Where'd you come from?" a rough looking freckle-faced girl, who was one of Jane's classmates asked her. "You sure speak differently Think you're better than us, do you?"
    Then she smiled at another girl who stood right in front of Jane and who Jane didn't recognize. "Come here and let's see you cry," the dark-haired girl said as she beckoned  to Jane. She grabbed Jane and then pushed her backwards, while another of Jane's four tormentors kneeled behind Jane.
    Jane toppled over onto the concrete playground. When she tried to get up, the two other girls sat on her and started to slap her face.
     "You stuck-up bitch," the freckle-faced girl said. "You think you're great don't you/ We'll teach you, miss snob."
     But Beatrice was in the playground too and saw what was happening. She ran over to Jane lying on the playground, and pulled one of the girls off Jane. "Get off my sister,' she screamed. "Get off her now." The dark-haired girl tried to kick Beatrice who kicked her back, right in her shins.Another girl jumped on Beatrice's back and started pounding her.
     But in the midst of this fight the school bell rang. "Careful people,' one of the four girls said. "Recess, it's over. Let's get out of here. If Mr. Wiley, the principal catches us, we'll be up a creek."
    The four girls fled back to the school building. But one shouted back as she ran, "We're not finished with you two. We'll be back."Then they were gone.
      "Mum, you should see what happened to-day at school," Jane blurted out as soon as she got home. "These girls attacked me." Diana looked at Jane's bruised face and anger swept over her. Soon she was on the phone to the school principal, Mr. Wiley.
      "Stop this nonsense," she told him in a loud voice. "I send my daughters  to school to to learn,  not  to get beaten up by a bunch of thugs. If you don't do something soon, my husband the doctor will."
      After this phone call, the four girls didn't touch Jane or Beatrice anymore. They were warned by Principal Wiley that they'd be thrown out of school if they started any more trouble.Still, when she sat in the classroom with any of the four, they hissed at her or made faces at her when they passed her in the hall.
      Beatrice who was two years older than Jane gave her  younger sibling some advice. "Jane," she said one Saturday afternoon while a blizzard roared outside, and the two girls nestled in the living room. "We've got to start talking like Canadians. Else we'll never fit in here.'
      So the two girls started to talk like Canadians, or like English-speaking New Brunswickers. Their old upper class English accents vanished . It was a step forward in Jane and Beatrice becoming true Canadians.

Friday 14 September 2012

Life of Jane continued- 3rd installment

                  Passage from India  - continued



      Doctor Sinclair's prediction was spot-on. Post war England was no place to come back to.  The family shivered  and near froze in the winter of 1948. Large parts of inner-city London lay in ruins as did many other places in England and Scotland. They were casualties of the German bombing in world war two. Food was rationed and the weather was grey and cold.
      The Sinclairs trekked to Barnet a small but growing  suburb to the north of London proper. "I don't like this place ," Diane Sinclair said as she looked around the cramped four-bedroom apartment in Barnet. "Oh my dears, what a change from India." Jean the nanny had gone by now to live with her sister in Birmingham.
      But the family didn't stay long in Barnet. One grey foggy day, Dr. Sinclair came home looking happy. "We're off to Canada," he said as he ran his hand through Jane's short blonde hair. "We're going to Fredericton in New Brunswick.
     "Where's that?" Beatrice asked.
     "A long boat ride away," the doctor replied. "And if you think it's cold here, wait till you get to Canada."
     "Oh that's great," said Charles. "I've always wanted to skate,Daddy."
     "Well you'll get your wish there," the doctor said. "Anyway I've got lots of relations in New Brunswick. They moved there in the 1880's. And I'll see them all I think."
      The doctor had found a job in the provincial bureaucracy.
     So the Sinclairs were off again and once again on a boat. They hauled their few suitcases onto another  big ocean liner  that had docked at the port of Southhampton, where they'd got off some months before. On a July day in l948 they headed out to sea again, but this time they sailed west across the Atlantic Ocean.    There were a few rough days on the ocean. But six days after leaving Southhampton the ship docked at Halifax. A day after that, the Sinclairs were in Fredericton, New Brunswick's capital city
     Here they would stay, some of them anyway, at least for awhile.There were problems there, but nothing that couldn't be overcome.

Wednesday 12 September 2012

Life of Jane continued

                    From India to Canada


      Jane was reading a book in her bedroom when her father suddenly appeared at the bedroom  door. "We're leaving," Mr. Sinclair said in his gruff northern English accent. "Get dressed. We've got to leave here now."
     "Oh Daddy,I - "
     "Quick Jane. get dressed. I said now."
     Ouside in the courtyard, the six Britishers, the Sinclair family and  Jean, the children's nanny,waited in the courtyard for Rama the long time driver. It was a blazing hot afternoon and finally Rama turned up. This short, dark-faced man had driven their Vauxhall car for years. Now he piled their bags of luggage into the back seat of the car and into the trunk.
     The six Britishers squeezed into the front seat and back seat, as fear ran through their bodies. As Rama drove them to the railroad station, they could see on the sides of the road, and sometimes on it, crowds of Indians. They brandished sticks and screamed at the passing car. "Quit India," some of them shouted at these white refugees. "Get out of here."
     "They don't know what they're saying," Rama said." Sahib, they've been paid to say these things."
     "We've got to leave,' Doctor Sinclair said, as he sat beside his  wife who was squeezed with him into the front seats. He wiped his hands through his thinning blonde hair. "We have to get out of here and get to the railway station."
     "It's all over for us here,' said Mrs. Sinclair.who sat perched between her husband and Rama. "That lousy Mountbatten. He's doing this far too fast. What a louse that man is. He set the date for Indian independence for August this year, and he's going through with  it, come hell or high water."
     After ten minutes of  life in a sweaty hot car, Rama drove them up to the railway station. He dumped all their bags onto the road, and just drove off, as soon as the six passengers got out. "Well there goes one good car," Mrs. Sinclair said. "God, we've lost so much including that car."
     "No use looking back Diane," the doctor said. "Now where the hell is that bloody train?'
     
A few hours later the train pulled up. It was packed to the rafters with Britishers fleeing India as this huge subcontinent in 1947 slid into independence and temporary chaos. The Sinclairs spent the next three days on the train as it hurtled across India to a port on the country's west side. Then they were on a ship that travelled through the Suez canal and towards England.
   On the ship Jane bunked in a small cabin, along with Beatrice, her mother, Jean, and at least half a dozen women of all ages The doctor and Jane's brother bunked in a similarly crowded  room full of men. The girls in the room, some in their teens, gossipped, or ran around the ship when they could escape their mothers or nannies. Often they were hungry or sometimes, just plain tired .
     After days of travelling, the ship, a huge ocean liner, slipped into the port of Southhampton.
     "England," her father said as the Sinclair family and hundreds of others made their way down the gangplank. "Bloody England. I don't think this is the best time to come back here."He was right .

                To be continued.

Monday 10 September 2012

The Life of Jane - introduction and chapter one

    This is  a story of  a person based on a real person. Some of the events are real and did happen. Others never happened. The names  of the people in this story have been changed .



         Chapter One - Passage From India

    In the fall of 1945, Jane Sinclair was a happy young 8 year-old. She lived in a mansion in eastern India, with her father, her mother, one brother, one sister and 67 servants. Wherever she went in the mansion, there was always some thin, dark-skinned man or woman, sweeping the stairs, tidying up the big kitchen, or cooking meals in it, or bowing to her and her siblings as they walked through the 23 room house.
    "Walk, don't run everywhere," Jane's 10 year-old sister Beatrice told her."Remember what mum said. 'We're British and we must be dignified.'"
    "Beatrice's brown eyes flashed with energy as she said this. Then she was off to her tutor Sabha, a short, light brown skinned man, who taught her arithmetic, English and botany. "Beatrice is so clever," Jane's younger brother, six year-old Charles said. "Or so mother says." Charles and Jane went to a school on the outskirts of Jannipur, a small Indian town in what to-day is West Bengal. Here, despite the often sweltering heat, they wore school uniforms. They studied arithmetic, spelling and English grammar. They also studied English history. They learned nothing about Indian history, though Jane had learned to speak Bengali from talking to her servants.
     At school, their teacher was an English woman called Miss Trueheart, a tall, dark haired and always neatly dressed lady. The blonde Jane envied Miss Trueheart.
    Still, she loved her brown-haired mother, Mrs. Diana Sinclair, whose maiden name Brown , she the mother said later, "was so ordinary." At age 20, the Scottish-born Diana
Brown met and married a tall blonde medical student from Liverpool, named Robert Sinclair. He was just completing his medical studies at Manchester University.
    Then he and his bride were off to India to where he ran the medical services in what later became the state of West Bengal. Many years later human rights activists were astounded to hear a 50 year-old Jane say, "The British Empire was a wonderful thing."
     All her life, after the age of 10, Jane looked back on her days in India as marvellous. "Awesome," the young people would say to-day. "I loved it there,' she recalls. "The British did wonderful things in India. When they left, things just fell apart."


                                                'The Life of Jane' continues in the next section.
  \

                                             

Thursday 6 September 2012

Life of Steve - The Epilogue

                                         The Epilogue


      Steve belongs to a generation that's dying out.
      Every year, and sometimes more,  one of his communist comrades drops dead.Each death shrinks his world, and confirms him in his growing isolation and oncoming death.  
     For Steve never married. Whether gay or heterosexual, he has lived alone.
     He belongs to a shrinking group of men and women who were inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. "Bliss it that dawn to be alive," wrote William Wordsworth about the French revolution of l789. "But to be young was very heaven." Many people around the world felt the same about the 1917 communist revolution in Russia.
     Steve wasn't alive when Lenin led the 1917 revolution. But he does remember the Soviet victories over the Nazis in the second world war, and the Chinese Revolution in 1949.
    Like millions of people before and after him, he joined the communist party and tried to organize a revolution that would sweep away capitalism, and bring in socialism. The revolution never came.
But along the way, communists like Steve, helped fight for pensions, unions, supposrt for farmers, the minimum wage and so on.
     In Canada, communists helped create the welfare state that's now shrinking year by year. They were a driving force for social equality, which too is history.
    But Steve has no regrets. "I did what I had to do," he says. "I just wish we would have won more victories."

Wednesday 5 September 2012

Life of Steve continued

   Steve had now taken steps to preserve his health.
    He'd met a doctor who used alternative medicine and who gave him new drugs and good advice. Steve stopped drinking and moved into social housing. He started to exercise and walked long distances.
    But then  he got walloped by two blows. The younger workers at the boiler room helped oust him. "Get rid of this old guy," the workers told the boss. "He's a pain in our behind and he can't do his job anymore,' they told the foreman. The company then laid off Steve and since they'd classified him as a parttime
 worker - for fifteen years!- he only got a small severance payment. Nor was he eligible for any pension.
     Soon trouble erupted where he lived. A small group of people from outside tried to take over the social housing complex and privatize it. They failed.
     But soon two big businessmen showed up and tried to take over the complex. Steve and only a few others in the complex stood up to these multimlionaires. Steve suspected they were going to tear down the present four storey building and replace it with a high rise place full of condominiums.
     For Steve it was a nother fight of his life. "This struggle at the building has gone on for the past ten years," he says. "But I'll tell you one thing. I'm not going to sleep in the streets."
    Meanwhile, Steve was trying to organize the workers at the part-time job he'd found after leaving the
boiler room.
   Two fights, one at home one at work. This was part of Steve's life: a never ending battle against the rich and the powerful, on behalf of the powerless.



   

Sunday 2 September 2012

The Life of Steve continued

   As communism vanished, some communists changed their views overnight. One man  had spent years denouncing the New Democratic Party. "It's just a bunch of right-wing social democrats," he said many times, often to N.D.P.'ers. Now he too joined the N.D.P.
    But Steve didn't leave. He stayed with communist party as it struggled to survive. Its membership in B.C. stood at barely 200 people. Its newspaper 'The Pacific Tribune' or 'The Trib' as it used to be called vanished. Meanwhile to compound the party's problems, the old line political parties tried to pass legislation that would forbid parties, like the communist party from taking part in federal or provincial parties.
    But the communist party did limp along, albeit in a very shrunken form.
    It started up a new paper called 'People's Voice'. It worked with other small parties to overturn the legislation that would have banned it, and other small parties from taking part in elections. And it met with other communist parties ariund the world to plan a new way forward towards socialism.
    "It was touch-and-go in the 1990's," Steve recalls. "But the party didn't go under. It's still around."





               Steve's Job
    
      It was a huge boiler room that squatted under a big building just outside Vancouver's city limits.
      Here Steve worked, sweated and toiled for over 15 years. "Sometimes it was dangerous there," Steve says. Sometimes the boiler gave off too much heat. Then Steve and his workmates had to turn the heat down quickly or the boiler room would blow up. Sometimes the pipes jammed up and they'd have to be unclogged.
    Once Steve nearly fell from a staircase onto the boiler room's concrete floor. But he didn't fall. If he had, he might have died.
    And heat, noise and dust clogged the air in the boiler room every day.
    Steve was now 65, then 70. He toiled on while most people retired or talked about retirement. But he hadn't saved much money and his medical expenses kept climbing.
    Most of his workmates were young men in their 30's or 40's. "They've bought big houses and run small businesses on the side," Steve observes. They lived lives worlds away from the class-conscious militants Steve had worked with when he was young. They laughed behind Steve'a back at his politics and his predictions. To them, he was an old fogey, a relic from another long ago era that they had never known. They often railed against the union, a union that had brought them many benefits.
     And the union leaders Steve met now, appalled him. They didn't seem to him to give a damn about organizing the unorganized. "They couldn't shine the shoes of the union leaders I used to know," he says.
    Steve had known men and women who had put their lives on the line, organizing unions in the 1930's and 1940's Some had gone to prison, others had been beaten by company goons. The present day union leaders sat in big plush offices, drove expensive cars, lived in huge homes, and vacationed all over the world. They earned upwards of $100,000 a year and more.
     Many of the workers in the unions lived similar lives - or wanted to.

    

Saturday 1 September 2012

Life of Steve continued

    Mikhail Gorbachev tried to give the Soviet Union a whole new lease on life. He took over the job as General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1985. This made him the head of the whole Soviet Union.
     He headed up the Sovie Union for only six years. During that time, he launched bold new initiatives to shake up Soviet society. . 'Perestroika' was  the word he used  which meant increasing automation to increase labour productivity in the Soviet Union. 'Glasnost' was another favourite word of Gorbachev's. Here it meant transparency, or opening up the whole political system to be seen  or examined by everybody. Meanwhile Gorbachev pushed for open and fair elections.
    But like many reformers everywhere in the world, Gorbachev failed.
    As soon as he changed one thing, new problems emerged. "Beneath its solid-looking exterior," writes Jim Laxer, "the Soviet Union was in such dire condition, that any effort to transform it, merely propelled it toward collapse."
    In l989, all the pro-Soviet governments in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslavakia and Romania collapsed. For Gorbachev refused the leaders of these countries to use their troops or Soviet troops against the protestors in these countries. As a result, the protestors overthrew the communist governments in these countries.
    Then in l991, on the heels of a failed hardline pro-communist coup, the Soviet Union itself vanished. It collapsed into its constituent parts. Russia, the largest republic in the former Soviet Union was now ruled by a proto-capitalist leader named Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin began to privatize and sell off large parts of the former Soviet economy. And in other former Soviet republics, the leaders there were doing the same thing.
     China and Vietnam were both ruled by communist governments. But these governments were launching their countries into capitalism North Korea and Cuba remained as the only communist countries left in the world.It was an amazing transformation that nobody predicted. Steve certainly didn't .
       While all these changes took place the Canadian Communist Party split into two factions.
       On one hand, hardline communists like Steve denounced Gorbachev as an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency, or C.I.A. "I like this man," British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said in effect of Gorbachev. "I can do business with him."
      This endorsement from an ultra-conservative British Prime Minister proved to Steve  and others that Gorbachev was a CIA mole. He'd burrowed his way into leading the Soviet Union , they said, in order to destroy it.
   But others in the party supported Gorbachev's attempts to remake the Soviet Union. When  the Soviet Union disappeared they left the party. Fights and disagreements tore apart friendships, and in some cases families. "I don't see my son anymore," one hardline communist told this author in 1991. "He's left the party
and joined another party."