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."