The Life of Jane continued

                              Abortion But Not On Demand continued


       Teresa was a short thin working class woman from London's East End. She had a long thin nose and thick black hair piled up on top of her head. "Grew up in Leytonstone," she told Jane as they sat in a cafe near Nancy's apartment. "I've lived by my wits 'cause my dad wasn't some big toff. He works down in the sewers that's all. And my mum cleans houses."
     Teresa explained in her working class accent the plan. They'd go back to Jane's room and there Teresa would slash both of Jane's wrists with a razor blade. "A clean one," Teresa said, "because we don't want
any infections in the wounds do we?" Then Teresa would scuttle down the stairs and call the ambulance from a nearby pay phone. But she'd leave the razor blade on the bed . "And," she added, "before I go I'll
wipe the razor with a cloth so I won't be leaving my fingerprints on the blade."
    "Now here's the story to remember," Teresa said, leaning over the table as she talked to Jane in a lowered voice. Nancy looked and smiled. "The ambulance men will take you to the hospital and there they may get rid of your baby, But they won't do that if you don't get your story straight."
     Then she launched into what Jane had to tell the hospital staff and the police. "Because the police are going to show up," Teresa said as she shook her finger at Jane, and looked around at the near empty cafe. "Remember the police are everywhere and their word counts."
     So Teresa advised Jane to cry as she told her story to the cops and the doctors. "You tell them you wanted to commit suicide. You've got a child inside you, and your so-called boyfriend, a damn yank, and the child's father, ran off back to his folks in America, leaving you all by your lonesome self."
     "Tell them you've been feeling terrible and you want to die." Then she pointed at Nancy. "I told this Chinawoman what to do and it all worked out. Didn't it Nan?"
    Nancy nodded and reached across the table to hold Jane's hand. She squeezed Jane's left hand and smiled. "It worked out fine," she said. "Good luck Jane. I'll be thinking of you tomorrow."
    

The Life of Jane continued

                             Abortion but not on demand


      Nancy and Jane became friends. But on the male side, things didn't go as well. Sometimes Nancy brought her boyfriend, Simon Kung along. Simon was an economics student too, just like Don. Sometimes the two couples would 'double date' as they used to say decades ago. But Don didn't like Simon, or for that matter, Nancy either.
      "Why are these people with us?" he said once. "I prefer to be alone with you." But Jane noted that Don seemed quite happy when the two of them were with a white couple.But now Don was gone and had left a baby behind,. Jane needed help and amazingly Nancy knew what had to be done.
     After hearing Jane's tale of woe, she seated Jane in one of her living room's comfortable armchairs and sat opposite her in another big chair. "You have three choices Jane," she said. First off, Jane could go to a place for unwed mothers. Here, she could have her child and then give it up to an adoption agency. It would take at least five months  or more.
     "I don't have that kind of time," Jane said. "I've got to get my  thesis finished and soon."
     Then Jane could fly out of England or travel by train and boat to a European country, Nancy said. It could be Switzerland or somewhere else. Jane could get an abortion in some country on the continent. "But it'll cost you over three hundred pounds, Jane. Do you have that kind of money?"
    Jane quickly did a few math sums in her mind and then shook her head. No, she couldn't do that.She didn't have that kind of cash.
    "Okay, so here's the way you get an abortion in jolly old England. You declare yourself mentally ill and then a doctor in a hospital will do the  abortion for you for free."
     "But how can I do that? I'm not mentally ill."
    "It's simple. You slash your wrists and tell the anbulance drivers when they show up that you want to commit suicide. You just tell them you"re pregnant and the baby has no father and you want to die."
   "And then? My God, I could die on the way to the hospital."
   Jane's mind wandered away from the apartment. Suddenly she wanted to float away from her body and this world with all its problems. But that's what she might be doing if she followed Nancy's advice. Then she became suspicious. "Nancy, how do you know all this?"
    Nancy smiled . Then she pulled up the sleeves of her chic lacy white blouse and showed Jane her two wrists. "See Jane," she said. "See the marks."
    And Jane could see two light scars that loooped around both wrists.
    "That's why I'm always wearing watches and bracelets Jane - to hide my scars. But you can't see much of them now anyway." Then  Nancy smiled again showing her gleaming white teeth. "So you see Jane, I'm still here. A nice innocent young Chinese girl who's come straight from the Orient. If my father only
knew."
    "But who was the father? Was it Simon?"
    "No no Jane," and Nancy smiled again and put a finger to her lips. "That's my secret. But first we'll get you to meet Teresa. She helped me in the past. We need her again."
    

Abortion but not on demand - The Life of Jane continued

                                Abortion but not on demand


   Jane did track down Don's home but Don wasn't there. She phoned his house or his parents's house in Winetka Illinois. She used a classmate"s phone for she had none in her room. A woman, Don's mother answered  and told her, "Oh, Don's off in Colorado somewhere. He's taking a trip with his fiance and her family."
    "His fiance," Nancy nearly shrieked. Oh no!"
    Then she nearly fell forward on the shiny wooden floor in the apartment she'd come to to make the phone call. The place was being rented by Nancy Chu, a rich Chinese classmate of Jane's who came from Hong Kong . Jane was staggered by the fact that Don was engaged, a fact he'd never told her.
    "What's the matter Jane?" Nancy asked. "You look like you've just swallowed a frog."
    Then Jane told Nancy the real reason why she had used the phone, a fact she not hadn't mentioned to Nancy before. "I'm pregnant and Don's engaged to another woman. What am I going to do? Oh what a mess I've made of my life."
     Nancy Chu had taken to Jane right from the start. They'd met in an empty classroom while waiting for a lecture. Nancy was a bright yellow bundle of energy who was always smiling. "I'm playing the old-fashioned Chinese lady," she told Jane on the day they'd met in the classroom. "You know like the Asians you see in movies like 'Sayonara', the cool calm collected women who never complain.That's my role."
    "But the Orientals in that film are Japanese aren't they, not Chinese?"
    "So? Jane most white people don't know the difference between us two races and don't want to."
     Nancy's father was a rich businessman who thought his eldest daughter was crazy to study  English literature in London. "He wants me to take over his business ," she said. "He knows that the English people don't like us Chinese so we need money to face their prejudice. Hong Kong's a colony of Great Britain you know. The English see us as totally inferior to them."
   " They see us Canadians the same way," Jane replied.
   "But you Canadians are part English aren't you? Anyway you're white. My face sure doesn't look like yours Jane."
    Nancy was her father's favourite child and Nancy had sweet talked her father into paying all her fees and expenses in England. "My mother didn't like this but she didn't have a chance.So here I am."
    "What will you do when you get your degree/" Jane asked this fashionably dressed woman.
   "Probably go back and then I'll have to work in my father's business. But right now I'm studying the poetery of W.H. Auden and Dylan Thomas and I'm enjoying that.." Then Nancy smiled and brushed her short black hair with her hands."After this class let's go out and have  a drink somewhere." And the two of them did.
   

The Life of Jane continued

                          A Turn For theWorst



        When asked by his neighbours in Fredericton how his daughter Jane was doing over in London, England, Doctor Sinclair would reply, "She's doing fine." And she was. In fact for a time it seemed nothing could go wrong for Jane in London.She passed her written exams. She passed her oral exams. Then she started in on her thesis on John Donne.
     She even went to a musty museum outside of London. There she saw under glass of course, some  of Donne's original poems written in the 17th century. She at one time also touched some of his original manuscripts that were part of his sermons. Now she started to write her thesis. She thought, the thesis would stretch out over 150 pages or more.
    Then came the new year of 1961. In  a blink of an eye, everything started to go wrong. Don vanished just before New Year's Eve. "Oh he's gone home," one of his roommates, Bill Arthur told Jane when she went around to his student digs in the apartment he shared with two other Americans. "He's finished his thesis and passed with flying colours."
    Arthur leaned his big florid face on the side of the front door and asked her, "Do you want to come in?"
    "No, I want to know where he is. I haven't seen him or heard a word from him for two or three weeks. Do you know where he is?"
   "He's back in the states now. Flew back two weeks ago,I think."
   Do you have his home address?'
    "Sure," Arthur said. "Come on in and I'll give it to you." Jane then edged past Bill's  tall thin frame to sit in the small living room of this second storey apartment where she'd sat many times before. But she couldn't bear to sit in the bedroom that Don had lived in. As soon as she had Don's address,which she'd lost a few months ago, she fled the building and walked briskly, nearly running back to her cold room.
     She lay down on her lumpy bed and gazed at the flaky white ceiling. She got up and wrote a letter to Don at the address that Bill Arthur had given her . She waited for two weeks after  sending the letter but no reply came. Then came more bad news. She went to a doctor after she realized her period had stopped. "I think you're pregnant, miss," the doctor, a middle aged greying man told her. Jane hadn't worn a ring when she went to see the doctor. So he assumed she wasn't married . "Oh my God," Jane muttered as she made her way home from the doctor's office . "What do I do now?"
     She'd have to contact Don one way or another.There was no other way and she'd have to speak to him . So she'd have to speak to him on the phone. That meant going to someone who had a phone. She didn't want to go to Don's former apartment where there was a phone. But she did know someone else who owned a phone. She's contact that person and phone Don from this person's place . Let's hope he'd be back at  his parents' house she thought.  At this point it was the only hope she had.

Life in London continued

                Being in graduate school wasn't all fun and play for Jane. It also meant long hard hours of study. Sometimes she couldn't see Don for days on end.She had to study for four really tough exams. They were going to be on English literature. Another exam would test Jane's knowledge of 19th century French literature. She would also have to pass three foreign language exams. Jane chose  Latin, French and Bengali. She hadn't spoken Bengali in many years. So she had to spend many hours in the university's library getting re-acquainted with this language she'd spoken as a child.
      Once all these exams were out of the way, she'd have to write a thesis on John Donne, the 17th century poet.
     So Jane buckled down to work really hard.
    She got together often with Professor Bowen, who nearly always turned up for their conference wearing his black academic gown. Jane had to take many English and French literature courses. Plus there were also seminars on poetry and novels.
    "I'm really working hard," Jane wrote to her mother. "I've met many young people here, including a new boyfriend. But we're nearly always studying."
     For the next two years Jane slogged away. She tried to ignore the arrogance of some British professors. "You're basically a colonial," one professor told her, "who's come to the mother country to learn about the best of our British culture." Jane let that insult remain unanswered. This professor, she knew, or any of the professors wouldn't like to be answered back. Then she met young men and older ones who wondered out loud if Jane or any women could get an advanced degree or be worthy of earning one. "It's a tough slog getting a degree," she told Don once, "especially if you're a woman.
      Then she had to get used to the lack of central heating in her room in the wintertime. Often she shivered at nighttime. And her use of the heater in her room pushed her heating bills way up. Still, as she told her classmates in wintertime, "I don't miss the snow back home."

    
     
    

The Life of Jane continued

                                   Life in London Continued


    Jane and Don McWilliam were now lovers and Jane had now broken off with John Tytherleigh. She'd last seen John just before she'd set off for England. They both agreed they shouldn't marry. "Have a great time Scooter," John said, using his nickname for her. "I'm sure you'll shake up those Brits." Then he waved goodbye and walked quickly away down a Fredericton. She hadn't seen him since.
    Now with Don, Jane set out to explore London and parts of England. Things from her brief childhood stay in Britain brought back the past. She found again fish and chip shops and munched  the food they offered which was still wrapped in newspaper. She took Don back to Barnet with her. They strolled along the town's main street and she pointed out the apartment she'd stayed in close to 13 years ago. They wandered into the back of the apartment to look at the grass covered yard she'd played in. Like many other revisitors to their childhood past, Jane noticed how everything  in the backyard, including the trees and plants had shrunk in size.
     "They haven't shrunk Jane," Don said when she mentioned how things seemed so much smaller. "You've
just grown, that's all." She looked in the street for rag and bones men who used to trundle along in horse carts looking for junk to buy and sell. But they were gone, replaced by cars that whizzed along city streets and motorways.
 Together Don and Jane visited the usual tourist sites. They went to the Houses of Parliament and even saw Winston Churchill sitting in the House of Commons. They climbed up the stairs at the Tower of London and gazed at the masterpieces in the National Gallery.
   But sometimes Don's statements disturbed her. He was so happy to see Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan wromp to victory over the Labour Party in the 1959 general election." Thank God that Britain's tired of socialism," he said in his American Midwestern accent . "That's fantastic." 
   Jane's mother often leaned to the left politically and had once told Jane that the British Labour Party had done some good things. Don flatly disagreed. Studying Milton Friedman and having him as a teacher, Don said, "showed me that a country can only prosper under free enterprise."
    Don's America-first patriotism seemed to override all other peoples and nations in the world. This bothered Jane too.
 "The U.S. is the hope of the world,"he said one Sunday morning as he scanned the pages of the Observer newspaper, while stretching out on Jane's bed. "Why don't these Englishmen know that? They keep putting us down. Without the United States, Britain would have lost the Second World War. And we saved the Brits and the French in World War One too.We're also the main reason why the communists haven't invaded Western Europe  and swallowed up England also."
    Jane tried to ignore these statements, for she enjoyed Don's energy, optimism and being with a good looking man.  And though she still feared getting pregnant, she enjoyed their  lovemaking too. She realized that she was in love and she enjoyed the happiness it brought her. She got used to the smallness of her room and the crowded sometimes scruffy streets she often walked along. Life seemed to her to be very good.

The Life of Jane continued

                           Life in London - Continued


         Don McWilliam was an American student that Jane met at a North American get together in London. He had dark hair and a clean shaven face. When he got up to go to the washroom, he towered over her. "I guess I'm about six foot three or four, " he told Jane after he sat down beside her again and she'd mentioned his height. "My father's as tall as I am, and my older brother's even taller. Anyway, what are you studying here Jane?"
     Jane was soon pouring out her story about her life in London. She complained about her small room and how disappointed she was with parts of London.
      "It's so big but some parts of it are so dirty. Plus things here are really expensive compared to back home," Jane said. "I'm not impressed with this place the way I thought I'd be. I've lived here before . But then I was only a child and I was with my family. And we were here for only about a year or less."
     "Oh it's big alright," Don said about London.  Then he filled Jane in on his background. Don came from a family of four, his brother, his parents and himself. He'd grown up in the prosperous suburb of Winnetka, in the Chicago area. "It's comfortable there that's for sure with lots of open spaces that I don't find here."
     "But there's some very interesting places here. It just takes time to get used to."
      Don was sharing an apartment with two other Americans. He was studying at the London School of Economics for a Ph.D or doctorate in Economics."I'm a great fan of Milton Friedman," Don continued. "I took a few of his classes at the University of Chicago. He's a great defender pf our American free enterprise system." Friedman, Don said , opened his eyes to the importance of economics. "If I hadn't taken any of his courses I wouldn't be here getting a Ph.D. I'd probably have been a college drop-out."
     As he spoke,  Don would smile at Jane revealing his small even teeth. He was 23 years old and had been living in London for the past three years. "I know parts of sthis city," he said brushing a few crumbs of a roll he was eating off of his dark sports jacket and blue jeans. His dark thick eyebrows above his brown eyes would often raise themselves when he smiled.
    Jane liked him. She realized how lonely she'd  been since soming to London.  Soon, they were a couple. Not long after that, they became lovers.
       

Chapter Seven contined

                                 Chapter Seven - Life in London continued


   At the time Jane won the Beaverbrook scholarship, Jane thought that the prize was a big sum of money. But when she deducted food, rent, travel expenses, using the laundromat down the street and other expenses, she realized she'd have to be careful with her money. To take just one example, food cost a lot more in London than it did in Montreal or Fredericton.
    When the session with Doctor Bowen ended, Jane  rushed down the stairs in this building that was one of several University of London buildings scattered throughout the neighbourhood. Outside in the street, the sun shone down on the crowds of passers-by. Jane walked back to her cold room and gazed at its bare walls. Kind of depressing, she thought.
    She went outside again and went round to two or three travel offices to cadge some posters off their walls. She went into the august National Gallery and bought some small copies of paintings. Then she put these pictures and posters up on her room's walls. But the room didn't look any bigger. It just seemed a little brighter. And every time someone used the toilet down the hall, or took a bath, the noise passesd through the room's thin walls. When people or visitors to her neighbors's rooms scampered up the two flights of stairs, the walls of Jane's room shook. Meanwhile Jane could hear noise from the room of her next door neighbour, who she found out was secretary in a local government office.
    Jane decided to do most of her work outside the rooming house at one of the university's libraries.
    "Dear mum," Jane wrote to her mother back in Fredericton a few weeks later, "I've had some trouble at first adjusting to this huge humungus city. But now things atre working out and I'm doing just fine."
    One of the reasons that lifted up Jane's spirits, was a big young man from Chicago named Tom McWilliam. Jane met him and a few other Americans in a pub not far from Charing Cross.Donald was sitting in the pub, drinking a beer and smiling at something another man of his age was saying to him.
     Jane had come to this pub called 'The Arms and Anchor' because she saw a notice pinned to one of the billboards in the building where she took some of her classes. "Are you a student from North America?" the notice said. "Then come to a get-together at the Arms and Anchor pub." The notice gave the pub's address and time and date of the meeting. Jane wondered whether any Canadians would be there. She knew many Americans would show up.
     She and another young woman from Brampton, Ontario named Felicia Pratt seemed to be the only Canadians in a crowd of about 30. But soon she was talking to Don McWilliam and enjoying it.         

Chapter Seven of the Life of Jane

                                     Chapter Seven - Life in London


      Professor Bowen or 'Doctor Bowen' as he liked to be called, sat in his study talking to Jane. He was a medium sized man with thinning red hair combed back from his forehead, and a small clipped red military-type moustache. "I was a soldier in the last war," he told Jane right after meeting her. "I  fought against Rommel in North Africa and was part of the invasion of Sicily. "
    Jane had heard vaguely about the last world war but she couldn't have told you  what  the battles were about and  where they took place. So she stayed silent when he told her about his military history. She judged he was middle-aged and just stared at him, as he pushed back his thick, black-framed glasses when they slipped down his long nose.
     "I'm your thesis advisor Miss Sinclair," he told her as he swivelled around in his wooden armchair that sat in front of a dark flat table. "Now here's what you must do."
      Then he laid out her schedules for classes she had to attend, readings she had to do, and other things to be done. Clad in a dark blue suit with a dark tie, from time to time he would re-arrange his black academic gown. As he went on talking briskly, Jane would jot down many of the things he said, in a small blue notebook. Bowen's accent was clear and concise and reminded Jane of Queen Elizabeth's way of speaking. It was definitely middle class.
     Sometimes Jane wanted him to stop talking and give her a rest.  But he didn't. He ploughed on with his comments. "Now you're going to do your thesis on John Donne, aren't you? So here's what you have to do first." And he was off again talking nonstop.
     Jane looked out of the study's window beyond the hordes of books that lined the study's walls. She could see in the distance, Waterloo Bridge, or was it Charing Cross Bridge? Here it was in late September 1959 and she still hadn't seen much of London's tourist attractions. She'd flown to London from Boston and ended up for a few days at a local Y.W.C.A.
     Then she found a room in an old rooming house not far from one of the University of London's campuses  for she was enrolled in some of the University of London's postgraduate English courses. Yet  she quickly realized that London was an expensive city and she couldn't afford to stay long at the 'Y'.
   "It's small miss," the landlady Mrs. Forest told Jane about the room as they both climbed up the rooming house"s two flights of stairs. "But it's adequate. Three pounds a week and I'll supply you for free with a gas heater. You'll need it come wintertime."
     Mrs. Forest was a small, chunky woman with dyed brown hair, and a squint in her right eye. "You share the bathroom with three other people . But there's a stove and a sink in the room."  Mrs. Forest put a key in the room's lock and opened the door. She was right. The room had a stove, a sink and even a dresser and a bed. But elsewise it was bare and dark. A small window above the sink supplied Jane with a tiny view of part of the city of London.
  Some fragments of Blake's poetry rang through Jane's head. Hadn't he written about "England's green and pleasant land " or something like that? She sure hadn't seen  much that was green and pleasant in London so far. But she had no choice. "I'll take the room, Mrs. Forest," she said. Then she thought to herself,
But it needs some fixing up too, and I'm going to do that a soon as posssible.



    

The Life of Jane- Chapter Six continued

                                 Scholarship Time - Chapter Six continued


          In early March 1959, three months before Jane's Graduation Day,she was  in Fredericton, sitting in a big room on a big wooden chair.
She wore a red cashmere sweater, a white Peter Pan blouse with short sleeves, a grey woolen skirt, and brown oxford shoes. Of course she was also wearing a brasier, panties and a slip. But the men in the room  of course, didn't know anything about Jane's underclothes.
       Three men all dressed in dark suits, dark ties and white shirts sat across from her on the other side of a dark oak table.
     "Now tell us Miss Sinclair why do you think you deserve the Beaverbrook Scholarship?" a tall grey-haired man with a grey moustache asked her. He sat in the middle of the trio. That opening question launched a two hour question and answer session between Jane and the three men. She must have impressed them, as did her graduating marks, which with the exception of one B were all straight A's.
     After Graduation Day Jane came back to Fredericton, making plans  to take a journey while working again at the golf club. While she took orders, swept and vacuumed the floors and cleaned and polished knives, forks and spoons, she thought constantly about the Beaverbrook scholarship. Would she win it or not? At night time after watching some t.v. program  or going out with her brother Tom, who was now studying to be a doctor at Dalhousie university, she would listen to the radio before dozing off to sleep
     But before she fell asleep or after waking up in the morning, one of the first things on her mind was the question:Did I win or not? She would phone home in the middle of the weekday, nearly every day when she was at the golf club and ask her mother "Is there anything in the mail about the scholarship?"
    For a month and a half, that is until mid-August, her mother would usually reply, "Jane nothing like that came to-day." And then on a sunny hot day in August, Mrs. Sinclair told Jane over the phone,"There's something here for you dear."
    Jane quickly asked the supervisor in the golf club if she could just go home for an hour. "Fine with me," the man replied and  watched in surprise as Jane tore out of the club, got on her motorcycle and roared off home. Once there  she ran up the stairs of the Sinclair house and slammed the front door shut.
     "It's on the kitchen table,"  her mother said as she sat in the livning room. "I haven't opened it."
      On the kitchen table was a cream-coloured envelope with a Beaverbrook scholarship on the envelope's left hand corner. Jane trembled as she tore open the envelope . "We are happy to inform you," the typed letter began, "that you have won..."
      Jane read no further. She screamed with joy, ran over to the livng room and hugged her mother.
     "I did it mum, I did it!" she shouted. "I've won the scholarship. I'm going to London. To London. Oh that's wonderful."
     Jane kissed her mother and ran away from the house  into the sweltering day that had nary a cloud in the sky. Then she sat in a nearby park and cried with joy. Hours later,  as dusk settled over Fredericton, Jane still couldn't believe her good luck. She was going to London on a Beaverbrook Scholarship. Amazing, she thought, just amazing.
      



        

The Life of Jane - Chapter Six

                                Chapter Six - To London

     One early morning in December 1958 Jane walked down the hall of the first floor of the arts building, on her way to a class. It was here in this scruffy building that she took many of her classes. She scanned the bulletin board near the entrance, and there pinned to it, was a notice that caught her eye. "Are you a student from New Brunswick and are you going to graduate  from the faculty of arts?" it asked. "You may be eligible for the Beaverbook Scholarship for graduate students."
     Jane was interested.Here, was a way to leave Canada and get another degree. The poster left a phone number and an address that she wrote down. She found out later that the scholarship was awarded every year to an oustanding student from New Brunswick.
    The winner could go to a university ouside Canada and stay in a  country and get an advanced degree. All fees were paid and so were most other expenses. "Holy Hanna," Jane told her father when she phoned home on one of her rare long distance calls a few weeks after seeing the notice. "This would be great for me if I won. Going to London, England to study would be fantastic."
     Jane wanted to go to England, a place that she had only stayed in for a few months, more than ten years ago. Also she was eager to continue her studies in English.
    Lord Beaverbrook, New Brunswick-born multimilliionaire, born Max Aitken, had made a fortune in Canada, and then England. He was an intimate of Winston Churchill, and had served in Churchill's wartime cabinet. But though like Jane, he admired the English, he didn't forget his native New Brunswick. He set up his scholarship as a way of paying back his place of birth.
   In June of 1959, Jane Sinclair, sat in a big crowd of graduates in an open air stadium,wearing a mortar board and a black academic gown. She walked under a warm spring sun,up to a stage where she received her arts degree from some notable. Her father and mother had travelled up to Montreal for the occasion, as had her sister Beatrice.
     "Well Jane, you're out in the big world now,"her father said after the ceremonies were over. "What're you going to do now?" Doctor Sinclair was stilll slaving away at his administrative job.
    "I think I'm going to keep going to school," Jane said as she and her family stood in the middle of a crowd of young graduates and their middle aged parents and relatives. "I'd like to go to London." She winked to Beatrice as she said this. Her sister was studying genetics in New York City.
    Jane was hoping that  she could win a Beaverbrook scholarship and go to London to study for a graduate degree. Who knows, she thought, maybe dreams do come true. Jane  had graduated with a  first class honours English degree. Now she had a Bachelor of Arts. But Jane was aiming even higher.

     

The Life of Jane continued

                                Chapter Five - Jane and John continued


           For the four years Jane studied at McGill, she went out with quite a few men. But she remained in a secret engagement with one man, namely John Tytherleigh.
    Every summer, except one, she went back to Fredericton, and every time she bonded with John again. He was now a civil engineer, working for a small firm in Halifax.
     Jane worked summers as a waitress and cleaning lady at the golf club where her father came to relax.But she had a distant aunt on her father's side who lived in Halifax. Jane would stay for two weeks at a time in this woman's house. Maud Roberts was a tall no-nonsense high school teacher with red hair. She'd married once but now was a widow. "Her husband Ralph enlisted in the second world war," Jane's mother told her."He died during the fighting in France. After that Maud stayed single and never had a child."
    Maud didn't mind bonding with Jane. Perhaps Jane took the place of  a son or daughter she never had. The two women became friends. But after meeting John who came to her house, Maud told Jane,"No hanky-panky in my house Jane. I've promised your parents that I''ll  look after you while you're here and I plan to."
     By then John and Jane had already made love in John's cramped untidy bachelor apartment. But Jane was always worried about getting pregnant. "We can't keep doing this," she told John after a bout of passionate love making." I'm scared. Let's put it off again until we're married. I enjoy this a lot but I'm not ready to have a baby yet."
    "Jane, I'm a man," John said, as he lay beside her in his narrow bed. "I need sex. If I don't get it I get all frustrated. Besides I'm wearing a rubber."
    "Rubbers sometimes break. I still feel worried when we make love."
    The year after that Jane didn't go back to Fredericton, possibly to keep John at bay. She went to work in a hotel in the Laurentians, a popular vacation spot north of Montreal. She spoke French  with many of the staff who were French-Canadians. Most of the other staff spoke English as their first language.
    One day a letter came to her at the hotel. "Dear Jane," the letter writer Maud Roberts wrote to her in her neat school teacher's script. "I saw John Tytherleigh in downtown Halifax yesterday afternoon. He was with a young, attractive girl. Just thought I'd let you know."
    "Hope you are doing well. Love / Maud" .
     This letter which Jane read in her bedroom that she shared with another worker, didn't hurt her too much. She knew John had eyes for other women. But she also thought that once they'd marry, he'd stay faithful to her. And how could she complain about John's dating other women. Didn't she do the same?
     "We'll be together one day.Or maybe we won't," she muttered to herself causing her roommate Harriet, who'd come silently into the room in the last minute, to look at her.
      Just talking to myself," she said to Harriet with a smile. Then she thumbed through the daily 'Montreal Star' which lay on the floor beside her bed. In the paper there was a story on two of America's famous singing stars, the Everly Brothers.
     She hummed and sang to herself their big hit of the year or two before . "Bye,bye love/ Bye bye happiness." Harriet joined in "Hello emptiness/ I think I'm a gonna cry."
     But neither Jane nor Harriet cried or felt like crying. Harriet leaned back on her bed and smiled. She was young , and clever she thought. Life was sweet. 

The Life of Jane - Chapter Five continued

                                   Jane Meets Jeanne


     Jane didn"t go out with Ron Shapiro after he told her he couldn't take her to his house and meet his parents. Still, the talk she had with him about Jews and Christians set her thinking. Jane started to notice how Jews and Christians didn't mix much at McGill. The crowd that gathered in the smoking room outside the main library was made up mostly of Jews and Christians. And neither group spoke much to each other.
      "They call the smoking room 'The Gaza Strip"" Ron told her once. "And that's because it's named after the Gaza Strip on the border of Egypt and Israel where Jews and Arabs fight each other."  Little by little Jane learned about the class-ridden, ethnically split city of Montreal.
     In the streets of the city she heard French, English, Italian and other languages. She met people who came from the Caribbean, Greece, Italy and other parts of Europe. She went to school with Jews, Christians, and even some Moslems.
    But these groups didn't seem to hang out with each other. "America's a melting pot," Ron Shapiro once told her. "You had a Jew on the U.S. Supreme Court back in the 1920's. Many of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's aides were Jews. It's not like that in Canada. So we Jews keep to ourselves. So do others."
      But Jane soon realized that things in New Brunswick weren't too different than the set-up in Montreal.
 Her father told her how the French speaking Acadians in northern New Brunswick didn't exactly hang out with the English speaking people who lived mainly in southern New Brunswick. Then there were the Indians stuck  in some of the poorest parts of the province in what were called 'reserves', or 'reservations'.
    "Some of the natives are livng in places that are as poor as some of the villages I've seen in India," her father once told her. "Those poor people have it real tough."
     Then there was the Acadian woman  Jeanne Mercier who Jane met at  a dance at one of Jane's  McGill
classmate's house.  "Oh you come from Fredericton," this woman who called herself  Jean, said to Jane. " I'm glad to meet you . I'll tell you one thing," she continued in a French-accented English. "At least here in this city I can speak French. You've got to be careful if you do that back home."
    "What do you mean by that?" Jane asked.
    Jean then told Jane about how she lived in a part of Bathurst . But she and her brother had to cross through an adjoining area to get  to school. Often English speaking rowdies who lived in the neighbouring area would attack the two Acadians when they crossed into the English -speaking area. "They'd throw stones at us, punch us and  yell at us 'Speak English you dumb assholes'"
Jean said. "I'm telling you I'm glad to live in Montreal, although even here, some people don't like it when I speak French .
     Jane has heard talk about French-English clashes in New Brunswick. But she'd never seen one up
close. Slowly she realized that all places in Canada had their  own conflicts and problems."No place is perfect," her mother used to say. Jane smiled to herself while going to class one spring afternoon.and remembered her mother's saying. "Well, she sure got that one right," Jane said out loud.