excerpt
When she recovered from her grief over Danny, Sarah accepted a
teaching post at Corkum in the northern part of the province. But
her tenure there was short lived. In the spring of 1942, Mrs. Roberts
suffered a stroke. Sarah applied for a leave-of-absence to take care
of her mother during her convalescence. But Mrs. Roberts never
did convalesce satisfactorily, and Sarah was forced to admit that her
mother had won. For five years Sarah found herself tied to the neat
brick house in Tillsonburg – nursing, cooking, cleaning, gardening
and doing everything except that for which she had been trained.
Apart from trips to the store to purchase their meagre supplies,
Sarah went nowhere. She saw no one except Margaret and Elizabeth
and, since the former was preoccupied with wedding plans
and the latter was nursing in a hospital in Toronto, she didn’t even
see much of them. Visitors to the Roberts’ home were few because it
hadn’t taken Mrs. Roberts long after her husband’s death to alienate
almost all of their friends.
There was no hope of meeting a man. The veterans began to
drift back to town when the war ended, some with brides, some to
the sweethearts they had left behind. But even the unattached ones
seemed to have forgotten that Sarah existed, or maybe they still regarded
her as Danny’s girl. Soon, almost all of the young men had
married or had drifted off again to more promising venues.
When her mother died Sarah applied for teaching posts but the
school year had already started and a shortage of teachers was a
thing of the past. She had been out of the profession for more than
five years, as had most of the teachers who were now returning to
it. But ex-servicemen and women were, naturally, given preference
over someone who had been caring for a sick parent.
On a grey, cold day in October, three weeks after her mother’s
death, Sarah sat dumbfounded in the office of Roger Corbett, her
parents’ lawyer. She was trying to understand what he had just said
but she felt too numb to take it in.
“I’m sorry, Sarah,” Mr. Corbett continued, “I wish there was
something I could do. Twice during the past year I went to see her,
as you know. And I went specifically to suggest that she change her
will. But she acted as if she didn’t understand what I was talking
about.”
Manolis Aligizakis 