Mary Hargreaves with her homemade Irish Soda Bread, a recipe she learned from her mother while growing up in Ireland. (Photo courtesy Adrain Macnair)
It was 1939 and the war was breaking out. Her father went to fight in the war and she and her mother, along with many other families, lived in married quarters provided by the army.
Mary Hargreaves and the other children would play in the camp, using the soldiers’ training areas as a playground. They would wander for hours, only coming back for meals. “There was no fear for parents back then. No need to be worried,” she recalls.
She and her friends would walk along the top of a curved wall that encompassed the army barracks where she lived for nearly six years. They would steal apples from the farmer’s fields just beyond the wall. A plane went down once in a farmer’s field and she and her friends went over the fence to investigate the crash.
She remembers how they were quickly put on rations and one time they got lemons.
“Lemons!” she said. They had never before seen lemons and her mother took quite a few home with her. The next day Mary told her whole class at Catholic school about these lemons and her teacher told her to bring a few back for him. So she went back to the army officer in charge of administering rations and told him, “I need four lemons, please.” And he told her that her mother had already taken her quota for the time being.
“We used to get milk from the cows at night, us kids,” she said. Sent by their parents, they would walk along the farm roads in the dark. She remembers they used to spin their milk pails around their arms and it wouldn’t spill for the most part. It was sort of a game.
“When it did spill, we would have to walk back to the farm and explain why we needed more milk.”
That was not the only time she went out into the countryside; she and her mother used to walk out into the country to get fresh eggs from a chicken farmer. She remembers there were American as well as British soldiers living in the camp and how the older girls would date the Americans because they had more money to spend. She recalls that at Christmas time, the Americans on the base would have Hershey bars and oranges, and how she would have to save up all her army coupons for a month just to get two chocolate bars. She remembers her and her sister standing to attention to get their spending money from their father every Friday.
In the ’40s they were very much aware of the war years. All the railings from the houses were taken for the war effort for the metal. “I had a gas mask, you know,” she says. Her younger sister, although she was just an infant then, had one too, but hers was more like an incubator.
A few years later, she was in Belfast on holiday when there was some bombing. “There was a lot of bombing because of the shipyards,” she said. She remembers living in Omagh, which although it was a county town still had German prisoners of war. “As children we would go over to them and just stare at them. We had no concept of the war and couldn’t believe we had prisoners of war in our town.”
Although she considers herself an atheist now, Mary was raised as a Roman Catholic. She went to several Catholic schools because she and her mother moved throughout the UK during the war years. She recalls attending a convent school where the nuns taught her how to play tennis.
“Can you imagine nuns teaching people to play tennis?” she exclaims. She describes them running around in their black robes, holding their headpieces. She laughs. Throughout the tumultuous events of her life though, tennis remained a constant.
She married Harry in 1958. The two of them moved to Vancouver in 1963 because Harry had a brother living here. They had an apartment in the West End and it was $100 a month. “And that included parking!” she says.
She got a job at Woodward’s. “I used to catch the Davie bus to get to work.” As for tennis, she would walk to the tennis courts near Stanley Park and wait for someone to come by for a game. Initially, they only spent two years in Vancouver, moving to Vancouver Island in 1965. “We had no children, so in 1967 Harry and I decided to adopt a baby, and that was Jane,” she remembers fondly.
Mary played tennis until her late ’60s and she still watches the sport on TV with a passion. She says her favourite decades were that of the ’50s and early ’60s, but this decade isn’t so bad either.
In fact. she says, “This is a very good time right now. I feel there is a freedom of thought, it is an easier time. I have very good friends here in Vancouver and it is a great city to live in.”
Asked if she has any comments on the decades she has lived and if she has any regrets, she answers, “At the age I am, there’s nothing left to lose. Just be and live.”
