POSTING #111

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Follow-up to Posting #110, "Getting Sick in the South"

In last week's Posting I ended with a story about powerful but inefficient steam locomotives as a not very subtle way of suggesting that there might be things that could be done to increase the efficiency of the delivery of health care.

Click here for a recent article in the Washington Post on attempts being made by the State of Massachusetts to rein in health costs. One of the key methods being tried is to move away from the fee-for-service model.

I am sure that politicians, health insurance companies and health care providers across the US will be watching the State's efforts with enormous interest.

I am also sure that Canadian politicians and persons involved in health care will be watching just as avidly.

Good for Massachusetts!!

Stories from Yorkshire

The great majority of immigrants we selected at the Leeds, Yorkshire, Canadian Immigration office where I worked in the early 1960s became successfully established in Canada.

To be sure, they often had to overcome difficult problems: trouble in getting British credentials and experience accepted by Canadian employers; difficulties in finding affordable accommodation; and, problems in coping with the inevitable culture shock that moving to a new country involves.

But there were a few who didn't make it.

They stayed for a time in Canada and then returned to Britain.

I had to interview one such immigrant, a man who had received an Assisted Passage Loan from the Canadian Government to pay his air fare to Hamilton, Ontario, but had returned after only three weeks.

As I looked through the notes of the interviewing officer before meeting with the unsuccessful immigrant I couldn't figure out what had gone wrong. According to the notes he was an intelligent, well motivated person, and a highly qualified machinist---an occupation in good demand in the Hamilton area. He and his wife were in their early 30s with two young children. His wife seemed to be very supportive of the move. The officer had commented that it was a close family---he had liked them.

Cases like that upset us. Had our screening failed to identify a problem? Had our counselling been inadequate?

When I asked the man to describe what had happened, he told me he had flown to Canada in March. His plan was to find a job and an apartment, and then have his family join him.

He had no friends or relatives in Canada to meet him but he had found a room in a private house in a pleasant residential area with tree-lined streets.  The  companies he visited were positive and it seemed that it wouldn't take him long to  find a good job.

But three weeks after he had arrived something happened, and he decided he would have to return to Britain.

"What was it?, I asked.

"I was walking down a street in Hamilton with all those trees, those maples that you have in Canada. Suddenly, the smell of the juice that comes out of them hit me."

"The maple sap?"

"I guess so, but it's a sweet smell and it almost made me sick. And the footpath was sticky with the juice.  I just decided that I couldn't stand this."

I thought about his comments. He had arrived in March when the sap would start flowing in the maples. I remembered as a lad walking to public school in the spring and sometimes finding an icicle hanging from a broken maple twig (a sapcicle?), and how I had enjoyed the sweet taste as it melted in my mouth.

I had never noticed the smell of maple sap but perhaps that was because I had grown up with it.

In any event, he couldn't stand the smell and he had caught a plane and returned to Britain.

It would take a psychiatrist to figure out what had really happened but my theory is that he had one of those 'oh-my-god-what-have-I-done' moments that we all have experienced.

There were no friends or relatives in Hamilton that he could talk to. Long distance calls to the UK were hard to make and expensive, and his family may not have been 'on the phone', as they said in Britain at the time.

He panicked.

Whatever happened, it is ironic that it was Canada's national tree and national emblem that took the blame for his failed immigration.

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The Leeds Immigration Office received newspapers from across Canada that were used by potential immigrants to check the wants ads---to see what jobs were available and what accommodation would cost.

There was a slim, elderly man with sparse white hair who came in regularly and asked for the latest Toronto Star. He would spread the paper out on one of our tables and spend an hour or so browsing through it.

We didn't pay much attention to him, as we got on with our work of interviewing immigrants. I suppose we assumed he had some connection with Toronto, perhaps family or relatives there.

A new Canadian secretary arrived in the office---at that time Canadian secretaries handled the confidential correspondence while locally-engaged typists looked after the bulk of the application processing---a young woman from Ottawa with a gentle manner and a warm smile. She was at the reception counter one day when the man came in for his newspaper, and she began to chat with him.

It turned out that he and his wife had migrated to Toronto in the 1920s from Leeds. He had found a good job, they had moved into a comfortable apartment, and  he was thinking about buying a car. Things  were going very well for them.

Then his wife became homesick.

As a digression, in the 1960s immigrants to Canada often talked about 'the thousand dollar cure'. If a wife became homesick and wanted the family to return to England, the husband would buy an airline ticket for her.

Usually after a month or so in England she would find that the  'old country' wasn't quite what she had remembered and that Canada was better than she had thought.

In the 1920s, there was no easy equivalent of 'the thousand dollar cure', so the couple decided to move back to Leeds.

As he talked to our secretary, the elderly man became agitated.

"That damn woman forced me to come back. We would have had a better life in Canada."

He carried on for some time, berating his wife.

From then on he always looked around for the Canadian secretary. If she were available, he would start in again about his 'damn wife'.

And then he stopped coming in. We joked with the secretary, asking her what she had done to turn off 'her boyfriend'.

A month or so later, the secretary found an article in the Leeds newspaper with an accompanying photo of the elderly man. The article was reporting on a coroner's inquest into the death of the elderly man's wife.

According to the article, the husband had testified that he had come home from some shopping to find his wife lying in the dark at the bottom of the cellar stairs. He had immediately called an ambulance, but the attendants had found that she was dead.

He told the inquest that his wife always refused to turn on the cellar light before going down the stairs because she was concerned about the cost of the electricity. He said that he had often spoken to her about the dangers of going down the stairs in the dark, that the small cost of electricity was not worth the risk of falling.

The coroner ruled that the death was caused by misadventure.

Several of us in the office read the article and then looked  at each other.

Had the death happened as the coroner had determined or had the husband pushed his 'damn wife' down the stairs? Should we go to the police and tell them about his rants about his wife?

We finally decided that we didn't really have the kind of concrete evidence that would have persuaded the police, or the coroner, to re-open the case.

The man never came back to the office.

I still wonder sometimes, what really happened.

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See you on April 24th for Posting #112 with more stories from our family’s universe! If you have comments or suggestions, please leave a comment at the bottom of this posting,  or email me at johnpathunter@gmail.com.