Clara had been the first to break our closely-knit family circle in September 1950 when she left home, headed for candidate school in Toronto. Thirteen months later when our mother died she returned for two months. Staying with our distraught father and two youngest sisters, she only filled the gap temporarily. Then on that sad Christmas day in 1951 we bade a final tearful good-bye.The next year, wedding bells rang for our dad, rejuvenating him to a new lease on life—June 21st, 1952, he married Helen Margaret Woodcox-McLaughlin. Two weeks later, July 5th, the bells were set to ring down in Montreal for Clara and her lover, Stanley MacGowan. My other three sisters, Helen, Marianne and Pauline, and I, with our seventeen year-old brother, Alfred, at the wheel, set out with very little money on a momentous automobile journey two-thirds of the way across Canada. It was the first venture any of us had had out of our simple life on Alberta's prairies. Following the wedding we were widely separated for many years. Thus it was an exciting occasion that August evening in 1960 when many of the family were able to meet me in the airport in Terrace, when I returned from India. Several of the family had settled in Terrace by this time. Each loved one held his own special place in my affections. I was overjoyed at the sight of each familiar face, and pleased to see all the nieces and nephews and small half-brothers I had never met. Yet my soul seemed knit to that of Clara's, like David's and Jonathan's of old. I spent a week in Terrace with the three families there—Dad, Helen and Hart, and Alfred and Dorothy—and a combined group of the second generation, numbering seventeen. (This number included a foster family of nine, belonging to Hart and Helen.) Dad's second little brood now numbered three boys. Alfred had a boy and a girl. The youngest two, Marianne and Pauline, now married, were not present at that reunion. Clara and Stanley invited me to join them and their three little ones as they travelled in their station wagon, journeying from Terrace back into Alberta. As we swerved and jostled over northern British Columbia's winding, rough mountain roads, we exchanged the experiences that had filled the intervening years. As we reached the prairies, a twinge of nostalgia swept over me. I really had not felt like I had returned home until I viewed these familiar scenes. We reminisced fondly. Much had changed, never to be the same again. The relationship of younger years had matured now. Our hearts were even more closely knit, though in a different way. Our togetherness was short-lived, however. I parted from them in our old hometown of Medicine Hat. They proceeded eastward to Ontario, where Stanley's relatives lived. They also spent some time in Mission headquarters. Later they returned to Africa for another five years. During that period their fourth child arrived, David. Clara and I were in correspondence at that time, even trying to make arrangements for me to go to Senegal to help them. Clara was over-burdened with medical duties in the village, which was in the throes of an epidemic. At the same time she was expecting the baby. Her other three were taking their schooling by correspondence under her supervision. Translation of the scriptures into the native language was a project also underway. Clara would have been so relieved to have me join them to share in some of the overload. However, I took sick at this time and the trip never materialized. . . . . . .
See: Chapter 7
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