Steve’s niece Zoë on a visit from Belgium in 2010, looking at June`s garden.

One Christmas we met in Montreal, where Heather and Pam were living. 

Leading a group of CGIT (Canadian Girls in Training, the United Church’s version of Girl Guides) with baby Heather on her knee, New Mills, NB, c. 1959

Outside the church on a Sunday morning, about 1967. Pam is in the background.

Being a minister’s wife was not easy.

It was life in a fishbowl, with everyone watching, and you couldn’t really be friends with people in the congregation as they would put the minister’s wife on a bit of a pedestal. Also, there were politics.

You’re playing a role, and there will be gossip, whether you do it well or not.

And your children had better behave in church.

What was worse, especially for her, was she couldn’t make her own decisions about paint and wallpaper in the house because the Manse Committee took care of that.

What I remember about my mother’s 1960s hairstyle was that it took a lot of work. There was the backcombing, by which you combed your hair straight up and then combed it back towards your scalp again, creating a tangled mass beneath the layer that was smoothed over it to give it the bouffant look. There were the curlers to give it body, as her hair was naturally very straight. She’d sleep in her curlers or use a sit-under hairdryer – that was a big purchase. It was also a big deal when she got a curling iron. And the hairspray! I don’t know if she matched the scent of her hairspray to her Chanel No. 5 cologne with the same attention that she paid to matching the colours of her clothes. I’ve always gone with simple easy hairstyles in protest. But she was a beautiful woman, and this is what beautiful women did. She obviously considered the result worthy of a rare formal portrait.

Somewhere in the mid 1960s

Having lunch with Ginnie Bell, 2006 (photo by Ginnie Bell)