I arrived on a bright and brilliant afternoon, energising me miraculously after my early start from Cambridge, a long flight, and a frustratingly slow crawl through immigration and customs at Vancouver’s arrivals hall. I guess that’s the way with major international airports everywhere in these post-pandemic days. Flying is rarely fun any more.
Once at the hotel in downtown, I simply dumped my bags, and headed out towards the waterfront, the route to which came back to me with amazingly easy recall given the five long years which have passed since my last visit here. I soon found myself down at the seaplane terminal from which I had left for Victoria on Vancouver Island on Labour Day 2017 ( described in Chapter Eight of SECRETS NEVER TO BE TOLD). The seaplanes were buzzing around in twos and threes, skimming over the water before heading off into the azure sky. It looked as if fun was still to be had in this sort of plane at least.
Victoria, the destination for some of these little planes, no doubt, is the capital of British Columbia of course, rather than the bigger Vancouver and was named after the last long-lived British Queen. Cousin Jessie was one of her subjects for the first twenty four years of her life. Victoria presided over the heyday of the British Empire and the emigration scheme for domestic servants which Jessie enrolled on described its young women as ‘daughters of the Empire’.
Little did I realise when I stood admiring the seaplanes that I was living through the final hours of the Elizabethan age, the one which has seen the end of that Empire during the seventy year reign of arguably our greatest monarch. The news that I heard in my hotel room this morning at 10.31 am local time was unsettling and shocking – and will be one of those days, like the death of President Kennedy in 1963, which my childish self recalls in Chapter One of SECRETS NEVER TO BE TOLD.
It took a great effort to leave my hotel room at all but I stuck to my plan and headed out to the Vancouver Public Library, which was one of several libraries and archives I went to on my first visit in 2017, helping me uncover not just information about Jessie’s life in Canada, but giving me real insight into the rapidly changing country to which she had committed her life and future.
Talking to the librarians on duty today, I realised that they were touched by Queen Elizabeth II’s passing too – and that she was their Queen as much as mine. I was pleased to donate a copy of my book to the library here on this historic day – one which none of us will forget.
To continue with my journey click here