Return to Vancouver: Day 5 – and a jaw-dropping moment


My first days here have been blessed with azure blue skies and bright sunshine. Saturday had turned extraordinarily hot – 34 deg. C and by the late afternoon, the sky turned a sickly sandy colour presaging the arrival of smoke from fires- both burning forests outside the city, plus a wood fire in Vancouver itself.

Sun over Campbell Valley Regional Park, Langley, B.C.

By Sunday morning, as soon as I left the B and B, the acrid smell of smoke hit me, so with a scarf over my mouth, I set off for Cloverdale library – it is a half-hour’s walk away from the main highway, which I describe in Chapter 9 of ‘Secrets Never To Be Told’. There are dragonflies, birds, and butterflies, by the side of the path to refresh me in the muggy heat, before I reach the busy route 10. In the 1920s Cloverdale was already a busy place, near a railway hub and the next settlement to the West of Cousin Jessie and William’s home in Langley. It was a place which Jessie had spelled on the back of one of her photographs, ‘Cloverdayl’. Now it lies in the city of Surrey, while Jessie’s place is over the border in Langley Township.

I plan to re-visit the library where I did some of my research back in 2017 as well as attending a Saturday morning meeting of the family history group -described in Chapter 13. It doesn’t open on Sundays. till one p.m ( but yes, British readers, it does open regularly for four hours on Sunday afternoon).

I decide to visit the Surrey museum next door in the meantime. It’s in a bright modern building and clearly has a modern take on its collections too. This notice is the first thing I see.

The first room I come to is strangely bare except for the striking window- or is it a mural, a trompe- l’oeil. It is the Indigenous Hall, opened less than four years ago, and intended as a space where Surrey’s three land-based First Nations people can represent their histories and stories. The Museum declares it provides this as a space where indigenous stories will be told in the way that local indigenous people feel is most appropriate.

There were no stories being told this morning but it is still a beautiful space – one that wasn’t there on my last visit. It serves as a reminder to me that Jessie’s experience as a domestic servant, shipped over from England as a ‘daughter of the Empire’, and that of her farmer husband, George, who came from a Cumbrian farm to settle on the land cleared and sold on by the men of the Hudson’s Bay Trading Company, has to be understood in the context of our emerging understanding that these lands are unceded territories, whose people were expelled and moved onto reserves but who have never renounced them.

Indigenous Hall, Museum of Surrey, B.C.

It’s past one now, so I walk next door. Maybe I am getting used to the smell of acrid smoke, or maybe it has receded. I breathe more easily.

I go into the library clutching a bag with a couple off copies of my book which I wish to donate to the library. The first librarian I meet refers me along the desk to her colleague who she says should be able to help me.

She certainly can – and more than that, she is clearly immediately fascinated by the story I have to tell her, of Cousin Jessie and William, and their life in the cabin on 56th Avenue.

The librarian, called Connie, notes down the address. Connie tells me she lived as a child very close by. Her father came to Langley to open and manage one of the banks there, and her mother was the same age as William.

She looks at the photographs I show her in the book, of the wooden shack, then the brick-built cabin that replaced it – perhaps by the time she lived there in the late 1950s and early 60s.

When did Jessie die? she asks.

1970 I say.

Connie is astonished. She realises that this woman lived over the road from her, for nearly ten years.

Well met, indeed.

This whole investigation I have pursued since 2015 has been full of moments like this. Extraordinary meetings, jaw- dropping discoveries, century-old secrets uncovered. They continue.

Connie and I swap details. I take a selfie to record this latest moment on my journey of discovery.

To view the last day of my journey click here

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