1953: Chronicle of a Birth Foretold by France Daigle

Author:France Daigle [Daigle, France]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780887846045
Amazon: 0887846041
Goodreads: 1745602
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc
Published: 2013-04-18T05:00:00+00:00

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Like Scandinavia in Alfred Nobel’s time, the Moncton area and Acadia in general offered little to attract the attention of the world during the first half of 1953. In Moncton, the year began on a practical note with an increase in bus fares. The price of an adult ticket went from seven to ten cents, but a savings was offered at three tickets for a quarter. Children would henceforth pay five cents per trip, but six children’s tickets would cost only twenty-five cents. Until then, they had sold ten for the same price. The new fares came into effect on Wednesday, January 14, the day after Radio-Canada’s Concerts du mardi broadcast Darius Milhaud’s Concerto no. 2, written for the violinist Arthur LeBlanc, and, in a Canadian premiere, played by the Acadian himself and accompanied by the Montréal Symphony Orchestra. During the first half of 1953, the violinist Arthur LeBlanc, the Acadian soldiers in Korea, and the Melanson triplets more or less accounted for Acadia’s contribution to the international scene. As for the students of Saint-Joseph College who spent the winter rehearsing the Bourgeois gentilhomme, they went as far as Victoria, at the other end of the country, to participate in the Canadian Drama Festival, where they did win a prize, though not first place.

Life in Acadia was therefore quiet compared to the upheavals on the international front. When these events became too heavy to bear, one could always turn to the news briefs for a more human perspective on distant horizons. Two in particular captured the imagination of Baby M.’s mother. In Toronto, a father offered to exchange his eyes for a house for his wife and six children, who were living in a garage. The man found a buyer, but the blind buyer, who “knew what it was to be blind,” required only one eye from the unfortunate father, who had thought “blindness was preferable to poverty.” The other news brief was about a London cab driver who did not like foreigners and who was fined eleven dollars “for refusing to accept an Arab sultan as a passenger.” The man later gave up driving a cab when he learned that the sultan in question had been-known to leave tips of 140 dollars.

Baby M.’s mother felt that a newspaper ought to deal with all facets of life, and enjoyed the fact that the entirely commonplace, such as an ad for Barbour products, appeared alongside the most extraordinary. It should be noted that Barbour provided something more or less universal, with its homogenized peanut butter, its prepared mustard, its jellied desserts in six flavours, and its double-action Acadia baking powder. Other advertisements punctuated the daydreams of energy-drained housewives: Cream of the West and Five Roses fought the flour wars, Domestic peddled its lard, Kraft its Parkay margarine, Magic its baking powder, and Fleischman its yeast. As for tea and coffee, Chase & Sanborn, Nescafé, Salada, and King Cole offered no less than the best. But when it came to beverages, no one could match the genius of the H.

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