A departure today in remembrance of those who have served, and those who have died serving, the countries they love. Whether that service was by choice or unwilling conscription makes little difference after the fact. What remains is that these men and women were and are subjected to what we ask of no one in normal society, that they face irrationality and fear, prejudice and privation, struggle and death, and then return to us whole, hale, capable of inserting themselves completely and seamlessly into the fabric of civilization.
There was a time I chose, somewhat vehemently and ignorantly, to denigrate those who served and survived previous wars. War is the ultimate evil, and therefore senseless and unworthy of commemoration. At least so I thought. Until I met my husband, Gary, and through him his father, George Stephens.
George was a colourful figure, a story-teller of legendary proportions, a man weaned on the army, hard, irascible, but with a tender side he could at times display to the woman he loved more than his own life, and to his children despite a confrontational nature that had him debating just for the devilry of it. George did like to stir the pot.
He, according to family legend, was the only British citizen to have served in five armies: the British, the French, the American, the Canadian and some other I cannot recall. His service in the forces of all but the British army remains shadowy and lost to knowledge, but while he fought in WWII he served during the Battle of Malaya, and later under General Montgomery’s eighth army tanks corps in the Battle of El Alamein in 1942. George was also there in the last tanks on mainland China during the Chinese Communist Revolution when the British tank corps were given orders to dig in their tanks and thereby make them pillboxes. I remember clearly George talking about facing the hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers and knowing that thin British line was all that remained of his country’s influence in China.
George Stephens returned home to Gloucester, England after that to marry the girl next door, Mavis Long. He tried very hard to be a good father and husband, but it would seem the wandering and unsettled life of an army man never quite left him. With the hope of a providing a better life than battle-scarred England could provide, George brought his wife and two children across the ocean to Canada in September of 1969, hoping to pursue the honourable trade of farm manager.
He was to learn a bitter lesson that farming in Canada, especially for a hired hand, was and is one of abject poverty, an ignominious career and reward for a man who had given his all in three major global crises.
It was in 1978 George died of a fatal and massive heart attack after collapsing with a bleeding ulcer. His ashes for a long time lived with Gary and me, sitting on a bookshelf which we thought fitting for the man who could quote Yeats as soon as regale you with a story about a drunken episode in the Chinese rice paddies. At the request of his widow his ashes are now buried in a veteran’s grave in Richmond Hill, Ontario.
Here at the Old Stone House we remember George Stephens on this Remembrance Day, along with his other brothers who also served in the British Army, and the brothers of Mavis Long’s family (Gary’s mother), Duncan who was shot down in an air raid over Germany, Jim and John, his uncle Walter Phelps who was taken prisoner by the Japanese and tortured so that he returned a fractured man, another uncle, Tom Phillips who fought alongside the
Gurkha Regiments in Burma and elsewhere. The photos below were contraband, images Goerge Stephens smuggled out and had sent to his ‘girl’ back in Gloucester, England.
