KAREN: You lived twenty-four miles from Rosthern? Where did your parents live?

MRS S: Oh, they lived not far from us, too. Yes.

KAREN: And where did your mother and father-in-law live? Did they live on a homestead close to you?

MRS S: Oh they lived not far, just a little ways west of where I spent a good deal of my early years. The place where we lived is called Hepburn now.

KAREN: And your parents lived just outside of Hepburn also?

MRS S: His parents. You see, I lived in the Waldheim area and he lived in the Hepburn area. When we got married I moved to Hepburn where he also had filed on a homestead. And so that’s where our homestead life started. And after a year we had a baby. And that baby died.

KAREN: I know, and that was a very sad story and we were very moved by it but we never knew the baby’s name.

MRS S: A____. Our first baby’s name was A____.

MARYANNE: So when you went into labour with your first baby, who went to get the midwife?

MRS S: That was my father-in-law. He was the closest of the parents.

MARYANNE: So how did he get the message that you needed a midwife? Who went to your father-in-law?

MRS S: My husband had the small sleigh. The one-horse sleigh and also he was good on horseback, but we got the midwife there (unclear) you know, and my father-in-law saw to it that she got there on time.

MARYANNE: Did they leave you at home alone when they went to get the midwife?

MRS S: No, no, he’d got his mother there and finally my mother came too which was a distance further, from Waldheim.

MARYANNE: So was your mother-in-law there at the time of the birth?

MRS S: Yes. She was. My mother-in-law. She’d had a bunch of babies, let me see 8, 9, ten… She recites all the names slowly, counting. That must be about ten. She has recited eleven names, all on the tape, should anyone want to know what they are.

MARYANNE: You have a better memory than I do. You have a remarkable memory. That is incredible, to remember all those names.

MRS S: That was the in-laws. And I come from a smaller family where there just four and I was the oldest. She recites the names of her siblings.

MARYANNE: And so tell me if I’ve got this right then? When you went into labour your husband went to get your father and mother-in-law?

MRS S: Yes he brought them to the house.

MARYANNE: And then your father-in-law went to get the midwife?

MRS S: Oh, he left my mother-in-law there.

MARYANNE: Left your mother-in-law and your husband stayed behind?

MRS S: A-ha. And my husband he had chores to do outside. He still had to look after that. And to see to me, you know. There was plenty of time. We weren’t rushed.

MARYANNE: Okay, now another thing, you told us that you calcimined the bedroom? Can you tell us what that is?

How ridiculously redundant does that question sound to today’s readers? It might make a bit more sense when you realize our first interview with Mrs S was conducted a year before the Google search engine was launched on the internet. Two years later, by the time we were doing this interview, Google had still indexed only 60 million pages, and it would be another full year before it caught the attention of serious internet users. (A quick Google search tells me that by 2016, Google had indexed 130 trillion pages.) So in 1999, when you wanted to know what calcimine was, and it didn’t occur to you to see if Yahoo! had the answer, your best option was to ask the person who had told you about it in the first place.

MRS S: Calcimine, that is a sort of a paint, but there’s very little paint in it. You bought it in cardboard boxes in powder form, like that, and you mix it with water and had when it was dry it smelled very clean and it had colour, you could have it in white and you could have some colours and I did my first walls that way, you know. I remember one time I had painted the whole kitchen, at that time which was the dining room too, and then on top I could put a stencil border on the wall and below that the pictures. And it looked quite like a home.

MARYANNE: You told us your mother-in-law mentioned something to you about the wallpaper, when she saw that you had put up the wallpaper and the border, and she said something to you… let’s see, let me find that… “when my mother-in-law saw the room and the border around it she said, ‘Oh my, you shouldn’t have done that. If we’d have known, we’d have been here and seen to it. But now,’ she said, ‘it’s done and you have a fine baby, I guess it’s alright.”

MARYANNE: So did you do that while you were pregnant?

MRS S: Yes! Yes, it never hurt me.

MARYANNE: And what did your mother-in-law… Did she give you any advice about that?

MRS S: But she had done the same thing.

MARYANNE: She did? So did she ever say to you “never lift your hands above your head” while you’re pregnant?

MRS S: Yes, yes she did.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, it was commonly believed that an unborn baby could be harmed if the mother put her arms above her head. It sounds as though Mrs S’s mother-in-law might have believed this to be true, and Mrs S seems to have accepted the possibility, even if she was much less concerned than her mother-in-law was.

MARYANNE: Can you tell us, Mrs. S, the midwife? You said her name was Mrs. Siemenson?

MRS S: Yes! She was a very nice.

We take a break at this point to get Mrs S a glass of water, and to discuss our next questions. By the time we were doing this interview, we had learned about “nursing homes,” which, we would have assumed, meant they offered care similar to a care home nowadays, or a convalescent home, perhaps. One of our interview subjects, Muriel Jarvis, had told us about the nursing home her mother ran, and we were surprised to learn the term was used to describe a facility (usually a private home) that provided care to mothers in the few days prior to labour and delivery, and for a week or so afterward. We wanted to find out if these homes had already been established by the 1920s, when Mrs S was having her babies.

MARYANNE: Asks about her last baby having been born in the “Goodwill Hospital.” So you had said it was like a building that they had converted, or like a home that they converted and there were about four or five beds?

MRS S: Yes. Yes.

MARYANNE: So was it a hospital, or did it just take care of maternity patients?

MRS S: Yes, mostly. Mostly maternity patients. And some mothers died there too, you know, but it was an improved way already of getting away and getting some help when there was a family to take care of at home. The parents-in-law, they would take care of the children that were already born and the mother could get away. They stayed in bed longer when they had a baby.

“…and the mother could get away.” This is a recurring theme. It took us a while to notice, but this was often the first reason the mothers gave us when we asked why they preferred having their babies in hospital.

MARYANNE: Right. That’s what you said, “it was a far cry from all the rest.” Can you explain to me why it was a far cry from all the rest?