MR D: No. But one thing, because, like I said, a young fella, never had the experience, never seen a baby born. But when we got married, there was no doctor in Hanley, we either had to go to Dundurn or Saskatoon. So it wasn’t then… Like I say, we didn’t have cars to travel with.

MRS D: We didn’t think we needed it.

MR D: Well, no.

MRS D: My mum had all her babies at home. We thought, she did it, why couldn’t we? And it was too expensive to go to a hospital. We had to pay in those days. We couldn’t afford that.

MR D: We didn’t have no money.

KAREN: A lot of people have said that. You were one of the first to say that. I think we’d talked to about five or six people before we came to see you, now we’ve talked to thirty. And we’re hearing a lot of the same thing. Not many people had money. Money was always an issue when it came time to choose a doctor or decide whether to have the baby at home.

MRS D: We never thought of any problem I might have.

KAREN: No? Didn’t you? When I was talking to my aunt, my aunt is 67 now, she had babies at home but she was also a nurse. She remembers when her mother, my grandmother, was having babies and she remembers many babies dying and many mothers dying. So did you not come across that at all? That there were problems and that babies did die? Or mothers died?

MRS D: Well, when I was still at home, a teenager, not even a teenager maybe, my mother had a baby, just lived about an hour or so. But there was a nurse living a few miles away, dad went to get her but they didn’t save the baby.

KAREN: My aunt said that people were a lot more accepting of death.

The story takes a sharp turn here. It’s a little beyond the scope, but we hadn’t heard anything similar from anyone else, and it’s another insight into the times.

MR D: Yes.

KAREN: Yes?

MR D: Mm-hmm.

KAREN: And they didn’t go to such extreme measures. There was sense of, God took you when your time was up and that was… You know?

MRS D: Dad made the coffin for the baby, but there wasn’t any funeral.

KAREN: Oh really?

MRS D: I don’t think.

MR D: Well, a little one. I recall at our home… let’s see… The last baby that was born and I don’t know if he even lived that long, and my brother and I had to go and dig the grave.

KAREN: Did you? How old were you at the time?

MR D: Well, could be thirteen, fourteen years old.

KAREN: And digging a baby’s grave?

MR D: And we had no idea, and there was nobody there to tell us, how deep we were. We started in the morning and the funeral was supposed to be at 1:30 in the afternoon, or 2 o’clock, and they were waiting for us to come home for lunch and then to the funeral. And so, well, we didn’t know what time it was, we didn’t have a watch. So all of a sudden our uncle came, and he looked down and he said, “Boys, what are you doing? Digging a well? You’re going to hit water pretty soon.”

So we were sure glad we were deep enough. Then we, well, we went home and had a nice lunch and right away the funeral was.

KAREN: But there was nobody working for the church that would have dug the grave?

MR D: No, well I don’t know why there… there was always other people buried there, but it was always up to young fellas to dig the grave.

KAREN: How old was your brother?

KAREN: Begins wrapping up the conversation and saying thank you, but MR D adds a bit more, he doesn’t want to quit.

MR D: And, she went to the doctor once or twice.

MRS D: I think just once and he told me I was gaining too much weight.

KAREN: Oh you told us that, yeah.

MR D: Yes. So then, we lived at Hawarden, when all of a sudden one morning she says “I have to go.” And her grandma was with us too. So we got in the car, we had an old ’28 Chevy and we drove to my folks place at Hanley and so they thought they had a 1944, and they said you’d better leave your old Chev here and take the Ford, and go ahead because you might not make it in time.

So all right, we traded cars and then we went and we picked up her mum, she lived about six miles away, so we picked her up. Well, you know, her mum never spoke English.

KAREN: Oh really. Did she speak German? No. She spoke Czechoslovakian.

MR D: And so, well, I could talk to grandma, but her mum, well she talked Czech to me and I did the best I could to sort of listen real close and sort of guess at what she was talking about and so we went to Saskatoon.

We got to the hospital and we took R___ in. And so we waited and, of course, the two grandmas they stayed in the car until she was admitted and then of course there was nothing for me to do so I went downstairs and the two ladies had discussed lunch. So they had to celebrate before the fact, yeah. And they chose the Bessborough.

KAREN: Oh did they?

MR D: For lunch. That was high-class, we had never been there.

KAREN: Which hospital were you in? I’ve never thought to ask.