Bagpipe Memories by Betty Gelean

Just for fun, I'm going to add a very short story I wrote in a Senior's Memoir class that lasted somewhere around 6 weeks a couple of winters ago. It has since been published in "The Interior News" in Smithers, BC during Remembrance Week, 2009. This story is very meaningful to me, although I was just a child, and wrote it from the heart of a child.

Bagpipe Memories

by Elizabeth (Betty) Gelean

Love them or hate them, bagpipes have always been emotional and memorable. For dancing they are happy, for funerals they are mournful. Bagpipes evoke thoughts of misty moors, fields of heather, and haunted Scottish castles. They bring out the “Scot” in people, whether ancestral or not. No other instrument moves us so completely.

My first recollection was a day in May 1946. I was 5 ½ years old. I’m sure that wasn’t the first time I saw pipers, I must have seen them in the parades of soldiers, sailors, and airmen that trod the streets of Vancouver during those war years, but they are a vague memory.

This particular day, my brother John and I were dressed in our best, and taken to the CNR station down on Main Street. When we got there we met more relatives than I knew I had. This day, Daddy was coming home from the war!

Hundreds, or maybe even thousands of people were jammed into and around the station in elated anticipation. Everyone had to stay back behind ropes. First came the pipers, bringing wonderful sound that filled the air until I thought there would be none left to breathe. It was so exciting to see the strange instruments, and men in kilts! Had I known the word then, I would have said “Awesome!” This was happy parade music. After the pipers came the soldiers, so many of them that I could not see Daddy, until, despite the ropes, my teen-aged aunt ran out to hug him. He didn’t recognize her at first because she was just a kid when he left. This was a young lady. Mommy, of course, was holding onto John and me, protecting us from the crowd. People were swarming around the soldiers.

I bounced up and down when I finally saw him. Everyone was crying, and I couldn’t understand why. John, only 3 yrs old, thought there was something wrong, and didn’t want to go to see Daddy; he didn’t know him. He was only 6 months old at the time our father went overseas. Every time John was asked by visitors where his Daddy was, he always answered ,“There!” and pointed to a picture on the wall. (the same photo up in the left corner) When finally we were able to go to Daddy, there was so much noise we could hardly hear or talk.

Much later, we were all going to Grandpa and Grandma’s for a big family get-together. I told Daddy that I needed a push on the swing because I couldn’t make it go. Imagine! I lied to my father on his first day back! I was caught out on it, too. We watched home movies and he saw that I was swinging just fine on my own, and with my brother!

Since that long ago day the skirl of bagpipes has taken me on many trips down memory lane. Even now, nothing can compare to hearing them on Remembrance Day, when I am reminded of the fallen, and to honour them. The pipes call to me, and take me back to that wonderful day of homecoming – I am left with the knowledge that I was one of the lucky children able to welcome their father home.