Meet Maurice

My father, Maurice Hervé Lebeau was born in Cowansville, Quebec on December 29, 1919. He was the son of Alfred Lebeau, whose mother was Marie Celanise Papineau, who I have it on good authority, was a distant cousin to Quebec rebel Louis Joseph Papineau. Which explains a lot.

I know almost nothing about my father’s life growing up. He never spoke about it. What I do

Lebeau Family, ca. 1929

know is that Maurice was the only son in a family of three children. He was the middle child sandwiched between the crusty Tante Annéa, the eldest, and the tender Tante Fleurette, the youngest.

Annéa, was born with a scotch in one hand, and a cigarette in the other. Or so it seemed. With her Amazonian proportions and raspy personality, she loomed large in every way. She was selected to be my Godmother (a regrettable choice) and quite frankly, she scared me.

Seated in the front row is my Tante Fleurette who was sweet and kind - her big sister’s polar opposite. I’m guessing Fleurette took after her mother, my Grandmaman Lebeau, who died when I was only five years old.

If a picture says a thousand words, this one says volumes about her. She was born Mathilda Rousseau in 1886 and married Alfred in 1911. My mother once told me that marriage to my grandfather had been hard on her. I think I can see that in this photo.

My father, I believe, was the poet of the family. I imagine he must have been a sensitive child. I know that as he grew up, he learned to love music. He played guitar for the local radio station and entertained with his deep bass voice. In a rare moment of candour, my mother once confided that he, too, had suffered at the hands of his father. Maybe this photo shows that too.

I always knew my grandfather, Alfred Lebeau to have a somewhat pumpkinesque physique. A middle child in a family of 14 children, he left the family farm in Valcourt, Quebec to make his mark in the business world. He was to become the owner of a successful family enterprise in Cowansville, Quebec, consisting of a restaurant, a grocery store, and a Massey-Harris farm equipment dealership. He was a ‘tour de force’ and could be quite intimidating, I imagine.

When war was declared in 1939, Grandpapa Lebeau, ever the opportunist, saw an opportunity. He bought a 140-acre farm including a large woodlot just outside of Cowansville. He had shrewdly calculated that hungry soldiers would need to be fed, and lumber would be needed to build army bases. Not long after, the demand for pork and eggs went up dramatically, as did the prices. Farming went from largely subsistence to very lucrative. And my grandfather had stocked his farm with, you guessed it, pigs and chickens. Crops included potatoes, oats, swedes, beets, corn and tomatoes.

Available labour was scarce, so my then 19-year-old father was pressed into service as a farmhand. A self-taught chef and butcher, he also worked in the family restaurant and helped out in the meat department of the family grocery store. Raised during the Great Depression, when child labour laws were lax and education for children was optional, my father quit school after Grade 6 or 7 to work as a labourer in his father’s various enterprises.

And then the war came for my father.

When war first broke out in 1939, there was no conscription, a disastrous feature of WWI which the government of the day was desperate not to repeat. So, there were two choices: A young man could join, when called up, under the National Resources Mobilization Act (NRMA) or voluntarily join the General Services (GS). The NRMA would see a soldier serve for a mandatory four-month period, and only for home defense. No overseas fighting. The GS was regular army. Deployment overseas was understood.

France and England had declared war on Germany. While it stirred in the bosoms of every red-blooded English Canadian to defend the British homeland and to fight for “King and country”, French Canadians felt no such similar stirrings to come to France’s defense. After all, France had abandoned them, and the British had subsequently conquered them. If you’re interested in a bit of Canadian history, read the next paragraph. Otherwise, feel free to skip it.

Canada, a French colony, was conquered by the British during the Seven Years’ War, leaving some 70,000 French-speaking inhabitants to fend for themselves. France had abandoned them on the battlefield of the Plains of Abraham, leaving them outnumbered and easy pickings against British forces. Their fate was sealed with the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1763. France, it appeared, had bigger fish to fry, (or Caribbean islands to plunder) and so handed us over to Britain on the finest Limoges platter. If you want to read more, click on the following link. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/conquest

Back to our story. You can imagine what happened when the French-Canadian soldiers, signed up under the NRMA were mingled together with the English-Canadian soldiers in the GS. From what I’ve read, it was a war fought on a whole different front. There was intense pressure for soldiers signed up under the NRMA to join the regular army. Those who didn’t were ridiculed and humiliated and came to be known as “Zombies”, because they wouldn’t sign up to fight overseas.

Salute to a Zombie, date unknown

A poem was written and widely circulated at every opportunity to shame these “Zombies” into signing up. My father was, no doubt, aware of the pressure tactics. I can’t help wondering how that sat with this French-Canadian, guitar-playing, singing poet. Could he stand up to the pressure?

And what about the pressure he may have felt, as an only son, to please his successful businessman-father, or to even measure up? Or was his home life as difficult, and my grandfather as abusive as my mother claimed?

To be fair, my grandfather is not here to defend himself. So, let me step into his shoes for a moment.

From my research, I understand that until WWII, farming in Quebec was not profitable. At best, it kept a family fed and sheltered. And because the Roman Catholic Church taught at that time that birth control was against their religion, and that marriage was strictly for procreation, women were told their duty was to give birth, annually if possible. I know, something straight out of A Handmaid’s Tale, right? This all dove-tailed nicely with a cultural imperative in Quebec to outnumber the English to preserve their culture and language, referred to as the “Revanche des Berceaux” or the “Revenge of the Cradle”.

Consequently, my dutiful great-grandmother did her bit and bore 14 children. Logic would dictate a crushing degree of poverty for the family as a result. My research has shown that extreme poverty can often lead to child abuse or neglect. So, it’s possible that my grandfather experienced both. And it’s possible that he, in turn, repeated the pattern, a well-established risk factor for becoming an abusive parent. What was happening to my own father may have been seeded a long time ago with the vegetables on the farm where my grandfather grew up. Both middle children – both sons- both suffering the consequences.

And as if that wasn’t enough, I’m going to make a leap into the pool of assumptions and assume that my grandfather was a driven, Type A personality, like me. I know we don’t make the most attentive parents, so I’m not going to cast stones. Enough about my Grandpapa Lebeau. And enough about me, for now.

Here, I believe, was my father’s dilemma, caught between a Rock that was his home life, and a Hard Place that was army life.

Maurice Lebeau, April 17, 1941

It was 11°Celsius with heavy rains and lashing winds that April 17th of 1941 when 20-year-old Maurice Lebeau, pictured here, reported for mandatory service in the NRMA.

The trip to the enlistment location in Sherbrooke would take just over an hour. I can’t help thinking that it must have been a very long hour and that the weather must have matched his mood, for he was leaving a likely challenging family life in the rear-view mirror to face an uncertain future as a reluctant soldier.

He didn’t have to enlist. He could have stayed on the farm. The Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 spelled out who would be called to serve, and who would be exempted from service. Included under exemptions were the category listed as Class II-C: Deferred in agriculture. This meant my father didn’t have to serve because he was needed on the family farm. So why didn’t he claim an exemption and stay home? And why, after only one month in the NRMA and barely out of boot camp did he decide to enlist and join all those Brits in the regular army, and leave his father short-handed on the family farm?

Stay tuned for the next blog when we journey with Maurice as he leaves behind the Rock, to enter the Hard Place.