Rainy Days Bring Me Back

Rain, Vancouver and Family are one thing for me.

We used to heat the house with wood, sawdust and coal, and used to have in the kitchen a wooden stove. There were no such things as microwaves!

By Citizen Correspondent Hannah Govorchin , Canada

Date Posted: 11/23/06

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For Canada, the period between the turn of the century and 1913 involved years of unbounded hope and large visions. The population grew at an unparalleled rate. Between 1901 and 1911 it increased by more than a third, from 5.3 million to 7.2 million, thanks chiefly to immigration.

At he outbreak of the First World War, approximately 170,000 immigrants from the ex-Yugoslavia settled in Canada, attracted by the offer of free land, a sense of space, and an opportunity to make a living in a free and open society.

Citizen correspondent Hannah Govorchin is the daughter of one of those immigrants and here she shares her childhood memories with us.

Rainy days bring me back family memories. Sometimes, as the rain falls so do my tears, mostly because we did not have an easy life.

My mother and father were Yugoslavian immigrants. I was born in Windsor, Ontario almost seventy years ago.

My mother was not in good health. My father was a gillnet fisherman, and in those days he was away fishing a season at a time. It is said that the majority of fishermen in B.C. in those days were Yugoslavian. I missed my daddy and was ecstatic when he would finally arrive home and as well bring sockeye fish. I never realized until I grew up how much my mother missed my father because of the fishing seasons.

When I was twelve years old, my father became high gillnet fisherman of B.C., meaning he caught the most amount of fish as a gill-netter that year. His picture in his gillnet boat was printed in the Vancouver Sun newspaper. At that time my father bought outright with cash a house much further up the east end of Vancouver near Burrard Inlet at McGill and Kaslo Streets where it was a typical neighbourhood. My brother also went fishing with my father. I attended high school at this time.

I got married and had three children. Those were though, but happy days. We used to heat the house with wood, sawdust and coal, and used to have in the kitchen a wooden stove. There were no such things as microwaves! We used to have an old fashioned hand held roller type of washing machine and since at that time there were no disposable diapers, only cloth ones to wash, we used it a lot.

Later sadness came into my life when in my twenties I lost my parents.