houses. They often came to our house because my husband was very much for telling funny stories. He enjoyed making the young people laugh. Sometimes his stories were a bit ridiculous, but as long as he got a laugh it made him happy.

We often played cards for amusement. In those days...radio was a thing that was a little ways down the road for most families. We were probably the last family in Pinette to indulge ourselves with such a modem thing as a radio. Quite often, the families would gather at a house and about 10 o’clock the hostess would make a lunch ~ a few sandwiches and perhaps a pot of coffee or a cup of tea — and that broke the card game. But then of course, they had to play another game. It was always Auction 453.

Moving On

John was 17 and Bert was 13 and Janet nine when my husband died. We had to rebuild our lives, restructure our style of living, which wasn’t an easy thing to do. That was in 1946, in February. He was 57 when he died. I was 41.

I stayed home and kept house for the children and tried to get my act together. The next year, I began teaching in the home school, which was a one-room school. Bert had taken his Grade 10 at home, and then he wrote his Grade 10 examination and went on to Prince of Wales College. I kept house and taught in the school where Janet attended.

John continued the farming that his father had been doing, but he specialized. He and my brother Archie built some turkey ranches and they raised turkeys as a special part of their farming project. Then his health broke down so that he couldn’t do this hard work. He had to have an operation for a hernia and his doctor advised him to get out of farming and do something that was less difficult for him physically. He went back to college and eventually went in to study medicine.

We closed the place...and I went to teach in Summerside, [and later] in Nova Scotia. I taught at Brookfield for one year and then went down to Barrington Passage where I spent five years teaching in the Barrington Municipal High School. From there I went to Halifax and taught...at the BC. Silver for four years or five. And then, the last [year I was in Nova Scotia], I taught at the J.L. Ilsley... . I retired in 1971.

Annie Gillis 161