Monica's Life Journey

CHAPTER 1

The first recollection I have of my life is standing outside on a beautiful day and looking at the firmament. I can almost remember seeing something up there, like an apparition, but I can’t be sure. My next recollection is of a man and a woman visiting me in the orphanage sunroom (the orphanage was in Montreal, PQ, Canada), and they promised they would come back. So I waited, and finally, they did come back and took me with them.

The next thing I remember is being in the backseat of the car, stopping at the American border to check in and being very sick (that is motion sickness). It must have been a miserable ride for me because I still get motion sickness to this day and know how miserable it can be. This was on August 10, 1940, at the age of five, as I was born on April 17, 1935.

I moved in with my new family in my father’s house (that is, my adopted father, but I will refer to my adoptive parents as my father and mother as they are the only parents I ever knew), a big house on top of a high hill in the small town of Suncook, New Hampshire. In this house lived my father and mother, grandfather and grandmother, my aunt Grace, my uncle Archie (they were sister and brother to my mother), and myself. On the second floor lived my other grandmother, grandfather, Aunt Alice, and Uncle Chuck, who were my father’s family.

In those days, we only had oil stoves for heat (no central heat), and my aunt Grace and I had to sleep on the third floor, where there was no heat at all. In order to keep warm, we would place bricks in the oven all day and then bring them up to bed with us at night and place them in a towel under the blankets at the foot of the bed. My uncle Archie was crippled from polio when he was three years old, so he couldn’t climb the stairs and got a downstairs bedroom along with my parents and grandparents.

I remember being in kindergarten and having taken part in a play, and I can still see my picture in a real special dress and a pillow to match. I guess the pillow had something to do with the play. I attended St. Jean de Baptiste Parochial School from Kindergarten through third grade and sixth through eighth grade. My girlfriend Connie always told of how rotten I was back in first grade when I placed her hat on the railroad tracks and the train ran over it and ruined it. We had the old Suncook Valley Railroad that ran right by the church and school, and we had to cross the tracks to get to school or church. I also remember a sister by the name of Sister St. Basilice, who was in charge of the kindergarten and she was at that school for about fifty years, as everyone who went to parochial school remembered her and never had much good to say about her. One time, I had accidentally wet my pants; I was a very nervous and shy person and probably did it from nerves, but anyway, she hung my wet underpants on the blackboard—talk about embarrassing situations! How could I ever forget that!

Monica’s first Photo

I lived about a mile from the school, and we walked to school through rain, snow, or sleet, walked back home for lunch and back to school for the afternoon session, then home at three o’clock. During Lent, which ran for six weeks from about late February or the first of March to the middle of April, we also walked to Mass in the morning before school. Sometimes we would walk back home for breakfast, and when it was too cold, we would bring a thermos of hot chocolate and some breakfast with us and eat in one of the classrooms, as there was no cafeteria or gym at that time. I remember that as being kind of exciting when I ate breakfast at school, sometimes the nun would join us and visit with us. We used to walk by the local club on the way to school or church; once I remember there was a body lying on the steps of the club. I presume now that it was dead, as I remember it being very cold out and it was about 6:00 a.m.

My grades were pretty average; it seems like I usually ran about 85 percent to 95 percent. In those days, we were not graded by A and B’s but rather by average score of up to 100 percent being the best or highest and 70 percent being a passing grade. I still have some of my test papers from the sixth, seventh, and eighth grade, and those are even better: they are mostly in the 90s and 100s.

My parents were quite old when they adopted me, and they had just been married, both having been unmarried all their lives. My father was born in Canada, and my mother in the United States. I believe they were forty-nine years old when they brought me down from Canada. I always felt my father was really not too anxious to have me but was only pleasing my mother as she absolutely loved children. There also might have been another reason, which I will discuss later. They had never told me about my adoption, and sometime after I started school, I don’t remember now how long after, I remember coming home from school and crying my eyes out because one of the children I went to school with told me I was adopted, and I did not believe it. When I told my mother of this, she admitted that I was. I remember crying a lot when I heard that I had been adopted and my parents were not my true mother and father. The other children made me feel like I was not like them, that I was different because I was adopted.

CHAPTER 2

After the third grade, I guess I became too much of a handful for my parents, as they sent me to boarding school. The school was named the Villa Augustina, and it was in Goffstown, which was a small town about twenty-five miles from our house. Even though it was so close, I came home only for holidays, like Thanksgiving and Christmas. My parents visited me occasionally, maybe once a month when there was no holiday in that month to come home for.

I must tell you that when I left home for boarding school, I did not speak a word of English. The only language I knew was French. At the villa (as we fondly called it) hardly anyone spoke French, even though most of the students came from a nearby French city. They were mostly sons and daughters of doctors and lawyers. I quickly learned to speak English, so much so that, after two years, when I returned to my hometown parochial school, I spoke English just as well as I did French.

I was quite lonely at that school, but believe me, I adjusted pretty well. I learned a lot of good behavior and etiquette, learned to live in a boarding house situation, and learned to make a bed like in the army. I remember how difficult it was to have full corners on pillow cases over feathered pillows. When I came home on vacation, my only friends then were my neighbors—Simone, Arthur, and Gene who were a couple of years younger than I but lived just down the street from me.

In winter, when there was enough snow on the street, we would slide down the hill. A lot of kids from everywhere came to slide down our street as it was real steep. The only problem was, sometimes if we couldn’t stop, we would slide right across Glass Street at the bottom of the hill, which was a busy street. We could also slide into the river if we didn’t stop on Glass Street.

The villa was in the country, on the main road leading to the small town of Goffstown; it was a treat on the weekends to walk into the village. We also used to have picnics in the mountains behind the villa. One particular fond memory was May Day (on the first day of May), when we used to dress special and dance around the Maypole.

In the second year that I attended the villa, my parents let me come home on the bus some weekends with one of the local girls who attended the villa, she was older than I. We had to take a bus from the villa into the city, and then from the city to our town. I recall the bus that was driven up the main street of our town and my sitting in the backseat and didn’t quite make it home. I vomited all over the back of the bus, another fun trip.

After two years at the villa, I begged my parents to let me come back home to school, and they finally consented.

CHAPTER 3

I reentered St. Jean de Batiste in the sixth grade, renewed friendships with my classmates, some not so good though. As we were writing in our diaries, there was one sister whom most of us did not particularly like, I wrote that in my diary and let one of the students read it. She told the sister what I said, so I got punished for it. You can bet I never let her read my diary again!

I did take piano lessons for a while. The piano was in the garage, but they did move it in the house for the winter so I could practice. I was not really very musical, although I did enjoy the piano.

My father worked for the railroad, and he could get free passes to ride on the train. Once a year, we would take the train to South Station in Boston and attend the Ice Capades. They were usually held on February 22, which was my father’s birthday and also George Washington’s, which was a Holiday. My father would also get me passes to visit my mother’s relatives in Nashua every summer. I usually would spend at least two weeks there and meet my friend Dorraine during that time, as she lived downstairs from my aunt Agnes, where I visited. Dorraine was just a couple years older than I. We used to do a lot together and also with my cousins, although they were all older and working gals. I even got the only bike I ever had from my cousins. I was really thrilled when I got that bike. I can still see the picture they took of me riding that bike on Jackson Ave. My cousin Eva was the one who mostly took care of me. She was the older of the cousins and had never married. She sang beautifully, and she sang in church a lot.

bicycle photo

Jackson Ave. was right across from the Jackson Mills, where most of the neighbors worked. My uncle worked there and also my cousin Eva, but she worked across the river in the office. These were apartment buildings they lived in and all the residents seem to be quite friendly. There was a croquet court across from the building, and all the men would meet there in the evenings and have tournaments.

Most of my classmates whom I was friends with, Lorraine, Diane, Gertrude, and Elaine lived on Broadway or just off it, and when I got my bike, we would ride those streets and go to the public school playground to play or try to meet some boys or just hang around the street corners to talk. There was nothing wrong with hanging around the street corners in those days, and sometimes there would be a dozen of us just having a good time.

Finally in 1949, I graduated from the elementary school with cap, gown, and all. There were about twenty-one of us in our class. We went on a class trip to the House of Seven Gables in Salem Mass. I remember it so vividly, as the day before the class trip, I had gone to the beach and gotten a terrible sunburn. If you ever have been to the House of Seven Gables, you know that they have very narrow stairways, seems like I kept hitting my sunburned back on the walls all day.

It was during this time that we would like to ice-skate, but I was forbidden from skating on Irish Pond because it was not always safe to skate on. One time, I was with friends Eleanor and Theresa, they were sisters, and I