5406 Ross Street

5406 Ross Street is the place in Vancouver where my mother Emily Garner and her younger sister Betty were born and raised. My maternal grandparents had got married in Liverpool in 1918 and shipped for Canada, ending up in Vancouver where my grandfather worked for the logging industry as an engineer.

I would guess that the houses in Ross Street were newly built in the 1920s when my grandparents moved in. Betty (always known to us as Aunt Betts) returned some years ago to revisit her childhood home and reported it much changed - they all have new windows among other changes. What has not changed is the magnificent view down the road to downtown Vancouver and best of all those mountains that ring the north side of the city - a little snow capped at this time of year.

The 1929 economic collapse also brought the logging industry to a virtual halt and my grandfather found himself without work. What must have been a terribly difficult decision led to the entire family returning to England, first to stay with my grandmother's family in Manchester and then to Glasgow where my grandfather got work with John Brown's shipyard on the Clyde.

When I visited Vancouver is 2003 for the first time and saw how beautiful it is and also visited Ross Street I asked Betty how it had been for her as a teenager to be wrenched out of her home, taken across Canada and then the Atlantic to end up in 1930s Glasgow, 'I just cried and cried' was her response.

Betty was later offered the opportunity to be demobbed to Canada after service in the WRENS during the war but my mother and father were returning from Alexandria to be married in the UK so she chose to return to the UK and then to the family home in Cambuslang, Glasgow. She remained in Glasgow for the rest of her life and it was many decades before she got the opportunity to revisit her childhood home and city.

Betts was a great traveller, she visited us in Cambridge every year and took cruises and other trips with her old friend Kath Scott right up to her death just over two years ago. She left us a little money - just enough, once it had been in the bank a little while, to cover the cost of our two round the world tickets we are currently using so we sometimes reflect that our trip is partly in memory of Betts. We also have taken the opportunity to scatter some of her ashes at Ross Street - a place she loved so much.

Brian