2023-06-06 05:18:43
“It was like…a ship lost in the ocean. Down the line, author Yves Beauchemin delves into his childhood memories. A long railway linking Abitibi and Haute-Mauricie. A sea of black spruce. A lake. And a very small village, Clova, where his father took his whole family to live in the late 1940s.
“I lived in Clova from the age of 5 until I was 13,” says Mr. Beauchemin, born in Rouyn-Noranda in 1941. which left me with wonderful memories. It was a tiny village, something like 400 people, on the edge of a lake. As children, we lived there in a state of freedom that you cannot even imagine. »
Founded at the beginning of the last century during the construction of the Transcontinental railway network, Clova would have been baptized by workers of Scottish origin who would have liked to recall the name of their hamlet of origin, near Aberdeen, in Scotland. The Compagnie internationale de papier (Canadian International Paper Company, or CIP) then owned the village surrounded by logging camps. The post office was opened in 1925, then housing, a hotel, a primary school. Advertisements were published regularly in The Press to recruit lumberjacks.
PHOTO ARCHIVES PRESS
Classified ad published in March 1944 in The Press
“My father worked for the CIP, says Yves Beauchemin. He was also responsible for fighting forest fires. »
To compensate for the remoteness, the CIP comfortably accommodated the families of the employees in white and green houses. “We lived in a semi-detached with our neighbors, the Sullivans. The house was furnished, the heating too. The food… The company was selling the meat for only 10 cents a pound! »
The anecdotes jostle. Boys sneaking into company warehouses, assembling rails at the top of a hill, planning to climb into an abandoned wagon and race down the hill… “Yeah. It was a bit of a daredevil! »
And then there was school. “I learned to read and write at Clova. I was top of the class. There were a lot of books in our house because my mother loved reading. The schoolmistress was called Anna Meunier. She could have been a captain of a warship! She was teaching grades 1 through 7 in the same class! The building was made of logs and had two classes, one French-speaking and the other English-speaking. “And during recreation, very often, the English fought against the French. »
PHOTO CATHERINE LEFEBVRE, ARCHIVES SPECIAL COLLABORATION
It is possible to get to Clova on a train from Senneterre to Montreal.
At 13, the teenager left the forest and continued his studies at the Séminaire de Joliette. He returned there for the first time by train at the age of 17, with his younger brother, at the dawn of the 1960s. “I remember being very moved because the village had hardly changed. »
From quaint to dilapidated
This was no longer the case in 1974, when he returned there, by road this time, with his wife, Vivianne. The pretty village he had known was dilapidated. The hotel was in a pitiful state. “All the bedroom doors were broken down…” The intoxicated patrons were screaming into the night. The family home had been burnt down. All that remained was a small cabin that her father had built for her younger sister.
The nightmare was recorded in a short story, “A Night at the Hotel”, which is also the title of the collection of stories in which it was published in 2001.
Yves Beauchemin has not returned to Clova since. In 1978, the CIP was sold. In 1981 the author published his bestselling novel, Ours. “I still have a deep attachment to this village. This is where I learned to write, to read, where I developed my passion for reading, where I made friends. When Ours appeared, there are lots of people who had lived in Clova who came to meet me because I had become the glory of the village”, remembers the novelist, amused. “When we lived in Clova, we never forget it. »
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#Forest #fires #childhood #smoke