Memory, Generation and Emigration: Roseena's story

Montreal, Quebec. It is a sunny, warm July morning. I am a dark-haired, skinny child considered small for my six years, standing with my grandmother Roseena on the sidewalk of the Rue Sainte-Catherine – Montreal's busy main shopping artery. We are alone she and I, my tiny left-hand firmly in her grasp, unnoticed by the many people walking by. Roseena, a small plump woman then in her seventies, gazes dreamily up at the Hudson's Bay Company storefront across the street. Something in her mood causes me to look up at her. She sighs then and without altering her gaze, half whispers, ‘I used to work here.’ These words send my young mind into overdrive but I am unable to articulate my confusion. We cross the street and enter the store where she buys me a pink yo-yo in the toy department. In the years that follow, this scene, crystallised in my memory, continues to play over and over again in my mind. I still have the pink yo-yo. My confusion of that day stemmed from the fact that my maternal grandmother Roseena McParland, was in Montreal on a visit from Belfast. She lived in Ireland. How could she possibly have worked in this Canadian department store, which in her day had operated as the flagship store of Henry Morgan and Company? It was only several years later at the age of eleven when we were back in Ireland that Roseena told me the whole story.

Roseena was born in Newry, County Down at the turn of the last century, eldest child of John McParland, who worked as a delivery man for a local bakery and Catherine Kellett from the townland of Drumacarrow outside Bailieborough, County Cavan. Catherine subsequently died of pneumonia at the age of thirty-two when Roseena was only six, leaving behind two other young children, four-year-old John Joe and infant James. As the eldest child and only daughter, Roseena with the help of a neighbour, minded her younger brothers, continuing to protect them from a spiteful stepmother once her father remarried.