Eugenie Smith
Eugenie Gertrude Smith: War bride. Gardener. Knitter. Friend. Born June 5, 1914, in Haywards Heath, Sussex, England; died Sept. 23, 2017, in Ottawa, of natural causes; aged 103.
Eugenie Gertrude Masters was born in England at the start of the First World War. As a young child, she was lucky to avoid the horrors of that war, but as a young adult when the Second World War began, she lived with the deprivations and high adrenalin of the time.
Eugenie worked as a hair dresser, walking to the shop a few blocks away from her home, Dale cottage. She spent her evenings with her sister Daisy in the pubs socializing with pilots and soldiers called up for duty. Twice Eugenie was engaged, twice her soldier did not return. One night she spied a Canadian officer at the other side of the pub. They locked eyes, and the rest is history.
Eugenie became Mrs. Stephen Smith just a few months later. As a major in an anti-tank squadron, Stephen was deployed to Italy when their daughter was born. After the war, Eugenie and her daughter emigrated to her husband's family home in Canada, and to a strange new life. Unaccustomed to the outdoor toilets and the wood stoves she found in rural Nova Scotia, not to mention living with in-laws far away from any large city, Eugenie became homesick. But her indefatigable nature always triumphed, a trait she earned after contracting polio at the age of 10 and wearing a leg brace for the rest of her life.
Eugenie wrote to her mother, who decided to leave England to be with her daughter. Soon, they formed a great friendship with the women at Hedley House Inn in Smith's Cove, and life began to be bearable.
Their son was born in Digby in 1957 and shortly afterward, Stephen got a job in Ottawa in charge of the heating system at Parliament Hill. Along with her mother and two children, the couple made the move to the big city. They rented a small apartment until they purchased a home in Nepean, where Eugenie and Stephen would spend the rest of their lives.
Eugenie worked in the local library as a bookbinder well into her 60s until she broke her hip and had to retire. She was always a ferocious knitter and enjoyed going to auctions. She had a vast antique collection and the majority of her furnishings were Victorian. One of her most treasured pieces was a rare English coin that was given out to the poor during the Depression that could be redeemed for food.
Mrs. Smith, as I always called her, and I met 26 years ago. We had a common love of gardening and her garden was filled with the flowers and roses that reminded her of England. In her final years, we would tour the immense garden that surrounded her house, me pushing her wheelchair, and she talking about each of her 60 varieties of roses by name, as if they were her children.
Eugenie's family meant everything to her, and it was her great fortune that she died peacefully with them by her side, in her home on Epworth Avenue, as her husband did many years before her.
I feel a great sadness that my friend has passed away but it was an honour to have known her. Mrs. Smith was an ordinary person who led a quintessentially Canadian life. In my eyes, she was a great lady. I miss her.
Maggie Steingass is Eugenie's friend.
Lives Lived celebrates the everyday, extraordinary, unheralded lives of Canadians who have recently passed. To learn how to share the story of a family member or friend, go to tgam.ca/livesguide