Looking West

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright, and fiction writer. She is the
author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

When her grandchild asked, “What was it like when you were a kid?”,
Rivett penned Looking Back (1977), a memoir about her childhood in St.
Lambert, Quebec. In this short sequel, she relates the rest of her very
busy life as an energetic and inquisitive woman.

Rivett’s first steady job was at the Montreal Neurological Institute,
where, among other duties, she typed a book on epilepsy written by Dr.
Wilder Penfield and others. Later, married and with children, she worked
in the medical library of the Montreal General Hospital and attended
library conferences, which led, after her husband’s retirement, to a
post at a biomedical library in Vancouver, which in turn opened up a job
as research assistant on a Florence Nightingale project, which took her
on more than one trip to England, where she was able to visit many
relatives, some of whom she had never met.

She also moved several times with her bank-manager husband, had a
lively social life, sang in choirs (her husband was also a pianist),
started a kindergarten, and always seemed to be improving herself with
voice lessons or university extension courses. Sadly, her husband
declined into poor health, but her own tireless gathering of friends and
family has ensured that she never seems to lack for company or
long-distance connections.

Looking West, which includes a few black-and-white photographs, is a
newsy report of what the author did and where she went that tells of
wonderful trips and interesting adventures but barely explains what
makes them so. Nevertheless, the comings and goings are a social history
in themselves as she tells us about her first day in a Montreal factory
during the Depression, and about a Montreal doctor’s insistence years
later that her husband be found to give his permission for an operation
on their daughter’s broken arm.

Details about daily life in our distant past are mostly gleaned from
the writing of a few women settlers. Historians of the future will have
far more sources to turn to, given the current outcrop of memoirs such
as this one.