Bitter Tales: Remembering Wartime Childhoods in Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1939

A public talk by Dr. Barbara Lorenzkowski, Lead Co-Director of Concordia University's Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling

Thursday, February 19th, 5-7PM (Tilley Hall Room 303, 9 MacAulay Lane, Fredericton, NB)

Free to the public, refreshments provided

Please RVSP, but no one turned away!

This presentation turns to three accounts of childhood in 1940s Atlantic Canada that foreground not the public story of the war, but intensely private moments of emotional and material neglect, alienation, and abandonment.

In recounting the days of their childhood, my narrators described – movingly and, at times, bitterly – how they grew up in homes that provided the necessities of life, but no emotional sustenance. They spoke of places of residence that offered shelter but no affection; of mothers (or mother figures) who fed and clothed the children in their care but refused to mother them; of parents so weighed down by poverty and incessant fighting that the tension released itself in yelling and violence. Growing up in a dirt floor apartment, the home of a boot-legging aunt, and the crowded tenement buildings nearby the Halifax harbour in the 1940s, they evoked emotional geographies over which they had not even sensory control. They did not feel at home in the transient and fragile living arrangements that parents and relatives provided, but out of place and on the margins.

We know little of the interior worlds of children growing up in broken homes. Drawn from my larger oral history project on wartime childhoods in St. John’s (Newfoundland), Halifax (Nova Scotia), and Saint John New Brunswick) during the Second World War, this research talk contemplates what the historian Carolyn Steedman once called “lives lived out on the borderlands, lives for which the central interpretative devices of the culture don’t quite work.”

Barbara Lorenzkowski is an oral historian of childhood and youth whose work explores the ways in which global processes of migration, displacement, and violence have shaped small people’s lives in outsized ways. She is co-editor of the anthology Small Stories of War: Children, Youth, and Conflict in Canada and Beyond (with Kristine Alexander and Andrew Burt, McGill-Queen’s University Press 2023). She is in the process of completing a FQRSC-funded book project on “The Children’s War,” a large-scale oral history project on children’s sensuous and emotional life-worlds in Atlantic Canada during the Second World War. Based at Concordia University, Montreal, Barbara Lorenzkowski is the Lead Co-Director of Concordia’s “Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling.”

This event is co-organized by UNB's Atlantic Canada Studies Centre and the Gregg Centre for the Study of War and Society

For any questions, write to: [email protected]

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Host or Publisher Department of Historical Studies, ACSC (UNB-Fredericton)