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Former writer reflects on rural life

By Greg Nikkel Edith Bernard has been a lifelong resident of the area, and has written about many aspects of rural life over a seven-decade span for the Weyburn Review.
Edith Bernard

By Greg Nikkel

Edith Bernard has been a lifelong resident of the area, and has written about many aspects of rural life over a seven-decade span for the Weyburn Review.

She marked her 100th birthday on Thursday with friends and family, but celebrated with a larger gathering over the summer so more family could be present.

She and her husband of 57 years, Virgil, had six children, four boys and two girls, and she has 12 grandchildren, 17 great-grandchildren and one great-great-grandchild who is two years old. Edith Spence was born on the family farm in RM of Brokenshell, on January 10, 1919 to Emma and John Spence, the eldest of six sisters.

She didn’t start out as a regular correspondent for the Review, but started sending in articles around 1937 about events held in the former one-room community schools from the area where she was living near Trossachs where she grew up. Later, after marrying her husband Virgil in 1941, she became the regular correspondent for the Khedive area from about 1947 until she stopped just a couple of years ago.

Edith took her schooling at Abbott School, which was located southwest of Trossachs, and then took her high school grades, 11 and 12, at Trossachs High School, working for her board while she attended school.

Back at that time, in the late 1920s and early 30s, many of the country kids drove themselves to school in buggies, wagons or in some cases, a car chassis hooked up to horses, said Edith, adding, “Not too many walked, it was a long way to go, unless you lived close to the school. I walked a mile and a half, sometimes in snow up to my knees, to light the fire in the school.”

“I would always write about the schools, about events they held, and nobody knew who I was, until Edith Jacobs found out I was writing these,” said Edith, chuckling. “I love writing.”

She added she gave up writing about Khedive news as it was getting harder and harder to get any news items from the area.

Asked if any stories stood out to her from over the years, Edith said one in particular was about the tearing down of the grain elevator at Axford, which she could see from her kitchen window.

“It was a landmark, and you could see it from Highway 13,” she said, noting another story she remembers well was writing about the demolition of Assiniboia School in Weyburn where the Co-op grocery store is now located.

“A two-storey school and they took it down! Think of how nice it would’ve been back then, a nice building like that,” said Edith.

She explained she began writing about events at country schools in her area, because in many ways those schools were the community centres in each area.

“The country schools were where they always had dances and Christmas programs. Those were really nice. Even in the smaller districts, they used to have events. At our small school, they used to have a crokinole tournament during the winter. They were the centre of the community, and everything went on there. Sometimes they would have wedding dances, anniversaries and birthdays, or they would just have a dance,” said Edith.

When the country schools began to be closed and centralized, she said, the bigger schools didn’t really take on that same role as a community centre.

Edith was a member of the Catholic Women’s League for over 60 years, and one of the bigger projects she worked on was the Brokenshell history book, “Browsing Through Brokenshell”.

She and Mrs. Renz drove into Trossachs nearly every day for a two-year period putting this history book together, and was also part of a Homecoming organizing committee.

Edith grew up on a dairy farm, and some of her best memories of that life was getting up 5 a.m. every morning to milk the family’s Ayrshire cows, and again at 5 p.m. She milked eight cows, by hand, every morning and usually 10 cows in the evening, and said she enjoyed this work.

“It didn’t matter what else was going on, like a sports day, we’d have to leave to go milk the cows,” said Edith.

The cream was separated out and held in an ice pit her father built, and it was taken three times a week by train into Weyburn to be sold.

Besides the milk cows, her father also grew some crops, like wheat and oats, and he often experimented with other crop varieties.

The first time she heard a radio was when they went to a neighbour’s and they let her put on the headphones to listen in. Shortly after, her father got their family’s first radio set and set up an aerial to pull in signals.

Edith noted her mother used the aerial to put up a flag as a signal to her father to come home for supper in the evening, as he would often be working far from the house.

Local signals, particularly CKCK radio from Regina, were the main ones but the reception wasn’t always very good. Amazingly, a Detroit radio station would come in clearly on many nights and that was a popular station to listen to.

As far as television, that medium wasn’t readily available until their farm got electricity around 1964.