I always thought Grandpa Murray was a boring man. Until my daily practice of reading his red leather-bound diary to his daughter, my mom.

In truth, Murray was a giant of his time: meticulous, a hard worker who adored his family, a war veteran, and someone who when he travelled on the train to Montreal and Toronto enjoyed long dinners with friends and hockey games. Like his grandson, he was a Leafs fan.

My mom, Norma, is in a nursing home in London. She is 92, one of a handful of COVID-19 cases quarantined in the home. She’s battling the virus, the brave caregivers are doing their best, but it’s touch and go. Compounding her condition is the fact that she is paralyzed on her left side, the result of a stroke five years ago on Friday the 13th. Her sense of humour (Monty Python is a staple of hers) is intact. She chuckled over the “Cheese sketch” the other day.

One of our great connections in the last little while has been this family diary her younger sister Janet (my aunt) lent me. With the help of a personal support worker, Mom puts the phone on speaker because it is hard to hold the handset for too long. In no time we are transported back to Moncton, N.B., 1948. So many gems, so many oddities and sometimes shocking surprises.

Friday, October 22: Still very cold this morning, 25 above with the sun shining brightly. Poor Gus Jonah shot himself Monday. He had been ill for about three years. I was over to Cubs and Scouts tonight and met Mrs. Hamer who with her husband have moved here from Montreal and is interested in Cubbing and is going to give us a hand.

“Mom,” I say. “Your dad just drops these bombs in after the weather report?”

“I guess he was just telling the story of the day,” Mom replies, her voice raspy. The last few days she conserves her words, oxygen levels fluctuating. Today, Sunday, was her worst day yet.

We’ve read through this diary many times. It’s just one year, two entries per page. What is so eerie is there always seems to be something new. He went on a five-day hunting trip with buddies and they got one deer, which they shared. I am not a hunter but as I read each day’s account I was pulling for this grandfather I never met, hoping he would have success and there would be more food for the Maritime winter.

Murray Northrup served in Canada’s infantry in the First World War. Born in 1898, he enlisted in 1915, fought in the trenches of Europe, was gassed. My mom has always blamed the gas for the early dementia he would soon develop. The diary records frequent headaches.

My father’s side of my family had always loomed larger than life to me, these crazy Irish with wild tempers, boxers and drinkers, though my dad, Tom Donovan, was the former and not the latter. But Murray Northrup on my mother’s side had always been a cipher to me, an enigma. English reticence perhaps. I never heard any stories until the diary.

His daughter Janet, my mom’s younger sister, gave Murray this little red book as a Christmas present. Weights and measures at the front, bank holidays, a spot to record the engine number of his car, a Buick. He kept the diary carefully for one year, 1948, when he was 50. It’s a time capsule. Canada three years after the Second World War. Money was tight. The old Buick always needed fixing. He considered a new one, but ultimately settled on repairs. The price of eggs — 65 cents a dozen and rising — led to him purchasing a brood of hens. Prices for household staples are jotted down each month in his neat writing. Bacon was 90 cents a pound, cooked ham 99 cents a pound, butter 80 cents a pound.

Home was Gunningsville, a neighbourhood in Riverview, across the river from Moncton. Murray presided over the men’s pants division at the Moncton Eaton’s store. Several times in the year he went on buying trips. To Montreal, to check in with suppliers and have dinner. Then to a movie (Danny Kaye in 1947’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”). “A truly enjoyable evening,” he writes.

Then on to Toronto. Arrived in a snowstorm in March, walked across Front Street and had “no trouble getting a room at the Royal York.” He and his fellow buyer made the rounds for two days. The night before boarding the train to Hamilton, he had “supper in the Venetian Cafe” with clients. “Topping it off, going to the hockey match between Toronto Leafs and New York Rangers at Maple Leaf Gardens. Toronto 2. New York 1.”

Back in Toronto on Monday, he saw two games at Maple Leaf Gardens in one afternoon and evening, a junior game and then the Leafs. “Good games too!” he writes.

Most entries begin with a weather report. Mom, in her lucid moments, laughs at how crazy the weather was that year. It was non-stop snow, rain, sleet, raging winds. “Howling blizzard, winds 50 miles an hour” is one entry. Buses were either on strike or could not move because of the roads. Norma was 21 at the time, working herself, had just met Tom Donovan, fresh off the boat after his own service in the Royal Navy. When my future father came over for one of his apparently frequent courting visits, Murray would record in his last entry for the day his plan to give them some space. “Norma and Tommy just came in so I guess I will be going to bed.”

Murray was a hard worker. Six days a week at Eaton’s, especially late hours for the frequent sales promotions (he and his colleagues shopped for the whole year when staff received 20 per cent off). Sunday, church twice a day. Monday to Saturday after work he was in a pitched battle with a basement floor project (a playroom for young Janet and their other sister Audrey), and a widening of the driveway which entailed frequently dumping wheelbarrow loads of clay into the river across the road, something that would be frowned on today. Thanksgiving Monday in 1948 he wrote:

“This is Thanksgiving Day and we surely have many things to be thankful for in this land of plenty and peaceful life. I cleaned the Hen House, fixed the eavestroughs, mowed the grass around the front to the house, cleaned out the ditches and with Blanche’s (my grandmother) help put up the storm windows.”

I find myself exhausted, just reading about all of this activity. Housebound as we all are, it is inspiring.

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“He just loved to work, to be busy,” my mom said last week. The diary has brought some peace for her in a difficult time. So many entries were a revelation. On his 25th anniversary with Eaton’s, he received a “quarter century watch”, a letter from the company president thanking him for his service, and six weeks of vacation to use whenever he wanted to. Then golfing with friends from work in the afternoon. “A day to be long remembered,” he wrote. And who knew that her mom and dad had such an active social life! Long before social distancing, they were out and about continually, visiting friends, having friends over. Not every guest was expected.

“November 20: We took a poor drunken Hobo into our cellar. He was soaked right through and in terrible condition. The kids are having a time here tonight and were unable to use the cellar as the man is still sleeping it off I guess.”

“November 21: Raining this morning and the slush and water is terrific. The poor, unfortunate man who slept in our cellar all night got up, dressed, and shaved. And, after drinking my shaving lotion I got him a good breakfast and sent him on his way. I hope he can find some way to turn from his curse of drinking.”

They grew their own vegetables in behind the house: carrots, onions, lettuce, peas, beets, potatoes, beans, corn. Fall canning by the family was a necessity and a pastime. Keeping busy was the thing to do. I expect Murray would have done well in quarantine.

A family man, when his wife and children went to the shore for a few days each daily entry revealed how he was trying to keep busy, but missed them all terribly. “Well I am all alone for a week and I do not like it,” Murray wrote on day one of a short trip by the rest of the family to the beach community at Caissie Cape (he dropped them there and returned as he was working that week). “I will be glad when Blanche and the family are home,” he writes on day two.

One day he stayed up until 11 p.m. to listen to the federal finance minister read the budget on the radio. A radio that was fixed just in time: $6.35 was the repair cost. The finance minister “sure didn’t hurt himself with the budget as there was hardly any change,” Murray writes in a rare political entry.

A written diary seems intimate and special in these days of iPhones, Outlook and now Zoom meetings. In his first week of keeping the book, the entries were short. The weather. The condition of the roads. But by week two his narrative builds. By the end of December he is fighting the page to fit as much detail as he can.

The only mention of sickness is a brief line on a muggy day in August. “There are 21 cases of poliomyelitis (polio) in New Brunswick and this is the kind of weather that brings it. (An estimated 11,000 people in Canada were left paralyzed by polio between 1949 and 1954, according to the Canadian Public Health Agency. Two vaccines brought it under control in the early 1970s.)

There is a sense of community and resilience in the pages. The man up the street helped Murray with a project — when that man needed cement steps poured, Murray was at his side. When the Buick’s oil needs changing, Murray changes it. When his hens laid eight eggs one day, it is a “record” he views with pride.

This weekend, her condition weakening, I read a short section where my mom decided one day to bring home a kitten and the next week, a canary. Why?

“They just seemed so nice to have around,” my mom replied. At times, and this may be a product of the virus, she believes she is there at her home on the river in 1948. Which, having studied the diary, seems a nice place to be.