This is a story about neighbours.
It began six years ago, when Mel and Hiie Galea moved in next door to George and Ursula Forrestal in their quiet North Vancouver neighbourhood.
The friendship began on day one. “They look like nice people,” said Ursula to George. “I’m going to make them some welcome muffins.”
During the 50 years George and Ursula lived on their street, they enjoyed good relations with their neighbours. “But Mel and Hiie were the best,” George says. “Ursula wasn’t well and Mel was always there with an offer to help.”
Over tea and muffins on subsequent visits, it came out that the new neighbours were without a lawn mower. Having given theirs to his daughter and son-in-law, Mel had to borrow it back when the lawn at the new house needed mowing. The Forrestal push mower was offered – “don’t bother to ask, just come and get it,” George said.
The arrangement works well. Mel keeps the mower in good working order, and helps George with repairs – everything from vacuum cleaners to plumbing. He has evolved into the neighbourhood handyman.
Rather than reveal their ages, Mel says, “We’re so old, everyone is younger than we are.” He is 10 years younger than George, a decade that made a great difference in their lives.
The Second World War took George from his home in Ukraine “back and fro” across eastern Europe until “I ended up in Berlin.” De-mobbed to the U.K., George was quartered in the huge bases left vacant when the American servicemen went home.
During the war, Mel was a child living with his family in Malta. Politically and economically important to the British and critical to the Allies’ wartime strategy, Malta was a constant target of Axis bombers. The Galeas spent a great part of the war in shelters carved out of tunnels deep in the Maltese rock.
In 1948, some 60 years before Mel and George became neighbours, their paths almost crossed. George was emigrating from the U.K. The P&O liner carrying him cruised past Gibraltar into the Mediterranean, stopping at Malta before continuing through the Suez Canal and the long passage to Australia.
Post-war employment opportunities in the British Commonwealth and a shortage of skilled personnel helped George succeed as a civil and structural engineer. With few mountains and little skiing in Australia, George moved on to Canada. Returning from a ski holiday in the Rockies, he met Ursula Forrestal, on holiday from England, at Vancouver’s CPR station, their lives coming together over an incident involving missing luggage. They married in 1963, travelling and skiing before settling in North Vancouver.
In 1956, Mel signed on to Malta’s assisted passage plan and immigrated to Canada where he hoped to get work as a draftsman.
“I was young and full of life, and a big fan of the movies,” Mel recalls. “The movies showed me that life in Malta would be too small for me. If I emigrated maybe I would get to work in my chosen field.”
Through the Mediterranean, past Gibraltar and the Pillars of Hercules, and across the Atlantic he sailed, all the way to Canada. He met and, in 1967, married Hiie Kelbre, who had fled the Nazis from Estonia and made her way to Canada.
Yes, Mel’s dream did come true. He worked on the AVRO Arrow project and was on the design team at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory. There he had the opportunity to enter another tunnel, descending into a shaft of the Creighton Mine to the observatory over a mile beneath the surface of the earth.
Mel and George’s working years are far behind them now. Ursula and Hiie are gone, within a couple of years of each other. Children and grandchildren are in the picture but their home community is also important to the two friends, even as it changes. “We get out and about, making sure we stay active,” says Mel, serving muffins and coffee at his kitchen table.
As megahomes transform their quiet neighbourhood, Mel and George continue to share tools and stories, keep up their gardens and keep an eye out for one another. Friends and neighbours, travelling around the sun together for another year.
Laura Anderson works with and for seniors on the North Shore. 778-279-2275 [email protected]
