There was a close bond among Ernest, Irene and Ruby Gordon Peterkin, three of the four children of Charles and Theresa Peterkin who survived into adulthood.
In 1912 Ruby and Irene joined a two-month tour with the Rosedale Travel club to England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Holland, Germany, Austria, Italy Switzerland and France. There is no record of whether they had an opportunity to visit their father’s old haunts in Woodside, Aberdeen.
While Ruby was a Nursing Sister in the Great War she gave her permanent address as the home of her brother Ernest and his wife Minnie. Towards the end of the war when Ernest had moved to 161 Inglewood Drive her future husband Dr. Hugh Alexander McKay lived there briefly, as did Irene.
Between the wars, Irene, a kindergarten teacher, spent the summers at her cottage which Ernest built on an island in Georgian Bay near Honey Harbour. Ernest loved to fish there. Ruby bought a property on Bone Island less than a mile away.
In their later years the three siblings joined forces to live in a new house at 14 Market St. in Georgetown. Ruby had earlier suffered a severe car accident and after a couple of years in Georgetown had to be transferred to a nursing home in Wychwood Park in Toronto where she died in 1961.
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From now on the Peterkin blog will be devoted to Ruby and the close to four years she served as a Nursing Sister from 1915 to 1918 in France, Greece and England. Ruby wrote
regularly to her relatives and friends, but was restrained by the censors to not disclose details of the undoubted horrors that she had witnessed inside and outside the hospital. Thus the reader is left with the impression that apart from having to be up for night duty and having her tent swept out by a British “Tommy”, life was a continuous happy round of tea and tennis and excursions with the officers and fellow nursing sisters.
Ten of Ruby’s letters survive, nine of them addressed to “Rene” (her sister Irene) who would have shared them with other members of the family with the hope that they would be returned to her. Ruby sends greetings to her brothers, sister-in-law and nieces, many of whom have written to her. But oddly there is never a mention of her father Charles although all the early letters are addressed to Irene at their father’s house at 34 Oakmount. One letter is a “round robin”, intended to be widely circulated. That anyone would expect her to repeat to a long list of correspondents the details of the unfamiliar – even exotic — life she was leading was simply unthinkable.
As it was, Ruby survived the war but in 1918 was hospitalized in England, diagnosed as suffering from bronchitis, bronchial pneumonia and pleurisy, and finally pulmonary tuberculosis, but luckily free of dysentery and malaria. It was recorded that “The climate of the East was very hard on her.” The medical officers in Buxton, England, invalided her out back home in 1918 as “medically unfit”, and once home she was sent for the cure to Calydor Sanitarium near Gravenhurst, Ontario, until 1920.