Brigadoon (Page 3)

Time Stands Still

The winter of 1940 was the turning point for us and for the other camps. In 1941, registered McGill matriculation schools also started in camps in Fredericton and in Sherbrooke that, by 1942, had graduated about 50 more students.

The school was wonderful. Our McGill junior matriculation subjects included English literature, modern history, math and geometry, physics, and chemistry. Some took Latin and other subjects. I became totally immersed in this heaven-sent opportunity, and for me "outside time" soon held still. I found peace and happiness simply in working on my studies without giving much thought to where it would lead.

Of course I could never have imagined what great things were on their way: release from internment, a university education and an academic life! My reward at the time was deep contentment in restoring the main thread of my life that had snapped when I escaped to England in January 1939, and the joy of my parents, with whom I was able to correspond from the camps, that I had passed my first exams.

In Deemed Suspect, Bill Heckscher recalled the ambiance of the Farnham school:

"How is it that students pass their exams all the same [in difficult circumstances]? How is it that they exchange views, imbibe their lectures, study their texts?

Whenever people said to me: 'Well, there was nothing to distract their minds; no women, no outings, no financial worries,' I felt insulted -- simply because one doesn't like one's tribulations pettified ex post. Experience has taught me that the very fact that everything seems to be adverse to learning makes people study. Their road leads uphill, but they feel proudly that the aims they achieve are the result of their own fight, their own willpower.

On a hot summer afternoon I remember I had fallen asleep, when I suddenly awoke, sensing that there must be 'something on.' I turned round and saw ten boys assembled at the foot end of my bunk, staring at me with sad eyes: I should have given them a lesson on Twelfth Night, and I had overslept my time. It is the dynamic push on the part of the young students which carried along their teachers, and made them the happiest men in internment, because they were made to feel that they had a task to fulfill."

I suppose the boys at the end of the bunk were ten of the fourteen of us shown in the camp graduation picture together with about an equal number of teachers, a ratio that would be the envy of any school. I have long thought of our Farnham experience as having attended a splendid private boys' school in Brigadoon, a place that was not on any map, where outside time held still, and where people were good to each other, just as in the musical. It would have been of little use without the helping hand extended by McGill University.

Vernon Brooks is Professor Emeritus at the University of Western Ontario. He was a lecturer and an assistant professor of physiology at McGill from 1950 to 1956.

Below, archival papers on Vernon Brooks, including his matriculation certificate.