There’s a single ceramic poppy sitting amongst the collection of war memorabilia at the Humboldt Legion Museum. Though it was crafted by hand, it is neither fancy nor pristine. Its stem is a rusted metal rod screwed into the center of its petals at the top. The rust was the consequence of sitting an entire summer in the fields of England come rain or shine. And though its journey began halfway across the world, its story began where the journey ended: in Saskatchewan.
“Everything has a little bit of a story behind it, a little history. But I find what I like most about history is it’s not the big things that matter a whole bunch; it’s those little things that tell a story,” said Garry Jenkins, the gentleman who donated the poppy.
Jenkins received the poppy about a month ago from his cousin who lives in England. It was one among 880,326 handmade poppies representing every person killed in the First World War who was in the British Commonwealth. The entire artistic installation was placed in the Tower of London’s dry moat from Aug. 5, 2014 to Nov. 11, 2014 and was entitled “Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red.” While each one carries a story, this particular one in Humboldt has an emotional attachment for Jenkins that few could even guess at.
It all began when he and his late father began searching for Jenkins’ uncle (his father’s younger brother) in 1981. The brothers had been separated at toddler age during the First World War. Jenkins’ father had been placed at an orphanage in Humboldt while the other was sent to a different location in the province. At some point, the younger brother was taken to England and raised there. Though on some level they both knew they had a brother, it wasn’t until decades later that Jenkins’ father decided to search in earnest. Their search led them as far as England, and they eventually managed to track down the area in which Jenkins’ uncle lived. However, time didn’t wait for Jenkins’ father. He passed away in 1984 before they were able to make contact.
“It was actually a bit of a tragedy because there was a mix-up. My uncle had retired and sold his house,” said Jenkins. “The postal people wouldn’t transfer his forwarding address, so the letter that we had social services send to him to ask if he was interested in reuniting with his brother ended up in that and my uncle was so fed up he didn’t care; he just rejected his mail and there was a great big misunderstanding and so social services wrote us back and said, ‘your uncle doesn’t really want much to do with you, but try again in a couple years.’ In the meantime, my father passed on. So my sister and I started putting ads in the papers down there to see if anyone remembered this guy.”
Finally, Jenkins and his sister had a stroke of luck. A lady in the area knew both his uncle and his uncle’s son, who was Jenkins’ unknown cousin. She gave him both their contact numbers, though Jenkins was nervous considering the previous message they had received from social services.
“At that point, we didn’t know if that rejection letter we got from social services was right or not. We just took it as that’s what it was,” he said. “So what I did do is before I contacted him, I found out he had a son, which is my cousin, and got a hold of him first to set the scene so that if there was any emotion or any rejection, we’d know.”
As soon as Jenkins got on the phone with the cousin he had never known about, never met, and never spoken to before, there was an immediate connection. Apparently, his cousin knew his father had come from Canada, but nothing more.
After that first phone conversation, it wasn’t long before Jenkins heard his uncle’s voice for the first time after years of searching.
“‘Everyone used to tell me I had a brother, but I was never sure. Kids in orphanages can be cruel. We all imagined we had families,’” Jenkins said his uncle told him. “He said (having a brother) was really important to him. The first thing he asked me for was my name. He said, ‘I want your name and your phone number in case we get cut off.’ It was really quite touching.”
It was an immediate and strong relationship that soon found Jenkins’ uncle and cousin visiting Canada. Jenkins went with them and visited the farm where the brothers came from, though the buildings had been torn down and the farm sold to other people by then.
“First thing I thought was, ‘how would he be like my father?’ And there was no mistake about it that he was my father’s brother,” said Jenkins. “Mannerisms, the way they talked, all those things, it was just amazing. For people who had never really met, or known they were family, they had those similarities. It was really quite something.”
From that point on, it was smooth sailing between Jenkins and his long lost family. Suddenly, England wasn’t just another country; it was another home with family. It was because of that kind of reasoning that Jenkins asked his cousin for one of the ceramic poppies.
“He wanted to send it. He likes his father to be remembered here. He’s a British guy and knows almost nothing about Canada, but we still have that bond. I don’t know how to describe it. Before it was just England, now it’s a little different. There’s family now there, I guess.”
Now that poppy adorns that vast collection at the museum. As a board member of the legion museum, it’s unsurprising that Jenkins would want to share it with the rest of the world.
“It does no good at my house except for me, but here it does good for everybody; it’s that simple. To me, it might have an emotional attachment, but that’s all. Here, everybody sees it. Well, not everybody, but everybody who comes here. And it spreads the message a lot better than if I have it on my mantle at home. You look at it for a few days and then forget about it.”
Jenkins wants it to inspire people and make them ask questions. He understands that it won’t mean much to younger generations now, but he’s hoping that’ll change as they get older.
“There’s a time coming when you’ll start to think backwards instead of forwards. And when you get there, you’re going to like places this more than you do today,” he said. “You look at that thing and you think, ‘it’s not a piece of art. There’s really nothing fancy about it, but what’s it all about?’ And of course, that invites the questions that people will start to ask and to me that’s more important. They’ll ask the questions that are important to them. I don’t think anybody here tries to tell anyone anything about war; I think they come down here to see there are two sides to every story.”
