A Ukrainian Islander reflects on the Bygone Days
Ukrainian Christmas will be celebrated Monday
Ukrainian Christmas, which is this coming Monday, Jan. 7, is often celebrated on P.E.I. by those with Ukrainian heritage with a special meal of meatless dishes and the sharing of traditions.
Polly Gulak was a first-generation Ukrainian Canadian who eventually settled in Montague, P.E.I. Gulak was 95 years old when she shared stories of the bygone days with historian Dutch Thompson, who called her a tiny, cheerful woman with endless energy.
"I was born in Manitoba in 1914 — Inglis, it was just a little town," she said. Gulak's mother paid the midwife not with money — like P.E.I., cash was scarce in those days — but with vegetables from her garden.
Hard work was her middle name
"I started to milk the cows when I was nine years old. I started to work in the field, I looked after my own horses — four horses. I cleaned the horses and then I had to harness them, all by myself, I had to have a stool to put the harness on.
"Seven o'clock in the morning, get out on the field, bare feet, a little dress on, no hat, no nothing. It was hot and dusty, dry but you just had to work, because my father he was just like a sergeant!"
She recalled picking heavy rocks from the fields, and later shook her head at those who decorated their flower gardens with rocks.
"I just hate it, because I picked an awful lot of stones in my life," she said. "They don't know what I know about stones!"
Gulak's father George Bezan was Ukrainian, and her mother Dominica ("Dora" in English) was born in Romania.
Their 800-hectare (2,000-acre) farm in Manitoba was about a third of the way up the border with Saskatchewan.
'No time to play'
The town of Inglis was known as the barley capital of Manitoba, with five grain elevators lining the railroad tracks — they're now national historic sites.
The immigrants who settled there were mostly from eastern Europe, and came to Canada at the turn of the last century to build new lives.
"Around where we lived was the Ukrainian, the Romanian, the German, the Polish and very few English," she said. Everybody got along well together and neighbours helped one another, she said.
Gulak was taught to read and write in Ukrainian, Romanian and English. Church services were in Romanian as the Romanian population was larger than others in Inglis at the time. After a few years the Ukrainian community grew and started its own church, Gulak said.
"Then they had to go to both churches!" she said with a laugh.
Gulak and her siblings did not write letters to Santa Claus for Ukrainian Christmas, however.
"We didn't live like kids, we lived like adults and we had to do what the adults do. We didn't have no bicycles, we didn't have nothing to play with. We had no time to play," she said.
Got the strap
Gulak did go to school, however, from the age of eight to 14, and enjoyed it immensely. After that her father took her out of school to work on the farm.
"I just got into Grade 6 and I had to quit," she said.
Those could be the words of a first-generation P.E.I. Irish or Scottish settler in the mid 1800s, when children were expected to leave school at a young age to help on family farms.
Another similarity is that many of the old ways were suddenly forbidden, like speaking Gaelic, or in Gulak's case Ukrainian. In the classroom only English was to be heard. When she went to school, her real name, Poliskiva, was quickly changed to Polly.
Gulak vividly recalled all 33 children in her schoolhouse getting a strapping from the teacher when one child spoke in their native tongue.
"So well we had to hold out our hand ... five straps to each hand," she said. "That teacher, boy would I ever like to get a hold of him!"
Something else that was the same in the bygone days of both Manitoba and P.E.I. was underwear made out of flour bags — Gulak grew up wearing flour bag petticoats.
Gulak picked up her petticoats and moved to Ontario, then British Columbia and Saskatchewan before finally settling on P.E.I. She never met her grandparents as they lived in the old country.
'I don't want to get married'
Like the early Scots, Irish and Acadian settlers on P.E.I., Gulak grew up in a strict home with customs that now seem outdated and maybe even unfair — take for instance her father's plan for her to marry.
"And I thought to myself, I'm not ready to get married, I don't want to get married!" she said. Nevertheless her father found her a husband, George.
"He married me off and I got married when I was 16 on my birthday — 27th of February, 1930," she said, adding there was "no such thing" as a honeymoon. So Gulak went to work on her husband's farm.
She and George had only one child, a daughter, and there was no midwife there to help with the birth.
"I had her on my own. I was alone in the house, I had the baby by myself," she said. "My mother-in-law just lived a little ways, and by the time my husband brought her in, the baby was born."
Gulak then told her husband she wanted no more children. "I don't want to go through all this again," she recalled.
She made traditional Ukrainian food her whole life including borscht with sour cream, perogies and cabbage rolls.
According to her obituary Gulak died in 2011 at age 97 and outlived two husbands, George Cheropita and Carl Gulak, as well as her daughter Adele.