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Elizabeth: struggling out of a bleak past
By Lindsay Kines of the Vancouver Sun
You hear a story like hers and you don't know what to think anymore. No way. No way somebody lives a life like that. Maybe 60 years ago. But not now.
We have a modern education system, don't we? We have a government that takes care of people, right? Somebody should step in and prevent something like this from happening. But Elizabeth West, a 30 year old construction worker from Surrey, has the proof.
Letters, report cards, newspaper clippings, ticket stubs. She collected the evidence over the years when her father wasn't looking. She hid it in a box on their farm and , when he barred her from the house, Elizabeth took the box with her.
One day, she vowed, she would tell her story. Now she keeps the evidence in a photo album - one of the strangest family records you ever want to see. The ticket stubs and brochures testify to the time her father, a Dutch immigrant, moved his entire family - a wife, five sons and five daughters - to South Africa and then Rhodesia, even though that country was in the middle of a war. A newspaper clipping tells the story of this strange, one family band returning from South Africa and making its way across the United States to Canada.
But the best piece of evidence is a letter to Elizabeth from the assistant to the registrar of B.C.'s correspondence branch. The letter, dated April, 29, 1975, says: "Thank you for your letter of April 4. We are sorry that you are not going to be able to complete your correspondence course. However, I am sure you are doing what is best. Enclosed is a transfer report indicating the work you have covered in Grade 5. You need not return any of the textbooks or material as you have paid for them all. We wish you success in your future studies".
The report shows Elizabeth received B's, C+'s and C's for her work. "Elizabeth needs to follow the instructions more carefully in order to increase her marks and avoid omissions," the report said. Helpful advice, sure - if a person can read it. But Elizabeth says her mother and oldest sister did all the correspondence for the younger children. Her father, she says, had pulled her out of school six years before because he believed the school system was brainwashing his kids. "Somehow we qualified for correspondence - right in the middle of the Fraser Valley," Elizabeth says. "I don't know how they allowed him to do it."
By the time she was 15, Elizabeth could barely write her own name, let alone read a letter from the correspondence branch. Her life consisted of working for her father's construction company. She did manual labor in exchange for room and board, with no wages, and rarely spoke with people outside the family. Her one pleasure came late at night when she sat in her room and taught herself to play the steel guitar, a difficult instrument at best.
But Elizabeth taught herself and then she put an advertisement in the Chilliwack paper asking for someone to give her lessons. Robert Hartkopf, a former U.S. Serviceman, replied to the ad and agreed to help. He was living on the Canadian Forces base with his wife and daughter and he had played the steel guitar a little himself. Hartkopf says Elizabeth, who was 25 by this time, spoke only a few words and always kept her head down. "You know what a dog's like after it's been whipped for a while?", he says. Hartkopf noticed something else, too. When he was going through books on the steel guitar with her, he discovered that she couldn't read.
"I thought, 'How is this possible that a girl could be this old and not know how to read?'", Hartkopf says. But he kept the question to himself. Besides, Elizabeth learned fast. Hartkopf showed her something on the steel guitar once or twice and she had it down. Elizabeth's father, however, took exception to his daughter's growing interest in music and her plans to join Hartkopf's country band, she says. "If you do, you're out of the house," he told her. "That's no way of life." But Elizabeth remembers thinking: "This is no way of life, either."
She kept going to Hartkopf for lessons and then, one day, her father kicked in the door at Hartkopf's place, claiming Elizabeth's guitar was his and demanding it back. Elizabeth never went home again after that.
Her father, Arjen Pellikaan, 63, of Coquitlam, disputes most of his daughter's story. He did pull his children out of school run by a Mennonite principal, he says. "I wasn't having my kids influenced by anybody." But he says Elizabeth could read and write at the time she left home. He also says it's true that none of his children received wages for their work. "It all went in one pot. It came into the household. That's natural." As for kicking in the door at Hartkopf's place, Pellikaan says the door was open when he got there. He says he has no idea why his daughter would make up a story about being illiterate. "Lizzie always goes moody," he says.
Elizabeth, for her part, says she suffered a nervous breakdown after leaving home. She was 25, illiterate and on her own for the first time. She credits Robert Hartkopf with saving her life. Hartkopf and his wife took Elizabeth in as one of their own. They tried to find a place for her to go to school. Gradually, Elizabeth revealed more about her childhood. Hartkopf, who served in Viet Nam, had trouble believing it all at first. "But I don't think she knew how to lie," he says. "She's been through more than anybody I have ever known."
When the family moved to Victoria, Elizabeth moved with them and enrolled in a literacy program at a college. She says the teachers treated her as if she had a mental handicap. In a self-esteem class, one teacher told the students to lower their goals because they did not have the skills necessary to meet such lofty expectations. Elizabeth remembers the man behind her started to cry; he wanted to be a firefighter.
Elizabeth quit not long after that. She tried again at a Christian school, but the teachers left her alone with books and she learned more from Hartkopf's daughter than anyone else. Finally, she just gave up on schools altogether and concentrated on her one love - steel guitar.
She played in a band in Victoria and a construction worker named Ken West came to hear her play a few times. They talked after the shows and then he started taking her out to dinner. If he found it strange that she always ordered the same things he did, he never mentioned it. Then, one night, after they sat down in the restaurant, he got up and excused himself for a moment. "You look at the menu and order something," he told her. When he came back, Elizabeth still hadn't ordered. "You can't read, can you?", he said. Elizabeth hung her head. "Don't be ashamed," said West. "There's nothing wrong with that."
They got married and moved to Vancouver. They worked as caretakers of an apartment building and then started working in construction together. It was Ken who first heard about the Invergarry Learning Centre in Surrey. "You should try it," he said. "You should give it one last chance."
"I'm not trying this again," Elizabeth said. But they lived near the school and one day she rode past on her bicycle - just for a look. Later, she told her husband: "I'll give this school three days."
Mark McCue remembers the first time Elizabeth showed up at Invergarry. She kept her head down. She rarely looked at him. If she could answer a question with one word, she did. McCue did most of the talking. He, a former elementary school teacher and, along with Lee Weinstein, one of the centre's founders. The program they set up takes a different approach from curriculum-based programs that teach students from a set list of books. Invergarry allows students to set their own goals.
"I think a big part of my job is to foster independence in people," says McCue. "I don't want them to think that I have a better idea of what they need." He asked Elizabeth what she wanted. "I'm hoping someday to write my own story," she said. McCue suggested they sit down, then and there, and write whatever she could. "Write me a story," he said. "Write anything." Elizabeth sat for a long time and then she started to write. She came back the next day and the day after that - and three days turned into almost three years.
That first sentence hasn't changed much since then. Oh, the spelling is better. The grammar has improved. But the meaning is still the same. "On March 12th, 1961, a baby girl weighing seven pounds, three ounces was placed into her mother's arms for her first feeding."
Elizabeth West still reads that sentence every once in an while. She has to read it. She's in the process of editing her book. That sentence is the opening line.
Copyright 2004 The Vancouver Sun
Elizabeth adds in her own words:
"At the early age of six I definitely knew just which
instrument I was not going to learn; the accordion!
Being the fourth child of out of ten, it was our father's
belief that if ones hands were busy one was out of
trouble. Not good logic. Plus, Dad played the
accordion as well. By the early 1970s Dad moved our
family out of the city of Vancouver B.C. to the small
town of Spuzzum British Columbia Canada, a canyon
wilderness located about forty miles north of Hope B.C. (population 98). " Now you see it, now you don't town",
outsiders called it. In the evenings our landlord and
townspeople would come over to hear our family
perform, bringing along their old C/W records for us
to listen to. It was then that I discovered and fell
in love with the old Hank Williams Sr. sound and
songs. Country and Western music was the music of
choice in the surrounding small towns.
One night, after we had finished
performing at the Legion, Dad took us
children to hear his friend's band, Country
Gentlemen,performing at the fairgrounds in Agassiz. Not only did the band play hot c/w music, there was a pedal
steel player in the band. I loved the sound! At this
particular time all we played was big band music
because Dad did not like or approve of c/w music. I
was about twelve at the time and I thought to myself the
guy was kind of cute. However, it was the steel I
wanted to take home. I still remember standing next to
the stage just mesmerized as the steel player played
steel guitar rag. That very night much to my surprise
the fellow asked Dad if he wanted to buy his Miller
steel from him. Boy! I thought life was great with my
Hank Williams record and pedal steel guitar. However,
that same week dad also bought a banjo for guess who?
I didn't want the banjo, so Dad and I had wars over my
learning to play it and once a week he'd lock my new
steel away. But when Dad wasn't at home Mom would let me play the steel. The steel guitar came with a book and a
cardboard chord diagram, which I still have. I couldn't
read and Dad didn't approve of his daughters taking
music lessons, so Mom tried helping me with the
reading of the book. Many times she'd say, "Why the heck
do you want to play the steel, Child! Piano's a girl's
instrument. Why must you be so wild?"
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Copyright 2005 Elizabeth West All Rights Reserved
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