Bells of Mourning

This morning Dr T and I went along to the monthly Portobello Market, heard the Portobello Choir and bought some delicious pastries. Here are two lovely women, both called Jane, who sing and lead the choir (the Pooka was conducting).

I'm grateful for Jane and Jane for posing for me. Today I really wanted a happy image of women about my age. On this day, 25 years ago, a gunman walked into the École Polytechnique in Montréal, separated male from female engineering students and killed fourteen women. It was a Friday, the last day before universities broke up for exams and students at the École Polytechnique were giving end of term presentations. The killer went from classroom to classroom, killing women whom he called feminists, merely for the fact that they were women who wanted to enter the male domain of engineering.

I remember hearing the news, 2000 miles away on another university campus as I was finishing up my first term as a Masters student. Universities had always seemed such safe places for women but no longer could this be taken for granted. The women killed were contemporaries of mine, fellow students. These women would be about my age now, about the age of Jane and Jane.

At the fifth anniversary of the Montréal Massacre, I was working as a Parliamentary Intern for a MP in the Canadian House of Commons. I asked him if he would consider reading out something I had written, my first piece for Parliament. He kindly obliged. At that point, all Canadians knew the killer's name but not the names of the women. Ron MacDonald, MP for Dartmouth, read out (starts bottom right) the women's names (continues top left) and finished by saying "Violence against women is not just a women's issue. Violence against women affects all of us." All these years later so little has changed.

A very young Stephen Fearing wrote Bells of Mourning to mark this horrible event in history.

Let's join together, women and men, to end violence against women in all its forms.

Wishing you all peace.