The Sad Story of Maude Beetle

I interviewed my father, A. E. Dixon, about some of the experiences he had while working as a medical doctor in Enderby, a small town in British Columbia, Canada. I asked him about some of his more memorable patients and he told me the story of one named Maude Beetle.

Mrs. Beetle was a war bride from England. This means she had married a Canadian soldier who had been in England during World War I. Apparently, he had told her he had a lot of land in Canada and led her to believe that he was wealthy. However, it wasn't until after they married and she came to Canada that she discovered his property was really the steep side of a mountain covered with trees. They lived together in a small wooden shack about 8 kilometres from town.

The Beetles made a very unusual couple because he was about 190 centimetres tall and she was less than 150. Mr. Beetle was not a pleasant person to live with. He was an alcoholic and when he went to town he became so drunk he could not stand. The people in town would load him on his wagon and his wife would drive the horse to take him home. This worked fine until they got to the steep part of the road at the base of the mountain. He would fall out of the wagon and Maude was too small to get him back onto it. To get him home, she would tie a chain around his feet and skid him up the road behind the wagon in much the same way as loggers would drag a tree they had cut down.

The hard life in Canada affected Mrs. Beetle mentally and after her husband died, she would come to town all dressed in black, from black gumboots on her feet to a fantastic black hat on her head. Maude had been a milliner in England and designed her own hats.

My father knew her only on a professional basis and she was a most entertaining patient. She would perch on his examining table and after he was done say, "Well, is the show over?" in a high-pitched voice. Once she became very ill and was hospitalized unconscious for a lengthy time. After she recovered and received her bill, she approached my father and said, "Just what does a young doctor do for an old lady for this much money?" He recalls being called to her house when she fell ill on one occasion. Chained outside the rough shack where she lived was a dog, half-mad with hunger. He had worn a trench 15 centimetres deep around the post where he was tied up. The house was in an appalling condition with a dirt floor and the sheets on the bed so black they could never have been washed.

Mrs. Beetle lived to be close to 80, proof that a sad, hard life is not necessarily an impediment to a long life.

Duncan Dixon