Mother was the fourth daughter of Lt. Col. J. T. Campbell, originally of the Royal Scots Fusiliers. Her mother, a Kinnear from Halifax and Ottawa, died when Katie was four, and shortly thereafter her father took the four girls to live for some years in County Galway, Ireland, during which time he married a second wife and fathered their stepsister Violet. When they returned to Canada Col. Campbell joined the Royal Canadian Rifles and was stationed in Kingston where they lived in a large house on the shore of Lake Ontario.
When Mother married Ned Merrett, then a bank clerk, she was breaking the
pattern set by her three older sisters all of whom married soldiers: Alice
married Ned Taylor who became a colonel and Commandant of the Royal Military
College; Marion married Alain de Lotbinière of the Platon, Quebec,
seigneurial family, who became a general with the Royal Engineers in India;
Maud married Archie Macdonell, of Glengarry, Ont., who started out with the
Royal Northwest Mounted Police, and became Lieut.-General commanding the
1
Canadian Division in World War I, was knighted
,
and ended his career also as Commandant of R.M.C. (See 
.2:
``Relations'')
Mother was a deeply religious person, a quality inhrited rather more by her
daughters than by her sons. She was a keenly active member of several
church-related organisations and, until old age prevented, a faithful attendant
at church. In this context she found her closest friends. Apart from her family,
her chief occupation was knitting
and sewing for charitable causes, her favourite being the ``In His Name''
society. She and daughter Helen were early members of the Ladies' Morning
Musical Club
,
but beyond that Mother went in for very few of the social activities of the day.
For instance, I never knew her to indulge in any of the games her husband and
children played---golf or tennis, or bridge (but she was a ``Patience''
addict, and would sit for hours by herself at a card table playing ``Caulfield''
or ``13 down''). She entertained sparingly, and usually only close friends or
relatives. She was a hardworking housekeper: until well into her seventies she
would do her shopping in person, including a trip once a week to the market---
first Bonsecours, later Atwater, to choose the family's provisions. No doubt her
Scotish ancestry made her careful with money, and it would never have occurred
to her to take a tai, for instance (Dad never owned a car), so whenever she
could not walk she went by streetcar.
Mother enjoyed life, and her religiousness in no way interfered with her keen
and frequently ``naughty'' sense of humour, a family trait shared by her
sisters. Maud suffered from a speech impediment which made her bubbling humour
all the more amusing, which she well knew; Marion sparkled too, but Alice was
more proper and could disapprove with a resounding ``sniff'', whereas Violet
was lots of fun but often bawdy. These Campbell qualities have spilled down to
various offspring.
When Father died Mother was 91, and we moved her from Westmount Boulevard to an
apartment in the Town of Mount Royal, where she was looked after by a succession
of housekeeper-attendants. On her 100
birthday in 1967 she received the
conventional congratulatory messages from the Queen, the P.M., and the Mayors;
and the President of the Bank presented her (the oldest pensioner) with a cheque
for her favourite charity: she received him with great charm and dignity. She
retained all her faculties and was reading and knitting (though on my weekly
visits it was always the same book, and knitted scarf grown a few rows longer),
and joking, until a very few months before her death in 1969, of being 102 years
old.