I'm from Barra originally.  A MacNeil from Barra.  And I was raised in Benbecula.  We left Benbecula when I was eleven years old and we went to Edinburgh.  And we were...  We stayed there but I married when I was twenty and I came to Canada.  And the man that I married he was a doctor.  And he was a pilot as well.  And so we came over with the Canadian Air Force.  In...  1954, January.  It was quite cold, it was.  That's when we came to St. John, New Brunswick.  Oh, it was cold.  And we went from there to Alberta.  January.  And that was terribly cold!  We were in Alberta for two months.  Then we went to London and to Toronto just for courses and then to Winnipeg.  Another place that is quite cold!  And we were there for three years.  Then he came out of the air force and we separated.  Splitsville.

And he came down here [to Toronto] and he opened a practice and I was working in Winnipeg as a social worker.  And I was to be going up north to Dauphin.  Terribly cold.  And he asked me to come back and...  see if we couldn't work things out in the marriage.  Well, my goodness I wasn't happy to do it but I did it.  And we were together for four years.  And then....  I had a child at the time.  I had a boy.  But things weren't going well at all and I left him.

Now...  That's when I came to Toronto.  I started speaking to people from the islands and I found out that they had a Gaelic Society.  And I started going to the ceilidhs and I was singing.  And...  I was simply working...  getting what I could going along for a fair while...  a fair while and...  I started putting together a choir.  We had a great big choir.  There were thirty people in it.  Simply massive!  And we did very very well.  We were travelling to Montreal.  Here and there.

And at that time, the people that were that were in the society at the time they were getting old.  So it goes.  And they were dying.  And the Gaelic society was simply declining, like so.  Finally someone said...  Oh!  We're finished.  We don't have the people so we need to stop.  And they stopped.  Well, that didn't sit right with me.  And one night I was just thinking in my sleep.  I had a dream.  This is not going to happen.  Lots of young people are learning Gaelic.  Lots of them!  And I was asking around down at Cànan agus Òran.  And I was seeing them all.  So I said...  There are plenty!  We'll build up the Gaelic Society of Toronto once more.  And I spoke to this guy and I spoke to that lady.  Oh, Oighrig...  There's no way!  It's finished!  It's dead!  It's dead!  Well, it's not!

I carried on and I got a man from here a woman from there.  They said it could probably start.  In any case, we began.  And now it's very alive!  It's just great!  And, I want another choir.  Another grand choir.