I am one of those people other people tell stories to.

When I was a student, aged about 27 (early '80s), an old man told me about being a "home child" shipped from Scotland to Canada as farm labour. For reasons that I cannot guess, he talked steadily through the 10 minutes it took to ride the bus from Kingston Penitentiary to the Douglas Library, and his chilling story tallied perfectly with the accounts published years later in scholarly works on the subject.

In 1976, when I was in Halifax, a woman at church told me about the beginning of her career in nursing: she was a probationer at the Infirmary on December 6, 1917 (the day of the Halifax harbour explosion), and she couldn't go home for days because of all the wounded and burned people flooding into the hospital. When she found a boy to take a message to her father, she got a note back saying her family was on the brink of giving her up for dead.

Also in Halifax, the old petty officer who ran one of the surgery wards at Stadacona Hospital (where I worked) told me about taking a deathbed confession: a Navy sailor dying of cancer admitted to "getting rid" of a messmate who was known as a sexual predator -- "not safe with young fellas". With the help of a friend, the victim was pushed overboard in a North Atlantic gale.

But I also remember a man who must have had excellent reasons for not telling his story. In 1979, on a train from Ottawa to Trenton, I sat down next to a middle-aged man with a distinctive tattoo that my dear old sergeant had told me about -- three little linked circles on the wrist, signifying a soldier captured at Dieppe (Operation Jubilee, August 19, 1942. Nearly 2,000 prisoners were taken, and many were held in chains for months. Canadian Army oral tradition has it that this was done in reprisal for using Fort Henry in Kingston as a POW cage.) Gormlessly, I pointed at the tattoo and blurted, "Were you at Dieppe?" He turned and stared out the window and said, very flatly, "What the fuck do *you* know about that?" He never so much as looked at me for the rest of the trip.