The Permanent Nature of Everything: A Memoir 9780773596238

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Preface
Illustrations
1 A Fatalistic Gaiety
2 Light through Leaves
3 Gran and Granddad
4 Grandmother and Grandfather
5 The Kennedy House
6 The Substance of Fantasy
7 Going to School
8 Pride and Prudery
9 The Larger World
10 Literary Property
11 Danger Zones
12 The Master of the Cutting Monosyllable
13 North Kildonan
14 Resistentialism
15 A Long View
16 The Cracked Mirror
17 Isabel’s Chalet
18 The Inescapable
19 Sylvan Avenue and the Bluffs
20 Abstractions
21 No Perfect Time

Citation preview

The Per m a n en t Nat u r e of Every thing

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• Judith Cowan, aged six.

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The Per m a nent Nat u r e of Every thing A Memoir

Judith Cowan

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2014 ISBN 978-0-7735-4399-7 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-7735-9623-8 (ePDF) ISBN 978-0-7735-9624-5 (ePUB) Legal deposit third quarter 2014 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% postconsumer recycled), processed chlorine free McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Cowan, Judith, author The permanent nature of everything : a memoir / Judith Cowan. Includes bibliographical references. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-0-7735-4399-7 (bound). – ISBN 978-0-7735-9623-8 (ePDF). – ISBN 978-0-7735-9624-5 (ePUB) 1. Cowan, Judith. 2. Cowan, Judith–Childhood and youth. 3. Cowan, Judith–Family. 4. Authors, Canadian (English)–20th century–Biography. I. Title. PS8555.O8575Z65 2014

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quand rien ne vaudra plus que l’espoir orphelin de l’enfance la courbe qui nous courba achèvera sa mesure nous oublierons d’un respir le défaut d’en face nous irons tranquilles inaperçus de mémoire emportant avec nous les frontières du voyage Yves Boisvert, Les amateurs de sentiments

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contents

Preface ix Illustrations xv 1 A Fatalistic Gaiety 3 2 Light through Leaves 13 3 Gran and Granddad 24 4 Grandmother and Grandfather 34 5 The Kennedy House 45 6 The Substance of Fantasy 62 7 Going to School 74 8 Pride and Prudery 87 9 The Larger World 98 10 Literary Property 116 11 Danger Zones 133 12 The Master of the Cutting Monosyllable 148 13 North Kildonan 163 14 Resistentialism 179 15 A Long View 194 16 The Cracked Mirror 210

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viii

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17 Isabel’s Chalet 225 18 The Inescapable 242 19 Sylvan Avenue and the Bluffs 257 20 Abstractions 276 21 No Perfect Time 291

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p r e fa c e

One summer towards the end of the 1970s, my mother paid me to sort through the layers of jumbled mess in the farmhouse where she was living. Three upstairs rooms were heaped with litter, and I worked for a couple of days, salvaging family documents and treasures, rescuing old toys or nostalgic objects, and tossing decayed, useless, or unrecognizable things out of a second-floor door onto the roof of the garage. Although I thought then that I was making a difference, over the ensuing years a lot of what I saved would be lost again, while the shambles, like some lowly protean life form, reasserted itself and kept on expanding. Had I only known it, that early venture into the physical remains of childhood’s confusion was an antecedent to this memoir. I should have saved more and carried it off while I could. In the attempt to bring a half-remembered past to life, photographs and documents have been invaluable, because setting out to trek back across a lost emotional and psychological homeland has meant addressing both the known and the unknown. Some landmarks have changed and others are gone, but, as I pushed on, places and experiences surged up out of the mist. Provided with a frame of reference, memories that

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had been imperfect or incomplete took shape and fitted together. A vague impression might flash back aureoled in a light of such clarity that, out of loyalty to my childhood self, I had to believe that it was true. But an experience snatched back from oblivion didn’t always resolve itself into the meaning I had expected. A memory that was accurate in detail might deliver a message quite unlike what it had meant to me as a child. It turns out that life’s sprawling disorder is uncontrollable and never does stop growing. Therefore this preface should serve as an apologia – both an explanation and an apology – for these personal, partial recollections. The physical surroundings of my babyhood were a series of rented rooms and apartments that come back only in disconnected scenes. The images of the four houses that we moved into and out of over the following decade are clearer. The first, a tiny post-war bungalow in New Toronto, may still exist, although I haven’t tried to locate it because, when we lived there, I was too young to have learned the address. The second was the tall old Kennedy farmhouse on the Second Line Dixie, in what is now Mississauga. That house was demolished long ago, and the surrounding fields scraped and levelled for a subdivision. It was hard to accept that even the rise of land that led to the brick house had vanished and the slope to the creek behind it. The creek itself is gone. Google Street View now shows the Second Line as Tomken Road, a featureless suburban street like a hundred thousand others. Our third place, however, a small storey-and-half house in North Kildonan, Manitoba, can still be seen, if no longer in the leafy setting where I used to prowl. Its land, garden, and fence are gone, the trees are gone, and again, the creek seems to have been swallowed up by the earth. Only the fourth house, the Scarborough bungalow that was new and modern when we moved in, has managed to settle into the landscape. When we arrived, everything around us was being bulldozed flat. Now, in photographs taken recently by my one of my brothers, I see that nature has reasserted itself. The bungalow, as ordinary as it always was, is a modest little old house enveloped in trees. The human milieu that prevailed during my childhood has changed even more than the buildings and the topography. Pondering the attitudes and behaviour of that other time, wanting to recapture the emotional atmosphere, I was venturing deep into territory situated

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somewhere between the forbidden and the forgotten. The moral and mental worlds of my parents and grandparents, almost obliterated from my mind over the intervening years, rose up to confront me. I was remembering things that I was never supposed to have known. So I should ask for forgiveness from the shades of my grandparents, who were formed by the standards of an utterly different world. Before I was born, they must have been disappointed, even shocked, by the caprices of my parents. But our realities were too far apart, and their lives overlapped with mine for too short a period for me to understand, while they were still alive, why grandparents place such hope in their grandchildren. Whatever they may have hoped for, I’m sure that neither of my grandmothers could have foreseen being commemorated in print. Although they were both educated, neither of them would have expected her life and personality to be discussed and reconstructed. My Cowan grandmother had trained as a stenographer and worked for several years before she was married. My Leonard grandmother started out as a country schoolteacher but went on to study at the University of Toronto and subsequently became a Methodist missionary. Both were small women, and in the first decade of the twentieth century, both married tall, good-looking men with far less formal education. Although their marriages did last, I suspect that their lives were filled with compromise and regret. Nor can I ever know whether they would have been flattered or outraged to discover how much I’ve deduced about them. My grandfathers, who survived into their nineties, both of them outliving my grandmothers, were more open and assertive about their respective opinions, which were, however, diametrically opposed. I was close enough to my paternal grandfather, Edward Cowan, to know for certain that he would not have been pleased had he guessed that one day I was going to tell the tale of his qualities and quirks. At the end of his life he was careful to burn decades’ worth of family correspondence in the kitchen stove, remarking afterwards, “some fella could have got his hands on that, and then he would have known all about us!” I bit my tongue not to exclaim that I was the one who wanted to know all about us. By contrast, William Leonard, my maternal grandfather, plainly intending to document the glorious struggle of his early years,

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left his own memoir from which I’ve learned more than I ever did by listening to him. But I doubt if he would have been happy with the way I’ve presented him. He had secrets that he thought would never be discovered, and I’ve dragged a couple of them out into the light. Approaching my parents’ lives, I’m treading on still more sensitive ground. Young and rebellious, they came into their own at university and during the Second World War. In English Canada, theirs was the lyric generation ­– educated, individualistic, and eager to take emotional liberty for granted. Having triumphantly overthrown their own parents’ values, they made even their marriage an act of revolt. But when their life together turned into a long-drawn-out contest we, their children, were the victims of that ongoing struggle. Maybe it was because they saw us as a challenge to their hard won freedom that our parents treated us so high-handedly. Not until much later in life, when they were no longer together, did they appear to realize that a steady diet of distrust and sarcasm isn’t good for children, and that we were collateral damage. By then, both of them regarded me with apprehension. The last time I talked to my father, two months before his death, he openly accused me of planning to write about him. What better demonstration of his narcissism could he have given me? As for my mother, who was to survive him by sixteen years, her self-image had been fixed in the days when she was a bright young thing. I’d been a challenge to her ego from the moment I first opened my mouth to squall. She never wanted to read anything I’d written and when she learned that I was working on a memoir, I think she viewed the prospect with resignation. She was counting on not being around to find out what I’d said. She hated being an old lady, and at the end of her life she seemed to fear me. I felt no need to hurt her, though. All I’d ever wanted was to get away, and I had, long since. Looking back now, with a better grasp of the challenges she faced, I do understand that her life was hard. But old age didn’t soften her, and no matter how feeble she became, she had never accepted me and never would. As an epigraph to this memoir, I have chosen the quote from Yves Boisvert because he refers to hope as an “orphan of childhood” and the most valuable emotion to survive when “the curve that curbed us has completed its arc.” At that point, he says, we shall “forget in a breath”

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the flaws of the other and “carry on calmly unnoticed by memory, taking with us the frontiers of the journey.” My mother’s long-gone battle with my father, and with the rest of the world, was an important part of the curve that curbed me, but after she died its parabola was complete, and I was free to tell the story – which has turned out to be another salvage operation, the instinctive processes of childhood awareness unfolding for me as I raked and sorted. I’ve extricated what I could from memory’s midden. I hope I haven’t tossed out too much. And having tried to unearth both the treasure and the hard truths from the unconscious past, I submit this patchwork of remnants, with apologies, to the gentle reader.

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• Ed Cowan and Will Cherry, Toronto, about 1896, looking at pictures of women.

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• Bessie McQueen, Montreal, about 1900.

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• William Mark Leonard, Transvaal, South Africa, 1904.

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• Edith Annie Weekes, graduating from the University of Toronto, 1904.

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• The Leonard family outside their house, 6 University Crescent, Chengdu, China, 1920. The author’s grandfather, William Mark Leonard, stands on the left, beside a Chinese nursemaid holding Alice, the author’s mother. Note the amah's bound feet.

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• The Leonards in Edmonton, 1921, on their way back to China after Canadian leave. The children, from left, are Evelyn, Wesley, Alice, Catherine, and Etheridge.

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• Bert Cowan, 1942, lunging at Alice, who is taking the picture.

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• Alice (in shadow), Bert, and Judith Cowan, Christmas 1943.

• From left: Hector, Paul, Doris, and Judith Cowan (with Fiddler Fee), about 1951. Taken by Alice Cowan on the back steps of the Kennedy house.

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• From left: Doris (with Buttercup), Hector, Judith, Bert, Alice (standing), and Paul Cowan, taken in North Kildonan, Manitoba, Christmas 1954. Alice's Gauguin copy is behind us.

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• From left: Doris, Judith (above), Paul (below), Hector Cowan, in 1955.

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• Alice, with her children Paul, Hector, Judith, and Doris Cowan, looking down from Grandfather Leonard's hayloft in Delhi, Ontario, about 1955.

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The Per m a n en t Nat u r e of Every thing

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c h a p t e r ONE

A Fatali stic G aiet y

According to my mother, my father proposed to her on a Toronto streetcar. That would have been towards the end of 1941, or possibly on New Year’s Day 1942, because their marriage license is dated on the second of January in that year, and they were married on the fifteenth. For all I know their wedding was the result of a New Year’s Eve party, a further step that they saw as the natural sequel to some celebratory fling. At the age of five or six, teetering around with my small feet shoved into a pair of strappy gilt pumps that I’d never seen my mother wear, I wondered when she was going to put them on and go out to a party, but I don’t think she ever did. Her dancing shoes must have harked back to that earlier time. My parents had met at the University of Toronto where both of them studied Classics. Although Bert never told us anything about his bachelor years, I know from Alice that he played the violin in the University of Toronto orchestra and worked on the student paper, The Varsity. Apparently he graduated a year later than she did ­– although he was almost a year older and had entered university at the same time – because he immersed himself in music and journalism and skipped most of his classes. As a result, he was dropped from the

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Honours program in Classics and finished later with what used to be called a deferred pass, the equivalent of the three-year general arts degree. But all this is vague and distant now. Bert died in 1990 and Alice at the end of 2006, although she was still alive when I began this memoir, and for a little while I could consult her. Amongst other recollections, she shared with me the prediction that her own mother had made for her, telling her, “you will see the millennium!” She was pleased that her mother’s forecast had come true. Not long into the new century, however, the reticence of very old age overtook her. She became unwilling, or perhaps unable, to share any further details about her life with Bert or the reasons for decisions that the two of them had taken when they were young. She died in December 2006, shortly after her eighty-ninth birthday. Alice had been born in 1917, in Cheng-du, West China, where her parents were missionaries for the Methodist Church. She was seven when the family, with five children – of whom the three youngest had been born in Cheng-du – was called back to Canada. From then on her father was to make a scanty living as a preacher in southern Ontario. Throughout all those years, from earliest childhood and on into her teens, my mother experienced more adventure and more hardship than my father would ever know. When she arrived at Victoria College, the combative red-haired daughter of an impoverished country preacher, she’d already crossed the Pacific three times. In prerevolutionary China, and later in the tobacco-growing region of rural Ontario, Alice had seen her share of the world’s tougher realities. She was penniless but well informed, sceptical, and adventurous. After graduating from Victoria College – in the depths of the Great Depression and with a BA in Latin and Greek – she set out to look for whatever work she could find. In the summer of 1939, aged twenty-one, she tried her luck in New York City. Her first job was supposed to be with a summer theatre, about which she told me strictly nothing except that it didn’t last. The big city’s street life was more dramatic. “One day in the automat,” she said, “Jesus Christ came in and sat down beside me to eat his sandwich!” Alice had rejected her parents’ religious beliefs as soon as she was out of their house, so she certainly didn’t mean that she’d had a vision or a revelation. What she meant was that she’d seen a

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longhaired, deluded man dressed in a white robe and sandals. What she liked about that encounter was the chance to confirm for herself, and later to share with me, the observation that religion was generally a delusion. Then she took a job teaching children whom she described as “developmental orphans,” and it was while she was working with them that the Second World War broke out. Rather dryly she recounted how the orphans, being American, “asked about it.” The United States, at that stage, were refusing to enter the war, and I can readily imagine my mother lecturing a class of challenging urban orphans about the British Empire and our respective values. In the fall Alice returned to Canada and went back to the University of Toronto where she enrolled in a master’s program in English literature. The most interesting outcome of her foray into English was that she was allowed to read James Joyce’s Ulysses, banned in Canada at the time, because her professor had provided a letter assuring the library that she was a serious scholar. My mother was not a very serious scholar but she wasn’t shocked by Joyce’s book either. She told me that it was rather disgusting and almost admitted that she’d found it boring. Unfortunately, though, the English program did impose one requirement that became an obstacle. Mother had learned to read Latin and Greek, but she was unable to wrap her mind around AngloSaxon, and she did not finish the graduate degree. That year, her other activity was to play second violin in the university symphony, while her closest sister, Evelyn, played first viola. Although Evelyn was a little older than Alice she’d taken longer to get into U of T, maybe because she had won no scholarships. She may have had to work and save to pay her tuition. Evelyn wasn’t as clever academically as Alice, but she was a better musician. By that time Bert, who had originally played first violin, was the orchestra’s conductor (if that’s actually true – my mother had a tendency to improve on the details in her stories), and he knew both sisters. When he graduated in the spring of 1940, Alice gave up on the Old English courses and also left the university. My father was a Torontonian to the core. Born in the city in 1917, Bert had lived there all his life and was less forthcoming than my mother about his experiences in childhood and youth. Most of what I know about him I learned either from her or from his mother.

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He displayed a lifelong reluctance to talk to his children and evaded questions with casual disdain. When I asked him once if he had a religion he stiffened. After a silence he admitted that officially, yes, he had but only for the purpose of filling out forms that required it – as forms did in those days – and then he didn’t tell me what the religion was. On the rare occasions when he opened up a little, he spoke in a clipped, staccato manner, as if forcing the words out. Certainly his upbringing had been more conventional than Alice’s, and he may not have thought it worth describing. Throughout the whole of his university career my father lived in his parents’ house under the anxious supervision of his mother. With her watching, he would have had no chance to experience an independent bachelor life. And after graduation, with the war worsening every day, he enlisted, going straight from his mother’s house in Toronto to the Royal Canadian Navy in Halifax. A little more than a year later, while he was still in the navy, he and Alice were married. So in his youth, my father enjoyed very little personal freedom. For her part, my mother admitted to me that in the summer and fall of 1940, she’d had “other boyfriends” – probably when Bert first went off to Halifax – and told me that she’d worked briefly in a Toronto factory designing children’s toys. During that time, she boarded with the archaeologist Homer Thompson and his wife and helped look after their children. They made an impression that was to remain with her for the rest of her life. Years later, my mother spoke admiringly of the Thompsons’ solid antique furniture and their unfussy, magnanimous lifestyle. It’s possible that she was in love with Homer Thompson, but both the Thompsons and their household appear to have represented a social status and an aesthetic authenticity that she hadn’t seen before. In 1941, she got a wartime job with what she described as the Allied War Supplies Corporation, Project 24, in Scarborough. In fact it was a bomb factory. A picture taken at work shows her standing with a group of other young women dressed all in white, their hair wrapped up as if for an operating room. Her work consisted of packing gunpowder into the fuses destined for shells. If she never handled the shells themselves it was because they contained some terribly dangerous substance – called, she thought, “composite

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explosive tetryl” – too irritating to be handled by a thin-skinned, red-haired person. Packing only the gunpowder wasn’t much of a privilege, however. Like all the others, she worked under the constant threat of being blown sky high. • Thus my parents’ marriage may have been, at least in part, a response to the fatalistic gaiety inspired by the darkest days of the war. It could have been the stresses of the period, with death as a not-too-distant possibility that pushed them to tie the knot. It’s also conceivable that Alice was the one who did the proposing and that Bert merely acquiesced in what he saw as inevitable. Once I heard him deny that he’d taken the initiative, although he may have been joking. He claimed that she’d tempted him with a toasted sandwich containing mushrooms fried in butter and declared that after their marriage she never made him another. Much later he told me that he’d married a redhead so that over the heads in a crowded room – and again I imagine a wartime dance party – he could see which one was his. Their wedding, the preacher’s daughter throwing in her lot with the triumphant sceptic, was only minimally religious. The ceremony was performed by a United Church minister, the Reverend J.A. Miller, in a church office or whatever there was at the “710 Coxwell Avenue, Toronto” mentioned on the marriage certificate. They weren’t married in the church itself, and the small gathering that followed was held in the apartment at 21 Poplar Plains Road that was their first married address. There used to be a black-and-white snapshot of Alice in a dark-coloured dress with white trim, cutting into a cake. That photograph may be among her papers with my sister Doris, or it may be among other things cleared from her last house, or it may be lost. As for the dress, it was still kicking around when I was a child. It was short and made of dark green velvet trimmed with what was by then some rather ratty white rabbit fur. Later on I think she took it apart to make something else. Of course Bert was present at the cake cutting, and in my recollection of the photograph, I see him hovering behind her. Was he in naval uniform? I expect so. But my mind’s eye provides no clear picture of him. His presence seemed tentative even then.

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My father was tall and thin, dark-haired, blue-eyed, and diffident. His body language expressed resistance, mainly, and a tense taciturnity. He gave away as little as possible. By contrast, my mother was a small, demonstrative redhead, also blue-eyed, but in the dominant mode, and thus their marriage was an attraction of opposites. Apart from the frenzied partying of wartime, it’s possible that Bert chose to marry Alice in order to defy his possessive and demanding mother. During their single years in Toronto, Evelyn and Alice shared accommodations, and my grandmother was supposed to have preferred Evelyn, the proper and serious elder sister. Bert had initially introduced her as his girlfriend, only to show up later with the younger, prettier, and much sharpertongued Alice. In Gran’s view, Evelyn was a nicer girl than my hoydenish mother. Worse than that, Alice had previously been seeing a man named Eric Henderson – perhaps one of those other boyfriends – and Eric subsequently married Evelyn, so in fact the sisters traded men. Both girls were redheads, they were only eighteen months apart in age, and there must have been a certain amount of competition between them. Or else Bert was looking for a challenge. I have a small, dim snapshot, dated “42” in my mother’s handwriting, in which my father, most unusually for him, is making a threatening face. With his hair ruffled up and his hands outstretched and clutching, he’s pretending to lunge at the photographer. If Alice was a tough, daring little thing, well then, he could respond by playing the big bad wolf. Behind him is a flagstoned terrace with a low wall and a section of trellis. Maybe the picture was taken on the University of Toronto campus or maybe it was somewhere in Nova Scotia. There’s no snow on the ground, so it wasn’t taken in the depths of winter, but there are no leaves on the trees either. The long shadow behind him suggests autumn sunlight. Although he’s not wearing a coat or jacket, he is wearing a sweater over his shirt and tie as he hurls himself at the camera. I suppose this photographic joke may record an early stage of my parents’ married bliss, leading up to my conception, about a year after their wedding. I’ve put that photograph into a frame with, underneath it, an even dimmer snapshot marked “Delhi, Xmas ’43” in which Bert is holding me on his lap while Alice leans forwards and tries to get me to look towards the lens. Delhi, Ontario, was where my mother’s

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parents lived. I imagine Grandfather Leonard behind the camera and Grandmother Leonard trying to get me to smile, with the result that I ignored the camera and smiled at her. My mouth is open and I appear to be laughing off to the left. I was three months old. And behind me, the fantastical glee seen on my father’s face in the earlier picture has vanished. He looks pleased but also ill at ease and undecided. He may have been wondering what he’d got himself into and for how long. • A recently discovered baby book tells me that I was born at 3:15 in the afternoon of a September day in 1943 in Sydney, on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. Two hours later, Bert sent Evelyn a telegram saying, “Judith Elaine arrived this afternoon. All well. Please inform Delhi and Daddy.” By Delhi, he meant his Leonard in-laws, and Daddy was his father – Granddad to me. It’s interesting that he doesn’t mention Gran, his mother. When my parents discussed names for me, Alice wanted to call me “May-ling,” after the glamorous Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, who was in the news at the time, accompanying her husband on a visit to the Roosevelts in Washington and seducing the press. But Bert was not seduced. He called me Judith, which my mother would claim had been the name of one of his old girlfriends from University College at U of T. Whether this was true or not, my father prevailed, and Judith is my name. There was no question of my being christened. Bert was indifferent to religion and Alice was in revolt against it. I was dragged out by forceps, and my mother has told me that when he first saw me my father remarked that my head was the shape of a lemon. However, that isn’t in the baby book, which merely displays some inky little fingerprints and notes that my hair was red-blond and my eyes were blue, which did not last. Although both parents were blueeyed, mine turned out to be green. The book further informs me that my first four visitors were “Sub-Lieutenants Cooke, De Lotbinière, Williams, and Campbell.” My mother told me, too, that on the evening before my birth, she and Bert had dinner with his commanding officer and that his superior had “not been aware” that she was pregnant. “When he heard I’d had a baby, he was astounded!” And she passed on a dramatic detail

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from their time in Sydney. One day in their apartment at 880 George Street, while she was nursing me, a blaze of ball lightning bounced in through the window, flashed across the room, and went out through a different window on the far side. Mother tossed that off in the “of course you remember this” manner that she was to use throughout her life for her more startling revelations. But I was only a tiny infant and I have no recollection of any fireball. Bert was a naval sub-lieutenant by then, and because his musical background meant that he could identify variations in pitch, he’d been trained as a sonar specialist. From that, he might have gone on to serve as a submarine detection officer on a corvette, but instead – having been an “orchestra leader” in university – he was assigned to the job of entertainment officer. That did not work out well. He organized one dance, and it was a disaster. “They threw everything out the windows,” my mother later told me. “They threw bottles and chairs and blondes. So after that the upper-ups put him to shoving old codebooks into the fire instead.” Relieved of entertainment duties, he was tasked with the very simple job of carrying out-of-date codebooks down to the basement of some military office building in Sydney and personally prodding them into the furnace with a poker. From that point on, after the dancehall catastrophe and the codebooks, it seems my father became disillusioned with his naval career. By the time I was seven weeks old, he’d resigned. One reason for his having been able to put his conflict with the navy behind him was that he’d volunteered before 1942. Early in the war, there’d been an understanding that men who volunteered early would serve for home defence only. That option was later withdrawn, but my mother confirmed that Bert had joined up in 1940 precisely in order to avoid being sent overseas and that he’d succeeded in staying in Canada. So he may have used that agreement to avoid being sent to sea on a corvette – and his superiors responded by giving him humiliating jobs. For that, or other reasons, my father remained bitter about his experiences in the navy. Years later, he told my brother Hector that he planned to write a book entitled My War with the Royal Canadian Navy, but he never got around to it. My parents travelled back to Toronto, where we moved in, temporarily, with Evelyn. It was from there that we went down to Delhi

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for that first family Christmas. The fighting was raging in Europe, however, and the rules for the conscription of able-bodied men had been toughened. Bert still had to serve. The other part of his strategy for getting out of the navy had been to sign up with the Royal Canadian Air Force. As a result, in the spring and early summer of 1944, we found ourselves in Victoriaville, Quebec. Although Victoriaville is a lumber town, set deep in a forested region called Les Bois-Francs (the hardwoods), it was home to a military air base at the time, and Bert had been sent down there to be trained as a bomber-navigator. We spent two months in Victoriaville, from when I was eight to ten months old, and from the baby book, I learn that it was there that I was immunized against whooping cough by a Dr Poisson. It also tells me that on 19 June I went for my “first real swim” somewhere near the town of Asbestos. Since I was under a year old, I suppose that means my mother dipped me, wriggling, into Black Lake and swished me around in the asbestos tailings. I think my parents enjoyed the time that Bert spent learning navigation. For them it was an interesting summer interlude in French-speaking Quebec. Mother once told me about having stopped a nun on the street in Victoriaville to ask for directions. She was delighted by the clarity of the nun’s French as compared to the kind of language she was struggling to understand the rest of the time. No doubt that was the experience of many young Ontarians trying to learn French by plunging in. Then their holiday came to an end. Bert had completed his training, and once again they got on the train for Toronto, this time stopping over in Montreal to visit Bert’s cousins from his mother’s side, the McQueens. According to my mother, they were “both welcoming and judgemental” – this detail from her memories recounted in old age. The McQueens did invite them for a couple of meals but were not otherwise very friendly. Mother added that Gran, Bert’s mother, was later offended to learn that my parents, although travelling with a baby, had not been taken in and offered a place to stay. However, the McQueens may have had their reasons. The son of the family, Howard McQueen, was Bert’s only male cousin. During the war he joined the air force, became a pilot, and was shot down and killed. By the time we were passing through Montreal, he may already have been dead. At any rate, there was tension, and my mother was made to feel it.

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We travelled on to Toronto, where my parents took an apartment at 328 St George Street, and Bert, waiting to be sent into combat, had his picture taken in his RCAF uniform. Emblematic of the times is the will that the air force required him to sign, in which he leaves his estate to his wife, Alice, and after her to me, his infant daughter. By that stage of the war, navigators were in short supply because they were dying every day. Bert didn’t mention that fact when, years later, he remarked to me, “I think I would have been a pretty good navigator, but unfortunately the war ended before I got a chance to try it. ” My father was no warrior, and if his quirky humour could not have saved him, his inborn scepticism and stubborn diffidence did. He’d taken the steps required to avoid being sent overseas. As officer material he was unconvincing, and his cynicism about bureaucracy meant that the toughest battle of his war was with the Royal Canadian Navy. When he joined the air force, he must at last have been resigned to fighting, but, as he pointed out, by then there was no time left for them to send him out to be killed. He remained in Canada and he survived to provide me with siblings – one sister and three brothers.

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chapter t wo

Lig ht throug h L eaves

Because the war was my parents’ constant preoccupation, it was an important part of my babyhood. Somewhere I have the ration book that allots me so much butter, sugar, eggs, and meat. Naturally these things weren’t always available, and when they were, I didn’t necessarily enjoy them even if my first words, at nine months, are supposed to have been “all gone.” That wasn’t my reaction on the occasion when Mother succeeded in finding an egg for me in a jar on the counter in a bar. It was a pickled egg. There are still bars in Quebec that offer hardboiled eggs in vinegar, but I’m not sure she realized then that it was sour. As she tried to force me to eat it, apparently I let her know that I did not want it. I puckered up and howled and writhed and wouldn’t swallow it, no matter how much she thought I needed it. From the same period or a little later on, when I began to be aware of what I was saying – which, according to Mother, was shortly after my first birthday – I long retained the mysterious word that my parents had used often enough and with enough emphasis for me to have taken it in and stored it away, waiting to understand it. Ruminating, I associated it with the word “nasty,” although it wasn’t quite that, it was different. It took me years to decode the word and

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to realize that it was “Nazi.” The nasties were the Nazis. I’d heard the word so often and in such a gloomy and serious tone of voice that it made an indelible impression on my baby brain. Later, and more consciously, I was to puzzle over the words “concentration camps,” imagining them to be cruel places where people were forced to think hard about things they really did not wish to know. I’d heard it over and over again, and no one had explained what the phrase meant. I may have been ten or eleven before the meaning came clear. At about the same time, Mother told me that during the war Bert had written a letter to be given to me if he were killed. She was sure that she had it somewhere. So far I haven’t found it, but it may be in the box of old love letters sitting behind me here on the filing cabinets, scrawled in his tight, tiny, streaked-out writing. If I haven’t read through them all, it’s because my father’s handwriting is almost a code in itself. He was terse in speaking, but his writing is worse, with the letters towards the end of a word indicated by the merest bump in the line. Today I live in Quebec, and once or twice I’ve travelled through Victoriaville, to teach a course at the CÉGEP, or to visit friends. Driving down the main street, I’ve wondered about my long-ago sojourn there and where we stayed. All trace of the air base has vanished, and my mother never told me the building’s street address, although I do know that it was called “Les Appartements Bob” and that we lived in number nine. I would have liked to go looking for that house, with its twisting outside steps, because it seems my babysitter was an Indian woman who had only one leg, but that she stumped up and down our spiral staircase with great energy, hauling me on her hip and her wooden leg. Now I realize that she must have been an Abenaki. And she gave me a gift that I still have, a silver chain holding a tiny silver heart engraved with a flower. • My first faint memories are of Toronto, the earliest from a forest somewhere outside the city. I have a visual memory of being carried through trees and gazing up into a canopy of leaves at the light of the sky. A woman with us had a long pheasant feather sticking up from her hatband, and it became a part of the view. I studied that

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feather, observing the way it blended into the light and shade, and saw that it belonged there, matched against a woodland setting. Many years on, when I asked my mother about the lady with the feather, she didn’t remember her but thought she might have been one of group of friends with whom we went on a picnic. What my mother did recall was how impressed the others had been by her agility when she crossed a stream on a log, carrying me. I would have been about a year and a half old. And there’s a second memory, from little later, of a similar outing. This time I knew it was a picnic. I think I ate, but I was also looking around. We must have been close to a racetrack or a livery stable. Maybe it was a fairground because across a field I saw a row of stalls with glossy rumps tethered in them, and I understood that those were horses – the real live magical animals right over there. But my parents weren’t interested. They weren’t even bothering to look that way. Later in childhood, I would hear Mother’s story about a horse that she’d tried to ride when she was a teenager. It was a heavy plough horse and it put its huge hoof, shod with a cleated horseshoe, down on her bare foot. When she told us the tale, usually she’d show us the scar on her foot, but I was never put off. I always wanted to ride, even on the day of that second picnic. From the immediate postwar time, one or two memories surge up. The place on Poplar Plains Road, where my parents had lived before I was born, and the St George Street apartment that had been their base at the end of the war, were several apartments back by then, so I don’t know where we lived, but I can call up one personal experience and another dating from the same period and related by my mother. Both had to do with her affinity for all things Chinese. She and Bert used to take me with them to a Chinese restaurant upstairs in an old house on Elizabeth Street. That house is long gone, along with the rest of Elizabeth Street, because it was swept away in the 1960s to make way for Toronto’s new city hall. But it was there that my mother offered me a mushroom, urging me to taste it. Was she remembering the effect of the mushroom sandwich on my father? I didn’t want the mushroom any more than I’d wanted the pickled egg, but again she insisted. Maybe she was hoping to impress the Chinese waiter with my gastronomic sophistication when she tried to force me to eat the slimy

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thing, and I refused. For years afterwards I hated mushrooms, and I’m not very fond of them yet. The tale passed on by my mother concerns the Chinese restaurant owner. Smiling indulgently, it seems he advised my parents that, despite the well-known Asian preference for sons, he considered them lucky to have a daughter because I would not have to go to war and be killed. He told them he was planning to go home to China to fight the Communists, and apparently that’s what he did. When we returned to the same restaurant a couple of years later – and I remember the chopstick lesson given to me by a different waiter – Mother asked about the man who’d gone back to China. They said there was no news of him. He was never heard from again, and his colleagues assumed that he’d been killed. When I was old enough to understand, my mother reported to me what he’d said about girl children. Another fragmentary recollection from that early time is of a large, beautiful room with carpets and curvaceous furniture. Carrying me, my mother had stopped in there to speak to a friend. Taking in the scene, I gazed out through a tall window that looked steeply downwards over a sloping lawn to a tree-lined street below. The scale and the height, and especially that angle of view, were thrilling to me. I approved of the place and decided that I wanted to live there, but for reasons I didn’t understand, we weren’t in the handsome room for very long. When, as an adult, I asked her about it, Mother suggested that it might have been the Women’s Union at the University of Toronto, but I don’t think so. The Women’s Union was on flat ground and, besides, I have a different memory that dates back to the Women’s Union, of having first tasted chocolate milk there. No, I believe the elegant room that I am remembering must have been a liquor lounge. On a different occasion and in another context, my mother once mentioned having been invited into such a club with me in her arms. When the waiter saw me, she was asked to leave. Mother was indignant and protested, but we had to go because the place was licensed and I was under age. In effect, I was thrown out of a bar before I was two years old. Now I wonder if my recollection of the beautiful room and my mother’s anecdote may date from the same incident. The acquaintance who asked her in for a drink would have been Margaret, a long-ago friend of Bert’s from when he first went to

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work for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. And as I link two disconnected memories, I think I saw that lofty room on the day when I also met a lady who showed me a lot of eager attention and who gave me a toy lamb. Margaret certainly did give me the lamb, because later on my mother made a point of letting me know where it came from. The tiny thing was stuffed, yet it looked exactly like the real animal, with minute woolly white curls in proportion to its size. Of course I didn’t know that those curls were probably the pelt of a newborn, or maybe an unborn, lamb. All I knew was that it was marvellously real. I delighted in it and carried it around with me until I lost it, and now I suppose I remember Margaret chiefly because of how much I loved and missed my lost lamb. Not too many years later, I was to learn more about Bert’s colleague. My mother, never loathe to reveal adult troubles to her children, told us quite matter-of-factly that Margaret was a clever, passionate woman – possibly an alcoholic – who was fated to make all the wrong decisions and suffered through a desperately unhappy love affair with one of the announcers at the CBC. When the man rejected her, she became distraught to the point of madness and took to sleeping on the doormat in the hallway outside his apartment. Then she vanished into psychiatric treatment, and after she came out, my parents were told that she’d married a truck driver. That was the last I heard of Margaret. If I’ve never forgotten her, it must be a result of the emotion that the little lamb carried, perhaps as a projection of Margaret’s hope and despair. • The first of our residences that I can actually recall was a ground floor flat at 480 Willard Avenue in the west end of Toronto, one block over from where Bert’s parents, Gran and Granddad Cowan, lived on Evans Avenue. The Willard Avenue place was the long, dark, oak-floored apartment to which, a few days after my second birthday, my sister Doris was brought home from the hospital. At the age of two I was surprised and not pleased to meet her, even if I did put up with her for several weeks. After a decent interval, however, I asked when she’d be

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going back to her own mother, or that’s what Mother claims. I don’t remember asking, maybe because they laughed, and my sister stayed. At any rate, I was no longer the baby, and my mother was busy with my new sister, so I was free to set out in search of social contacts. The childless couple next door, whose long dark flat was the mirror image of our own, were delighted to welcome me in, and I loved being petted, complimented, and given good things to eat. Since Doris also remembers them, she must have followed me over there as soon as she could toddle, which means that we must have lived next to them for a year and a half or more. Both of us counted on running in and out of the neighbours’ place, and we took it for granted that our friends would always be there. A different memory from Willard Avenue is of Bert’s first car, a 1920s Durant. Until I started writing this memoir I’d assumed that the Durant must have been Canadian, because it vanished from the market, but it turns out that Mr Durant was the original founder of General Motors. He was an American wheeler-dealer who went broke and started over more than once, and the Durant, in its time a solid enough machine, was among his failed enterprises. Bert’s was a tall square black box, more than fifteen years old when he bought it, and with a back seat offering enough floor space for me to stand up and stroll across from one window to the other. Those windows were framed in oak, and I distinctly recall testing the density of the wood with my baby teeth one day when Bert started the car up and rattled me, literally. After Willard Avenue, for a time we moved in again with my aunt Evelyn, sharing a three-storey, nineteenth-century house on Brunswick Avenue in Toronto’s Annex. The war was over, so this would have been well after her husband, my uncle Eric, had returned from being a prisoner of war, but he was off again somewhere else. He may have been doing his graduate degree in geology in the United States. If he’d finished that, he would have been doing geological work either in Newfoundland – not yet a province of Canada – or somewhere in the Maritime provinces. Whatever the reason, Evelyn was renting a genteel old house in central Toronto, and she sublet a couple of rooms to my parents. I don’t know why they’d chosen to leave the Willard Avenue flat, unless it was because Bert, having settled into his CBC

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job, wanted to live closer to the centre of town. He was always the downtown person, whereas Alice had declared from the first year of their marriage – and I have this in a letter she wrote to him when he was posted to Halifax – that she wanted to live in the country. In those early years, she may also have been glad to move back in with her sister for a few weeks, if only to get farther away from the Toronto’s west end and her mother-in-law’s supervision. There can’t have been much space for us at Evelyn’s place. We weren’t the only people renting rooms. There were others upstairs. Doris was still small, and my cousin Alastaire, if she was even born by then, was only a tiny baby, but there was a bigger child in the house, the son of the upstairs tenant, and I played with him. He was a brown boy a year or two older than I was, and his name – which seemed appropriate to me – was Jimmy Brown. We chased around in the hall and clattered up and down the long, echoing staircase until one day Jimmy wasn’t there any more. All my mother and my aunt told me was that his mother had moved out. Neither of them said anything about what she did or why she’d left. She was simply gone. And she’d left in such a rush that she abandoned some of her possessions. A day or two after she and Jimmy vanished I came upon some marvellously diaphanous garments hanging over the back of a chair in the kitchen. Their transparency puzzled me. Fascinated, I pulled them on over my jumper and blouse and held out the long silken panels. How could these things be clothing? I could see right through them. Yet they were lovely, as lovely as the floating trousers worn by the temptresses in illustrations from The Arabian Nights. There was also an enormous, mystifying fan made of iridescent feathers, each one adorned with a gleaming blue-green eye. During the night, some fabulous Oriental princess had passed over on her flying carpet, dropped some of her accoutrements, and flown on before I could catch a glimpse of her. I held the peacock-feather fan in both hands and flopped it back and forth, trying to fan myself with it, but it was too big. A spell had been cast on it and needed to be undone to shrink it back to size. Instead, from one day to the next, the fan was gone, as were the trailing veils and floating trousers of rainbow silk chiffon. They disappeared as inexplicably as they’d appeared. Neither my aunt nor my mother ever told me what had been done with them.

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Disappointed, I poked around for a day or two hoping to find them again yet knowing that I wouldn’t because they’d disappeared. • Then my uncle Eric came home, and for a while our two families continued to share the Brunswick Avenue house. It was during that period that Eric made friends with me. My childhood memories of my uncle are happy ones because he was kind and attentive. Not that Bert was a cruel father but he wasn’t interested in children, not even his own. He was tender with babies and cuddled Doris while she was small and round, but I was no longer a baby. Already I was stiff, gawky, and timid. Sometimes these days my father’s voice still echoes in my ears, saying “Judith!” in the tone of reproach that he used when he caught me doing something clumsy or forbidden. But even that was rare because most of the time he didn’t bother with me. He was bored, maybe, with any child old enough to talk and say the things that all children say. We weren’t original enough for him, and if we stood up to challenge him with some insistent question, his policy was to squelch us with a remark too sarcastic for a child to parry. As the eldest, I was the first to get the treatment. But Eric didn’t squelch childishness; he encouraged it. He played and joked with me, and made me feel clever and worthwhile. He was a very tall man, six foot four or five, and in my eyes that gave him godlike stature. There was something wrong with him, however, something that dated from his prison-camp days, which I was not allowed to know about. Although big and friendly and generous, he was considered fragile. One day when he was bending down to tie a shoe or to pick something up, I did a thing that I would never have dared to do with my own father. I rushed gleefully across the room and threw myself onto his back. Immediately, Evelyn and Alice both shrieked at me as if I were a criminal. Mortified, I skulked away, guilty of I didn’t know what but above all humiliated at having revealed my feelings and been reproached for them. •

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After Brunswick Avenue and I guess as soon as Bert was established as a news editor with the CBC – the job he was to keep for the rest of his working life – my parents moved into their first house. That small, rented bungalow, part of a postwar housing development in what was then called New Toronto, is the first place that I remember clearly. The area has since become part of Mississauga, but the name “New Toronto” dated back to the beginning of the nineteenth century when it was a village west of Toronto on the lakeshore between Mimico and Long Branch. Our street was a treeless suburban stretch outside the limits of the old village. Bare and straight, it ran between two rows of little houses on tiny lots, completely unlike either Brunswick Avenue with its tall, handsome houses or the tree-lined streets of my Cowan grandparents’ neighbourhood. The south end was closed off by a massive redbrick building that faced out over Lake Ontario, and if we never saw the lake, it was because that building blocked the view. Offhandedly, Mother told me that “in there they have padded walls and they make the people eat with rubber spoons.” The brick building was the Mimico Asylum for the Insane. At four years old, I took her remark literally and didn’t question the information. Both Doris and I remember the iceman who stopped his truck at the curb, opened the rear doors, and used a pair of big tongs to lug blocks of ice in for our icebox. When we ran out to peek into the back of the truck, melt water dribbling onto the street, he let us have slivers of ice to suck – but that was in the summer. When winter came, Mother stopped buying ice and had someone, certainly not Bert, build a wooden crate that projected out of the kitchen window. She was counting on using it for keeping food fresh throughout the cold season. Unfortunately, a railway line ran past the back of our lot, and one afternoon while we were out a thief, probably a tramp who’d jumped off a train, came and smashed the crate, scavenging for food or whatever else he could find. When we walked into the house and Mother saw the damage, she screamed, with the result that soon after that we had a refrigerator. And it was from the New Toronto house that I tagged along behind as she walked a couple of streets over, pulling our children’s wagon, to buy a pair of armchairs and a chesterfield from a man who’d advertised

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them for sale in the paper. I listened while she told him, brightly, that she was planning to make slipcovers for them. “They’re too good to cover!” he said, upset at her lack of appreciation for their beauty, and I agreed with him. They were upholstered in mohair plush of a deep, lustrous blue, and the seat cushions had a brocade pattern on their undersides, rich with glints of rose and turquoise and gold. Or was that the side that was supposed to be shown? Maybe the brocade side was for special occasions only. Carrying the accent cushion – made of the same plush and with a band of the same brocade – I pondered these possibilities while my mother balanced the pieces on the wagon and hauled them back one at a time. She did make slipcovers for them, but the nubby, nondescript things were soon stained and tattered, then discarded. With the seat cushions installed brocade side down, the handsome plush chairs and chesterfield were thereafter exposed to us, the ravaging children. We bounced, fought, kicked, slid, spilled things on them, and trampled all over them, and the mohair plush stood up for a surprisingly long time. One of the armchairs came to grief early, but the chesterfield endured for seven or eight years, and the wing chair was still in the family, being torn to pieces bit by bit, until well into the 1960s. From the New Toronto house, we were once more within easy range of Gran and Granddad’s place, and on a Sunday visit it occurred to me that our former neighbours on Willard Avenue, the couple who’d been so fond of Doris and me, would be glad to see us. When I asked if we could go over there, a telephone call was made, and we all walked across to the other street. Our friends were still there, but our reception was strangely formal. There was no play, no affection, and no food. The visits that Doris and I had made had been spontaneous and unsupervised. We’d simply run next door and had been gathered in. This time our parents and grandparents sat in the front room exchanging grown-up conversation while I slumped between them, boxed in and disappointed, not understanding what had changed. Where were the cookies and the games and the flattering intimacy? Our former neighbours had changed, and I felt their indifference as an unexplained setback. The couple who claimed to adore children had lost interest in us.

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It wasn’t until more than a year later that Mother passed on the news that the woman had been ill and that she had died. Then I remembered that stilted conversation, filled with hints of the unspoken. So that was what the grown-ups had been talking about over our heads: death. That was the reason for their coolness and solemnity. Had our neighbour died of cancer? Out of emerging consciousness, stored impressions allowed me a flash of understanding. Without so much as hearing the word, and with only the foggiest notion of what cancer might be, I assumed that was what she’d died of. After our cool final visit, her death wasn’t a surprise and was barely a disappointment. It was a first lesson in the transient nature of human contacts; friends might not always be there. • The New Toronto house turned out to be another transient experience. Although I hadn’t noticed, my mother was pregnant again. With a third child on the way, the family needed more space both indoors and outdoors. The New Toronto bungalow was minuscule. Even the lot was too small for a garden, and that dangerous railway line made it a risky place to raise small children, so from one springtime to the next, we’d moved in and were moving out again. My last memory from the bungalow is of my uncle Eric. Towards the end of our winter there, he dropped in for a visit. I was overjoyed to see his car, which looked a lot like Bert’s Durant, pulling up outside. Wanting to play, and assuming he could see me from the street, I jumped up to a front window, peeked out, crouched down and hid, and jumped up again, close to the pane. On the second jump I caught my upper lip on the little curved finger-hold used to lift a sash window and cut myself quite deeply. By the time my uncle was in the house, I was howling and bleeding profusely. I still have the scar. I don’t think he ever knew that it was all for him.

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chapter three

Gran and Granddad

More than my uncle Eric, though, it was my father’s parents who were a source of unstinting love and affection. My mother’s parents were far away, in Delhi, Ontario, whereas Gran and Granddad lived in Toronto. Throughout the early years of childhood, we were in and out of their house almost every week, and I could take their closeness for granted. Gran, small and clever, was a born and bred Montreal Scot. Her maternal grandparents, David and Sarah Cunningham, had emigrated from Edinburgh, and her mother, Elizabeth Cunningham, had been born in Montreal. Whether Gran’s father, John McQueen, had also been born in Montreal or whether he too came from Scotland, I haven’t found out – but the Cunninghams seem to have travelled back and forth between Edinburgh and Montreal. Gran told me how her own grandmother, Sarah Cunningham, arriving back from Scotland in early spring, disembarked alone at Quebec City and travelled on by train to Montreal. When the family asked her what she thought of the country, she said, “Tis all verra well but I hav’na seen a cu!” On Quebec farms, the cows were still inside. For that trip it seems her husband, my greatgreat-grandfather David Cunningham, had stayed behind in Edinburgh, because we have a letter he wrote later to his son in Montreal,

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explaining that he’s found work and is remaining there for the moment. He thanks his wife for a photograph she has sent, saying that he recognizes Sarah herself but commenting that the other – whom he calls “Bettsy” – has changed beyond recognition. That would have been his daughter Elizabeth, my great-grandmother. After that, there’s no further record of him. The family may have carried on without him. Elizabeth Cunningham married John McQueen, a printer whose business address was at 671 and 673 Craig Street (now Saint Antoine Street), and they had three children, of whom my grandmother was the youngest. Born in 1882, Gran was christened Bessie Haig McQueen in the Crescent Street Presbyterian Church and grew up ladylike and self-assured. Granddad, on the other hand, was born on a farm in Michigan, in 1876. Tall and craggy, named Edward John Cowan, he was the eldest of thirteen children, twelve boys and one girl. A son-in-law once described the early Cowans as “lace-curtain Irish,” but he was thinking of Granddad’s enterprising Toronto cousins. Granddad himself was a farm boy. He had four years of schooling, lots of basic practical skills, and a kindly and considerate manner, but he was too wary, even timid – and on occasion too unpredictable – ever to have succeeded in business. It was Bessie’s family, the McQueens, who displayed social aspirations and material ambition. They weren’t wealthy, but they admired luxury, and Montreal was more elegant than Toronto. My mother, always critical, used to scoff at Gran’s air of having expected more out of life and referred to her Montreal past as her “palmy days.” I was too young to understand what palm trees had to do with it, and if sometimes I saw that my mother and my grandmother didn’t like each other, I remained untroubled by what, for me, were merely grown-ups’ concerns. As far as I know, the pair of them remained on civil terms if only because of us, the grandchildren, and if there were periods when the two women didn’t speak, I didn’t notice. • Gran and Granddad lived in their narrow, semidetached house at 131 Evans Avenue in the west end of Toronto for all the years that I knew them, until Gran’s death in 1967. That little house, where Bert

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had grown up, and from which Granddad walked to the streetcar stop every day, got on the “car” and rode to his job at Rowntree’s chocolate factory, anchored my childhood. It was the one place that was secure and unchanging. Unhappily aware of Alice and Bert’s disdain for convention, Gran and Granddad were proper, responsible, and loving. When we’d been washed, brushed, and dressed up, they liked to take us visiting and show us off to friends and other members of the Cowan clan. They were concerned about supervising us decently, and their house was orderly and comfortable. One of our mother’s austerities was not to give us pillows, maybe because she thought they’d make us slump-shouldered, and we’d learned to sleep flat. But when I stayed over in Gran’s little back bedroom I enjoyed the indulgence of sleeping on a pillow and was even given a towel and washcloth of my own. Visiting Gran and Granddad meant entering a structured world quite different from the slapdash, improvisational life that my parents were creating. After scrambling down out of Bert’s jalopy, we’d climb the two or three concrete steps past the lawn and run up the walk to the veranda. Passing the folding chairs and the porch glider, we came to the heavy oak door, always kept locked. But at the very moment we knocked, as if she’d been waiting behind it, the door would be unbolted, rattling, by Gran and thrown open with cries and kisses of welcome. In the flurry of arrival, the family would shuffle left, through an archway and into the small parlour, its electric fireplace flanked by two little windows, high up, and a copper coal scuttle. In a familiar pattern, another archway opened to the dining room, and the dining room – whose window looked across into a similar window at the neighbours’ house – led to the kitchen. While my parents were being interrogated about their activities, and maybe Doris was being petted, I could slip away into the dim hallway and the stairs. Leaving the grown-ups to their discussion, I’d pause by the bulbous-legged walnut table with the heavy black telephone. When we weren’t in her house, that phone was Gran’s lifeline to her grandchildren and the outside world. While we were with her, the telephone remained silent. Moving on, I’d head up the staircase to sit by the banisters and listen. At the top of the stairs, a wrought iron grating had been set into the floor to allow heat from

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the kitchen stove to rise to the bedrooms, and when the family moved along to the kitchen, their voices rose up through it. Ghostly footsteps went up or down on the other side of the wall, because the stairs were contiguous with the staircase in the other half of the house, which belonged to a family named Morony. After a while, the talk would taper off, and my parents would reappear in the hall below. If I’d been invited to stay, I’d hear them saying goodbye and taking Doris with them, because one granddaughter at a time was enough for our grandparents. Then I could sidle back down to the dining room, where Gran had a cherrywood dining table and chairs in a style she told me was “Duncan Phyfe.” There was also a cherrywood buffet with a china rack and a row of tiny blue glass Venetian demitasses. The floor was covered by a handsome oriental carpet, and parked behind Gran’s chair was a walnut tea trolley that she used for rolling dishes in from the kitchen and back out again. Supper was always eaten in the dining room, with Gran toddling back and forth to roll in the meat and mashed potatoes with salty gravy, and peas or carrots or string beans, followed by a dessert of stewed fruit with cream or else a pie with a very salty crust. “I love salt!” she’d declare, just as she liked to announce her favourite colour. “I love yellow!” Granddad did not comment on her preferences. He sat at the far end of the table, methodically eating what was put in front of him and telling her whom he’d seen that day while he was out. I sat between them, being cautious and good because there was no other way to be in that house. After dinner Gran stacked the dishes and trundled them back out to the kitchen. While she washed them, in a dishpan on the kitchen table, I hung around watching and talking to her, although I don’t remember being asked to dry. It seems to me that Gran did it all. After doing the dishes, we’d join Granddad in the front room where both grandparents read the newspaper, or Gran crocheted squares of coloured wool to be stitched together into afghans. When Granddad had finished with the paper, he’d fold its sections and stick them into the coal scuttle as if they could be used for lighting the electric fire. Then he’d ramble through the house inspecting things, methodically checking the windows and locking the doors. That done, it was time to turn out the lights. Nothing was left but to climb the oriental

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runner on those softly creaking stairs and get into bed. By eight-thirty or nine, tucked under the covers in the little back bedroom, I’d lie listening through the city night to clashing and groaning sounds from the marshalling yards where the Toronto Transit Commission’s streetcars were being lined up and put away for the night. They were a part of my childhood as they must have been part of Bert’s. During his teen years, my father slept in that same room and would also have heard the streetcars being backed and shunted. Sometimes there was a crackle and a zap! when one of the long trolley rods fell across another. When we were very little, Granddad was the only one of our grandparents to take us on his lap and read to us. I clearly remember the texture of his tweed jacket and the smell of his dentures, all of which I observed uncritically as he turned the pages. It was a part of being read to, like the timbre of his voice and his Michigan pronunciation. A book that has survived from that time is Rabbit Hill, a pretty, clothbound children’s book with handsome endpapers displaying the topography of the rabbits’ neighbourhood – not only the hill with the rabbit holes but the human houses as well. The black-and-white animal drawings are beautiful and natural, and there’s a lot of text, obviously intended to be read by an adult to a small child. Looking at it, I remember the cover and some of the illustrations but recognize nothing of the story. From the dialogue, it’s set in the American South, and it looks as if I enjoyed listening to it because on my own I was interested enough to add some vague pencil scrawls on the flyleaf and to yank out the first eleven pages, as well as pages from the end. I seem to have examined that book intently when I was about three years old. Granddad indulged us with small delicacies such as cutting our toast into strips, which he called “fingers.” It tasted better that way. And he was protective and imaginative enough to foresee danger for us. It was part of his apprehensive, home-loving nature. He was fearful of anyone or anything unknown and of impending disaster generally, but about Doris and me he worried more specifically that our red hair would attract some prowling pervert and that we’d be snatched off the street and never be seen again, even if he couldn’t spell out for us what he was warning us against. “Don’t run along so close to the curb like that,” he’d say. “Walk on the other side, facing traffic, and well back from the street. Don’t you know … well, some fella could come along

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in a car and open the door, just like that, and well … then you’d be … you’d be … gone!” And we’d stare at him solemnly. Gone. What did he mean? Now I understand that he realized how detached our father was and that he worried about it. In his view, Bert was never home, Alice was an impulsive scatterbrain, and we were running wild, as indeed we would, as soon as we got the chance. It would have been easy for a pedophile to grab us, but those were more innocent times, or we were lucky, and we survived. Granddad was right to worry just the same, and his concern was his way of letting us know that he loved us. Although I didn’t I see it then, Gran’s kitchen was straight out of the nineteenth century. It had an old-fashioned range – first a woodstove and later a combination stove with gas burners on the top and a firebox at the side – and a freestanding sink in the corner by the pantry. That was it. There were no counters or cupboards. In the centre of the room stood the kitchen table with four chairs, all painted pale green, and against the walls were a couple of buffets, also painted in shades of green, for dishes and towels. On the corner buffet the cookie jar waited for the grandchildren, cookies softening inside. I still have that cookie jar, and I can’t forget the fascinating rubberiness of the buttery, over-salted cookies that used to come out of it. A roundshouldered 1940s refrigerator was pushed against the wall beside the back door, and past the door, in the corner behind the sink, a second door led to the pantry, a little unheated room with a tiny window high up in the outside wall. On the doorframe beside the back door, Granddad had hung a mirror on a nail. When he came downstairs in the morning, he’d stir up the fire in the stove, add wood, spit into it, and stir it up again. For a moment he’d peer out at the back porch, the yard, and the morning light. Then he’d strop his razor, run some water, and shave in front of the mirror. As he shaved, he talked to me. Once he described how he’d bought Bert’s violin for him in the 1920s. “That’s a good enough fiddle, but it’s the bow that’s really worth something. That bow belonged to a violinist from the Toronto Symphony Orchestra who lost two fingers in a hunting accident; that’s how I got it for Bert. That was a good buy.” After shaving, he’d put away his razor and his shaving soap and go to work on his shoes, applying oxblood polish to a pair of dark-brown brogues, telling me as he buffed them to a shine what

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good shoes they were and how many times he’d had them resoled. Watching, I learned how to do it. He polished the first shoe and set it aside while dealing with the second. That was the time it took to dry. When the second shoe was done, a few strokes with the shoe brush brought up a satisfying shine on the first. Shining the second shoe, he told me proudly that he’d been wearing those shoes for twenty-five years, and they were as good as the day he bought them. Granddad was meticulous, he was keen and perceptive about quality, but he was also an archconservative. Because I was a girl, he didn’t talk to me about money, but both my brothers have told me how he lectured them about “the value of a dollar!” • The truly successful member of the Cowan family had been Granddad’s uncle John, who stayed in Ontario when Granddad’s father moved to Michigan. In the nineteenth century, John Cowan went into business in the new city of Toronto where he founded the Cowan Cocoa and Chocolate Company. In those days cocoa was sold in bulk and measured out at the time of sale, whereas John Cowan launched a line of products in sealed packages with fancy labels, presenting them as finer quality. They appeared on the market at the right moment, and the business prospered. Thus the young Ed Cowan had been able to set out from Deckerville, Michigan for the city of Toronto secure in the knowledge that his uncle, and his uncle’s business, would provide him with steady work. It wasn’t quite a return journey, because he’d been born in the States, but it was a move to the place where the family was best established. When Granddad, aged eighteen, was taken on as a wagon driver for the Cowan chocolate factory, the course was set for the rest of his life. He’d left the farm without having to venture into the unknown. That was his prudent side, always in search of quality, of the sure thing, and always hoping to avoid risk. But my grandfather also had an erratic side, and the unexpected could arise from a wild streak in his nature. One tale from his bachelor days was about the time he and a pal stole a streetcar. In the nineteenth century, Toronto’s streetcars did not run on Sundays, and on a boring Sunday morning he and his best friend took one out for a joyride. They

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went up to the car barns somewhere in the north of the city, managed to push a streetcar out – because they were much smaller and lighter in those days – and got it rolling on a long downgrade. The two young men hopped aboard and went racketing along until they hit a steeper slope, where they found they couldn’t stop the thing. They hung on and rode the streetcar while it went faster and faster. When it reached the bottom, where there was a curve, it jumped the tracks, ran into a field, and sank into the mud. At that point, Granddad and his friend leapt off and ran home. By the time he confessed his deed to me, the crime had remained unsolved for more than sixty years. It’s unlikely his uncle John ever heard about the streetcar folly because shortly afterwards Granddad was given a chance to move up in the chocolate business. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, his uncle opened a second factory in Montreal, and he sent his nephew Ed to work as a “manufacturer’s agent” in the older and more beautiful city. Granddad was on the overnight train that left Toronto on 31 December 1899 and steamed into the twentieth century at Windsor Station in Montreal. On New Year’s morning, 1900, he stepped out into a different culture. “Lordy, girl!” he said to me, “it sure was strange to hear people speaking French around me!” In Montreal, moreover, Granddad was to encounter a social custom that he much admired. On New Year’s Day, he told me, you could walk along the street, enter any house, wish the lady inside a Happy New Year, and be graciously received by her. I know this is true because I’ve heard other reports of the practice – that long ago the year began with an open house in all the salons. But was it the Scottish practice of first-footing, was it some parallel French tradition, or was it both? What Granddad didn’t mention and may not have noticed was that it was chiefly young men who were welcomed in. Nor did he say that was how he came to meet my grandmother, but I do know that Ed Cowan was to spend more than ten years in Montreal where he made the acquaintance of the young Bessie McQueen. We have a Notman Studio photograph of Gran in the late 1890s or early 1900s, as a dark-haired beauty wearing a frilly white shirtwaist and a very big bow in her hair. She looks romantic, but Bessie had a down-to-earth side. When that picture was taken, she was an ambitious young lady who worked as a stenographer. One of her

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weekend assignments was to visit the home of a McGill professor and take dictation in his dining room. He was writing a book that had nothing to do with his professorial work, so he paid privately to have his creations typed up. His name was Stephen Leacock, and Bessie found nothing funny about his writing at all. “Oh! … It was just silly stuff!” she told me. “Crazy … crazy stories. And he was hard to follow. I had to take it all down in shorthand while he kept walking up and down and laughing!” After delivering the typescripts, my grandmother never took any interest in their subsequent success, or asked Professor Leacock for copies of his books, because she already knew what she thought of them. Bessie’s secretarial career came to a close in 1906 anyway, when she married Ed Cowan. The marriage contract was drawn up by a Montreal notary public, in English, but in accordance with the Quebec Civil Code – stipulating, for instance, that the couple were to remain separate as to property. Their first child, my uncle Jack – or John, named for his wealthy uncle – was born in Montreal in 1907, and their daughter Elizabeth arrived in 1912. But then, for reasons no longer known, things seem to have gone downhill. In the years following, Ed and Bessie left Montreal, the saddest evidence of their move being a document related to the burial of little Elizabeth who died in Toronto in 1916. By 1917, when my father, Herbert Nelson Cowan, came into this world, the family was settled in Toronto for good. Granddad must not have been effective as a manufacturer’s agent because when he returned to work in the original factory it was as a foreman. After that, my grandparents would live on in their semidetached house in the west end of the city until Gran’s death in 1967. With all that in mind, I think of Bessie McQueen in 1906 – young, beautiful, and competent. She must have been pleased to snare the tall, good-looking Ed Cowan, the presentable and mannerly nephew of an up-and-coming industrialist. Did Bessie look forward to owning a large house in the Square Mile and wrapping herself in furs for trips to the theatre in a horse-drawn sleigh? Did she imagine giving tea parties in a vast salon with ferns and, yes, potted palms? Instead she found herself in a little house on the outskirts of Toronto, married to a man who, rather than moving up from the job he’d had when she met him in Montreal, seems to have been demoted and sent back to where he’d started.

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It wouldn’t have been like Gran to conceal her disappointment, and there were tensions in the marriage. A diary left by my uncle Jack reveals that Granddad once threw the family cat out of an upstairs window. The cat never came back, so he went out and bought another cat, as if that could make up for the sufferings of the first one. Usually Granddad was polite and thoughtful but not always, and in later years, when sometimes he sank into a silent and darkly moody state, Gran would goggle at me and whisper, “It’s the wane of the moon!” He may have suffered from intermittent depression, which was never diagnosed. When Cowan’s Chocolate was sold to Rowntree’s in 1926, Granddad went on working there, the only member of the family to do so. He continued calling himself a manufacturer’s agent, and working as a foreman, until he was over eighty. Faithful to nineteenth-century practice, however, he dressed like an executive. Every day he rode the streetcar in a shirt and tie and a three-piece suit, with a gold watch in his vest pocket. His uncle’s family had moved on but not Granddad. In his final years with Rowntree’s, his role was that of a venerable antique, a man whose presence was purely ceremonial. He was introduced to visitors as the last representative of the factory’s founders, and when he did retire, the company presented him with an engraved, silver-plated tea service that was never used.

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chapter four

Grandmother and Grandfather

My mother’s parents, Edith Annie and William Mark Leonard, always called Grandmother and Grandfather, inhabited an entirely different world. In Delhi, in the heart of southwestern Ontario’s tobacco-growing region, Grandfather was a preacher with the United Church of Canada. He wasn’t an ordained minister but a lay preacher of long standing, and with the Delhi church as his base he travelled around preaching throughout a circuit of other churches. He and Grandmother were more remote figures than Gran and Granddad, sterner and less communicative. With my mother’s parents, I never felt the easy intimacy that I enjoyed with Bert’s parents, partly because we didn’t see them as often but also because Alice was in life-long revolt against them and their religious values. While we were in their house, there was always an unacknowledged wariness hanging in the air. A visit to them was not so much a visit to two people as to a place and an atmosphere. While staying with Grandmother and Grandfather, we even went to church once or twice, the only church services that I experienced as a child. Our visits to Delhi also enriched my culture with a brief exposure to Sunday school, where I examined flatly coloured illustrations of people wearing long robes, against a background

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of sand and palm trees, with sometimes a donkey or a camel in the picture. Could those scenes be real? I needed to know if that was what the past had looked like. A part of religion’s mystery lay in trying to understand what was supposed to be special or morally superior about such bland images. So the connection with Delhi was tenuous. Overall, the idea seemed to be that while there, we were expected to be good. Grandmother was good. She believed in God. And Grandfather was important. That was the surface message from Mother. The underlying message was repressed insurgency. My mother did not like her parents, although, fearing her father’s anger and her mother’s disapproval, she never said so openly. Did I talk to Grandmother? Maybe she tried to talk to me, and I was too shy to answer, too shy even to listen. As a child, all I saw was that she was a small, serious woman with a coil of pale beige and white hair swept up, twisted into a spiral, and pinned to the back of her head. I don’t remember seeing her smile. Certainly she never took me into her room to show me her treasures, as Gran did, and I have no clear memory of her personality, except that she was very reserved. One story does come to mind, though. At the dinner table, Grandmother recounted the tale of a man who owned a pet tiger. He managed to master the big cat until the day he let it lick his arm. The roughness of its tongue drew blood, and when the tiger tasted human blood, it killed the man who’d thought it was tame. I’m still pondering the moral and metaphorical implications of that. Maybe Grandmother’s story was a reflection of the Chinese proverb advising us that “he who rides on a tiger cannot dismount.” One should never start into a relationship that one will not be able to control. All the rest of what I know about Grandmother Leonard was recounted to me by my mother or dug up in bits and pieces from my cousins. Grandfather wasn’t quite so secret. On a summer day when I walked into the village of Delhi with him, we met a woman on the street who stopped to say hello. Grandfather paused, exchanged a few remarks, and kept going, saying to me when we were out of earshot that he had no idea who that lady was. He observed that being a preacher meant he was often greeted in public by people he didn’t recognize. The impression he left with me was that he found it normal and preferable not to know everyone who wanted to know him.

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The Leonard house in Delhi was distant geographically as well as morally. It was only about a hundred miles from Toronto, but in our childhood that was a long drive. The trip took all day, and for us, trapped in the back seat of Bert’s car while he made his way through an intersecting grid of country roads, it seemed an immense distance. When at last we came to a low railway underpass with clusters of wild, messy pink blooms swarming up over the blocks of stone and concrete, we knew we were there. Our grandparents called those flowers “Bouncing Betsy,” but I’ve since learned that they’re called “soapwort” and were not originally wild. Having been brought over centuries ago from English gardens, they might better be called feral flowers. “Dizzie Lizzy,” Gran Cowan’s name for the same flower, isn’t listed in Ontario and may be a Scotticism. Perhaps both names were originally an allusion to Queen Elizabeth I. Passing under the Elizabethan flowers and through the underpass, we turned left into a curving driveway and pulled up on the lawn beside Grandmother and Grandfather’s sprawling white clapboard house. It was like arriving at a place set apart and fortified. There was an austerity to it. Even then I may have associated that house with the past rather than the present, and with a disconnection from daily life. As a child, I was under the impression that Grandfather had built it, probably from Mother’s version of her adolescence there, but recently an American cousin, Robert Park (son of my mother’s eldest sister, Catherine), has found documentation showing that our grandfather merely enlarged it for his family. • William Mark Leonard had been a carpenter or more precisely a ship’s joiner. Born in 1871 in County Down in the north of Ireland, he’d been trained in the craft of building wooden ships. In a memoir written late in life, he recounts how, as a boy, he apprenticed himself to the shipbuilding trade in Glasgow and subsequently returned to Ireland to begin his career with Harland and Wolff in Belfast. About his life’s work as a preacher, which ran parallel to his work as a joiner, he reveals that it was while he was living in Glasgow that he was converted to evangelical Christianity: “I was attracted to an Open Air Meeting at the end of our street … Soon I stepped into the light, [and] having a

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powerful voice I began to preach.” Further along he declares that, “the goal of my ambition was the Christian Ministry.” My mother’s angrier version of that story was that her father had been converted in the street “by a bunch of people banging on tambourines.” Grandfather does mention singing, so there may have been tambourines, but it’s possible Mother made up that detail. For his part, the young William was in reaction against his own father, Francis Leonard, who was a Catholic and was said to have been a drunk. When his father deserted the family, it was William, the eldest son, who had to support his mother and younger siblings. To put it bluntly, my maternal grandfather was the resentful son of a Protestant seamstress whose Catholic husband had decamped. But it wasn’t until long after Grandfather’s death that my cousin Alastaire Henderson (Evelyn’s daughter), consulting the records in the town of Donaghadee, County Down, discovered that he’d been registered as William Mark, son of Mary Ann Mark, the daughter of the village blacksmith. When Alastaire asked the clerk behind the counter why her grandfather was registered under his mother’s name only, the woman blushed. Grandfather had been born to unmarried parents, probably because they could not legally marry in Ireland. His two younger siblings were born in England, in Barrow-in-Furness and Manchester, where it seems their parents did marry, but Grandfather was illegitimate. He never admitted this shame, and he never got over it. He used the name Leonard all his life, and when the time came to apply for the old age pension, needing a birth certificate, at last he wrote to Ireland. It seems he did receive a document, but after his death only the empty envelope could be found. My proud, pious grandmother died never knowing that her handsome husband had been born out of wedlock. After Francis Leonard’s defection, the young William Mark Leonard and the rest of the family suffered acute poverty. When there was nothing else, they ate dry bread soaked in milk, and for the rest of his life, Grandfather was sick at the mere thought of bread and milk. At thirteen, he left school to help in his mother’s dressmaking shop, taking technical courses only in the evenings. That was in Glasgow, and one day a lady customer stepped into the shop and exclaimed with amusement at “the wee laddie at the sewing machine!” William got up

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from the machine and never touched it again. The next day, he went out and apprenticed himself to the shipbuilding trade. And at the end of the nineteenth century, whatever my grandfather’s ecclesiastical ambitions may have been, he was lucky to be a ship’s joiner because it was a skill that could get him work anywhere in the world. In 1903, with the Boer war just over, Grandfather left Harland and Wolff, and set out for Capetown, South Africa, which he said was “a wild place” in every sense of the word. During his two years in Africa, he worked as a builder while also preaching the Wesleyan message wherever he found a congregation that would listen. As a small girl, even I listened and believed him when he told me that long ago, before I was born, he’d seen the African city of “Timbuctoo.” Should I have taken that literally? The point he was making was not geographical. What he wanted to describe was how the people there had worshipped by dancing, a practice that he found shockingly improper. However, another story that I heard from my grandfather, without apology, was about how he and his carpentry pals would get out of their lodgings without paying. “What I’d do was I’d empty my trunk and move my belongings out in parcels. Then I’d nail the trunk to the floor from the inside and lock it. And I’d leave it with the landlady as security, because she wouldn’t catch on until I was well away.” From Capetown, he travelled on to the Transvaal where he was hired as a carpenter in gold mining territory. There he found plenty of sinning and drinking to fulminate against, and in addition to preaching for the Wesleyan Church, he joined the Lodge of the Royal Templars of Temperance. He claims in his memoir that his attacks against the tavern trade were so successful that he made enemies amongst the “liquor vendors,” lost his job, and couldn’t get another. Before he sailed for Belfast, he had a formal photographic portrait made. It shows a handsome, dark haired young man wearing a stiff collar and curled moustaches. When he reached Belfast and found there was no work to be had there, he wrote to a friend who’d gone out to Alberta and decided to try his luck in Canada. Between 1905 and 1909 William Mark Leonard travelled back and forth between Kamloops, British Columbia, and Edmonton, Alberta, working as a house builder, but often out of work, and preaching whenever he got the chance. He’d been taken on as an unpaid circuit

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preacher and covered “over 180 miles every month, most of it in the saddle.” His memoir mentions a favourite horse, named Brownie, and I remember a tale that I heard directly from Grandfather about Brownie having been spooked by a cougar while they were travelling through the mountains. Grandfather took the mountain lion as an alarming encounter, but was more discouraged later when Brownie developed hoof cracks on the stony mountain roads. The horse had to be taken out of service until his feet could heal, and in his memoir William reports that he borrowed “an Indian Cayuse, he was tough,” while Brownie was put out to pasture. Later, however, when Brownie’s hooves were better, William sold him. Then in 1908, in Alberta, William Leonard was hired to put up a mission house for a group of Methodist missionaries “some 45 miles north of Lamont on the CNR.” The missionaries were working with a sect of Protestant Ukrainians, calling themselves Ruthenians, who were in flight from persecution under the Hapsburg Empire. Among the missionaries was a teacher from Ontario, a high-minded lady whose name was Edith Annie Weekes. William related that she baked delicious homemade bread and claimed that he fell in love with her because of it. Nevertheless, when the mission house was finished, he returned to Kamloops and his preaching circuit. It wasn’t until 1910 that he went back and asked Edith Annie for her hand in marriage. William Mark Leonard was by then forty years old, tall and dark, and she was a little, thirty-six-year-old redhead. When he asked her to marry him, Edith Annie said yes. William’s mother and younger siblings had come out to Canada by that time, and the family was living in Edmonton. When his mother, Mary Ann Leonard, learned that her brilliant son was planning to marry “a Canadian chippy!” she was not pleased. However, after meeting her future daughter-in-law for the first time, that big, strong, suspicious old woman changed her mind. She liked Edith Annie, declaring, “Why Willie, she’s a real little lady!” One of their wedding pictures shows the couple in front of the plain mission building with the name, “Kolokreeka,” written above the door. The photograph is dim and grey, but Grandmother seems to be wearing a small coronet in her hair, possibly an adornment used in Ukrainian weddings and offered to her by her students. Later in life, she would tell my mother that on

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the evening before her wedding she allowed Grandfather to kiss her for the first time. Edith Annie Weekes, the eleventh of thirteen children, was born in 1875 on a farm called The Maples, near Glencoe in southern Ontario. The little one-storey brick house is still standing. Her father, William Weekes, had married Lydia Jane Edwards who was descended from a Loyalist named Seneca Edwards. Seneca’s father had been a Welshman, but his mother was a member of the Seneca nation, and the family was proud of possessing Iroquoian blood. Although William Weekes was a farmer, he educated his children. One of his sons became a doctor, others were notaries or lawyers, and Edith Annie was brought up learning to draw, paint, and play the guitar. I have the lady’s size guitar, built for silk-and-steel strings, that her brothers had made and sent out to her in Alberta. We also have a couple of chalk and charcoal drawings and two of her landscape paintings: “The Road to the Mill” and “The Thousand Islands.” The first is dated 1894 when she was nineteen. The restorer in Montreal called it “naïve” in a positive sense and “not painterly at all.” The second, copied from a photograph of the Thousand Islands, is also naïve, but slightly better executed, with authentic-looking patterns painted on the sides of an Indian canoe drawn up on an island. In her teens and early twenties, Edith Annie taught in country schools, saving to pay for university. She enrolled at the University of Toronto and in 1904 graduated from Victoria College, an educated twentiethcentury woman. It was after graduation that she set off out west to work with the Ukrainians. By contrast, Grandfather’s only professional qualifications, apart from his training in joinery, were a gold medal won in an elocution contest and the correspondence course that he’d taken to qualify as a lay preacher with the Methodists. He was a good-looking, narcissistic Irishman, given to imaginative talk and harsh judgements. However, he was also an adventurer. After the births of their daughter Catherine and son Etheridge, both of them in Alberta, Grandfather and Grandmother packed up the family and set out for the city of Cheng-du, in Szechuan, West China, where the Methodist Church had hired Grandfather to work as a builder. His job was to oversee the construction of Hart College, the Methodists’ portion of the West China

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Union University, as well as the Canadian School, and the house at 6 University Crescent in which my mother Alice would be born. That sounds straightforward, but the world they were setting out into came without guarantees. The rather simple wedding dress that Grandmother is wearing in the picture taken at Kolokreeka was to be lost to pirates on the Yellow River. My mother’s dramatic version of that event was that the family was attacked and had their trunks ransacked as soon as they arrived in China, but Grandfather’s written record attests that their trunks were broken open and pillaged on their second trip up the Yangtze, as they were returning from Canadian leave. Not that it matters now, but the family was robbed more than once, and a variety of their possessions, along with my grandmother’s dress, were carried off years later. Both William and Edith Annie had prepared for their mission by studying Mandarin, and in Cheng-du they set to work both physically and spiritually. William could claim experience that included building and preaching in South Africa, as well as the construction of the mission at Kolokreeka, and a number of houses in Edmonton. As the construction boss’s wife, Grandmother would have worked on a voluntary basis, but that was what women did then. She was reported to have taught hygiene to the women of the neglected poor while Grandfather was giving orders to a gang of Chinese workmen. In 1981, when my mother visited Cheng-du on an organized tour, she went to see if the college building that her father had built was still standing. It was, and it was being used as a medical school for both traditional and Western medicine. “But the soldiers wouldn’t let me take a picture of it,” she told us. “Not even when I told them that my father’d built it!” Would Grandfather have cared? Maybe not. William Leonard appears to have seen his mission to convert the heathen to evangelical Christianity as more important than putting up colleges for them. In Cheng-du, he proceeded exactly as he had in South Africa, preaching whenever the church authorities would let him. He must have been confident of having a great deal to offer and convinced that doing the Lord’s work would win him status and respect. Contemplating a photograph of my grandparents in Cheng-du in 1920, gathered with their children and their staff on the veranda at 6 University Crescent, I’m sure he felt that he was just getting into stride. He and Edith Annie

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had an impressive house, they had servants, and both of them could speak the language. China was their career. Although Edith Annie was over forty by then and did reportedly suffer a couple of miscarriages, in China they had three more living children. My aunt Evelyn, my mother Alice, and my uncle Wesley were all born in Cheng-du. Because William and Edith were both working, and had five children to raise and educate in China, they sent the two eldest, Catherine and Etheridge, to the Canadian School while the younger ones were cared for by an amah or Chinese nursemaid. Long ago, my mother remarked to me that she’d always been able to get away from her because the amah could not run. In the picture taken on the veranda of their house, with the amah seen holding Alice in her arms, the reason is obvious. The Chinese lady’s feet have been bound back into little clubs. But soon enough, my mother was taken away from her anyway, when my grandparents realized that the younger children, and especially the four-year-old Alice, were learning Mandarin rather than English. From then on they were taught in English, presumably by Grandmother, and missed a unique and wonderful chance to become truly fluent in the Chinese language. Later in life, Mother knew only a few baby words in Mandarin and could count to ten. She recalled an exclamation that her amah had used when the wind slammed the door shut, something about “Mr Wind!” but all the rest was lost. Her memories were distant and fragmentary. She mentioned having played house in an ancient, empty tomb, using a banana leaf for a sheet. But she told us that anything left out in the compound overnight ­– meaning inside the garden wall but not inside the house – was stolen, even the rope from their garden swing. The best story that my mother told me was how, as a very little girl aged about three and travelling with the rest of the family down the Yangtze in a river barge, she’d heard things whistling overhead. “Lie down flat,” the boatmen said to her, very gently and in Mandarin. “It’s all right, just lie down flat dear, yes, like that, and keep your head down. Shhhh … it’s all right! Stay there.” It wasn’t until years later that she realized what it was she’d heard whistling over her head. Those were old-fashioned musket bullets. But Alice had done as the boatmen told her to and she lived to tell the tale. She also told me how the family, packing to leave Cheng-du for the last time, had held a sale to

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dispose of some of their household goods, including a coffee pot which they later learned had been purchased for Chiang Kai Shek. He was westernized, after all. Maybe the Chinese general found Szechuan oldfashioned and folkloric and had been longing for percolated coffee. • That was the past, or some of it, that haunted the house where Grandmother and Grandfather lived, surrounded by their broad green lawn and reached by driving through the railway underpass. None of the tales came directly from them. My grandparents did not reminisce about China, although another cousin, Barbara Leonard (Etheridge’s daughter), has told me that sometimes they spoke Mandarin when they didn’t want Catherine or Etheridge to understand. That may have worked with the two eldest. The little ones would no doubt have understood spoken Mandarin at least as well as their parents did. However, the whole Chinese period remained distant, sealed off from the present by the arrival of communism and the departure of most of the Canadian missionaries from West China. Throughout my childhood, the few bits and pieces – bamboo baskets and fans, lacquer work, and embroidered silk or linen – that the family had brought out with them were precious, because China was closed. The stories we heard about that time came only from Mother and not while we were in Delhi. In her parents’ presence, Alice was no longer her assertive, harum-scarum self. She was prim and cautious, with the result that I must have taken my cue from her and kept my mouth shut. There may have been further reasons for our grandparents’ silence on the subject of China. Mother had told us about her father having decided that his true vocation was to preach and that he found occasions for doing so. The way she put it, building was what he was supposed to do, whereas preaching was an activity that he got away with. Also according to her, when they left China for the last time in 1924 it was because the political situation had become too dangerous for the Canadian missionaries. There was more to the story, however, and there was a problem that seems to have been kept from the children at the time. Recently my cousins and I have learned that Grandfather was recalled from China by the Methodist Church, not because of his

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preaching, but because of his behaviour as a construction boss. Alvyn J. Austin’s Saving China: Canadian Missionaries in the Middle Kingdom, 1888–19591 reports that he had acquired a reputation for treating his Chinese labourers rudely and harshly. Often argumentative with educated Chinese people, Grandfather was worse with his construction gang, to whom he felt scornfully superior. He displayed his contempt by berating them in their own language, which he may have spoken just clumsily enough to be truly insulting, actually yelling at one man to ask him if he wanted a wet nurse. When the coolies got fed up and went on strike against him, the other Europeans backed the coolies, so Grandfather wasn’t popular with either the Chinese or the Westerners. A picture of him on the building site with his men shows him wearing his hat on the back of his head and looking like an Irish tough. Following the strike, he can’t have been effective either as a builder or a missionary, so he was sent back to Canada. And even twenty-five years after Grandmother and Grandfather returned to Canada, as a granddaughter who knew nothing of their earlier lives, I’d go home to my parents’ Toronto house with a sober sense of having been exposed to something that I wasn’t ready to understand.

1. Austin, Alvyn J., Saving China: Canadian Missionaries in the Middle Kingdom, 1888–1959 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986). Grandfather Leonard was dead by the time the book came out, but Etheridge, his eldest son, was supposed to have been surprisingly upset by it. 

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chapter five

The Kennedy Hou s e

An important element of my mother’s quest for betterment was her lifelong drive to own property. The New Toronto bungalow was small, it was rented, and it had only a few feet of ground around it. She wanted a house with land because she wanted a garden, and she needed a safe place for Doris and me, as well as a room for the new baby. Apart from those practical considerations, the bungalow was tainted by the atmosphere of insecurity created when the prowler smashed our coldstorage box. That invasion was my clearest memory of the place – at least until the day I cut my lip on the window sash – and the cold gust from the hole in the kitchen window had left me with the feeling that it was forever winter in the little house. Those happenings are followed, in my memory, by a blank that covers winter’s chilly finish and the beginning of a shivery spring. As my parents organized our move, I may have been sent to stay with Gran and Granddad. What stands out above all else is the birth of my brother Hector, whom I met for the first time in Gran’s big bedroom. Mother had just brought him home from the hospital, and Gran took me upstairs to see them both. My first impression was that he was enormous. He was long, twice the length Doris had been, and red all

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over, including his hair. Mother was tremendously proud of him, and years later I would hear from Doris Tidy, Bert’s second wife, that Alice announced to him in a tone of triumph, “I have given you a son!” If Bert remembered that declaration and mentioned it long afterwards, he must certainly have been struck by her attitude. My sister and I were merely daughters. Our rebellious mother, so resentful at any form of masculine authority, did not feel she had accomplished her role as a wife until she produced a male child. But after telling Doris Tidy about it, Bert remarked that he was perfectly happy with daughters. The meeting in Gran’s bedroom suggests that the New Toronto place may not have been warm enough to take a newborn home to right away or even that my parents were between houses. Whatever happened next, including the move, has gone into the blank. In my recollection, Hector’s arrival in the family and our arrival at the old Kennedy house happened in quick succession. I was four years old, and suddenly it was spring. Then it was summer, it was warm, and we were living in a tall redbrick house in the countryside outside Toronto. • The Kennedy house had been built in 1905 on the Second Line Dixie, in what is now Mississauga. The base line was Burnhamthorpe Road. Later, as an older child, I would wonder if the name “Dixie” had something to do with the American South, but apparently not. Dixie was a village at the intersection of Dundas Street and Cawthra Road, founded in 1807 by a man named Dixie who started out with an inn and a tavern. The Kennedys arrived during that same period or soon after. They established themselves as local notables, and a son of the family had left an early mark in the world by scratching his initials, “TLK,” on the windowpane at the foot of the stairs in our dining room. When the real estate agent pointed them out, he told my parents that they stood for Thomas Laird Kennedy – from 1948 to 1949 Ontario’s fifteenth Premier – and Mr Kennedy was in office when we first occupied his childhood home. These days there’s a Kennedy Road and also a school named for Thomas L. Kennedy, so the real estate agent knew whereof he boasted. Although the house is gone, the Second Line has been named Tomken Road, in a contraction of the name Thomas Kennedy.

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Looking at the map now, I see that we hadn’t moved very far from New Toronto. My parents sought out a place in the same general area but in the farmland farther up from the lakeshore. Bert bought the house under a special plan called the Veterans’ Land Act, and the mortgage payments were nineteen dollars a month. He didn’t buy it from the Kennedys, however. They’d moved on before we arrived, and my father bought it from a family of postwar Polish arrivals named Grabus, who sold us only the house and the five acres surrounding it. They’d built themselves a bungalow on the next lot over and held on to the agricultural land. After that, they continued to work the fields, and we were neighbours. The brick house stood on a small rise, and its driveway led up to a sandy parking area beside the kitchen porch. Then the drive veered left, crossed a stream, entered the Grabuses’ territory, and pursued its course up to the barn, which was still part of the farm. Behind the house, the land fell away again, the grass sloping to a row of young willows that bordered the stream. On that side, the driveway and the stream marked the limits of our property, but there was more land to the right of the house, where a large vegetable garden was invaded by couch grass, pigweed, and burdock. And out in front was a huge lawn with tall feathery grass rippling in the wind. On a warm spring day when we were still new to the place, Doris and I, with the Grabus children and a little girl from across the road, went paddling in the stream in our shorts and jerseys. The ducks from another farm beyond the garden were in the water already, and we couldn’t resist joining them. This was an exploit, and we were thrilled to discover that the stream wasn’t deep, and we wouldn’t drown. If it was cold and muddy, we didn’t care. We walked right into the foot or so of water and hunkered down to poke around on the bottom for stones or odd bits of things thrown away, porcelain cup handles and interesting bottles, getting wonderfully wet and dirty. It meant nothing to us that the creek flowed past the foot of the manure pile next door, but it meant something to Mother. “Tetanus!!” she shrieked when Doris and I rushed in dripping and breezy with the joy of our adventure. Immediately, she stripped us of our clothes and scrubbed us down in a basin in the middle of the kitchen floor. I was blamed for letting it happen. It was my fault

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because I was the eldest and was supposed to have known better. I’d been a silly girl. But I hadn’t known better. It was the first I’d heard of the manure pile – or tetanus – and I don’t think that’s what you get from manure anyway. Wouldn’t it more likely be typhus? Isn’t tetanus what you get from stepping on a rusty nail? We didn’t catch anything, and I’m sure nothing was said to the Grabus children who were in and out of their barn, barefoot, all the time. The farm with the ducks and the manure also belonged to a family of postwar newcomers. Like the Grabuses, they were central Europeans, but they may not have been Polish. Their name was Fallis, and the rear part of their land, across the creek and along the opposite bank, was planted with a stand of twenty-foot pine trees in whispering, churchlike rows. The Fallises owned just their immediate lot, with that beautiful pine plantation, and Mrs Fallis looked after the place. She had the ducks to take care of, and chickens running around scratching for worms and hoping to be fed, as well as a horse and a cow in the stable behind the house. I never did see Mr Fallis, who went off every day to a job, but once or twice I saw their large son riding the horse, although he was a draft horse, built for ploughing or hauling loads. • The fields, the stream, the pines, and the animals were the world that I discovered when we first arrived in the Kennedy house. I’d be turning five in the autumn, and the spring of 1948 was the beginning of a year that was the happiest I’ve ever known. The lack of streets and houses, of topographical limitations that meant anything to me, and the absence of adult supervision were a sudden and complete liberation. While my mother was busy with a draughty old house and two smaller children, I spent the summer out in the natural world, running free. For the first time I had the satisfaction of amusing myself alone. There was no mention of kindergarten, and I was untroubled by the demands of any kind of school. For a year and more I floated blissfully through that childhood time in which the present is assumed to be forever. As I explored my new, endless environment, I was sure that what I was discovering was the permanent nature of everything. The countryside, the gravel road, and the little general store across the road were the

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whole of the universe, and there was no one to tell me how any of it worked or if it was supposed to mean anything. Did my mother try? It’s possible I’m being unfair. I do know the names of the wildflowers that surrounded us, and it was she who taught me those, starting in the spring with hepaticas, bloodroot, and tiny wild violets, some of them yellow. Later the single-flowered trillium, which we were not supposed to pick, opened shyly in the woods. Then the dandelions sprang up, followed in the summer by daisies, buttercups, and a modest-looking flower we called a dog daisy. Mother showed us how to split the stems and thread them together in chains, which worked better with the dandelions than with the native wildflowers. In the deeper grass sometimes we found the small, intensely orange flowers that Mother called Indian paintbrush. Along with them appeared black-eyed Susans, Queen Anne’s lace, jewelweed, wild columbine, and the tiny yellow snapdragons called butter-andeggs. Finally the blue, blue chicory standing tall along the roadsides signalled the arrival of high summer, and by the time the goldenrod bloomed, the warm days were growing shorter. Throughout the spring and summer I gathered all those wildflowers, picked them or tore them out, breaking their stems off short or pulling them up by the roots, and carried them home in scratchy handfuls to be stuck into jam jars on the table or the windowsills. In the autumn the roadside ditches were purpled with dusty frazzled asters and chokecherry bushes drooping under clusters of astringent little cherries. We ate handfuls of those, puckering at how sour they were, laughing and pretending to choke, then eating more. No one told us that the pits were poisonous, but it didn’t matter because we spat them out anyway. With very little forbidden and no supervision, I wandered privately in the fields, or in and out amongst the pines, studying bright bugs, the colours of wet stones in the creek, or the glitter of dew on the spider webs that spread across the grass, and built endless hope on everything I examined. It all had inexpressible value. The real and the miraculous were mingled parts of the same secret world that I yearned to enter and possess. When winter came, I followed rabbit tracks in the snow and picked up rabbit droppings, wondering what these round little treasures were. There was no danger anywhere – or

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I had no idea of danger – and I observed my surroundings unaware of having any relation to them. I was a spectator, barely aware of my own existence, yet looking all the time for jewels fallen from the jewelweed or diamonds in the grass. I didn’t realize my liberty because I’d taken it for granted. The places that we’d lived in before, the Toronto streets and apartments that I’m dredging up now, and the need to be accompanied by a grown-up, I forgot. Instead I entered my own world, both physically and mentally. In 2006 I asked Hector how far back his memories begin. Since he spent at most a few weeks of his infancy in the New Toronto bungalow, the Kennedy house is his very earliest memory. At some point in the 1960s he even went back to see it, and he tells me that he found it surprisingly small and dingy. In my recollection, the place was as huge as the natural world outside was endless. From the start, however, our parents’ first house presented challenges that revealed a significant split in their interests and aptitudes. A Saturday morning scene during our first springtime there offered a clear picture of Bert’s policy regarding country life. Our vegetable garden was so thick with weeds, all their roots deeply knotted and tangled, that Mother could do nothing with it. When she hired a man with a rototiller to turn it over for her, even he had a tough time. He was a muscular man, and Bert watched from the dining room window as he rammed his bucking machine through the couch grass and the burdocks. Sipping coffee, our father smiled and called him “Ramsey.” That wasn’t the man’s name, and Doris and I took a few moments to understand the joke. Then we were pleased with ourselves and giggled to see Ramsey ramming at the heavy lumps of roots. We were still laughing when he’d finished the job and taken his machine away, but by then Bert had left the window. In his view, the rototiller man was a part of the passing show. To Mother, her husband’s lack of interest didn’t matter. What she wanted was to get on to the next stage of her gardening project. She called us out to rake the earth, dig rows and holes, and plant the seeds of beans, peas, and carrots. She cut potatoes into pieces, showing us that each piece had to have an eye, and planted them, telling us that the tomato plants could come later. I listened and learned but was more intrigued by the discovery in the earth of rusted nails, black and

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square, with square heads. Mother told me that nails like that were very old – I know now that they would have been hand-forged on an anvil – and that there’d been a barn there once or maybe a pioneer house that had burned down. That was fascinating. So there was more to the earth than growing vegetables; there were stories hidden in it as well. We stuck the seed envelopes onto sticks at the ends of the rows and went back to the kitchen, where Bert was pouring himself more coffee. When we told him what we’d planted, he said he hoped there were no parsnips, because he detested parsnips and didn’t want them in the house. Distracted by the parsnip question, I forgot to tell him about the ancient nails. There followed the first of our country summers, with Mother exhorting us to “go out and mow the lawn,” although the iron mower was too heavy, or its blades too dull, for her or any of us to shove it through the grass. Bert didn’t count because he was rarely there, but it may even have been too heavy for him. I never once saw him mow the lawn. The grass grew and waved in the wind, and flowers grew all through it. I lay down in its depths and stared up at the undersides of the stems and leaves and blossoms, their shadows different colours, with insect life parading along their channels and a big blue sky blowing past overhead. Lawn mowing couldn’t be done and didn’t matter. When Mother nagged at us to weed the garden, we shirked that job out of pure laziness. The vegetables flourished anyway, and we learned to pick a red, sun-warmed tomato, lick it, and sprinkle salt on the licked part before biting into it. Inside, the big kitchen was the place where we drew pictures at the kitchen table, or played on the floor, or stood around asking questions. Through the back way was an unheated summer kitchen and a shed, jumbled with Mother’s projects. To one side the kitchen opened to the porch where she once took a picture of us sitting on the steps. To the other side, we rampaged through an echoing dining room containing an oak table, a mirrored sideboard, and six chairs. We climbed the long staircase up the side of the dining room to throw things down at each other. Or we ducked past the foot of the stairs into the front room, which featured a fireplace set with shiny, reflecting tiles, a bay window looking out towards the road, and past the window a door opening to a shorter section of the porch, around the corner from the

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kitchen part. The blue plush armchairs were usually drawn up to the fireplace, and the chesterfield was pushed back against the wall. That parlour was our gymnasium – we raced, wrestled, and scrambled all over it. A favourite game consisted of making a complete circuit of the room without touching the floor, leaping from couch to armchairs to side tables to hassock and the veranda door. For other fantasies, we pushed the furniture into formation to serve as castles or forts. Since nothing in Mother’s house had an established position, a timeexposure photograph would have shown chairs and tables shifting and circling in a sort of constellation, never finding permanent placement. Mess was endemic throughout the house. Our parents’ bedroom always had heaps of clothing slung on the furniture or dropped anywhere on the floor, because neither of them ever picked anything up or put it away. It would be years before we, the offspring, came to understand that the different drawers in a dresser could be used for sorting and storing specific pieces of clothing – a drawer for socks and underpants, a drawer for slips and undershirts, and a drawer for blouses. Maybe even a drawer for pyjamas and nightgowns, such a satisfying concept. Before that discovery, we also dropped everything on the floor. The one piece of furniture that we didn’t climb on was Bert’s Heathkit hi-fi. It consisted of a tuner, a turntable, a big plywood box whose two speakers were covered with coppery-coloured window screen, and a crimped metal amplifier with a mushroom-shaped red light to alert him when it had been left on. Its place was under the front window, where it remained, inviolate. The Heathkit had been assembled for Bert by one of his CBC friends, a flamboyant radio journalist named Bill Beattie, and Bert was very proud of its performance. He used to sit in front of it listening to symphonies conducted by Herbert von Karajan or Sir Adrian Boult, and miming the gestures of conducting the orchestra himself. Another material improvement was a new car, the Durant having been traded in on a small English car, possibly an Austin. It can’t have lasted long, as I barely remember it, except for overhearing my parents discussing its refusal to start in the winter and how parts stiffened and broke off in the cold. It was followed by a Vauxhall Vanguard, a little station wagon in a light muddy green colour with silvery-greenish

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vinyl seats. Before the Auto Pact with the United States, Canada had a lot of modest British vehicles because they enjoyed a tariff advantage and were very inexpensive. My first disappointment with them was the discovery that I could no longer stand up and walk around in the back seat. They were a lot smaller and lower than the old Durant had been, and of course I’d grown as well. My head bumped the ceiling and I was forced to sit down. Trips by car were never as much fun again, although I do remember fighting with Doris in the back seat of the Vauxhall. Our parents had left us in the car while both of them went into a laundromat in suburban Toronto. The Vauxhall had separate front seats. Hector was a baby and he’d been left sprawling, unattached, in the front passenger seat. There he rolled over and managed to get his head caught between that and the driver’s seat. If he howled, it didn’t bother me because I was busy beating up on my little sister, and she was shrieking too. But a woman walking past heard the bawling, noticed what was going on, and tried to open the car door. It was locked. She waited. When Mother and Bert came out with the laundry, there was a scene while she berated them for leaving a baby and two little girls unattended. They were as astonished as I was that anyone would take an interest in our battles, and I was blamed for not noticing that Hector was in trouble, although he says he doesn’t remember a thing about it. • Thinking back on the cavalier attitude both parents displayed towards domestic chaos, I realize that Mother had her work cut out for her with the Kennedy place, as well as with Bert. She wouldn’t have admitted it, but she’d taken on too much for a woman whose husband had never been responsible for anything. In marrying a man radically different from her own carpenter father, she’d gone to the other extreme and had chosen a husband who’d grown up as his family’s darling. Bert’s status had been that of the brilliant younger son. On the day of the battle in the Vauxhall, if he was in the laundromat it could only have been because he was desperate for clean shirts. Concern for keeping things together had been Gran’s domain and Granddad’s was general upkeep. Bert had never touched a tool, never built or repaired or

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adjusted anything, and had certainly never washed a dish or done laundry. He’d been expected to do his homework and practise the violin. His father, his mother, and his big brother Jack had always made the way smooth for him. An important reason for his having been overprotected was undoubtedly the early death of his sister Elizabeth. When Bert appeared the following year, he was a miracle and destined to be his mother’s pampered pet for ever after. Gran would have done anything for him, and what she couldn’t manage, she instructed Granddad to do. Moreover, after my father’s birth she ordered Granddad out of her bed and out of her bedroom permanently. I suppose that was the nineteenth-century lady’s one reliable method of contraception, but Gran took it to surprising lengths. She kept the baby who was Bert in her bed until he was eight or nine years old. As a child, of course I knew nothing of that. All I knew was that my grandparents slept in separate bedrooms, which I accepted as normal. Children also sleep in separate rooms. But the nuances have come out in bits and pieces over the years. According to my cousin Sandra (Jack’s daughter), who heard it from her mother, both boys slept with their parents for years. While Bert was in his mother’s bed, Jack, the elder son, was sent to bunk with his father, until what age we do not know. Eventually, the back bedroom became “Jack’s room,” and they were still calling it that when I slept there, some of his books remaining in the slatted ends of the little oak desk. With ten years’ age difference between the brothers, it would have been Jack’s room until he went off to university. And only then would Bert finally have escaped from whichever parental bed he was in, and got a room of his own – not that his mother ever let go. Throughout my childhood and adolescence, on my way in or out of Gran’s house, I was used to seeing her tottering after him, arms outstretched, begging for a kiss. What she said was, “Give us a bekky!” At the time, I understood the expression as a baby word for a kiss. Now I recognize it as a part of her Quebec heritage. In French, un bec, meaning a bird’s beak, also means a little peck on the cheek. Gran never ceased imploring her reluctant son for a kiss, while he invariably backed off and got himself out of there. Bert’s firmest commitment was his ongoing effort to escape his mother’s clutches.

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• And to the farmhouse on the Second Line Dixie, he felt no commitment whatsoever. Alice had wanted a house, it was her project, and he let her deal with it. His view of the mundane physical world was whimsical derision. Agriculture, like Ramsey, was a subject for jokes. Normally my father slept until noon, then got up and had breakfast before heading off to the CBC for the late shift. He worked in the radio newsroom from three in the afternoon until eleven at night, and he was never home until past midnight. We, his children, didn’t see him during the week. In the kitchen one afternoon, when I was seven or eight years old, I remarked to Mother that it was almost as if I didn’t have a father, and she turned on me instantly. “That’s a wicked thing to say! You’re a terrible wicked girl, even to think such a thing! Never let me hear you say anything like that again.” I was shocked and scared by the vehemence of her reaction, but it would take me years to figure out why. My mother did not want the reality of her situation pointed out, and especially not by me. Of course she was lonely and concerned about her husband’s late nights, but the truth, coming from her daughter, only compounded her distress. If she didn’t know how to deal with the problem, at least she could conceal it from her children, and therefore my remark was all the more upsetting. At the time, I didn’t know why what I’d said was so very wicked. The personality conflict between my mother and me meant that I was often a terrible wicked girl for other reasons. As for Bert’s habits, now that I am myself a confirmed nocturnal, I can feel some sympathy for him. If he was never home or awake during the day, it was because he’d taken to late hours like a duck to water. The night shift may have been his first taste of something resembling freedom, providing as it did an escape from both his mother and his wife. For an hour or two after work, no one knew where he was. It wasn’t his fault if Gran had spoiled him helpless, or Granddad assumed that sending his sons to university exempted them from learning anything practical. And if Bert was a nonpresence at home, at least he had a job and supported the family. Hammering and nailing and dealing with the physical world he saw as technical considerations to be dealt with by hired specialists like Ramsey. Small children needed

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to be cared for by the woman of the household, so he had little reason to hang around. Later on, though, when he’d taken to staying out all night, Mother made sure that we didn’t know about his absences. That was her pride, as well as a desire to protect us. I didn’t know until I was grown up that my parents’ marriage had been a disaster from early on, but I do know that there are day people and there are night people. Some of the Cowans are innately nocturnal. My cousin Sandra and I are both late-night people. When I first visited her on Vancouver Island in 1995, her great fear was that I was going to bound out of bed at eight in the morning expecting breakfast. She was relieved to learn that I’d be happy with coffee by noon and not much else, because she never went to bed before two in the morning herself and never got up before one in the afternoon. On the other hand, neither of us has tried to raise a family of five children. But Bert made no attempt to raise his children either. He avoided the problem by avoiding us whenever possible. Yet Hector, even with Bert for a father, seemed to learn carpentry, plumbing, electricity, and auto mechanics out of the air. At about the same time as I noticed that Bert was never home, I also realized that other children called their fathers “Daddy.” Why did we always call ours by his first name? That was never discussed. In the beginning it may have had something to do with my parents’ youthful radicalism. Or in the early years, maybe it was Gran who instructed me to call my mother “Mummy,” without bringing herself to call her adored son by anything but his given name. Since I was the first child, I went along with what everyone else called him. Nobody called him Daddy and no one suggested that I should. By the time I started to wonder why we were different, it was too late. I didn’t dare ask him about it. His name was Bert, and in the family he remained Bert, whereas Mummy would evolve into Mother by the time I was ten. • Once we were established in the Dixie house, with Bert downtown most of the time, Mother struggled bravely and inefficiently to make the place liveable. When we arrived, there was no indoor plumbing, and during that first summer we discovered the horrors of the

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outhouse. The only running water in the house came out of a hand pump over the kitchen sink, from a concrete cistern in the cellar, filled with whatever had drained off the roof. On the far side of the driveway, under a dangerously flimsy wooden cover, there was also a well, but in the hot weather its level fell too low to be reached by its long-handled outdoor pump. Mother explained that it needed to be primed, to bring the water up for the pump, and she’d go out and pour a bucketful of cistern water down it. Ugh, I thought, remembering that one day, over the sink, she’d exclaimed that she was pumping up frogs. When I peered in, wondering if I’d see them hopping around, there was only a dribble of black slime, but that was bad enough. What the water that she poured down the pump looked like, I did not find out. Fortunately, before winter came, the well had been equipped with an electric pump that brought clean well water into the kitchen, and real taps had been installed at the sink. A small upstairs bedroom was converted to a bathroom, which, although it had cold water only, did provide an indoor toilet. I watched as the men installed a septic tank and a drainage bed, with much discussion about tiles and slope. There was a bathtub upstairs, but the labour of heating water on the stove and hauling buckets of it up there meant that a basin on the kitchen floor was still more convenient. It may have been as much as a year later before hot water was put in. Who did it all? I know my uncle Wesley was called upon, as well as local handymen. Very little was installed by skilled tradesmen. Everything done in the house was rough and ready. Throughout the improvements, I hadn’t forgotten the cistern under the kitchen either. The thing was still down there, hulking in the gloom, breeding monsters. I imagined a bloodred spider the size of a German shepherd crouching in the mouldy corner behind, mandibles at the ready. For months I was afraid to go into the cellar unless Mother was already down there. But a year or two later, creeping down the rickety steps, I was almost disappointed to find it simply dank and quiet. No crimson monster crouched in the shadows, waiting for its next victim. There was a smell of earth and old wood, with no animal life to be seen, and the cement of the cistern looked dry and crumbly. A different vacancy hung in the air of the Grabuses’ barn, with its deep scent of hay, birds twittering high up amongst the beams, and

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light glinting in between the boards. All that was beautiful, except that barns were supposed to have animals in them. The Grabuses’ barn had only a few chickens and a frighteningly territorial rooster who strutted back and forth, glaring. But then one morning, looking up the slope, I saw Mr Grabus leading a big brown horse out the barn door. I ran up to see, and he told me that he’d hired the animal to plough the field next to our driveway. When I followed along, watching him slap the reins on the horse’s back, he didn’t chase me away. Bits of chain clinked at either end of a wooden crosspiece while he held the ploughshare’s curving blade into the sod, and the horse leaned into his collar and pulled. It didn’t look difficult. The plough cut its way through the ground. Out from behind the polished metal curled a wave of slick brown earth, its green and weedy side going under as it fell against the previous furrow. Although Mr Grabus was talking to the horse and not to me, I felt free to watch and listen. He was saying “giddy-up” and “whoa” but also “gee” and “haw.” Clearly the horse, who didn’t belong to him, understood those words even when they were pronounced with Mr Grabus’s Polish accent, and soon I had them figured out as well. “Gee” meant right and “haw” meant left. Since then, in French, I’ve run into the expression “hué et dia” and recognized those terms as related to “haw” and “gee.” Now used in French to mean “helter-skelter,” or running off in any old direction, the commands to the brown horse must once have been Anglo-Norman. Mr Grabus’s hired horse was responding to words as ancient as “co-boss” to a cow, “sooey” to a pig, and “sic ’em” to a dog, all of which I learned during childhood, not realizing that I was picking up the last fading echoes of a mediaeval vocabulary used for communicating with domestic animals. I was always trailing after the Grabuses into the fields, watching and listening. The Grabus children, being true peasants, showed me how to squat down and piss in the long grass. There was nothing to it – and it was a way to avoid the outhouse – except that I would never have dared do such a thing without being assured that it was normal. Nor did I tell Mother what they’d shown me. Another time Mr Grabus called Doris and me up to the barn, eager to show us a cow he’d bought because she’d just calved. I hurried up the hill, slipped past the mean rooster in the doorway, and did get to stand over the

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damp, stringy calf lying on the straw, still attached by its umbilical cord. But Doris, being smaller and not as fast, didn’t get that far. The rooster in the doorway was as tall as she was. He waylaid her and pecked her cruelly in the back of the neck. Mr Grabus didn’t seem to understand that his bird was a criminal, and I took my sister back down to the house crying. Mr Grabus was often unkind, and I wonder if he wasn’t trying to show us city people that country life was too rough for us. When Mother bought a chicken from him one evening, he didn’t pluck or eviscerate it. He strode down from the barn carrying it by the feet, wings flapping upside down, and dropped it just inside the kitchen door where it lay on the doormat jerking its legs. That it had no head seemed unimportant because it was moving, so I crouched beside it, wondering if it was going to be all right. As I waited for it to recover, I must have known that it wasn’t going to survive. I did see that its head had been cut off. Maybe I was experimenting with hope, feeling pity for the poor chicken because at least it was trying to live. It continued to quiver but did not get better, and after a while I went off to contemplate some other puzzle. I never did see it removed from the doormat, so it must have stayed there until I went to bed. And although Mother would have dealt with it that night, I don’t think she ever bought another chicken from Mr Grabus. She did know how to pluck and gut them – a skill I never learned from her – and in years to come would go on to slaughter her own ducks and geese, but she may not have been expecting that chicken to be dumped headless and twitching just inside the kitchen door. The next day, though, once it had been roasted, I’m sure I ate it without recognizing it. • Behind the store across the road, a Ukrainian family named Krajnik had moved into a timbered shanty that had once housed cows. No one in the neighbourhood seemed surprised at their living in a cowshed because they were fresh from Eastern Europe and used to hardship. The men had put in a woodstove and sealed the windows. They had two daughters, both older than I was, and a little boy named Stevie, who was closer to my age. When Stevie smiled at me I was puzzled to

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see that his teeth were outlined in black, and one day I followed him home and saw the inside of the shanty, which was low and warm and crowded. His mother offered me a brown bread sandwich with applesauce dripping out through the holes in the bread. That was delicious. But then one of the men, said to be Stevie’s uncle, leered at me from a dark corner and asked if I was a little girl or a little boy – and was I sure about that? How could I tell whether I was really a girl or a boy? He had a strange look in his eyes. I saw there was something wrong with him and not to be dealt with, so I backed out and ran home. A few weeks after their arrival, Mother hired one of the Krajnik daughters to help clean our house. Approaching the piano to dust it, the girl touched a key and jumped back in surprise when it made a sound. She’d never run into a thing like that before. And when Mother gave her a pair of rubber gloves for a scrubbing job, she put them on willingly enough but was astonished, when she took them off, to discover that they’d kept her hands dry. Then towards the end of the summer, the Krajniks bought themselves a cow. They had no pasture, nothing but the parking space in front of their shanty, so they must have stabled her in a lean-to behind it. For feed, they seemed to think she could live off the land. The poor animal did try. That fall, a couple of weeks after Hallowe’en, Mother tossed the deliquescing remains of our Jack-o’-lantern off the back porch for the fun of seeing it smash – and the Krajnik’s cow came up the driveway and ate it. Otherwise, the Krajnik children were sent out to lead her along the roadside and pasture her on whatever was growing free there. Unfortunately they hadn’t reckoned with the Ontario highways department, which, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, was beginning to use the new miracle weed killers. Before long the cow’s milk – and they gave us a jug of it, I can’t forget the taste – was really bitter. Not liking waste, Mother tried to use it for cooking, but it was foul, it was unusable. And within a few weeks the Krajnik’s cow had died of herbicide poisoning. • We had everything to learn about life in the country. When the cold weather arrived, there turned out to be no storm windows. And during the early part of the winter – maybe because there were lodgers in the

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house – I found myself sleeping in the sun porch over the veranda. It was all windows, and they were opaque with frost. When I wanted to see if it was snowing outside, I scratched a hole in the frost with my fingernail. But I don’t remember suffering from the cold, and soon afterwards I was moved into a different room, at least until the windows had been covered. Later I heard my mother describing to a neighbour how she’d made the storm windows herself, tacked them together and hammered them into place with the heel of her shoe. Would those have been the windows for the sun porch, maybe made of plastic sheeting? I failed to take in the details, dissociating myself from the problems that adults had to deal with. Once the windows had been covered, I was moved back into the sunroom. And on a bright Saturday afternoon, once again able to see out through the windows, I noticed Bert’s car pulling into the driveway. Granddad was in the passenger seat, and I ran down to greet him. I knew he’d be bringing chocolate, and he had, but that wasn’t the reason for his visit. Bert had brought his father out to the house because he wanted to show off the Heathkit. Eager to demonstrate the perfect balance of its turntable and the clarity of its high fidelity, he twirled the knobs on his technological marvel. The big speaker gave out an impressive whump and he turned all the levels down. He plucked a long-playing record out of its cardboard sleeve, removed its paper liner, and, handling it by the edges, set it on the turntable. Delicately, he lowered the needle to its surface. He adjusted the volume, and rich, glorious music welled up and poured out of the little speaker and the big speaker. Granddad listened for several minutes, really interested in this new and superior gramophone. He walked over to the turntable and pressed down hard, a couple of times, on the edge of it. The record skipped and thundered, and Bert winced. “Did I do that?” Granddad asked. “Yes,” said Bert. Granddad seemed startled that a small prodding could produce such a loud, ugly disturbance in the music. But nothing else was said. Although Bert was evasive with his mother, he was always respectful and affectionate with his father. Both of them went back out to the kitchen, and shortly afterwards Bert drove Granddad back to Evans Avenue.

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chapter six

The Substance of Fanta sy

Even if Granddad never stayed at the farmhouse for long –­and Gran, as far as I recall, never set foot there –­my father’s parents remained a vital presence in my life. They stood for urban civilization and a link with a world that I might otherwise have forgotten completely. It was Gran and Granddad who offered the small ceremonies that mean so much to children. When I turned five that autumn, I was taken into the city for a birthday party in their dining room. After I’d blown out the five candles on the cake, they gave me a very small package. Opening it, I found a little box and, inside the box, a tiny gold signet ring. When I put the ring on my finger and looked at it, there was a J engraved on it, so it really was mine. It was also from our grandparents’ house, towards the end of that same year, that Doris and I were taken by Mother to see our first movie, The Wizard of Oz. The film, in colour, was a sensory revolution for me. I’d never experienced anything so intense. Although the tornado didn’t faze me –­because I couldn’t imagine one and didn’t understand the urgency about rushing into the cellar –­ I was terrified by the Wicked Witch of the East, to the point of blubbering and wanting to get under the seat. My year spent dreaming amongst the wildflowers

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had left me so countrified that the film’s dramatic visual effects were more than I could bear. When Mother scolded me, telling me to sit still and not be silly, I shut my eyes and waited for it to be over. I wasn’t reassured that the action was taking place out in the country, because it didn’t look like any of the fields that I knew, and I wanted to go home –­or back to Gran and Granddad’s house. I’m not sure Granddad ever saw a movie, but if he’d seen The Wizard of Oz, he wouldn’t have enjoyed it either. Alarmist as he was, he knew how badly things could go wrong if given a chance. His was the sort of personality that slips easily from apprehension to fatalism, and his imagination nourished a fear of the shadow world. Sandra has described seeing him going down to the cellar one evening to check that all was well before locking up. After turning out the light at the bottom of the stairs, he came rather quickly back up to the kitchen. “It’s not the dark I’m afraid of,” he told her. “It’s what’s in it.” To make sure that I’d got his words right, I asked her, “It wasn’t the dark but what might be in it?” “No, no,” said Sandra. “He didn’t say what might be in it; he said he was afraid of what was in it. Very Irish.” So Granddad, along with his inborn conservatism, was fey, and occasionally he was overcome by a fit of startling rashness. Apart from the streetcar episode, his driving experience had been with horses only, until he decided the time had come to drive a car. My uncle Jack’s diary records that one day in 1926, when –­ possibly as a gesture of defiance at hearing that the Cowans had sold their business to a bigger British company –­ Granddad took a notion to invite his elder son for a spin. Without benefit of licence or instruction, he “borrowed an automobile” from the chocolate factory and, committing himself to the laws of physics and the genius of Henry Ford, set out into traffic. Jack’s diary gives no details about their ride. Maybe he was still in shock when he got back to his room to write it down, because he simply reports that it was a terrifying experience and says they barely survived. That was the one and only time Granddad ever drove a motor vehicle. As a small and greedy granddaughter, however, unaware of my grandfather’s driving record or the chocolate factory’s history, I didn’t even know that the business had once belonged to his uncle. All I knew was that Granddad worked there. As the years went by, each

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of his grandchildren, one at a time, was treated to a tour of the place. When my turn came, I got on the streetcar and went with him to his job. He took me by the hand and led me into the scented vastness. This was before the days of fluorescent lighting, and we walked through long shafts of window light alternating with shafts of shadow. It was marvellous, following him through the cavernous factory, gawking at the differently coloured spouts and streams and spiralling coils of chocolate and cream and fruit syrup falling through those slanting columns of light, and inhaling the intoxicating essences that went into the making of really good chocolates. Then I was surprised to see my grandfather, who to my certain knowledge never ate chocolate, put his finger right under one of the streams and taste it. But I concluded that he was doing so only because he had to. Even if he no longer liked the stuff, it was his job to sample it. Eating the chocolate was his grandchildren’s role, it was my role, and we all revelled in it. Our mother was reproachful about the chocolate. It ran up against her thrifty, nutrition-minded, puritanical streak. At home, we ate fish or ground meat and drank milk with it. She had a recipe that consisted of daubing some sort of white fish with orange salad dressing and baking it on a cookie sheet in the oven. On Sundays, we ate roast beef with potatoes either baked or boiled in their skins –­ we ate the skins –­ and lots of greens. When we ate beets, we ate the greens too, steamed like spinach. Bread was almost always brown. Breakfast was oatmeal porridge. Mother made good desserts but supervised their distribution. Her oatmeal cookies were delicious, but anything really sugary, like her wonderful Chelsea buns, was an indulgence. There was no money to waste on treats, and we were never allowed even to think of buying candy or chewing gum. Against Granddad, however, she could do nothing. The chocolate was free. Her attempts to dole it out in small quantities were not successful. Several times a year, and especially at Christmas, we gorged on Smarties and Black Magic. From the black corrugated paper sections of the Black Magic box, we extracted the identification sheet and learned the centres of all the pieces. Gobbling those squares, ovals, mounds, wedges, and rectangles, we knew what to expect inside. A lumpy piece contained nuts, a wedge was orange cream, a rounded dome had a cherry inside it, and an oval was a strawberry or raspberry

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cream. Squares, rectangles or lozenges tended to contain layers of caramel or nougat, which, to my taste, weren’t as good. And despite our mother’s scathing remarks, we ate more of Granddad’s chocolate at home than at our grandparents’ house. Since they no longer touched it themselves, they didn’t keep it around, except to send back with us. The other grandparental treats, and a close second to the chocolates, were Gran’s cookies out of the jar on the buffet. Their rich mix of sugar, butter, flour, egg, and salt marked my palate and later helped to save me from commercial desserts made with chemical fillers, stabilizers, and colours. Of course I ate those too, but I could taste the difference. It was Granddad’s chocolate and Gran’s buttery shortbread cookies – along with, and in another domain not so very much later, the ironic, understated cartoons in Bert’s New Yorker magazines – that would become the defining luxuries of my childhood. In different ways, they all oriented my taste for the genuine. Past the buffet and the cookie jar, the back door opened to a roofed stoop between the pantry and the clothesline. I followed Gran out there as she brushed the crumbs from her breadboard into the grass for the birds, telling me that it was wrong to throw bread into the garbage. If Mrs Morony was on her own stoop, hanging out laundry, we’d say good morning to her. Then we’d make the circuit. Close to the house, where the lawn was bordered by flowerbeds, I followed my grandmother while she deadheaded her pansies, cosmos, and chrysanthemums. Back by the lane, between the gate and the rowan tree, where the yard was narrowed by the neighbours’ garage, there was just space for a vegetable patch, and there we might pick some beans for supper. Along the side of Gran’s house, a little picket gate closed the narrow walk leading between it and the neighbours who owned the garage. Once when I was very small, maybe because I’d seen someone taller open the gate from the other side, I stretched up to reach through between the pickets. The latch would have been on my side, but I stuck my arm through anyway and then tried to pull it straight back out. When my elbow caught, I yanked, hurting myself and squealing. Being too young to analyze the problem, I was pulling down, in the wrong direction. But immediately, a big girl appeared from the house next door. Without bothering to speak to me, she lifted my arm out from

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above and freed me. The solution was so simple that I was nonplussed. What had I been making a fuss about? My rescuer didn’t stay to be thanked or to dwell on my silliness. She turned around and went straight back to her own yard. Since then I’ve pondered the possibility that angels –­ if angels exist –­ may behave just like that, not interested in being friendly but appearing out of nowhere with stern, impersonal charity, saving us, and then vanishing. Whoever she was, I never saw her again. During the late 1940s or early 1950s, there was a summer week when Gran and Granddad’s house had no electricity, because the city of Toronto was switching over from twenty-five to sixty cycles. This was done during a heat wave, and the house was lit by candles. For the first time, I saw my grandmother in a sleeveless dress, complaining about having to light the woodstove to boil water. But when the changeover was complete, the humming, blinking yellow lights were replaced by bulbs that shone steadily. If there was still an amber dimness in the house, it was because of Granddad’s preference for forty-watt lightbulbs. The light in the bathroom at the top of the stairs was especially feeble. The odour of the narrow little room was indistinct as well, dank and mysteriously ancient, like very old soap, yellowed and cracking. There was a little white sink under a wooden medicine cabinet, a plain claw-foot bathtub with a rust stain running down from the taps, and an elderly toilet whose loose porcelain handle had to be jiggled to stop it running. Granddad had painted the walls and the wood trim a glossy cream colour and the linoleum on the floor black. Then he’d used the end of a sponge mop to daub large contrasting cream polka dots onto the black. Beside the bathroom, the back bedroom was barely big enough for a single bed, a chair, the small oak desk with its slatted bookshelves at either end, and a triple-mirrored dressing table. The window looked out over the roof of the stoop to the lane and the back yards of other houses. The middle bedroom, although bigger, was doubly narrowed by the width of the stairs and the upstairs hallway. And as with the dining room below, its window faced directly across to the window next door, so it was heavily curtained, and the room was always dark. That was where Granddad slept.

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The front bedroom, however, Gran’s room, was the largest. It was as long as, maybe longer, than the living room beneath and broader because it took up the full width of the house. There was space for a big bed and a divan –­for afternoon naps without mussing the bedspread –­ as well as for a walnut highboy with many drawers and a pair of doors that opened to smaller drawers containing secrets. There was a dresser, too, with a plate glass mirror and a display of precious things spread out on its surface, and a Windsor chair at the window, useful for scanning the street from above. Sandra and I have compared our memories of Gran’s room and of her wedding photograph on the wall, showing her as a beautiful girl in a lacy white dress. That room had a mystical fascination, fragrant with perfume and face powder, and filled with the haunting appeal of those little walnut drawers that opened with tiny walnut knobs to reveal kid gloves, velvet ribbons, silk scarves, leather cases containing brooches and watch fobs, or old coins and medals. They were relics of the palmy days. Once Gran gave me a pair of opera glasses from a drawer in the highboy and on another occasion a set of miniature playing cards. She told me they’d belonged to her mother, Elizabeth McQueen, who’d played solitaire with them. More luxurious fantasies were hidden away at the back of the scented closet, where a shelf concealed behind folds of fur and silk held a large box filled with jewellery: ropes of beads mixed and tangled with glittery pins and pendants and rings and clasps. Some of it was costume jewellery, and some of it was real gold, silver, garnet, agate, or jet. Some of it dated back to the nineteenth century, many pieces having been brought from Scotland, while others dated from Bessie’s youth in Montreal. A string of amber beads was a gift that Jack had brought back from Europe. The long jet necklace with the tassel of tiny jet beads was mourning jewellery worn by Elizabeth McQueen after the death of her husband –­ John McQueen having died young, of tuberculosis. Looking at me holding the jet necklace in my fingers, Gran chose that moment to reveal that she’d been only five years old when her father died and that they’d forced her to kiss him goodbye in his coffin. As a little child, she’d been terrified, and for the rest of her life blamed her mother and her sister Isabel for that piece of socially correct cruelty. Another lifelong sadness was at having been christened

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“Bessie.” Gran resented her name because it was a diminutive. Her mother had been called “Elizabeth” and Gran had named her own daughter “Elizabeth,” as if to make up for having been cheated of the name herself. But on a card that John McQueen wrote to his wife from a sanatorium in Arizona, sending his love to his youngest daughter, he calls her simply “Baby.” So the father Gran never really knew didn’t even call her Bessie. Then I picked up a tiny gold baby’s locket with EC engraved on it. It wasn’t Bessie’s. When I opened it, I found a wisp of blond hair belonging to Elizabeth Cowan, and Gran told me that her adored daughter had died at the age of three of diphtheria. “How she suffered,” she said, and now I suppose that Elizabeth’s early death was one of Gran’s reasons for longing to indulge her granddaughters. Elizabeth McQueen’s adornments included an ornate, goldplated Victorian locket and a handsome choker made of eight oval amethysts. The locket opened to reveal two tiny, lost, photographic faces: my uncle Jack and little Elizabeth. There is, as far as I know, no other picture of my aunt Elizabeth. Only the amethyst choker had a happier history. Gran and my great-aunt Isabel both declared that it had been a gift offered to Elizabeth McQueen by “a man from New York,” presumably after she was widowed. Those were the treasures that Gran brought out for us to play with. Sometimes she spoke of the past, and sometimes she let us conjure up our castles in the air. At different times, Sandra and Doris and I all enjoyed the privilege of emptying out and sorting through the jewellery box. We never stayed with our grandparents at the same time, but our memories jibe. Individually, we draped ourselves in the splendours from our grandmother’s box and stood on the bed to admire ourselves in the mirror on the dresser. It was fantasy, but fantasy with substance, and it nourished our longing for beauty. Little by little though, as Gran gave us the best things –­ and we grew older and more discerning –­ the contents of the box came to seem less marvellous, but only because we’d already been given such a lot of it. • In 1967, after Gran had died and her house was being cleared out, I visited her closet like an empty shrine. Was the magical box still

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there? It was, or at least there was a box with a few bits of plastic in it. But nothing was left of any interest, as if she’d taken her treasures with her – except that she hadn’t, she’d passed them on to us, long before. I have Elizabeth McQueen’s locket and her amethysts, and also a portable writing desk made of mahogany and burled maple. It’s the nineteenth-century lady’s equivalent of a laptop, with compartments for paper, pens, and an inkwell and a slanted writing surface faced with Morocco leather. The outside and the lock –­ already broken when I first saw it –­ are decorated with abalone and mother-ofpearl inlay. I have the Windsor chair from the front window too and another, plainer one, from the back bedroom. The mysteries had been transferred to our keeping, and I shall always be grateful to Gran for having nurtured our dream world. When I was a little girl, her room, overflowing with the arcana of feminine frivolity that my mother sneered at, was a haven. It offered the climate of romantic promise that was denied me at home. On that same day in 1967, I salvaged the Oriental carpet from Gran’s dining room and was touched to find one end worn thin. That was where she had come and gone from the kitchen for close to forty years, carrying in the plates and clearing them away. I dragged that carpet around with me throughout my student years until it went into the attic of my current house. In the 1990s I hauled it down and handed it over to my brother Paul who has thirteen and fourteen-foot ceilings in his Montreal condominium and thus the space to hang it. He had it cleaned and restored by a specialist who, he tells me, “went into ecstasies over it.” Originally, Granddad would have collected that carpet from the offices of his uncle’s factory, either in Toronto or later in Montreal. If it came from Montreal, Paul has repatriated it, and now, hanging on his wall, its colours look rich and beautiful. The Duncan Phyfe dining table did not fare so well. By the time of Gran’s death, Mother had left Bert, and he was living in an apartment downtown. He rented an open, unsprung trailer, of the kind used for hauling concrete blocks or gravel, and tossed his mother’s dining room furniture into that. When the table arrived at his place in the City Park Apartments, one of its formal cherrywood feet had broken off. Bert shrugged and used the table just the same, with a pile of bricks under the broken end, as if taunting his mother beyond the grave for

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her concern with appearances. The broken table wasn’t discarded until after his own death. After Bert was gone, moreover, I carried off his violin. When I showed it to Jacques Martel, the classical luthier here in Trois-Rivières, whose walls are hung with diplomas in Italian along with stainless steel patterns for violins, cellos, and Renaissance lutes, he confirmed what Granddad had told me, that the bow is better than the fiddle. Bargain hunting was part of Granddad’s search for beauty and luxury. He was keen about rummaging in antique shops or used furniture stores and finding interesting and worthwhile objects. I have an Empire-style walnut desk that he brought home one day and, from another expedition, an ormolu clock with rams’ heads on its ends. • And now a truly distant figure rises up out of memory: Granddad’s cousin, Kathleen Louise Cowan. I’d been forgetting her, but Granddad also displayed his love and respect for faded beauty through his loyalty to Kathleen. When I asked Sandra about her, my cousin told me that it was in Kathleen’s house that she saw a television set for the first time. A daughter of John Cowan, Kathleen had inherited her share of the chocolate fortune and never married. She would have been at least seventy when Granddad took me, as an eight or nine-year-old, to be presented to her. He and I stood hand-in-hand at the side door of a big house. The door was answered by a tall, severe-looking woman in a black dress, who let us in to wait in a panelled hall, where I was struck by a strangely penetrating odour. When Kathleen herself came down the stairs, she must have been less impressive than the maid because I have no recollection of what she looked like. All I remember is that she was friendly and welcoming and led us through into a long parlour with French windows at the far end. While Granddad and Kathleen talked, I peered out of those windows and found I was looking down into a paradise of greenery. Over the terraced lawn and down through the trees, a stream was cascading over rocky ledges into the ravine below. I suppose the house was in Rosedale. It was like no part of Toronto I’d ever seen, and the whole visit was an adventure, including that sharp, oily smell.

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At the time I thought it was the odour of furniture polish, and it’s taken me years to realize that it was turpentine. After the conversation in the parlour, Kathleen conducted us upstairs and down on a tour of the house where, on all the walls, we were invited to admire her paintings, every single one of which depicted a bouquet of peonies. Kathleen Cowan spent her whole life painting peonies, became skilful at it, and, as far as I know, never tried her hand at anything else. Although I met her just that once, in the family there were always bookmarks and greeting cards with peonies on them, faithfully distributed by Granddad. Kathleen was to live on into her eighties, still manoeuvring her Oldsmobile through the streets of Rosedale, and still painting peonies. The sale of the chocolate factory had freed her to enjoy life as she saw fit, and surely there was a Zen-like perfectionism in her having devoted it to the painting of a single kind of flower. When I was older, maybe twelve or thirteen, Granddad took me to see another of his chocolate cousins who must have been Kathleen’s brother. Although I understood nothing of it at the time, he would have been Herbert Norton Cowan, referred to in family documents as “H.N.” It wasn’t until I was grown up that I realized my father’s name, Herbert Nelson Cowan, had been chosen in an echo of the earlier H.N., Nelson being the maiden name of Granddad’s mother. The first H.N. had married late and had no children, so Granddad probably hoped that some or all of us would inherit money or property. The elder Herbert Cowan’s house was an even grander place than Kathleen’s, far beyond the lace-curtain stage. He had satin upholstery in the parlour and dark wood panelling in the dining room but did not offer us a tour. Our visit to him was a relatively stilted experience, maybe because I was old enough by then to understand that Granddad was courting favour for me. From our reception, it didn’t look as if that was likely to happen, and I hung back, waiting to get away. Granddad chatted with H.N. in the parlour while I tiptoed across the hall to peek into the dining room. I don’t know if any of my siblings were later subjected to a similar showing. It was obvious that the elderly widower who sat with us for a little while in the handsome room was not interested in Ed’s granddaughter and didn’t have much to say to Ed either. We said goodbye and left. Afterwards, no mention was made of our visit, and I don’t know when H.N. died.

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However, towards the very end of the 1960s, when Gran and Granddad were both gone, Bert received a phone call to let him know that Kathleen had passed away. There was no mention of her having left him anything, and Mother declared, scornfully, that all she’d bequeathed him was a very old German camera. Either Granddad’s hopeful expeditions to introduce his grandchildren to his wealthy cousins had made no impression, or Kathleen had run through her money, or, quite properly, she’d left it to the children of her other brother and her sister. They were her closest relatives, and Ed Cowan, cautiously polite but lacking in the entrepreneurial spirit that had made his uncle John rich, was a poor relation. As for Kathleen’s camera, Hector tells me she gave it to Bert much earlier, because our father was using it in the 1950s. Hector says it was an excellent camera for the time, and that he used it himself during his student years. I’d like to think that with it Kathleen photographed the shapes and shadows of her peonies –­ leading me to wonder what became of her paintings. Would her heirs have tossed them out? Crammed together in the same house they were overwhelming, but individually they were graceful floral paintings. If she’d known that I admired them, might she have left me one of those big blooming still lifes? If only, on the single occasion when we met, I’d had the courage to say something, but I think I just stared. I’d never met an artist, and those paintings were her expression of the creative adventure, her approach to dream and metaphor. Granddad’s loyalty to Kathleen was to a kindred spirit because, in his way, he was also a dreamer. Despite his very short time in school, his letters were written in ceremonious, flowing sentences. He was a lifelong reader of the poets, and when I was a teenager he gave me his big leatherbound edition of Byron’s complete poems. Towards the end of his life, he also presented me with two leatherbound collections of poems by the nineteenth-century American poets John Greenleaf Whittier and Mrs Felicia Hemans. Inscribed in the books are “to Edward John Cowan from his Aunt Jane, Christmas 1898” and “to Edward John Cowan from his Aunt Jane, Christmas 1899.” She’d sent her young nephew those books while he was working in Toronto, the Hemans volume arriving just before he left for Montreal. Clearly, he was leaving them with me for posterity, so I passed them on to my own nephew, Timothy Hilts, at Christmas in 1998 and 1999.

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The rest of Granddad’s creativity –­ including daubing polka dots onto the bathroom floor –­ had been channelled into practical things like carpentry and, surprisingly, knitting. As an adolescent, he’d had his right leg broken by a kick from a horse, and in the nineteenth century a broken bone meant being bedridden for months. To keep him occupied, his mother taught him to knit, and he became very good at it. Gran had never learned knitting, she’d never advanced beyond the crocheting of her afghans, but not only did Granddad read us stories and poetry, he also gave us beautiful double-knit mittens in two colours. If I have none of them now, it’s because we used them up. Heedlessly, we lost them or wore holes in them, and Mother threw them away. At the end of his life, Granddad took to making hooked rugs as well, and in 2007, clearing out my mother’s house, I stumbled upon the last of them, torn and dirty, out in the shed. She must have given it to one of her goats to sleep on. Made of brightly coloured wool, it depicted a cowboy on a rearing horse, waving his hat. When he was very old, on the verge of his nineties, Granddad shared with me a birthday exploit dating from the day when he turned four years old. His mother had given him his first pair of “cowboy” boots. As he recalled, they’d been made of red rubber, each boot with an appliqué of a cowboy on a rearing horse. “And I walked into a puddle with those boots on,” he told me, “and I watched the water come up and up, and I walked farther in, and the water got deeper and deeper and came up and over, and it ran right over the tops and into my boots, and when they filled up, by golly, they held water!” That would have been in about 1880. Granddad and I laughed together about the rubber cowboy boots that had held water.

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chapter seven

G oing to S chool

Towards the end of our first winter in the Kennedy house, I came home from a weekend at Gran and Granddad’s place with a purebred Persian kitten. He’d been sharing my bed in their back room and was meant as a gift for me. We had a longhaired tabby kitten called Buttercup, for the yellowish patch under his chin, so Mother named the new arrival Bluebell, for his fine cloud of blue-grey fluff. That seemed like acceptance, and I expected to keep him, but in our draughty farmhouse, Bluebell caught cold. He sneezed, and his eyes and nose ran. When Mother bundled him into a basket in the warm oven with the door open, he huddled in there willingly enough but continued to sniffle, and after a couple of days, she announced that he was too delicate. She handed him to Bert to take back to the breeder. Mother hadn’t been asked if she wanted another cat in the house, and my kitten required too much care. Since then I’ve wondered if Bluebell was rejected because he came from Gran, but what could I say? He’d been a surprise, I’d hardly had time to get attached to him, and protesting would have made no difference. I felt the cold draughts in the old house too but was tougher than Bluebell. I rampaged around paying no attention to the chill until

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one morning, searching in the snow-light of my room for something to wear, I found a floral print sundress. Up to that point, I’d felt no interest in clothes and never thought about what I wore. On the March morning when the dress came up from under other things left on the floor, it was new to me, and its colours delighted me. Finding the pretty dress was like stumbling upon a little piece of summer and, with winter almost over, I wanted to wear it. I wasn’t sure I’d be allowed to keep it on, but I so longed for the warm days of freedom that I pulled it on anyway over my undershirt. When I looked in the mirror, the effect wasn’t as summery as I’d hoped. The dress was sleeveless, and the undershirt’s flannel sleeves stuck out, but I went down to breakfast in it because I loved the colours. Mother took one look and laughed, “You go right back upstairs and put on something sensible!” So I had to take it off and put on an ordinary blouse and jumper. It was that floral print, however – after the blue plush armchairs and brocade cushions – that awakened my second conscious response to the sensuous message of colour. As with the brocade, it was the precise combination of colours, a mixture of blue, green, turquoise, and mauve, maybe with a dash of pink or ochre, which touched me. Their appeal was almost physical. Even today, when I come across those tones, I feel their magic. And although Mother said I could wear the dress when summer came, I never saw it again. By the time the weather warmed up, it had gone back into the tangle and vanished. • As our second spring in the Kennedy house opened to a second lovely, heedless summer, I forgot about the sundress along with the stresses of winter. The coming of warm weather, together with clean tap water, a toilet that worked, and a garden featuring slightly more vegetables than weeds, meant clothes didn’t matter. The fields were filled with the colours of real flowers. Forgotten by the grown-ups and happily oblivious of any other world, I was out foraging on my own, eating wild strawberries out of the grass or the flat grey-green seed pods of a plant that Mother called bread-and-butter. Along the bank of the stream, the willows’ silvery foliage had grown into a row of playhouses,

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and I hunkered under those, gazing down through the water to the sandy streambed. Indifferent as before to the dangers of the Fallises’ manure pile, I indulged in active dream play, dunking a collection of small plastic farm animals in and out of the stream. Sometimes I saw crayfish on the bottom. They were the same size as the plastic animals, but they had pincers, so I left them alone, and they left me alone. Or I wandered across to the Fallises’ pinewood where I peeled resin off the trees and tasted it. It wasn’t good, and afterwards I couldn’t get it off my fingers. I’d drift back to the slope behind the house where the Queen Anne’s lace was blooming in the scrubby grass. With sticky fingers, I pulled apart its lacy umbel clusters, so flat and white and delicately spread. I wasn’t ready yet to wonder who Queen Anne had been or why her lace was growing in the field, but I was intrigued by the dark purple floweret in the centre. Why was there one miniature cluster of tiny purple petals surrounded by white ones? There had to be a reason. I picked the purple part out to sniff and examine it, but it smelled just like the white parts. Moving on, I compared the torn purple centre to the centres of other blossoms, finding them all the same. Still not satisfied, still grappling with notions of inexpressible value, I wandered on. The Queen Anne’s lace was a question that could wait. I know that I did have dolls, and I’m sure I must have played with them. Some of them were lying around upstairs, in states of undress and dismemberment, throughout the years that we lived in Dixie, but I don’t recall their individual identities. The only name I can come up with is “Punkinhead,” and recently I’ve learned that Punkinhead was an Eaton’s original now valued by collectors. He was a rubbery, genderless entity with a head that featured some ill-defined grooves meant to be seen as tousled hair. The paint soon wore off his surfaces and he lost what little appeal he had. But now Hector claims that Punkinhead was his. What’s more, when I mentioned Punkinhead to Doris she laughed and told me to ask Paul about him. So I did, and Paul revealed that at the age of three, as he was cuddling Punkinhead and babbling his innermost secrets to him, Doris, then seven, decided that she’d heard enough. She snatched the toy away, ripped off its head, and tossed both head and body into the stream. Paul confesses that he was “dreadfully affected” by the attack. It remains his second

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earliest memory, he says, the first being of the day the pressure cooker blew its lid and made a dent in the kitchen ceiling. I remember the pressure cooker exploding but had never known how Punkinhead met his end. Nor had I realized that he was a plaything for general punishment, having been passed on down to be bounced, thwacked, and loved by all of us. Most touching of all, Hector refuses to believe that Punkinead finished in the stream, insisting that the toy belonged to him, and that he was still with us when we left the Kennedy house. If I didn’t know what the younger ones were doing to Punkinhead, it was because I was outside exploring. That summer a city friend of Mother’s offered her several pairs of roller skates, which Mother handed to Doris and me, not offering any instruction, and simply forbidding us to wear them in the house. I don’t know what Doris did with hers, but I was interested because these were wheels and wheels meant transportation. The skates were the old-fashioned four-wheeled metal kind that strapped on over ordinary shoes, and I buckled them up. I stood up and struggled across the sandy parking area to the driveway, which was gravel. The challenge was to skate along the hardened parts where the tires of the car had bared some packed earth, but the surface wasn’t good enough. None of it was really flat, and there were sandy hollows and bits of gravel everywhere. I couldn’t get up any speed. The skates were also impossible on the gravel road in front of the house. Not giving up, I tried them on the boards of the veranda, but that was like a corduroy road. The space was narrow and the transverse boards were buckled and bumpy. As a last resort, I tried the skates on the lawn, where the grass wound itself in around the wheels until they jammed. In the country, roller skates were good for nothing, so I forgot about them. The city and all its values were receding into the past anyway, and I wonder why Mother even gave us the skates. When I was trying all the time to understand what worked and what didn’t, or what was or wasn’t real, the skates did not work. In the evenings, at bedtime, I was offered a different kind of puzzle when Mother read to us from a book entitled Half-Past Bedtime. Written by someone called H.H. Bashford and published in England in 1922, it’s a collection of fourteen sober, serious children’s stories with a base note of the marvellous: pathos, psychological truth, miracle, and redemption. The formal, black-and-white line drawings

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are beautiful and visually authoritative. I was beguiled by the oldfashioned British world that framed the stories, encompassing as they did the empires, both Roman and British, from antiquity to the 1920s and from rural England to distant colonial ports or the Arctic or the tropics. Here was a universe beyond my experience, whose characters moved within a social and cultural structure unlike anything I’d ever known. The stories offered seemingly unassailable assumptions against which individual values might be measured. The children in them were genuine, flawed human individuals, but they were learning the rules of an established order. Their milieu provided them with clear demonstrations of good and evil, as well as examples of how to respond. Impropriety existed. Good behaviour was an obligation. The characters were equipped with a defence of manners that we did not possess. Social class, which we had not heard of, was taken for granted, and the children in the stories learned that it was their duty to behave respectfully towards those less fortunate. At the time I couldn’t grasp – in fact barely suspected – that implicit message, so it, like other questions, was stored away for future examination. After all, having listened to and pondered the stories, we were part of that world too, weren’t we? But I couldn’t be sure. It didn’t occur to me that we were another distant colonial land, like India or Ceylon, yet the stories left me with a suspicion, maybe just an apprehension, that they were realer than I was. Unlike me, those fictional children knew how they were supposed to behave, even when they transgressed. I never knew when I was going to be yelled at and was just groping along. As for treating those less fortunate with respect, were the Grabuses or the Fallises less fortunate? Were they to be pitied? They seemed to pity us for not knowing how to farm. And what about Stevie’s uncle? Treating him with respect would be a big mistake. Retreating to the world of the grass, I crouched in its feathery privacy, plunged into the codes and symbols of my dreams, with roles reserved for the people and animals that I knew, as well as for invented characters. There were other children in the neighbourhood, like Stevie, but I wasn’t close to them. My best friends were animals, whom I saw as individuals. Buttercup, no longer a kitten but a suavely selfpossessed tomcat, was the most successful of our cats, talked to and petted. As the brief passage of Bluebell, his unlucky counterpart, faded

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into memory, other felines came and went. Not all of them were memorable, but there was one pretty kitten who was accidentally killed. Bert was seriously attached to his cats – claiming that he’d save them from a burning house before he saved his children – and this particular kitten had responded with lively affection. One Saturday evening, not very late because we were all still up when Bert pulled into the driveway, the trusting little animal ran out to him as he got out of the car. But it was nearly dark, and Bert didn’t see the kitten. He slammed the door shut on him, killing him instantly. And as was so often the case, my father said nothing. It fell to Mother to let us know what he was feeling. She said that the kitten’s death was a shock and a tragedy and that Bert was very upset. I saw no sign of that, however, and wondered about my own feelings. Maybe I was supposed to grieve too, but if I didn’t show it, was I really grieving? I did feel pity for the kitten, but that was all. As for my father, he went upstairs and closed the bedroom door. Then, because we were in the country, Mother decided that we should have a dog. The first was an ugly whitish-beige puppy, who may have been a yellow Lab. Mother gave him the modest name of “Mud,” and tripping over him in the kitchen, she spilled boiling water on his hindquarters. Poor Mud yelped and squealed, and after that was uglier still. He did survive, with a patchy bottom, but happily for him he didn’t stay with us. I think he was relocated as a farm dog, and I hope he went on to lead a normal life. Other dogs came and went, but in our early household they had a poor life expectancy because both parents preferred cats. The sagacious Buttercup was to live on for many years, affectionate, independent, and uncastrated. He’d figured out how to deal with us. He was clean and polite in the house and wild outside. • Whether I was clean or polite were not questions that occurred to me, involved as I was in my imaginary world. By the end of that summer, I was a small, introspective animal myself, assuming that I was independent and taking my freedom for granted. At an age when I might have started trying to read, I’d been released into the outdoors, never suspecting the demands that were about to be made on me. But

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now my time was up. My early communion with the natural world came to a close when, in the autumn of 1949, I turned six and had to go to school. I hadn’t the faintest inkling of what awaited me. If school had been mentioned, I’d paid no attention until, late in August, Mother decided that I ought to get a head start: I was going to learn to read. As so often, the idea came to her on the spur of the moment and too late. I was at the kitchen table, drawing pictures, when she sat down beside me. She pulled my paper out from under my nose and started to print out A, B, and C. “Why don’t you start learning the alphabet? Look, this is an A. You just draw it. Do this, like this. Copy it. See? Show me you can make one, it’s so easy. After A comes B. This is a B.” I didn’t want to. I’d been read to, but I’d never tried to read anything. Surrounded by my parents’ books, I might have looked at the pictures – at least I was past scribbling on them – but had put them down again. Reading and writing I saw as part of the grownup world, and I was happy to leave it to them. Now here was my mother, who for a year and more had paid almost no attention to me, taking my drawing away and spoiling it. Her arrival at the table was an unwelcome intrusion into the autonomy of my secret world. For perhaps the first time I was being offered the chance to refuse her something, and I seized it. I wouldn’t look at the letters and wouldn’t try. Our tussle ended in a stalemate. The reproaches that she showered me with were nothing new. She couldn’t make me do it. In scorn and disgust, she gave up. Of course she was hoping that I would shine at school. She wanted the authorities to notice now clever I was, and she wanted me to be a credit to her, but I was startled and unwilling. All I understood was that for no conceivable reason she was interfering with my creative activity, so I resisted, stubbornly. That made no difference to the march of time and bureaucracy, however. On a Monday morning in September, Bert had to get up early. I was given a lunch box and a school bag and sent out to get into the Vauxhall with him. He turned right out of the driveway onto the Second Line, drove down the road, and turned left onto Burnhamthorpe while I sat tensely in the front seat, looking out at the fields. As we covered the short distance to Burnhamthorpe Public School, he advised me to take note of the way we were going and to

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remember at which corner to turn when I’d be walking home later in the day. Both the Second Line and Burnhamthorpe Road were quiet country roads, and he pointed out that the school was only a mile from our house. Since I was used to wandering around on my own, that part didn’t frighten me. It was the schoolyard and the school itself, large and official looking, that were foreign territory. Bert took me in to the office and did whatever had to be done to enrol me. Then he left me there. School was worse than a shock; it was an outrage for the undisciplined, unsocialized creature that I’d become. I was led into a board-floored schoolroom with wooden desks bolted down in rows and told where to sit, amongst children who were all strangers to me. I felt sick. The Grabus children weren’t there, and if Stevie Krajnik was at the back of the room somewhere, I didn’t see him. I didn’t try to talk to any of the others, assuming that they’d always been there and knew far more about school than I did. They must be wondering who I was and what I was doing sitting in their midst. I found a space under the seat of my desk and pushed my school bag into it. On the top I saw a round hole for an inkwell, empty. Paralysed with timidity, I took deep breaths, trying to settle the fluttering of my heart while I snuffed up the chalk-and-new-pencil smell that we all remember. The woman at the front of the classroom gave me to understand that I was to sit in that particular desk every day and that I had to stay there. I was not to get up and leave my place unless I held up my hand and asked permission. Imprisoned by fear of what the others would think, I froze to the spot, looking out the window. From that first day what comes back most clearly is having been sent outside at lunch time, to a sports field where I watched in astonishment as the others grouped themselves to play a game involving swinging a bat at a ball. I must have known that this practice existed, but I hadn’t expected to see it being enacted in front of me by the other pupils. I thought we were supposed to be learning to read. Baseball had been a distant phenomenon and certainly not associated with education. I was scandalized. In real life, a baseball game turned out to mean a lot of yelling and children running away while being howled after, viciously, it seemed to me. I was frightened and glad that I wasn’t involved. But then, before I could get away, I was involved, because they dragged me into it. To my

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terror and distress, they pushed me forwards while the others stared, laughing, and told me to swing the bat while they threw the ball at me. This was supposed to be fun. After hitting the ball, it was going to be my turn to run while they whooped and howled. It certainly it wasn’t fun for me. Hitting the ball with the bat was impossible, I could see that, so obviously the most important aspect of the horror show was to stay out of the way of the ball. But I was afraid to refuse and knew that I’d have to go through the motions, so I waved the bat vaguely through the air while the ball sailed past me. That was a relief. But what was I supposed to do next? Did I need their permission to run? Since no one yelled at me to do that, I stood there hoping that they’d let me go and was surprised when they did. Someone took the bat out of my hands. Another child was pushed into place, and they resumed yelling while I backed away, mortified. Secretly, I was furiously indignant. What on earth had this barbaric business got to do with school? What did it have to do with anything? Certainly neither Beatrix Potter nor H.H. Bashford had ever mentioned it, and I wanted nothing, nothing to do with it. I skulked off to the far side of the schoolyard and sat down in the grass at the base of a tree. I opened my lunch box and took out the sandwich and the little jar of milk that Mother had filled for me, with the top screwed down tight over a piece of folded wax paper. I’d never opened a bottle closed like that and had difficulty wrenching the cap off but did succeed. I ate the sandwich and drank the milk, which was tepid, noting that it wasn’t yet sour. So there was that much that was positive on the first day. Milk brought to school in my lunchbox was still drinkable. And after refusing, a week or two earlier, to learn the alphabet, I now had something more important to reject. Sitting under that tree, hearing the yells coming from the baseball field, I knew I was going to resist school sports with all the courage that I could muster. Forever. They were an intrusion and an insult, the domain of the coarse. Then the yelling stopped, we were called back to the school, and the teacher told us that since this was our first day we were being let out early, and I could go home. I had no trouble finding the way back along Burnhamthorpe Road to the Second Line. •

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Over the four years to come, making my way home along that road was to be among my most formative experiences. It was a rural route with a deep ditch on either side, beyond the ditch a weedy margin of public land and a wire fence, and on the far side of the fence a field, often with cows in it. From that first day at school, I’d been seen as different. I had curly, carrot-red hair, and although I couldn’t read, I used what the others thought were long words, so I was fair game for social exclusion. Other girls didn’t often speak to me. Boys chased me, teasing and shoving. They shoved me into the ditch. I scrambled up the other bank and walked through the weeds along the fence, getting burrs in my socks and skirt. There was an Ernie and a George, and there was Stevie, from across the road. Sometimes Stevie was friendly, sometimes he wasn’t. Getting home was a challenge, and, although I hated all sports and for the rest of my school years was to practise passive resistance on the baseball field and the volleyball court, wherever I was forced to stand and watch a ball go by, I did learn one kind of physical contest, which was fighting. I don’t remember feeling afraid or angry. The combats on the road were a practical necessity and a way of getting home after class. I stopped letting the boys shove me, and I stopped retreating into the weeds. Instead I kicked and elbowed and walloped and swung my school bag at them, growing bigger and stronger as the weeks went by and acquiring a longer reach. The school bag grew heavier too. During school hours, I sat at my desk looking out the window, and when we were let out, I fought my way home. When I got there, I beat up my younger siblings. My mother declared that I was a bully and brute. “Why are you being such a beast? You ought to be ashamed of yourself!” I was ashamed of myself, but I kept on fighting. I was rarely the big sister who takes care of the younger children, and sometimes I’ve wondered why. Maybe there was never any suggestion from Mother that I should help with the others. Was it because she didn’t trust me? They were her babies, and I was competition. Or else it was because I’d asked, from the start, when Doris was going back to her own mother. There was rivalry in that. Mother once boasted to me that when, as a baby, I had a tantrum – and she was a young and impetuous mother – she’d hold her hand over my mouth until I started to turn purple. And on the street, when I was a year and a half old, she used to walk me on

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a leash to prevent me from darting into traffic, a practice that seems strange now but which was done at the time. It was for my own good. She had to control me. My relationship with her had been a battle of wills from the start, beginning with the day of the pickled egg. Certainly I look like her and I sound like her. I’ve inherited her red hair and her face shape, although her eyes were blue and mine are green. But then I outstripped her. I inherited my father’s bone structure and grew to be taller than she was. And my mind turned out to be different from hers. She was passionate, quirky, and a little loony, whereas I’d inherited some of Bert’s mental resilience and retreated into stubborn privacy. I don’t remember having tried to tell her anything about my troubles at school. It wouldn’t have occurred to me. There came a day, however, when I decided that I couldn’t face it any more. Walking down the Second Line and along Burnhamthorpe Road between fields that I’d been free to explore the year before, I tried to believe that the whole experience was a nightmare. It couldn’t be real. It couldn’t go on and on like this. I scuffed along in the gravel so slowly that by the time I got to the schoolyard I was late, and everyone else was inside. That was worse. It was unthinkable, terrifying, that class had already begun. When I walked in late, they were all going to stare at me, and I couldn’t bear it, just could not go in there. I tugged a little at the metal-plated pull on the big door and decided that I wasn’t strong enough to open it, which was not true. I knew it wasn’t true, but I hoped that the door might be considered too heavy. With very little expectation of getting away with this excuse, I trailed back up the road, safe at least from pursuit and teasing because all the boys were trapped inside in those galley-ranks of desks. I took my time and dawdled along soaking up the late morning air and the birdsong and the scent of hay from the fields. An hour later I climbed the steps to the kitchen door. I didn’t really expect Mother to let me stay home, but I had to try it. It was wishful defiance, like going down to breakfast on a winter day in a sundress. When I opened the door, with no difficulty, and stepped into the house, the CBC’s Music in the Morning was coming from the radio, softly. It was peaceful in the house. Paul was a tiny infant, asleep in his bassinet. Hector, not yet two years old, was sleeping in a patch of sun on the kitchen floor. He had his thumb in his mouth and with his other hand was twisting a lock of orange curls. I was too depressed even to

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give him a kick and wake him up. I don’t know where Doris was. She was keeping a low profile, doing what she wanted. I was the only one being forced out into the world. When Mother turned around from the sink and demanded to know what I was doing back home, I told her the story about the heavy door. I don’t remember what she said to that. She may not have bothered to say anything. To my surprise, she walked into the dining room, where the telephone was, and called the school. While I hovered glum and guilty in the kitchen, longing for freedom, she went upstairs and woke Bert. After taking me to school on the first day, naturally he’d resumed his normal routine. He didn’t have to be downtown for hours, and maybe he hadn’t got home until three in the morning, so he was asleep. But rather quickly he appeared downstairs. Out we went to the Vauxhall, and back I went to the school. My father walked me to the door, opened it with a sceptical glance, and handed me over to the people in the office. They didn’t punish me. The school secretary had accepted the theory that the door was too heavy, and I was ushered to my desk. End of escape attempt. After that final act of resistance, I resigned myself to the educational process. • Looking back, it seems to me that my mother’s sudden decision to push me to read revealed her ambition for herself as much as for me. Her longing for me to be a source of pride may have stemmed from her revolt against Edith Annie, her own mother. Working around the house, standing at the counter or the stove, Mother was in the habit of providing a defensive commentary about whatever she was doing: “Now I’m just going to scoop this off the spoon with my finger and lick it … ummm!! Grandmother wouldn’t approve. She’d say I should use a wooden spoon, but this is perfectly all right! And it’s simpler.” My mother had been the youngest daughter and the fourth child in her family. By the time she was six, Grandmother Leonard – Edith Annie Weekes – would have been fifty years old. She wasn’t young, and maybe she wasn’t very patient with her eager little girl. In the 1970s, on my way back from France, I stopped in London and stayed for a couple of days in Wimbledon with my mother’s cousin, Frances Weekes Layton. “Cousin Frances,” as she asked me to call her, was the daughter of one of Edith Annie’s brothers, and it was she who

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told me that when they were all children together, Edith Annie had been seen by the rest of the family as an alarming perfectionist. I found that interesting because my mother’s impulsive messiness was just the opposite. And although I was meeting my cousin Frances for the first time, in her voice I caught the familiar tone of criticism and revolt that I was used to hearing from my mother. Alice and Frances both came from the generation that had thrown off the yoke of propriety in favour of an angry spontaneity and a love of intellectual confrontation. In that Wimbledon kitchen, too, I recognized the family tradition of clutter and thrift – unidentified cups and pots pushed to the back of the counter or the sink, some waiting to be washed, others holding scraps of food saved from one meal to the next. Blood is thicker than water, and so is domestic disorder. While cousin Frances chiselled the last shreds off a ham bone, she recounted how her father had described his sister, her aunt Annie, as fiercely fussy and demanding. And listening, I understood how deep were the roots of my mother’s revolt against her parents. It was more than a rejection of their obligatory churchgoing. Alice’s defensive assertiveness and her impulsive, sometimes batty, declarations about how things should, shouldn’t, or needn’t be done had evolved in defiance of the atmosphere of criticism that she’d endured from both her educated mother and her hyper-judgemental preacher father. In deciding to teach me to read, what my mother had been passing on was her own anxiety. At the age of six I couldn’t detect that, but I did feel her eagerness, which was enough to put me off. School was a punishment. In December when my first report card arrived, it was very bad. Mother was astounded. She pouted at me accusingly. She’d always been wonderful in school, good at languages, at history, at art, and science, and mathematics, at everything! What was wrong with me? She demanded to know why, when I drew a picture, I no longer drew a large head or face filling the page but instead a tiny figure lost at the bottom of the sheet. I looked at my own drawings in guilty surprise. I hadn’t realized what I was doing and could find no answer for her. Was it wrong to leave all that white space around my picture? This was something else that I was supposed to have known but had somehow failed to see. I backed away and stopped drawing pictures. I didn’t learn to read and nearly failed grade one.

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chapter eight

Pr ide and Pr uder y

My mother’s resolve to push me to read may also have had its origins in her own sudden exposure to Canadian schooling when she first arrived from China. We know that she did well and got high marks, but we cannot know what that success cost her in work and struggle. After the closure of their career in China, the Leonard family’s homecoming was no doubt a discouraging comedown, and Alice’s disappointed parents may have passed their stress on to their children. If the couple chose to settle in southwestern Ontario, it would have been because Grandmother’s roots were there. Edith Annie had extended family in the region, where her brothers were professionals. However, the secure position of the other Weekeses could only have made the Leonards’ situation that much more humiliating. Thanks to the newly created United Church of Canada, Grandfather was taken on as a preacher and given a church of his own in Delhi. But as he’d done in British Columbia – although this time with a car – he travelled around preaching throughout a circuit of other southern Ontario churches. His career as a builder was finished, and he was never again to enjoy the status and authority that he had obviously relished in China. What was worse, in Canada in the 1920s and

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’30s, preachers’ families were poor. The Leonards had to live on whatever pittance the church provided, plus the money from the collection plate, and it was out of those funds that William Leonard was expected to support his lady wife and their five growing children. Having escaped the poverty of his childhood, Grandfather must have found it galling to start over. In his proud, bossy survivalism, I expect he lectured his children, blaming them for needing more than he could provide. By that time Grandmother would have understood her situation. The high-minded religious principles that had tempted her to marry the charming and forceful William Mark Leonard had failed to produce the moral rewards expected, and her own children, in instinctive, unavoidable revolt, shared her distress. My mother must have known that in order to free herself she had to do well in school. In 1935, while they were living in Fairground, Ontario, the family suffered another cruel setback when their house burned down. My uncle Wesley, by then a muscular adolescent, is said to have saved trunks and furniture by throwing them down the stairs and tossing them out the door. I have their dining room table and chairs now, and when I scrubbed them down to refinish them, I found not only blackened crevices but also dovetailed and splinted repairs, evidence of Grandfather’s joinery work after the calamity. The list of treasures lost in the fire, drawn up by him for the insurers, includes “Alice’s beads,” worth five dollars. That would have been a favourite coral necklace that my mother was to regret for the rest of her life but which wasn’t lost in the fire, or not exactly. During my childhood I heard the story several times. Alice ran back into the burning house to save the necklace and succeeded. However, when she put it down outside and rushed back in for something else, it vanished anyway, having been stolen by one of the onlookers, together with an amber necklace belonging to Grandmother and valued by Grandfather at one hundred dollars. My cousins Barbara Leonard and Alastaire Henderson both report that in later years our grandparents’ marriage showed signs of strain, and sometimes Grandfather was sent to sleep on the chesterfield in the main room. Grandmother’s reserve, which intimidated me as a child, may have been her way of covering up her unhappiness. Of course she would never have left her husband, but, with her brothers as witnesses

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to her predicament, she surely had moments of regret or even anger at the life she’d chosen and the limitations of the man whom she had married. It seems likely, too, that Grandfather had been grievously insulted at having his work in China cut short, and I wonder if the judgemental attitude that even I remember wasn’t an aspect of his bitterness. Moreover, the recently unearthed information about the end of his Chinese career, and the realization that he originally came from a rough-and-tumble background, helps me to understand the yelling and the scathing remarks that Mother treated us to as children: “Dig out your ears!” she’d shout when we didn’t listen to her. In fact, she was passing on the feisty attitude that she’d learned from her father, together with her revolt against him – until, that is, we’d drive out to spend a week with her parents in Delhi. There, finding herself once more within his sphere of influence, she assumed an artificial primness as a means of defending herself against a tyranny that she must have been glad to escape from when she left for university. • As a child, all I felt was an atmosphere of constraint. Seeing my maternal grandparents’ house as a secret kingdom, I was intrigued, and I enjoyed my visits there because of that air of mystery. While in the Delhi house, we were aware of living under a different regime but were never there long enough for it to become oppressive, and, as time went on, that impression faded anyway. I remember one summer day when Mother took us down to Delhi on the bus. She asked the driver to stop at a railway crossing that I’d never noticed. We climbed out of the bus and walked along the railway embankment rather than following the road and turning in through the underpass. From above, I didn’t recognize that ordinary looking white clapboard house. I had no idea where we were and gazed around. Where was the enchanted stone passage, gateway to my grandparents’ closed world? Surely we weren’t there yet. But Mother was scrambling down the embankment, through the bouncing Betsy and the black-eyed Susan, and climbing a wire fence. She’d already taught us how to do that, not climbing it in the middle of a section where the wire would sway and cut but by

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putting our feet on the strands where they were solidly attached to a post, so we followed her over the fence and found ourselves beside the vegetable garden on our grandparents’ back lawn. Oh. It looked more ordinary from that side. But compared to the Evans Avenue place the Delhi house still seemed enormous. Inside it was filled with quirky corners and surprises, like the little triangular platform overlooking the stairs from above, and which gave access to a window, or the long mysterious closet, curtained off like a stage, that we entered from the living room but which led through to our grandparents’ big downstairs bedroom. From that bedroom, we had direct access to the bathroom and a door on the other side of the bathroom that opened into the far end of the kitchen. The kitchen opened to the dining room and the dining room led back to the living room, in a circuit. We could tear round and round, and we did. The staircase to the upstairs bedrooms, which weren’t heated when not in use, was behind a closed door off the living room. That was special, so we played in there, slamming the door, climbing the turning staircase, and shouting down from that wedge-shaped platform under the window. On the upper floor were three small bedrooms with sloping walls. And on the windowsill in one of those bedrooms, I found an arrowhead that Mother said she’d picked up in a field long ago. I examined it and put it back. In another year, in a closet in another of those bedrooms, I discovered a red rubber douche bag labelled “Feminine Defender.” It had an appliquéd cutout of an armoured medieval knight on it, looking to me like the image that I’d conjured up of the cowboy with the rearing horse on Granddad’s red rubber boots, although I could not imagine what the apparatus was for. The nicest thing about the Delhi house was that it had windows looking in all four directions, with the lawn spread out on three sides and the green and flowering railway embankment filling the fourth. Wandering around on a hot afternoon, I explored the shady space between the house and the embankment and examined the tiger lilies that were growing tall and leggy there, dropping their shiny black seeds into the sandy soil. On the other side of the house, at the end of the lot, was a barn, and at the back the kitchen garden, closed off from the houses on the next street over by a row of scrubby trees. The garden was

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a productive food source, with beans, beets, potatoes, and tomatoes as well as raspberry, currant, and gooseberry bushes. A quince tree grew by the side of the house, and I was told that Grandmother made quince jam from its fruit, but I don’t think I ever tasted it. What I liked best was the big tin of buckwheat honey, which we ate on that homemade brown bread that had first attracted Grandfather, spread with strongflavoured postwar margarine from another tin. It tasted nothing like butter and I still like that kind of margarine and no other. Near the vegetable garden was the compost heap, final destination for everything from the kitchen slop bucket. I peered into that with disgust. Ugh! This wasn’t like the metal dustbin at Gran’s place for “putting out the ashes.” This was horrid. But in those days there was no garbage collection in Delhi. One summer afternoon I watched Grandfather digging a pit under the trees at the back of the lot. Its purpose was to receive all the noncompostable and noncombustible household garbage, and judging from the row of hollows, it was the fourth or fifth in a series, each pit shovelled out of the sandy soil and covered up when it was full. This hole was about four feet wide, eight feet long, and almost six feet deep, but Grandfather, by then over seventy, jumped easily in and out of it. He’d been digging those pits for years, and there may still be a trove of precious old bottles buried there, tinged with rainbow iridescence by their time in the earth. The trains rumbling past the living room window were a thrill because the whole house shook. We loved that. I waved to the engineers and sometimes they waved back. Once one of them threw us some apples. We learned to put copper pennies on the rail and go looking for them afterwards, smeared out to ovals by the passage of the train. Picking up the remains of a penny, I wondered what the weight of those big steel wheels would have done to me. It didn’t bear thinking about. There were other dangers too. Across the yard, the barn had a precarious little platform jutting out from the hayloft, and a snapshot shows the five of us, Mother and her four children (because my brother Graham was not to be born for many years yet) crowded onto it, smiling for Grandfather’s camera. Our perch looks risky, and I don’t remember how I felt about climbing out there, but looking at it now, I realize that I was scared. I don’t think I expressed my fear, though, and if I said anything, no doubt my mother pooh-poohed it.

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Did I ever see the Delhi house in the winter? I think so, but only once or twice. After the “X-mas ’43” picture taken of me at the age of three months, Delhi was generally a summer destination. The house had no proper basement but only a root cellar. Heat was provided by a gas space heater in the main room, and Mother claimed that Bert didn’t like to go there in the winter because the gas gave him a headache. On one or two cold nights when I do remember staying over with Grandmother and Grandfather, we carried an old-fashioned dishshaped electric heater upstairs. It had a glowing element in a copper reflector and a pointed wire nose to keep children’s fingers away. Anyway, it was during the summer that we had the time to go to Delhi. Our holidays meant that we were free to stay for a week or more, and on one of those vacation visits, Mother took me walking out into the country to look for a sulphur spring that she hadn’t seen herself since she was a teenager. When we found it, it had a yellowish crust around it, and it stank. “Pee-yew!” I said, while she laughed. On another summer stroll she took me with her to pick up a dress she’d ordered for me from the village seamstress. From the underpass, we walked straight up a quiet street to a neat bungalow with a green lawn, a couple of trees, and – right there on that ordinary lawn – a tethered goat. I’d never met a goat before, and I was delighted. I was also impressed when my mother walked over and petted the animal, which I think was a billy goat. “Why is he here?” I wanted to know. “He’s keeping the lawn down. See how smooth it is?” After that, I may have taken one look at the dress that Mother showed me. It was blue and beautifully stitched with smocking “all done by hand, she doesn’t even have a sewing machine!” but I turned away because I was more interested in the goat. And in fact I don’t recall wearing the dress, although I looked for the goat every time we went up or down that street and never saw him again. Farther along in the same direction was the swimming hole, at a bend where the Big Creek River flowed through the town. Mother told us that the spot on the opposite bank had been used long ago by a tannery, disgorging toxins into the water, but all trace of that was gone. Since then, the municipal authorities had dumped sand into the curve of the shore and had built two changing houses, one for

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women and one for men. I was timid about changing into a bathing suit right there on a bench with other girls around me and especially hesitant about changing in front of the big, suntanned, loud-mouthed women from the tobacco fields. Then one of those women showed me that there were other things to worry about. When a group of little boys was caught peeking in through a knothole, a hefty black-nailed woman charged out and grabbed one. Holding him by the scruff of his neck, she informed him – and some of the words she used were new to me – that the next time she caught him with his eye to a knothole, she was going to carry him down to the water, shove him under, and hold him there “till you stop kickin’.” I was as startled by her unexpected modesty as I was impressed by her violent coarseness, especially in combination, and I gave it some thought. It seemed that prudish women were not necessarily timid or fearful. A woman could be bold and tough and use swearwords, while still being very reserved about showing her body. On another swimming day, when Doris and I waded out into the river to where a rope with floats marked the safe section, I was touching bottom with no difficulty, but my sister, at four or not quite five, was half my size. She floated off her feet, and then she simply upended. I don’t know where Mother was, but she wasn’t watching. I saw Doris’s little bum floating away, head under, grabbed her back, and turned her right side up. She didn’t seem alarmed, and I didn’t think she remembered the incident, but she says she does. She tells me that she can recall having seen the surface of the water from the underside. Neither of us ever thought of telling Mother what had happened. • A group photograph taken in Delhi in the summer of 1950 shows Evelyn and Alice with their children, their parents, and their brother Wesley gathered in the sun-dappled shade of a tree on the lawn. Bert is in the photo, and my uncle Eric would be, except that he’s behind the camera – Wesley’s camera – taking the picture. What’s unusual about that photograph is that we’re all together. After the New Toronto period, we were never very close to Evelyn’s family. The Hendersons had moved to Ottawa, and we’d moved out to the country. When we

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were children, moreover, the age differences were important: Alastaire, Evelyn and Eric’s daughter, was younger than I was, even younger than Doris, while Jay, their son, was two years younger than Hector. But we were separated by more than age and geographic distance. The gulf between us was lifestyle and attitude. Not only was my mother the most rebellious of the Leonard children, but the competition between Alice and Evelyn, ongoing throughout their childhood and student years, had never been resolved. Instead, in that family picture, it takes on larger meaning. Alice looks pleased and sure of herself. This would be because, with four children – me, Doris, Hector, and our baby brother Paul – clearly she’s out ahead of her elder sister who has only Alastaire and Jay. But that was a result of the war. Eric had spent years in a prisoner-ofwar camp, and Evelyn’s babies could only come later. Soon after the photograph was taken, Alice’s sister did catch up, with the birth of Hildegarde and then Mark. Why my aunt Evelyn gave complicated names to her daughters and simple ones to her sons I do not know unless, like her sister Alice, she had a preference for sons. Physically, she was bigger than my mother, and in the picture, she’s a long-limbed, heavy-browed young woman with a look of brooding determination. What I see in her expression is a reflection of the disapproval that hung over Alice in her parents’ house, as if some of the reproach was coming from Evelyn as well. In a letter written to Evelyn in 1936, Grandfather shared his opinion of his youngest daughter: “Alice is breaking my heart, in that Hell called Toronto, she is only saved by our daily prayers for her, dancing is just the accepted thing with her, now she’s in the swim with the vampire life of a big City, she dances, she is of a jolly, clever, type, a fine entertainer, and I fear she is playing the part of a cheap clown, for those who want her funny tricks … I like to see her, clever, witty, funny, her poesy, is fine, her literary ability, and classic achievements are great, but what is it all, if she plays with fire of sin and gets burned, all her joy will crackle in smoke.” If we have that letter – which contains further remarks about the evils of the world, claiming that “rakes” with their “dirty jiggling business” would love to embarrass the preacher by “besmirching” his lovely daughters – it’s because Evelyn chose to send it along to

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her sister, adding a note down the side that says, “Terrible specimen, isn’t it? Please destroy it.” Her comment seems disingenuous, as if her real purpose was to pass her father’s message on. And Alice – “clever, witty, funny,” was clever enough to see that it was too good a specimen to destroy. The Hendersons were more conventional than the Cowans. They went to church on Sundays. They dressed plainly and eschewed luxury. Evelyn and Eric were to live out most of their lives in the same modest family house in Ottawa, with Eric working as a geologist for the federal government and Evelyn staying home to cook, keep house, and volunteer for the church. Unlike Alice, who was intuitive and creative in an impulsive way, Evelyn was rational and severely, even vengefully, down to earth. Was she envious of her little sister’s spirited selfassurance? How far did her negative judgement go? Was she hoping that we, the undisciplined offspring, would somehow come to grief as a punishment for having been allowed to run loose? Evelyn had strong opinions and natural authority, which my mother acknowledged. It was Mother herself who told me that when they’d both played in the university orchestra Evelyn was a much better musician. And Evelyn knew how to drive long before Mother did. As a child, I watched her changing gears in Grandfather’s juddery old Dodge, marvelling that she knew how. My aunt was intelligent but morally fastidious and, for unknown reasons, angry. Studying that long-ago gathering of redheads, I ponder the tensions lurking beneath the surface. I look at my languid sevenyear-old self, not entirely unaware, taking in some of the emotional climate but not yet making connections. I look neither happy nor unhappy. I was simply on the sidelines, waiting to figure it out, and expecting to survive. A little later on, when I was about eight, I had an unsettling experience with my aunt Evelyn. I was upstairs in one of the family houses, either in Delhi or at the Hendersons’ place in Ottawa, changing out of a bathing suit, when she came into the room and announced that she was going to change as well. And in doing so she made a point of walking nude in front of me. “In our family,” my aunt informed me, “we’re natural and uninhibited about our bodies.” What was that about? I didn’t find her behaviour natural. I didn’t want to see her naked body, and I was astonished and put off. By then I

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had discovered, whether in the changing house at the swimming hole or by glimpsing my mother’s body, that adult women had pubic hair, although I was still assuming that men were as hairless as the Greek and Roman statues of naked athletes in the Royal Ontario Museum. Knowing that grown women were hairy down there was bad enough, however. Being expected to look at it was worse, and its being natural did not help. That scene offered a message that I’m still trying to figure out. Had my mother been telling her sister about my reluctance to change in front of the others at the swimming hole? And did Evelyn take that as a symptom of something shameful? Or, in the contest between the pair of them, was she settling some other secret score? Both the sisters were in revolt against their parents, but not in the same way. • A few years ago, thinking back to the perplexing stiffness met with in Delhi, so different from the heartfelt affection of my father’s parents, I asked my mother if Grandmother and Grandfather Leonard had ever met Gran and Granddad Cowan. It was hard to imagine, and Mother told me that they had met only once, when she and Bert were married. The two sets of grandparents were poles apart, too different to have wanted to know each other. So I wondered what thoughts William Leonard, fire-breathing Methodist preacher, might have been turning over in his mind as he was forced to stand by, looking on, while his irreligious daughter was married in a perfunctory ceremony to a sceptic like Bert Cowan. Now, having read what he’d written to Evelyn years before, I think I know. He must surely have seen my mother’s marriage as a proof of his failure. That was a part of the subtext, anyway, to the photograph of the combined families gathered in a patch of shade on the summer lawn. Our missionary grandparents had lost all influence over their assertive red-haired daughters, and they knew it. Grandmother looks pale, tired, and resigned, while Grandfather, peeping over the group from the back, appears shrunken and glum. My mother, however, surrounded by her husband and children, seems calmly sure of herself. She looks as if she knows that she’s getting somewhere in her struggle with life,

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and it’s clear that time has favoured her in the battle with her parents. As I imagine it now, the simple antagonism against Gran, her palmy mother-in-law, was trivial in comparison with the break that she’d had to make with her own family. That was a rupture with a whole way of life and with the traditional pressures that had formed her parents. The psychological roots of those reached back for generations, far into the lost sufferings caused by a puritanical, egotistical religiosity.

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chapter nine

The L arger World

After the first shock, my years at Burnhamthorpe Public School coalesced into one period, not all of it as bad as the beginning. Thinking about it now, I realize that my brother Paul was born that year, a couple of weeks after I started school. By then my mother’s attitude towards me must have been sink-or-swim anyway, and with her fourth baby about to appear, she had no time to wonder how I was doing. She was worn out with the house and the garden and the two younger children she already had, plus the fact that her husband was coming home at ever later hours. At least her elder daughter was in school for a part of the day, under someone else’s supervision, and off her hands. I’m sure it never occurred to her that I might be having a terrible time, while as far as I knew the terrible time was the norm. If school was hell, that was what it was supposed to be. I endured it while it was happening, and when I got home I put it out of my mind. Hanging through the banisters one September afternoon, looking down into the dining room where Mother was ironing, I could see that she was roundly pregnant. During her two previous pregnancies, I’d been too young to notice, but this time I understood what the change in her body meant. She glanced up and saw me. “What shall we call the new baby?”

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“Paul,” I said, giving her the first name that came into my head, because there was a boy named Paul in my class at school. “Oh, Paul. That’s a nice, simple name.” She went on ironing, but she named my second brother at my suggestion, adding Edward as his middle name in honour of Granddad. So certainly I knew there was going to be another baby, but I must have suppressed the knowledge. By the age of six I’d seen enough of that sort of thing and was preoccupied with defending my escapist world against the encroachments of education. Fairly soon, though, a morning dawned when I found a strange woman downstairs in the kitchen making porridge for us. She must have told me that she was there because my mummy had gone to the hospital to have a baby, and, as usual, I avoided thinking about it. Having known that it was imminent and having been consulted about a name didn’t mean that I took it in with any willingness. What I remember best is having played with the porridge, which was of a consistency that I wasn’t used to, until it got cold and gluey and sick making. Because Mother wasn’t home, I was able to get off to school without eating it. That was an unexpected boon, but it was also indicative of the season to follow. I was on my own, and I was supposed to take care of myself. I don’t remember much about Paul as a baby except that he was large and fair, with blue-grey eyes, and the only one of us not to be a redhead. Out in the greater world, the rest of us were in the minority, while inside the family Paul was a minority of one. That distinction recognized, he joined the house’s population and was added to the lineup of younger children that made me a big girl and a back number. If I complained or made demands on my mother, I was pushed away and told not to “blubber like a calf.” Desperate for attention, sometimes in a childish rage, I shrieked for her until my voice cracked and my vocal cords hurt. She paid no attention. I was no longer a baby, and the others needed her more. As for Mother, after coming home from the hospital she was looking forward to getting back into shape. She’d had four babies and did not mean to have any more. Emblematic of her resolution was a favourite pair of white linen shorts that she hadn’t been able to wear while she was pregnant. It didn’t matter that summer was over; she went looking for her shorts. But she couldn’t find them. She kept on searching, and complaining, until the truth came out.

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The woman who’d come in to help during Mother’s absence had asked for a cloth to dust with, and Bert had let her cut up the shorts. Mother was outraged. He’d handed over her linen shorts? How could he?! Judging by her distress, the shorts had stood for more than a piece of clothing. They must have represented an image of glamour that she felt slipping away, and the fact that her husband hadn’t recognized or cared about them added insult to injury. For years afterwards, Mother’s grief at the sacrifice of her shorts took a place just second to her sorrow at the long-ago theft of her coral necklace. On the periphery of my parents’ disagreements, I pursued my own struggles, fighting on the road and squabbling at home. I’d become one of those children who are bossy in the family and fierce in schoolyard conflicts but desperately timid in the schoolroom. In front of the class, I was literally afraid to move. There came a day when, sitting at my desk, clenching my bladder, I wet my pants because I didn’t dare raise my hand to ask permission to leave the room. Somehow I felt I had no right. Mortified, I watched the urine trickle along beside the wooden rail that the desks were bolted to. But then the teacher, whose name I do not remember, made a great sympathetic fuss. To my surprise, she seemed to pity me and was actually apologetic. The school janitor was called in and arrived with a can of the absorbent green crystals called Dustbane, which he sprinkled on the floor and then swept up. All cleaned away. But of course the others would have remembered me as the red-haired girl who’d wet her pants in school. That unhappy accident only added to my difference and my exclusion. When a pair of new children showed up in class, both of them wearing hand-knitted woollen clothing, the teacher told us that they’d just arrived from Holland and that they spoke Dutch. But did they speak any English? At first they settled for saying nothing, and within a week or two they were responding. After that the brother disappeared into a more advanced class, while I made friends with the sister, who was my age. Her name was Meitje Limas, and the teacher called her “Mighty” Limas, so she was even more different than I was. Shyly, she and I stuck together for a while, although I don’t know what we could have said to each other. When she invited me to her family’s house, they welcomed me in. Her father made me a pair of carved and painted wooden clogs, which I loved. Not understanding that

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they were for gardening, I used them as slippers and clacked around indoors in them until they slipped out of sight. When I found them again some months later, I could no longer get my feet into them. The pretty painted clogs were too small, and they were unbending. I kept them, though, and still have them, even if Meitje and I had drifted apart by the time I’d outgrown them. At the beginning, when we were both outsiders, we’d had that in common, but Meitje wasn’t an outsider for long. She wanted to be like everyone else, and soon she succeeded in blending in, whereas I went on being myself. Some years later I heard that she’d changed her name to Norma. Being myself meant continuing to commit embarrassing blunders. During the first couple of years in the Kennedy house, my parents really did not have the money they needed to pay for essential domestic appliances – a need that must have been one of Mother’s reasons for renting out rooms – and she had to scrub our clothes by hand or have Bert haul the wash to a laundromat in the city. Once the water supply had been dealt with and a hot water heater installed, the next obvious requirement was a washing machine, so when my parents ordered one from Eaton’s, it was an important event. But then I was guilty of a serious faux pas. They hadn’t told me that they’d borrowed money from Gran and Granddad when they bought the Vauxhall, and I didn’t know that they’d promised to pay it back before purchasing anything else. On our next visit to Evans Avenue, I was delighted to share the happy news about the washing machine with Gran. Instantly, she turned on Mother. “What washing machine?!” My poor parents. Hoping to get away with it, they’d gone back on their word, and they might have succeeded, if only I hadn’t spilt the beans. Plainly, though, the basic wringer washer that they’d bought from Eaton’s and rolled up to the kitchen sink was an essential appliance. It was just my bad luck that I’d been a blabbermouth and, once again, a bad girl. Nevertheless, I was developing and improving. At school it was decreed that I’d passed grade one, even if I’d hardly done more than crouch at my desk in despair. Another summer came and went, indistinguishable from summers before and after, and another year of school. By the end of grade two, I was on my way to being a good pupil. I was learning to read and was recognized as smart. I’d grown

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taller and was hardened to the battles on the road. Although I did see a school bus driving up and down past our house, there was never any suggestion that I should travel on it. Maybe it was for a private school, or maybe it was considered an extravagance. At home I gave up fighting with Doris, who simply rolled into a ball and squeaked, and instead attacked Hector, who was soon big enough to fight back with energy and determination. Then both of us tormented Paul, who squealed dramatically. During our second year in the Kennedy house, and for some of our third, I was still happiest outdoors. The natural world surrounded me as I walked to school and home again, past green or snowy fields, and ditches deep with daisies or melting ice. The grass and the wind and the flowers were a buffer zone between the blank stretch spent sitting at a school desk and the closed culture of my parents’ foibles. At home, the family microcosm was the only civilization we knew, and our wrangles with each other were preparation for contending with the rest of society. Early excursions into the city were visits to Gran and Granddad’s house – where my parents were expected to give progress reports – or, before the washing machine arrived, laundry runs in the Vauxhall. However, that was our most primitive period. As time passed, and the larger world opened out, our life expanded beyond the rural. • At the beginning of September the whole family went to Toronto to visit the Canadian National Exhibition. After a stroll through the livestock barn, where I got to sink my fingers into the deep, springy wool on a sheep’s back and look into the coldly calculating eyes of pig, we proceeded to the midway, admiring the rides, carnival barkers, and junk food. I got candyfloss in my hair and discovered that the red sugar shell on a candy-coated apple made the apple inside it taste awful. I took in the message that the rides were frivolous and not worth the money and wanted to ride them all the more. I slowed to goggle at posters outside the tents advertising bearded ladies, twisted snake men, or tiny little people, but wasn’t allowed into those. Instead, we went on the Ferris wheel and the roller coaster where I discovered

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the delightful sensation of leaving my stomach behind me. Best of all was a wonderful merry-go-round called the Derby Racer where I rode a carved facsimile of a full-sized thoroughbred horse, rising and falling on a chrome-plated pole as it revolved to music. At the Toronto Zoo I stared into the long-sighted golden eyes of a caged lion who, looking back, appeared to be seeing right through me. Would he really eat me if he could? I wasn’t sure he’d even notice me. Moving on, I gazed up at a high-nosed camel, his lower jaw working back and forth, unconcerned that his coat was hanging off him in shaggy lumps. Once we embarked on the SS Cayuga for a day trip. The Cayuga was a summer lake boat that plied the waters of Lake Ontario between Toronto and Queenston, and I loved the whole adventure. Up at the prow, on tiptoe, and with my chin on the rail, I stared down into a big transparent wave cleaving smoothly back from the bow, then turned and ran the length of the deck to peer over the rail at the rear where the propellers were leaving powerful, swirling vortices. Barely bothering to glance at the distant houses on the long green shore, I snuffed up the exciting scents of wind over water, burning fuel oil, hot metal, and overcooked food in the snack bar. In the Royal Ontario Museum, I admired the colossal totem pole, huge faces with grim or grinning mouths that soared several stories up the middle of the stairwell. Climbing round and round those faces took me to the Greek and Roman galleries with the classical statues that misled me about men’s anatomies. Perhaps they did have a little carved pubic hair but hardly enough to notice. What was fascinating was that their marble bodies had the translucence of flesh, and their feet were especially beautiful with long, straight, well-separated toes. So did that mean that long ago, everyone had shapelier feet? “No,” said Mother, “that was the sculptor, he idealized the human body.” The whole museum experience, the stony floors, the sonorous echo fading to a hum of voices and a scuff of feet as people passed, peering into glass cases, aroused in me a new and exciting notion of time, which suddenly went back such a very long way. There was an intriguing odour as well. The ROM had a sharp, special scent that I took to be the smell of all the ancient, shrivelled, fossilized stuff they had in there. I speculated that it might be the odour of the Egyptian mummies. The one partially unwrapped mummy that I stopped

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to gawk at had blackened skin and teeth, dried brownish shreds of hair, and crumbling toes. Her feet – because I think she was, or is, a princess – were certainly not beautiful. Standing over her, I wondered how the echoing museum, with crowds of strangers trooping past to stare, could possibly represent the afterlife that she’d believed in. This wasn’t the pyramid she’d counted on. Maybe she was very, very surprised. For some reason, the rot-and-formaldehyde odour was particularly strong in the area of the basement coffee shop. It was combined with a stale cooking smell like what I’d noticed on the Cayuga, and I wondered briefly if it might be the smell of mummified food but then rejected the thought. In those days the ROM’s coffee shop had a back door that opened directly to a quiet little green garden in a bay of the big brick building, and as soon as we were through the cafeteria line we’d go out there, where I drank my chocolate milk without hesitation. On the grass, a few ancient Chinese statues stood watching over the picnic tables, and I ate my snack in the fresh air, away from the stink of sterilized decay, enjoying the benevolent gaze of those dignified stones. For a number of years, early in December we were taken to a Christmas party downtown. Doris says they were children’s parties for the employees of the CBC, and she remembers one that featured a full-sized adult human convincingly disguised as Mother Goose. During the festive season, we also went to the Christmas pantomime in the Eaton Auditorium, where I saw an actor whose name was Eric Christmas. I found that logical and wondered if he was brought out only for Christmas, like the decorations. Then there was the drama of the Santa Claus parade. It may have been Gran who took us to that, because the event is associated in my mind with the scent of perfume from her fur coat. I waited in the crowd along the curb on Bloor Street, my heart beating with anticipation. What made the parade seem important was the thrilling sound of trumpets and drums and the skirl of bagpipes approaching from far away. The music came closer, preceded by strolling clowns, acrobats, and animal figures, until the floats arrived, with the biggest and the last featuring Santa Claus on his throne. I enjoyed knowing that he was a fraud, and I enjoyed debunking him to other children whenever I got the chance. But that didn’t spoil the parade for me.

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Over the various Christmases, too, our parents took Doris and me to see different versions of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker, whether at Massey Hall or the Royal Alexandra Theatre I no longer know. The magic began with a muted babble of voices over the keening sounds of the orchestra tuning up, the scent of many perfumes, then the hush that fell when the musicians were ready, and the sparkle of jewellery from the audience as the lights went down. The music – real music – was marvellous, but so was the crowd. It was the whole experience that moved me – the people and the emotional rush of sound, followed by the applause. In the Royal Alec, where we had seats high up, the vertiginous steepness of the place was dizzying, almost as good a shudder as the Ferris wheel. We must have gone to the Royal Alec a couple of times a year because I have a clear recollection of the large, dark Victorian painting that hung on the wall in the upstairs foyer. Every time I went there, I looked forward to the disturbing thrill of seeing it again. Through the bars of a lion’s cage, a crumpled female figure in a white dress could be seen lying face down on the floor. The big cat, with an air of noble detachment, had one huge paw placed on her, while the pale, blurry face of an appalled onlooker could be glimpsed peering through the bars from the far side. What had happened? What was that girl doing in there with the lion? From visit to visit, I expected something to be done to save her, but the situation remained unchanged – except that after Honest Ed Mirvish bought and refurbished the theatre, the painting vanished. I’ve always wondered what became of it. • A different sort of cultural excitement was a royal visit. In October of 1951, I was among the schoolchildren who lined the road leading from the airport at Malton, waving a Union Jack for Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh as they drove past on their way into Toronto. I was interested in seeing a royal figure but barely caught sight of a hat in the open car. By 1953, however, the year of Elizabeth II’s coronation, I find that I’d become a little monarchist. I drew a crayon copy of the British crown, with its purple velvet and its big ruby, and stuck it into my scrapbook.

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That scrapbook, which seems to cover the period when I would have been seven or eight until I was ten, surprises me by the blandness of the pictures that I cut out of magazines and pasted in: animals, children in cowboy costumes, a Breck shampoo advertisement, and quite a lot of the cartoon children used to advertise Campbell’s Soup. Turning the pages, I find more animals, more cartoons – such as Li’l Abner and Daisy Mae – and a lot of roses. Then pictures of babies, more cut out roses, and more babies followed by succeeding generations of the royal family. I stuck in portraits of Queen Victoria, Queen Mary, King George VI, and, after them, two formal portraits of Queen Elizabeth II, as well as a newspaper shot of her with her children. Following the pictures of the royal family, for no reason that comes back now, I pasted in a magazine illustration of the three musketeers lifting their swords in a pyramid formation. That appears close to the end of the scrapbook, when I might have been almost eleven. Alexandre Dumas had not entered my consciousness, but the musketeers and the Count of Monte Cristo certainly had. After the British royals, maybe I was looking for equivalent figures from France. By the end of the scrapbook, my perceptions had changed. The last picture that I cut out and pasted in is a photograph taken from the fifty-eighth floor of a building in New York. The photographer’s feet are dangling out of a window over Fifth Avenue. Had that become my view of the greater world? I found the picture frightening then, and it still gives me the shivers. During the same period, my fear of the telephone surfaced. That was a fear of the unknown and also a fear of technology, although our phone in the Kennedy house was barely technological. It was an antique even for the time, a hardwood box with a horn-shaped bakelite mouthpiece sticking out on the front and a cloth-covered wire leading to a horn-shaped black earpiece hooked onto a pair of prongs on the left-hand side. There was no dial. For ringing the operator, there was a crank on the right-hand side. That venerable phone had probably been in the house since it was built in 1905, but my parents didn’t question its status. It hung on the dining room wall at the foot of the stairs because that was the most central location between upstairs and downstairs, and they had the service put into Bert’s name and used it. It certainly wasn’t intended for casual conversation, and it was too high up for a

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small child to reach anyway. Nor did it ring very often, except for calls from Gran, whose lifelong mission it was to be kept abreast of events and to keep track of her daughter-in-law. In her own house, Gran was properly installed for chatting. Her telephone was that heavy black 1920s handset that stood on the walnut card table in her front hall. She had a small chair set sideways to the table, with the phone book and her address book ready to hand. She looked up numbers, called people and businesses, and made enquiries. Never had Granddad put a telephone call through for himself. True to her early training in office procedure, Gran would find the number, dial it, make sure that she had the right party at the other end, then hand him the receiver. Unaware that I was following his example, I’d never touched the telephone in either house, and never expected to, until the day when I asked my mother to make a call to a friend for me, and she refused. She told me I was old enough to do it myself. But I was afraid of making that leap into the dark at the other end of the line. Even if I’d grown tall enough to reach the receiver, I was sure I wouldn’t know how. “Oh, don’t be such a ninny!” said Mother and stepped up to the phone and placed the call, which did involve turning the crank at the side. Was it the number of turns of the crank that produced a specific number of rings at the other end or did she speak to an operator and give her a number? I didn’t follow what was going on. When my mother put the receiver to my ear and went back to the kitchen, I had no idea what she’d done. But I needed to know, exactly. I was in a panic at being forced into something I didn’t understand, an early presage of what my first response to using a computer would be – or a cellular telephone, come to think of it. I was afraid the thing was going to make technical demands beyond my ability to respond. However, I did wait with the earpiece against my head, hearing ringing at the other end, until an adult voice answered. At that, too shy to ask for my schoolmate, I immediately hung up. Later, when Mother found out what I’d done, she pooh-poohed my timidity. I didn’t get through to my friend and didn’t talk to her until the following day. I never confessed about having called and hung up, and never mastered the antique telephone. •

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A different test was the struggle developing over the clothes that my mother made for me. Starting with the flowered sundress – which I don’t think was homemade – by the end of my first year at school my attitude towards clothes had changed from indifference to critical sensitivity. Most of our clothing, mine and Doris’s, was sewn for us by our mother. Today I might like the things she made, and belatedly I realize how hard she worked and how little she had to work with. Some of her creations were intriguing. In those postwar days, after one shopping trip downtown, she came home with an army surplus parachute. It was the real thing, enormous and made of thin, very light, natural silk, half of its sections a grubby white and alternate sections a bright orange. The orange parts were harder to recycle, and I’m not sure what became of most of them, but the white parts were used for making nighties and blouses. They were wrinkly and never very white, but they were silk – and I wore them only at night or under a sweater – so I had no complaint about those. It was the identical dresses and jumpers that Mother cut out and sewed for us that troubled me. She dressed Doris and me in rusts, greens, and beiges to go with our red-haired colouring, and I found the colours ugly. I didn’t want to wear homemade clothes, and I longed for things from a store. I wanted to wear pink and blue like other little girls, and being told that I could never wear pink – or red either – I saw as a deficiency on my part. So being red-haired was a handicap, and suddenly I was concerned about my physical appearance as well. I’d grown, but at the same time I’d become skinny, with scabs and abrasions on my elbows and knees and shins from climbing and scrambling and struggling with all the elements of the world around me, as well as battling the boys on the road. My face was freckled and my nose was snub. Nor had anyone ever suggested that any of this was cute. Instead I was given to understand that I was not to be conceited and that I should accept the way I was. I concluded that I was ugly, whereas Doris was pretty because she was small and round and cuddly. She wasn’t covered with marks from fighting. “She’s going to be a beauty,” Mother said to me one night, stroking Doris’s hair as she slept.

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Crushed, I crept away to my own bed and sobbed. It was true that Doris had a straighter nose than I had, as well as whiter skin, greener eyes, and lovely mahogany-dark red hair. But in my escapist dreams I was supposed to be beautiful. Beauty represented personal worth, and I needed a reason to feel valued, I needed it as a defence against the outside world. Mother heard me crying and came in to see what was wrong. When I confessed the reason for my grief, she conceded that I had “regular features,” but that was as far as she would go, when in fact she was pretty herself, even if I didn’t see it then, and Doris and I both looked like her and like each other. I went on believing that Mother preferred Doris, which my sister now contests. She says that when she was about five, walking along the street with our mother, they ran into someone Mother knew. This person bent down to Doris and told her that she was “a very pretty little thing!” “Oh, don’t tell her that!” said Mother, immediately. “She knows it only too well!” Doris was astounded. She certainly did not know it. No one had ever so much as hinted that she was pretty – or not while she was awake – and the thought hadn’t crossed her mind. Yet here was her mother suddenly and unexpectedly accusing her of being conceited and to a stranger and in public. She was hurt. So I was wrong to think that I was the only one who suffered, or that Doris escaped Alice’s narcissism. Our mother seems to have seen both of us as competition, and from a very early age. She preferred her sons, and she made sure that her daughters didn’t get any exaggerated notions about their looks. I hated my hair, not just because it was carrot-coloured but even more because it was curly. I envied a classmate named Margo Barry, whose family came from Quebec, because she was allowed to wear her hair in long, shiny dark brown braids pinned up around her head. My hair wouldn’t even hang down straight. It curled in all directions, always cut short because Mother chopped our hair when she chopped her own. She may have told us to brush it from time to time, but I have little memory of doing anything with it. I was yelled at to brush my teeth, and I did do that, but my hair was just there, riding along on my head. When I visited Gran, she’d tut-tut about what a mess it was. Upstairs in her big fragrant bedroom, she’d take the heavy old “French

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Ivory” comb from her dressing table and try to drag it through my hair. This was emblematic of her difference from and conflict with my mother, who scoffed at combs, declaring that our hair was too thick, and never used anything but a brush. Mother was right about that. Doris has the French Ivory comb now, and when I see it, I feel once more the clonk of its impact with my skull, getting nowhere. When the comb wouldn’t go through my hair, Gran resorted to scissors and cut the tangles out. She must have counted on its curliness to hide the mess of different lengths, and I was surprised when Mother would notice that something had been done to it. Most of the time she claimed to be indifferent to personal appearance, either hers or mine, so her objection must have been to the fact that Gran, by cutting my hair, had invaded her space. In the competition between mother-inlaw and daughter-in-law, I was territory. • The battlefield of childhood wasn’t all defeat and dishonour, however. A happy event was being sent to Gran’s for a week and coming home to find that Mother had decorated a bedroom for me. This may have been when I was moved out of the frigid sunroom, or it may have been when some of our roomers departed. I’m not sure how many bedrooms the Kennedy house had, but I do remember that my new room was a proper bedroom and that it had been painted in a pale greenish blue and had a new turquoise bedspread and matching turquoise curtains. Mother twitched the curtains closed, bathing the room in a mysterious aquamarine penumbra, and said, “Look, you can pretend you’re under the sea!” I was astonished that she’d done all this for me, and delighted. In my early conflicts with my mother, I was oblivious to her creativity until she surprised me with it. Perhaps she surprised herself from time to time with a surge of maternal feeling for her difficult, standoffish daughter. That spring, after taking possession of my new bedroom, I caught chicken pox and lay in the turquoise gloom feeling it heave and sway as if I really were under the sea. My mother brought me my meals in bed, and once I dropped a spoonful of jelly on the floor. Months later, hanging over the side and contemplating the big, humped old

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farmhouse floorboards, I noticed that the jelly was still there, as hard and shiny as an undersea jewel. Mother was better at thinking up special effects than she was at cleaning. One summer night, long after dark, she came upstairs and woke me. The younger ones were left to sleep, but I was invited downstairs. I got out of bed, followed my mother out into the deep country night, and found the grown-ups in confabulation in the driveway. It must have been very late because Bert was home and he’d brought a friend with him. At first it was black out there, but after my eyes adjusted, I saw masses of stars overhead. It was exciting to have been woken up and allowed to come downstairs in my nightie. The feel of the cool damp gravel under my bare feet suggested that this was important, an exception to the norm, and a special occasion. They told me to step up to a telescope on a tripod and look through the lens, which I did without the slightest notion of what to expect. But when I put my eye to the thing I saw a planet. It was real, it was close, and it was as round as the moon but with a different texture and different light shining down one side. I got to look for only a moment, and then it was someone else’s turn, but the moment was marvellous. Was it Mars, or was it Venus? If they told me, I didn’t take that in. But I grasped the excitement of exploration and discovery under the starlight. So it was true about the solar system. There really were things whirling around up there. I went back up to bed happy. Through the wall of my new bedroom, very late, sometimes I overheard my parents’ voices. Bert was home from downtown, and they were talking in bed, telling each other long stories, incidents complete with names I didn’t know, and punctuated with conspiratorial laughter. Not expecting to understand what they were saying, I was comforted by their tone of easy intimacy, hearing a complicity that was absent from their daytime exchanges. Maybe I did have a father after all. It was in those late night conversations that he and Mother sounded happiest, sharing their playful scorn at the absurdities of the world and other people. Around this time our nightly readings were from T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone, a surreal fantasy of individualism and revolt, set more or less in the time of King Arthur. It had the additional interest of providing a discussion that was both realistic and highly imaginative

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about what the distant past had been like. From that book I glimpsed the down-to-earth, day-to-day functioning of a castle, its relations with the village and the fields, what a joust really was, and how magic might be seen as a mundane, even a practical consideration. King Uther Pendragon, King Pellinore, Morgan le Fay, and the mysterious power of iron were conjured up with just the right blend of the said and the unsaid. The ugly duckling theme, that King Arthur as a child might have been called “the Wart,” appealed to me, and later on I was to read and reread the book for myself. That copy is still on my bookshelf, a secondhand first edition in a faded and battered state, with the original owner’s name crossed out and mine added in my mother’s handwriting. Mother sometimes mentioned an organization called Canadian Girls in Training. I never found out what the CGIT would have trained us for and didn’t know then that it was a United Church of Canada organization. Maybe there wasn’t one nearby, or maybe Mother wanted to stay away from her parents’ church, because I was sent instead to join the junior wing of the Girl Guides, called the Brownies. I went twice. The evening meetings were held in a community hall across from the school. A group of little girls sat in a circle on a varnished floor while the woman in front asked us to call her “Brown Owl.” In preparation for the activities to come, she told us that the following week each of us should bring something from the natural world for her to explain. At home, I poked around in my room and found a small fossil that I’d picked up from the crushed rock along the rail bed in Delhi. It was a chunk of honeycombing, its tiny alveoli smaller than a millimetre across, and built by some inconceivably ancient water creature to shelter its larvae, which had subsequently been fossilized in the mud. Or that’s what I thought it was. At our next meeting, I held it out to Brown Owl, watching for her reaction. “Oh,” she said, taking it from me and turning it over. “The wind did that.” She went on to the next girl while I put the bit of fossil back into my pocket and returned to sit down. Brown Owl had nothing to teach me, I decided. There was no point in keeping on with the Brownies, might as well forget about them. Was I turning into a little snob? Yes, I was. But did my mother care? When I didn’t go back, nothing was said. She may not have noticed. My chief regret was that I hadn’t stuck with the Brownies for long enough to acquire the dress, a

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little yellowish-brown safari dress with interesting loops and pockets. All I’d acquired was the Brownie neckerchief. With the arrival of winter, and after a soft, damp, early snowfall, Mother took us out onto the lawn and showed us how to make a snowman. We rolled a big ball of snow towards the centre, until it was too heavy to push any farther. We rolled up two smaller balls and stacked the three of them, packing snow into the cracks to cement them together. We scraped under the snow to find pebbles and twigs for eyes and nose and mouth – because Mother would never have wasted an edible carrot on a snowman – and we finished by smoothing and patting him into shape. All that week, coming and going, I admired him standing out in front of our house. And the following week too, after school, on my way to Margo Barry’s place in her father’s car, I looked for the snowman on our lawn. But where was he? He’d been replaced by a wonderful snow polar bear, huge, upright, in proportion, and holding a blue plastic fish in his paw. I was amazed and, for the first time, proud of my mother. She really was different. During school, while I was stuck at a desk and other children’s mothers were doing the laundry or making pies, mine had been out in front of the house working on a perfectly realistic snow bear, whose existence Doris confirms. She even remembers the blue plastic fish and states that it was hers. • Later that winter, if it was the same winter, there was a dangerous drama. As usual, I was at school and missed the excitement, but when I got home I saw the blackened wreckage of one of the blue plush armchairs smouldering in the snow on the lawn. Mother was in the habit of using the fireplace as a garbage disposal, and apparently she’d tossed something in there, set fire to it, and left it to burn while she went back to the kitchen. But again there were people renting a room upstairs, helping to pay for utilities. I never knew who our lodgers were. Different sets of people were there, and then they were gone. This family had a little boy not quite old enough to talk. Mother later recounted that she’d been working in the kitchen and had paid no attention when he toddled in and observed, “Fire … burn.”

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“Yes, yes,” she’d said to him and went on with whatever she was doing, even if he was repeating his message. Then out of nowhere, she heard someone bash into the house through the side door that opened directly into the parlour. Driving past, an Eaton’s deliveryman had seen flames through the window. He’d slammed on the brakes, jumped out of his truck, and charged straight in. He picked up the blazing chair, carried it out to the veranda and heaved it over into the snow, saving our house and everything that we owned. Whether the little kid had pulled something out of the fireplace or whether Mother hadn’t properly closed the fire screen was never clear. Nor did I hear that she’d thanked the Eaton’s man for his quick action. Did she offer him some grudging acknowledgement before sending him on his way? I’m sure she didn’t. At the time, it was just another catastrophe averted – but since then I’ve thought about how self-centred we were and how fond of making harsh judgements. In other families the newspapers might have been called, the Eaton’s man commended, and some sort of praise, or even a reward, offered for his heroism. But my mother did hate being caught out in any kind of mistake, whether it was leaving a little boy alone with a fire or setting an armchair too close to the fireplace. Rather than being grateful, she was annoyed with the Eaton’s man for having been so quick to play the hero and make her look inadequate. She downplayed the incident, claiming that she would have put the fire out inside the house, and why did he have to break the chair by throwing it so hard? Who’d left that side door unlocked anyway? That the unlocked door had allowed the man in to toss the chair out was beside the point. Mother was looking for somewhere to lay blame. All through childhood I was used to seeing her argue with male authority figures. If a lifeguard, an insurance agent, or a general practitioner tried to advise her, she was instantly resentful. What right had that man to try to tell her anything? She knew what she was doing. In her view, the brave, quickthinking Eaton’s man was just another member of the male universe by whom she did not wish to be judged. As for Bert, of course he was in the house during the morning’s adventure, but he was in bed, asleep. I imagine him under the covers, eyes firmly shut, resolutely ignoring the whole skirmish. Once the

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shouting was over and the Eaton’s man had been vanquished, I picture him picking his way down through the clutter on the stairs, looking quizzical and making some remark about the practical advantages of loutish physical strength, at least when faced with fire and flood, then serving himself a bowl of cornflakes – reserved for him, because he did not eat porridge – and swallowing his coffee before heading off downtown. Despite my mother’s combative attitude towards the opposite sex, I never saw her try to lecture my father about anything. She was clever, but she knew that she could not best him in debate, and he pursued his course unflummoxed by explanations or protests. I expect he shrugged off the incident of the flaming armchair and went on eating the cornflakes, which were emblematic of his privileged status. Mother had made it official that they were for him only, while the rest of us ate oatmeal, because he was a sybarite. She brought that word out admiringly, and, because it was new to me, my father became its personification. Sybarite, sybaritic, with packaged cereal as a luxury for the self-indulgent. Probably Bert did care more about his cornflakes than the furniture, and if the house had survived, well then, no problem. All’s well that ends well. I think I was the only one who regretted the blue plush chair.

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chapter ten

Literar y Proper t y

Over the five years that we lived in the redbrick house, from when I was five until I was ten, the neighbourhood around us was changing fast. The Poles and the Ukrainians weren’t the only newcomers, and they were farmers anyway, following in the footsteps of the Scots and the Irish who’d settled the land a century earlier. They brought less change to the local lifestyle than people like my parents – even if in our family the initiative was my mother’s alone – who imagined they were moving to the country when in fact they were spearheading a transition from countryside to suburb. They wanted houses with trees around them, and fresh air and flowers, but their move was possible only because the pioneer farms were being broken up and sold. All along the Second Line Dixie, building lots were being chiselled out of the farmland, and people were putting up houses for themselves. Some did it bit by bit, as they could afford the materials. They’d buy a piece of land, have a cellar excavated and a concrete foundation poured, put in insulation, water, electricity, and then, as a temporary measure, roof the foundation over with plywood and tarpaper, and move in. Up the road past the country store, a family was living in the basement of their future home. Because their daughter was in my

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class at school, one day I had a glimpse of the inside. To my surprise, it was like a complete house with a real kitchen and bathroom. The place was newer and neater than our house and much, much better than the upgraded cowshed the Krajniks were starting out in. That same fall, however, Mother informed us in a tone of disapproval that the man was a communist. He’d come along the road and put pamphlets into all his neighbours’ mailboxes. Being strictly fair, she did allow, with sturdy knowledgeability, that communism was legal. She conceded that there was a Canadian Communist Party and that our neighbour had the right to think whatever he liked. What she objected to was finding the pamphlet in our mailbox, which was intended for the Royal Mail. The mailbox wasn’t there for him; he hadn’t put a stamp on his propaganda. Probably our communist neighbour was an idealistic factory worker from the industrial belt springing up around Toronto, and I suspect my mother’s indignation had as much to do with his method as his opinions. In distributing tracts, the communist was proselytizing, seeking converts. Coming from a missionary background herself, my mother identified him, instinctively, as competition. If he was one kind of puritan, she was another. She no longer believed in God – if she ever had – but she did believe in socialism, and in those days my parents were supporters of the CCF or Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. Therefore, while Mother considered herself virtuously left wing, the ideologue from up the road represented a position that she saw as going too far. Her political coloration was just right, whereas our neighbour had overstepped the bounds of common sense. At school, I continued to play with the communist’s little blonde daughter, but with more curiosity, and for a while I associated communism with the practice of living in the basement. Across the road in the other direction, down towards Burnhamthorpe, a family named Calvert had recently emigrated from Britain. Playing with the Calvert children, I learned that their father had something to do with building planes – which of course we called aeroplanes. Mr Calvert worked for A.V. Roe, the aircraft factory that would produce the legendary Avro Arrow fighter plane, so he may have been an engineer. There was no contact at the parental level, but one mild summer evening Mother walked over to fetch Doris and

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me home from the Calverts’ place. They had friends visiting, and the grown-ups were sitting out on the lawn behind the house, having a drink, and enjoying the warm dusk while children ran back and forth laughing and rolling in the grass. I hadn’t noticed the brown bottles, which meant nothing to me, but when Mother showed up around the corner of the house, Mrs Calvert, no doubt wanting to be gracious, offered her “an ale.” Canadian usage would have been to call it a beer, but that wasn’t the problem. Although there was no telling what Bert was up to downtown, and in spite of that remembered scene from a Toronto liquor lounge during my babyhood, up to and during our country period Mother was still under the influence of her teetotalling parents. Her distrust of the beer bottles was the most lasting effect of her early upbringing. I’d never seen my parents touch anything alcoholic, and certainly the demon drink was the one area in which Grandmother and Gran would have been in complete agreement. “I can’t get it past me nose!” was what Gran once said to me about beer. In her opinion, it stank. So what I did see, when Mrs Calvert invited my mother to join them for a drink, was that she was too flustered to be polite. Her reasons may have been multiple. Maybe it was just the beer. Or maybe motherhood and social isolation in her farmhouse had left her feeling inadequate. It may even have had to do with the fact that the Calverts were English, Mother having once or twice revealed a streak of atavistic Irish resentment against the Brits. For whatever reason, she refused, collected us, and got out of there. “I didn’t know what to say,” she huffed into the night as we tramped back along the side of the road. “I thought she was asking me if I wanted a nail!” Her embarrassment left me pondering. Alcohol was supposed to be bad, I had heard that, but now it looked as if it might also be associated with a certain elegance, or a least a raffish prestige, and with the practice of receiving friends on a summer evening and sitting outside talking. In the Kennedy house, I’d never seen my parents receive guests. True, Bill Beattie had come out to set up Bert’s hi-fi, but that was a onetime-only occasion and not while the offspring were around. As for the late night visit of the man with the astronomical telescope, Bert had asked him out to our place because it was dark enough in the country to view the sky, and he left before morning. His visit had resembled

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the passage of a supernatural visitor one doesn’t get to see in daylight. The only result of that episode was that for the following Christmas Mother gave Bert an inexpensive telescope that, as far as I know, he never touched. Whatever social life our father enjoyed was carried on downtown while Mother stayed home with us. And alcohol, like the Calverts, must belong to the greater world. It was a social test and a sign of sophistication. We, the children, had made the first approaches, our neighbours had been friendly and welcoming, and Mother had blown it. • That my mother expended her argumentative opinions on her children was indicative of her loneliness. She had no one but Bert to talk to, and he didn’t come home until the middle of the night. Some of the time, although this cannot be known, her need for grown-up conversation must have taken precedence over sex. Young children never imagine that their parents would indulge in any such activity, and I hadn’t realized that sex existed. Instead, overhearing faint murmurs of discussion through the wall, I expected her to share what they’d been talking about. In the days that followed, I looked forward to hearing the stories that our father brought back from his job. In the CBC radio newsroom, Bert worked alongside the then popular radio personalities Allan McPhee and Max Ferguson, and he relished any chance to describe the ferocious deadpan gags perpetrated by McPhee who was seen at the time as an iconoclastic enfant terrible. One gleeful report was about the afternoon when McPhee noticed a bunch of girls being given a tour of the radio studios in the basement of the old Havergal building. Discreetly, he joined the group. As the young ladies gazed in through layers of soundproof glass at a wellknown broadcaster – a man with a beautiful voice but who was never seen by the public – McPhee pretended not to know him. From the back, he asked, insistently, who that man was, until someone provided his name. And only then, once he was sure that all the girls had heard and understood the name, did McPhee shout, “But my God, the man is bald!!” Bert, who always had hair, loved that one. The other prankster, Max Ferguson – “Old Rawhide” on the air – displayed a gentler and

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more nuanced humour. As well as the wry wisdom of Old Rawhide, he voiced the velvet-toned naïvetés of an imaginary “Marvin Mellowbell” who was passed off as a real announcer. Bert detailed for our mother how Old Rawhide and Marvin Mellowbell had got together to organize a tour abroad for Kate Aitken, the CBC’s cooking and home economics lady. Their proposed shenanigans had something to do with spiriting her into Tibet disguised as a yak. The stories seem childish now, but we were children, and we loved them. However, Bert’s role in the games played by his colleagues was as a bystander only. He was a bemused spectator to the guerrilla humour of his confrères, watching from the sidelines while they mocked the establishment. If they were wild, he was innocent. And he displayed the same light-hearted detachment about more serious events. One night he brought the Vauxhall home splattered with a pox of tiny red spots. Getting ready for television, the CBC was putting up a transmission tower. As it rose ever higher above the Jarvis Street parking lot, the structural steel was being painted in red and white sections. And the previous night, cans of red paint left at the top had fallen – or been thrown – down into the parking lot. One heavy can went through the roof of “the Kremlin,” the Victorian mansion that housed the offices of upper management. Others smashed several cars below. Since Bert’s Vauxhall got only the spray, he didn’t care. He took it as another of the mad cruel world’s amusing vagaries, cleaned the windows with a razor scraper, and left the rest. All this was passed on to us by our mother. But she had plenty to tell herself, and in bed at night, I expect she responded with the local anecdotes she’d already shared with us in the kitchen. The Fallises being our nearest neighbours, her best reports were about their goingson. First she told us that they’d sold their cow. Why, she couldn’t say. Unlike the Krajniks, they were too sensible to have tried pasturing the animal along the roadside, so maybe it was the price of feed, or else she was an old cow and had gone dry. A seemingly unrelated detail was one that Mother and I had both noticed: there was a punching bag hanging from the Fallises’ apple tree. The muscular Fallis son came out of the house every day and set to punching the thing, perhaps training to become a boxer. That meant he no longer had time to take the horse out, and Mother declared that the poor animal, who already

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had a record of truancy, was lonely. She claimed that when Mr Grabus had hired the brown horse that I’d followed through the furrows, and stabled him for a couple of days, the Fallises’ horse had got out then too and had gone up to the barn to visit. “Why didn’t the Grabuses just hire the Fallises’ horse?” Mother demanded, asking me, but not Mr Grabus. And now, with no activity and without the companionship of the cow, the horse was regularly breaking out of his stall, opening the stable door, and wandering off down the road. Neighbours kept having to bring him home. Mother predicted that if he wasn’t working or being ridden, he was going to keep on going walkabout. He had a reason for escaping, she said. He needed attention. The flock of turkeys that had taken the place of the cow weren’t really company for him. They were let out during the day – while he remained shut in – and they’d be gone by Thanksgiving anyway. For a few weeks, though, they stood around in the yard, gobbling, while the Fallis son hammered the bag, and the horse moped in his stall. For their part, the turkeys had given rise to a confrontation with a pair of Ontario Hydro linemen. It seems that turkey cocks react to red with the same rage that bulls feel, and Mother happened to be watching when the linemen pulled into the Fallises’ yard in a red truck. The Fallis son wasn’t home, the turkeys were out, and the boss bird was strutting back and forth, tail fanned out, refusing to let the men out of their vehicle. Mother laughed, painting her picture of two husky pole climbers afraid of a turkey. As she told it, they’d leaned on the horn for help. “They honked and they rolled the window down and they stuck their heads out and they yelled, ‘Hey, lady, call off your turkey!’” So Mrs Fallis had to come out and drive the feathered menace off. Listening to the story, I believed the part about the linemen but did wonder if the red truck could really have sparked the turkey’s rage. That same autumn, however, in search of pinecones and meandering along the slick carpet of reddish needles in the central corridor of the Fallises’ pinewood, I felt something stab me in the back of the neck. Ow! I turned around and found myself looking into the cold, mad eye of the tall turkey cock. He’d come up behind me and pecked me hard, giving me exactly the same treatment that Doris had received from the Grabuses’ rooster. Was it because of my red hair? It was a gratuitous, unprovoked attack. I ran away but later told

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Mrs Fallis what her turkey had done. She smiled and showed Doris and me how to gather corncobs – which were scattered around because that’s what the turkeys were eating – and throw them at the turkey hard enough to drive him off. We thought this was a great game and flung corncobs at all the birds with such energy that Mrs Fallis had to call us off. As for the Fallises’ horse, I never knew his name. All I’d seen, when the son rode him, was that he was a bulky grey draught horse with an arched nose and hooves the size of dinner plates. But then, on a day when I was home from school, I witnessed one of his exploits. Getting out again, he’d crossed to our side of the property line and discovered our garden. The barbed wire fence between us and the Fallises’ place had fallen over and was lying flat, deep in the unmown grass, so there was nothing to stop him. And no doubt he began, legitimately enough, by eating grass, but soon he reached the young lettuce. Mother went out to hang something on the clothesline, glanced around the corner of the house, and saw that enormous animal standing right on her garden, flattening some of her plantings and ripping up others. Well! How dare he? I heard her screech and ran to look. Her sympathy for him had evaporated. She flew across the yard in a fury. “Get out of there, you wicked beast!” The horse raised his head, innocently. He stopped chewing, his mouth full. Peeking round the corner of the veranda, I watched Mother grab him by the halter and begin tugging at him, all fourteen or fifteen hundred pounds of him, while he pricked his ears and looked mildly confused. “Come on, come on!!” The horse stood there. “Giddy-up!” What had he done? Slowly, he picked up his feet and went with her, which was a mistake. The massive animal followed my small mother back across the property line where the rusty fence lay hidden in the grass. Not getting to choose where he put his big hairy feet, he got snagged in the barbed wire, and I was treated to the sight of my mother tugging at him while he jerked and stumbled, unable to get his feet free. Did I laugh out loud? I didn’t try not to, while Mother yelled, “Oh! Silly beast!”

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Mrs Fallis heard the commotion and came out to restore order. She untangled the horse and led him back to his stall. At least he hadn’t stepped on Mother’s foot. And apparently our neighbour kept a straight face while she apologized about the garden. What little I remember about her is that she was a woman with natural authority. My mother had a propensity for getting into squabbles with the neighbours, but as far as I know she and Mrs Fallis were always on civil terms. Not long after that, however, the grey horse vanished from next door. The turkeys had been sent to slaughter by then, and I looked across at the lifeless stable with regret. • Another autumn floated past and another Hallowe’en arrived. By this time Doris and I were old enough to go out collecting candy, so Mother made costumes for us from orange parachute silk and black construction paper. I don’t remember if they represented anything, but with these disguises pinned onto our clothes, we wandered out along the dark concession line collecting goodies from the neighbours’ houses. We carried no flashlights, and our costumes had no reflecting elements or even anything light coloured. There was no adult with us and no mention of any sort of danger. We were just out marauding. “Shell out, shell out!” we yelled at kitchen doors all along the road. From here and there in the distance, other treble voices, also shellouting, echoed ours, and tramping the shoulder of the road in the pitch-black night, we met other unidentifiable goblins. But dressed in a flimsy silk-and-paper costume, with nothing warm on underneath, I was surprised to find that I was freezing. Up to that point, I’d paid no attention to the passage of the seasons. There was warm weather, and there was cold weather. So far it had been sunny during the day, and I’d been assuming that it was still summer, except that now I was shivering violently. Disappointed that the warm season had come to an end, on I went regardless, gathering candy kisses. Then, from far off down the road, I saw the headlights of a car coming and felt the need to run across quick. But Doris stayed where she was, on the opposite side, while I urged her to cross before it got there. It didn’t occur to me to tell her to wait until it had passed. “Run,

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run!” I called. She hesitated, and I called her again. I told her to hurry. The oncoming car was getter closer and closer. At the last moment she ran across, and she made it. I could have got her killed, and if I’m telling this now, it’s because I did realize that but only afterwards and with guilty feelings. The road was in deep darkness, and she wouldn’t have been visible until she was in the headlights. However, like the time she’d nearly drowned in the Big Creek River, I did not mention the incident to our mother. We lugged our candy home and ate it. It wasn’t as good as Granddad’s chocolate. The dense yellowish-brown toffee, its sticky toughness hardened into the twists of its orange and black paper, was sugary but also slightly foul. It had more than just a burnt tang; there was an aftertaste resembling vinyl or rubber. However, I’d shivered and hallooed for it, so I chomped on it until my jaw ached, at the same time wondering why these things were called kisses and why they weren’t very good. Surely kisses were supposed to be delicious? I’d had almost no exposure to advertising and was learning, slowly, that things weren’t always what they were cracked up to be. Hallowe’en candy, supposed to be the occasion for a once-a-year orgy of selfindulgence, was instead a dose of reality. My mother’s policy when observing eager pleasure or greed in a child or an animal was to declare, “He thinks it’s his birthday!” Most enjoyable things were judged to be undeserved, and the implication was that even birthdays were a bit gross. Maybe the toffee wasn’t really palatable, but it was all I deserved. Years later, Mother would laugh as she described for us how she’d never used corporal punishment because she found it cleverer and more efficacious to make us feel that we’d done something wrong. “I never spanked you when you were little … I used psychology! Instead of hitting you, I made you feel guilty! I told you that if you’d been stealing cookies, I could smell it on your breath. When I saw you running away, covering your foolish mouths with your little hands, well, of course I knew what you’d been up to!” It is true that we were never spanked. However, I don’t remember running away with my hands over my mouth either. Our mother didn’t always know what we’d been up to. Once or twice, when Stevie turned up with foil-wrapped chocolate dollars from his uncle, I accepted

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them. I hadn’t forgotten the strangely hot look that the uncle had given me, or the disturbing questions that he’d asked about my gender, but I persuaded myself that it was all right as long as I stayed away from the shanty down behind the store. So why should I feel guilty? Peeling the foil off the stale chocolate and eating it, I rationalized my doubts. The chocolate was second rate, and therefore eating it was only a secondrate transgression. Guilt was a constant companion anyway. When Doris turned three and I turned five in the same week, our aunt Evelyn had given us a pair of identical birthday cards, each of them depicting a lime green puppy with a rounded slot for a mouth and a bright silver dollar in his jaws. Doris’s dated from 1945 and mine from 1943. We were entranced by the gift, taking the big shiny coins out of the puppies’ mouths and putting them back again. They fitted in and stayed there. Mother put the cards away in the top drawer of a walnut bookcase that had been a wedding present from Gran and Granddad. It stood in the front room, just to the right of the door where the Eaton’s man would rush in to toss the burning armchair out of the house. Those cards, with their silver dollars, were in the drawer for a couple of years. At some point, however, I took them out to show them off to Stevie Krajnik, who happened to be friendly that day. And after that the silver dollars vanished. I couldn’t believe it. They’d been stuck so firmly into the puppies’ mouths. How could they have fallen out? I kept hoping that if I went back to the drawer and looked often enough, at the very back of that drawer or in the other drawer, the silver dollars would be there again, the way they were supposed to be. After all, the cards were still there, with the lime green puppies grinning emptily. It was unreal. How could such big heavy coins be gone? I don’t remember if I was the one who had to tell Mother that the silver dollars had disappeared. That part must have been too painful, because it’s gone from my memory. But to Mother, their disappearance was no mystery. I was blamed for having been stupid enough to show them to Stevie, and general blame was again distributed about the fact that the veranda door had been left unlocked. Retroactively, the theft of the coins made that a crime, and Mother told me that it was my responsibility to go across the road and get those silver dollars back. This was like being told to hit the ball with the bat all over again. I couldn’t do it. I could not go down to that

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place behind the store, and I couldn’t tell my mother why either, so I simply didn’t do it. After a day or two Stevie wandered onto our front lawn. “You took those silver dollars out of the cards in the drawer,” I said to him. “No, I didn’t,” he said. “Yes, you did.” “Did not.” “You have to give them back,” I told him. “I can’t,” he said. “My uncle threw them into the fire.” So that was that. The silver dollars were lost forever, and it was my fault. It was doubly my fault because I couldn’t confront Stevie’s uncle. Now I wonder why someone, maybe Granddad, didn’t go to a coin dealer and replace them. He used to buy lottery tickets from the Irish Hospitals Sweepstakes when lotteries weren’t even legal in Canada, so buying coins would have been right up his alley, but maybe he never heard about the theft. And after a while, Mother too seemed to have forgotten it. Going through her papers after her death, however, I found those lime green cards again, the puppies’ mouths still empty, and felt as guilty as I had all those years ago. Moreover, Stevie had worse than that to offer up. Three or four years into my school career, and depending on the season and whether or not I was on foot, I was still running a gauntlet of teasing and harassment in order to get to school and back. Some of the meaner boys would hop the fence into the field and pick up cow dung on a stick, then fling it at me. This didn’t happen often, and they always missed, but as they threw it, they shouted that I was a “Cow-an” – a cow, in fact. But Stevie was different. When he took up the stick, what he yelled was, “Dirty Jew!” I didn’t know what he meant. I ran from him and escaped. Was it “dirty Ju’” for Judith? This was another puzzle that I did not figure out for years. Mother eventually offered a reason for part of it. She told me that the Krajniks, who were Catholic, had spelt out the name on our mailbox and equated it with “Cohen.” They’d noticed that we didn’t go to church, whereas they, despite their poverty, were devout enough to pay for a convent school for their daughters. Putting their prejudices together, they’d concluded that we were Jewish. But Mother

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hadn’t heard about the taunting on the road, and she didn’t explain to me that Judith was originally a Jewish name. Nor had I heard of the central European history of anti-Semitism. If I wasn’t traumatized it was because I wasn’t Jewish and didn’t understand. The horrors of the Holocaust, still so fresh, were unknown to us as children. Even with the words “Nazi” and “concentration camp” buried in my infant brain, the full impact of their meaning would not rise to the surface until the late summer afternoon during my years at U of T when I noticed that the good-looking, middle-aged woman in the dry cleaner’s on Spadina Avenue had a number tattooed on her arm. Along with my fall coat, I carried out of that shop a revised understanding of the human condition and of individual survival. Having been chased down the road by Stevie Krajnik was only a minor insult. • By the time I started grade three, the school administration decided that I qualified for an accelerated group chosen to do grades three and four in the same year. This was surprising, considering my earlier performance, but I plodded along without knowing where grade three ended or grade four began. I barely knew who my teacher was because they all seemed the same. What I did admire, first thing in the morning, was their clear, authoritative writing on the clean blackboard. That contrast of soft white chalk on freshly washed black slate made the facts outlined seem crisply true, and if sometimes the list of categories for a subject appeared to have overlappings or redundancies, I observed them uncritically. That was our teacher’s breakdown of the facts, and I accepted it. If her English was slightly different from what we spoke at home – if she said “might” where I would have said “may” and vice versa, and used “sunk” for “sank” – it was an unexplained phenomenon. I gave none of it any thought because I was reading on my own and felt no need for help. The first full-sized book that I read straight through was Anne of Green Gables. Consulting that copy now, I find my own barely formed handwriting in red pencil on the flyleaf. The book had been a gift from Grandmother Leonard, but she didn’t write anything in it. Instead, I was the one who noted that it was to “Judith from Grandmother,

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Christmas 1951.” So I was eight, I was reading, and I wanted my book to be inscribed. Mother gave me to understand that Grandmother and she and I, because all of us were redheads, had a special connection to Anne Shirley, and I did not doubt it for an instant. I suspended disbelief and knew that Lucy Maud Montgomery’s book was my entry to a world that only we could appreciate. That skinny, verbose, whitefaced orphan in an ugly dress was me, clothes and all. So I wasn’t alone after all, and my case was not unique. At least one other red-haired girl had been as different as I was, as socially inept, and as given to escape into fantasy. The fact that I had both parents and a sister and brothers made no difference to my identification with her, or not while I had my nose in the book. At the same time, however, I was reading anything and everything. Books had turned out to be a better escape than daydreaming. We hear of parents who push or bribe their children to read. In our house the situation had come to a pass where Mother tried to get us to stop. She protested that she never had time to read, and she yelled at both her daughters to “put that book down and come and help with the dishes!” – which we did, but only because we had to. A tall stool was provided that made it easier for us to reach the sink, and a dishmop. The dishmop was fun. With it, Doris and I played a giggling game that we called “pretty little raindrops,” which involved whirling the dishmop round and round and splattering the kitchen with dishwater. We did get through the dishwashing but not efficiently. And once the dishwashing game was finished, I went back to biting my nails over my parents’ books, popular 1950s writers from the States, some of them racy paperbacks, whether I understood what it all meant or not. The intense link was not so much with the message as with the magical transcendence of print. I was entering another world and wasn’t concerned about the parts that weren’t clear. I skipped those and read on, chewing my fingers. “If you don’t stop biting your nails, everyone’s going to know that I weaned you too soon!” Mother shouted, and I tuned her out and went on biting and reading. The result was that in school, grammar and spelling weren’t much of a challenge. If I didn’t know the rules and didn’t try to learn them, it was because I possessed the language. I knew the answers, so the

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tests were easy, hardly worth thinking about as I filled in the blanks. I made no effort and still spent most of my time staring out the window. The multiplication tables were more difficult. I did have to memorize those and learn long division as well, but after that I stopped trying and took in no further information about arithmetic. Then one day, sitting in my school desk, I fell into a children’s adventure story that I couldn’t put down. That had never happened before. I pulled the drawer partway out from under the seat, propped the book in it, open, and was reading it over the side, surreptitiously. But just as I reached the crisis – in which the child hero flits along a beach, escaping from a band of pirates who are too heavy to cross the quicksands – the teacher caught me. I’d never heard of quicksand and was utterly absorbed in the fascination of it and the dread. Did sand exist that could swallow and suffocate a person? I imagined the terrifying struggle to escape, with every kick, every lunge serving only to drag the person deeper in. Shuddering, I didn’t notice that the teacher was dictating a spelling test until she was standing over me. I gaped up at her while she confiscated the book. Then she asked me to go with her. We left the classroom, and as she closed the door behind us, I caught a buzz of whispering. The others were sure that I was going to get the strap. Our classroom was in a semibasement across the hall from the school kitchen, a sterile place with stainless steel fittings and empty cupboards. The teacher – and I do wish that I could remember her name – ushered me in there and stood staring down at me. She had the strap in her hand. I looked back up at her, not so much scared of the physical punishment as the humiliation. Would it hurt? Could it hurt? How much could it hurt? I didn’t want to cry. I was never to find out because that was as far as my punishment went. The teacher must have decided that the strap was too drastic. Instead she asked me what I’d thought I was doing, reading a book in secret like that, and I had no answer. She said that I was supposed to pay attention when she was giving dictation. Didn’t I know that? Yes, I admitted, I did know that. Neither of us said anything about the fact that my spelling was almost flawless. So in future was I going to pay attention? “Yes,” I said, humble with relief.

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The strap disappeared, and back we went to the classroom where the dictation resumed. If the others thought that I’d been strapped, they may have found me stoic. Since I never told anyone that the teacher had spared me, she saved face as well. The only downside to the experience was that I didn’t get to finish the book about the pirates. I never saw it again and have no idea what its title was. I was years away from noticing authors’ names, so I was never to learn what happened after the boy hero made it across the quicksand. Only general knowledge acquired since then allows me to suppose that he got away, that the pirates were caught and punished, and that he lived happily ever after. The pirate story was an exception. The books provided by Burnhamthorpe Public School weren’t usually as interesting as Bert’s Rex Stout mysteries, in which Nero Wolfe, the fat and fastidious detective, had a fast answer for everything. That seemed logical, because it was a characteristic that he shared with my father. Recently I pulled one of those Rex Stout novels off my bookshelf. It’s a war edition on crumbly yellow paper, so it must have been a fairly early acquisition. Entitled Not Quite Dead Enough, it bears the following inscription on its flyleaf: To be guarded and cherished with all the respect and care which the owner – H. Cowan – has come not to expect for his literary property from his children. My father’s protest is undated, and that particular piece of literary property has no scribblings in it, so I don’t know which of us had damaged some previous book. The “H” stood for Herbert or his other identity, “Herb.” That’s what Bert’s CBC colleagues called him, apparently at his request. It was his doting mother who’d dubbed him “Bertie” maybe because that was what the Duke of York, later George VI, was called in the 1920s. So my father was Bert in the family while elsewhere, in journalism and broadcasting, he was Herb, a person his children did not know. Thinking back to what I learned from Rex Stout, I recall that in one of those novels Nero Wolfe ventures out in an automobile, which

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someone else has to drive since the man with the big brain despises machines. There’s a minor traffic accident and the car slides into a ditch. “Thank God!” says the corpulent genius in the back seat. “Why?” asks his sidekick. “Because the inevitable has happened and it is no worse than this.” That kind of deadpan humour was like Bert’s. I was also interested to read that Nero Wolfe had a habit of stirring caviar into his softboiled eggs. I would have liked to try that. But I never bothered to follow the convolutions of the crime that he was supposed to be solving, because that wasn’t what it was about. Rex Stout’s books were cultural information, so Bert was right, and they were literature. Moreover, if my father’s admiration for cynical, hard-drinking American detectives seemed surprising in the early years, later on it made a sad sort of sense. • None of us was ever close to Bert, but three anecdotes, two of them coming directly from Gran, may help to trace his development and his decline. The first dates from about 1920, when she was in the habit of putting him out on the front porch in his pram, for the fresh air. I first heard this from Mother, although I don’t know how she heard it, and recently Sandra has confirmed the story. Whether he was three-anda-half or nearly four has not come down, but Bertie was too big a child to be treated like an infant, and to keep him entertained, Gran would leave him the newspaper, open to the comics page. The result was that people passing in the street would look up and see a baby sitting in his baby carriage, reading the paper: the little genius. The second story was passed on by Gran herself. When I asked her if she’d ever ridden in a rumble seat, she paused. Yes, she said, she had, in my great-aunt Isabel’s Chevrolet coupé. “And it was so cold!” she told me. “I had your father with me and I had to wrap him up in my fur coat!” When I asked how old Bert would have been at the time, she thought for a moment. “Oh, about sixteen,” she said. That was how overprotected he was.

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The third story dates from many years later when, in my grandmother’s presence – being a bad girl again or maybe testing the waters – I hinted that Bert had had wine with dinner. Gran stared at me. She gasped in complete refusal to believe it. “Bert wouldn’t take a drink!!!” she whispered. Wouldn’t take a drink, as if such a thing would have had to be forced on him. It went along with her earlier comment on beer, that she “couldn’t get it past me nose!” What in childhood I did not know was that Granddad did drink beer, but in the cellar. It was my brothers who were in on that secret, presumably because one day they were going to grow up to be men, when they too would have to cache their beer in the basement. And if, early in Bert’s life, Granddad had shared that knowledge with his younger son, or even the offer of a beer, my father would probably have felt bound to adhere to his mother’s point of view. But later on, when Gran was dead and Bert had moved on into serious drinking, he made no attempt to conceal it, or not while he still thought he could stop.

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chapter eleven

D anger Z ones

The era of Bert’s British cars came to an end the year I turned eight. Like the Austin, the red-spotted Vauxhall had fared badly in Canada’s winters, and I was used to hearing my parents discussing its shortcomings. Besides being weather sensitive, it was too small for the bunch of us, and the result was that Bert traded up to a larger American car. Hector, not yet four at the time, confirms that it was a Ford – a 1949 Meteor he says, secondhand, and “with a flathead V8 and three on the tree.” That baby sleeping in a patch of sunlight on the kitchen floor was taking in more than anyone could have known. If Hector’s first word was “garbage can,” his second was “carburetor.” He tells me too that the first problem Bert encountered with the Meteor was yet another part that broke. The column shift lever snapped off in his hand. While the dealer waited for a new one to arrive, he lent Bert a pair of vice-grips. And at the age of three, Hector immediately understood the usefulness of vice-grips by watching as his father used the tool for shifting gears. When I first saw it, the Meteor seemed huge and sleek. Looking at pictures of the same model now, I find it bulgy, stolid looking, and not so very big. But it was large enough for a family of six people, with three children bouncing and yelling in the back seat, sometimes a cat

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on the rear window shelf, and the fourth and youngest child stuck between his parents in the front. As with its predecessors, however, the Meteor was not “our” car but Bert’s, because Mother had no driver’s licence. She maintained that she was able to drive just the same and recounted an incident from her adolescence when her father had forced her to drive some tottery old flivver across a flooded causeway – which she did, but in fear and trembling, blaming him all the way. “Then why did he make you drive it?” I asked. “Because he was afraid to drive it across there himself!” she declared. Not always believing her versions of stories, now, when it’s too late to ask what really happened, I’m speculating about that one. If the causeway was flooded, Grandfather may have decided to wade along the road ahead to make sure that he knew where there was a solid road surface under the water, letting his resourceful daughter follow at the wheel. Because she resented most things about him, Alice later forgot why she’d had to drive and remembered only her fear and her anger. Of course this is conjecture. The facts are gone, and what I learned from my mother’s story was only more confirmation that she hated her father and was unwilling to give him credit for common sense or good judgement, ever. There’d been danger involved, he’d made her drive his jalopy, and the experience was added to the things that she held against him for the rest of her life. That didn’t prevent her from wanting to establish a precedent about the Meteor, however. She was going to drive it, and on an evening soon after it arrived, she took it down the Second Line and around the corner onto Burnhamthorpe to pick us up from a children’s birthday party. I wasn’t present when she asked Bert for the keys, I was at the party, but if the car was parked at the house, he was home. And if he didn’t come and collect us, it would have been because he was unwilling to act as a “taxi driver” for his children. That was one of his many refusals, and Mother may have decided that his obstinacy was providing the excuse she needed. I can easily imagine her laughing at the idea of needing a licence for such a short trip, even if it was dark, and she lacked experience. So she came and got us, happy and full of cake, and in backing out of our hosts’ driveway,

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she knocked over their mailbox. We thought it was funny. But to her, it must have been a source of mortification. In later years Mother was to have jobs, take driving lessons, and buy herself a series of cars, but I don’t think she ever drove the Meteor again. On the other hand, the coming of a bigger car marked our passage to the kind of holiday that Mother had been missing. For her, a summer getaway to a lake was what a vacation ought to be. Her family had always gone looking for places to swim in the summer, from the mountains of China to the swimming hole in Delhi. A family photograph taken during the hot weather in Szechuan shows Edith Annie and her children gathered on the rocks beside a pool in a stream, with the Chinese forest behind them. A later Leonard photograph shows the extended family gathered in a group, up to their waists Lake Erie. Now we had a car large enough for the six of us to pile into and rumble off to a rented cottage, and the Meteor helps to date the period. Our lakeside vacations began in 1950 or 1951. Mother would have searched the classified ads for a cottage close to a beach or on a wooded lakeshore and called to rent it. Probably Bert’s only contribution was not objecting. For us children it was a new and adventurous pleasure, and two whole weeks were an eternity – as they may have been for Bert, if in a different sense. For him the two weeks were all the vacation time he had, and no one had asked him how he wanted to spend them. Mother was happy though. She was enthusiastic about packing the car with all the necessary food, drink, bathing suits, and towels. Paul was plopped into the front between the parents. Doris and Hector and I were stuck in the back, squabbling amongst bundles and provisions, and we were off. Naturally there were no seatbelts. They hadn’t been invented, but Bert’s sceptical view of human nature had made him a defensive driver, and we survived. The cottages we went to were all much the same, usually very humble. The main room would have a table with an oilcloth on it, some wooden chairs, and in the corner a sink and a hot plate. The shelf above the sink offered a percolator for coffee and a couple of dented saucepans. With luck, the place might have a thrashing, struggling refrigerator. There were usually thick white mugs and chipped plates, as many as there were beds. The bedrooms were cubbyholes with sagging beds crammed into them, two per room.

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The curtains were plastic, sometimes torn, and the screen door slapped shut on a spring. On the floor, the linoleum pattern would have been worn away by many seasons of sandy feet, wadded towels, and rolled-off bathing suits. But we hadn’t gone there for the inside. Outdoors, we ran barefoot to the water’s edge, waded in until we fell forward up to our chins, and dog paddled back and forth. None of us knew how to swim, but we thought we were learning. We loved getting wet. We loved the water in our hair and the sand between our toes. We loathed the weedy parts and worried about the snapping turtles we’d been told could bite a finger right off, although I never saw one in any of those lakes. Sometimes a rowboat came with the cottage, and I bumped around in that, rowing crookedly and waving the oars in the air while trying to see over my shoulder. If I shipped the oars and trailed a hand in the water, would a muskellunge leap out and bite my fingers off? That seemed less likely than the snapping turtle. Along the shore, we rummaged in the sand for coloured quartz, which never looked as good dry as it had when wet, and clam shells and interesting bits of driftwood. Looking down into the clear water, sometimes we saw live clams on the bottom, open until we disturbed them. Then they shut. For unknown reasons there was no question of eating them, and I wondered why. Time and again, I was troubled by the suspicion that my surroundings were somehow secondary to what I was reading about in books and that the world I lived in wasn’t the best version of reality. The inedible clams added to that impression. Was it because this wasn’t the seashore that there was something wrong with them? Elsewhere, I’d read about people gathering clams, steaming or baking them or making them into clam chowder, but apparently these clams were not suitable for that. Were they poisonous? I never found out what was wrong with them. Instead, we ate and enjoyed fried baloney, the circular slices of pink sausage meat clipped around the edges to prevent them from humping up in the pan, or boiled hot dogs with yellow mustard and bright green relish. We drank Kool-Aid made of orange or purple crystals dissolved in water and fruit juices remixed from frozen blocks of concentrated pulp. For us, the children, all that was wonderful.

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I didn’t wonder then if Bert enjoyed spending his vacation picnicking with the family, although he never swam. I rarely saw him put a foot into the water, except once or twice when dealing with a boat. Lakes hadn’t been a part of his childhood, Gran and Granddad being more inclined towards train journeys to visit family in Montreal or Michigan. The one thing that my father did know how to do was row the boat in a straight line. That must have been the result of his navy training. Otherwise, to get through the two weeks away from the city, he chose the most comfortable place he could find in the shade and read Fantasy and Science Fiction or detective stories, ignoring his offspring while we plunged and gasped. We were trying to get our feet off the bottom and float. Once or twice when I was small enough, Mother held me level in the water and told me to kick. I did try, I kicked, but I didn’t trust her. I was afraid she was going to let go of me, and that was exactly what she did. So then I floundered and swallowed water and put my feet down. Fed up with me, she turned away and left me to figure it out. When I succeeded in convincing myself that if I relaxed and straightened out, I might actually float, I did learn to swim. Or I learned not to sink while going through the motions. I never swam well enough to cover any distance and was discouraged at how little effect my flailings produced. Kicking with my feet and reaching with my arms were two different movements that I never learned to coordinate. Everybody knows, I suppose, either how to do it or what it feels like to try without getting it. However, I did love plunging into the summer water and feeling transformed, wet and sleek, always hoping to adapt to the other element by floating and paddling in about four feet of water. I’d hold my breath and put my head under to look down at my feet in the mysterious depths. Every year I wanted to believe that I was going to learn to swim properly. I’d keep at it until I was strong and fast and confident in the water, but the two weeks were never enough. When the vacation was over and we went home, there was only the creek, which was a foot deep and where we’d already been punished for wading because it wasn’t clean. Swimming pools, even public ones, must have been rare then. I’d heard of their existence, but I’d never seen one. •

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As for the sun and the sand, because we were redheads, for a large part of the day a beach was untenable territory. Sunscreen lotions didn’t really work, and at midday we could stay out in the sun for ten, or at most fifteen, minutes. Past that point, our skin started to burn. There was no question of lying in the sun to get brown. From our earliest childhood, Mother had yelled at us to cover up or get back into the shade, and a couple of blistering sunburns taught me the importance of respecting her advice. I was timid about exposing my body anyway, even before I started to despair about the deficiencies of my skin, and as I looked around and realized how much better looking the suntanned children were, I felt self-conscious and inferior. A suntan provided social protection, almost like clothing, and it appeared to confer ease and confidence in the water as well. Golden-skinned people always knew how to swim. Being fish-belly white did not mean that I could swim like a fish. And I was never, ever going to be a beautiful brown like other girls. Thus the sunny beach was a danger zone to be traversed, speedily, between the shade and the water. Once in the lake, I needed to be in up to my neck in order not to burn or be looked at but couldn’t go in over my head for fear of drowning. So I dipped and played at the lake’s edge, as long as it wasn’t weedy. Weeds gave me the horrors. My dream of learning to be a good swimmer remained a fantasy, and I settled for running into the water, splashing around, practising floating, and running back out. After getting wet, it was easier to retreat into the woods and look for raspberries. We’d had poison ivy pointed out to us, so we could avoid that, and if there were mosquitoes in the shade, they could be endured for a while. There came a summer evening when I was travelling through cottage country, alone with my parents. I don’t know where the younger ones were, and for some reason, probably an impulsive decision by Mother, we stopped at a roadside resort and rented a rowboat. Mother and I climbed in and sat in the stern while Bert pushed off. He stepped over us and took the seat in the middle, handling the oars with disdainful skill, then rowed a little way out onto a transparent lake and along the shoreline. It was almost dusk, and the lake was quiet. The oarlocks creaked and the oars splashed. Tentatively, I peered over the side. The water was so clear and still that I could see straight to the

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bottom, to the clam shells and ripple patterns in the sand. However, I also saw that those were seven or eight feet down, and I was terrified. That limpid water was far over my head, and it was right there, just beyond the flimsy wooden gunwale of the rotten rowboat. I’m not sure how old I would have been, maybe seven, and I had heard of life jackets, but I’d never seen one. The lifesavers in pictures were the old-fashioned circular kind, and certainly there were none of those in the clunky little rowboat. The more I looked over the side and sized up the situation, the more frightened I was, and Mother laughed while I snivelled. Oblivious of the muskellunge threat, she trailed her fingers in the water and exclaimed at its purity. “Look how smooth it is!” she said. “It’s as clear as glass, oh, it’s lovely, it’s beautiful.” I knew how clear it was. I’d looked down into it and didn’t want to look again. I was in a very dangerous situation and not one of my own making. I huddled on the central thwart, weeping and begging to be taken back to the shore. While Bert kept on rowing, making no comment, Mother scolded me. What was wrong with me, spoiling the evening, crying when my parents were offering me a special treat? What a silly girl I was. Finally I think they did cut the boat ride short, while I was lectured about my lack of appreciation for a charming twilight outing. But I’d hated what I saw as an unnecessary risk. If I’d fallen in, would my mother have rescued me? She would probably have told me to kick my feet. Would Bert have saved me? I didn’t think he’d know how. In later years, I would make the effort to face my fear of deep water, but on my own terms, and when it was my decision. Thus the whole question of swimming was another aspect of the not quite real. Could what I was doing in the water honestly be described as swimming, or was it just an approximation? Could I have saved myself from drowning by pretending to swim? This was another domain where my mother bragged about how strong and skilful she’d always been and expressed her astonishment at my incompetence. But I couldn’t help it. Even if I did love the warm weather and the clear lake water and the soft sand, and – when the sun had gone down – the velvet black summer night, I was afraid of deep water. I couldn’t learn to dive, simply could not go in headfirst. When I was older, once I did jump feetfirst into seven or eight feet of water and was almost surprised to find that I came up again.

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Swimming out to a raft or boat was an exercise in courage and selfcontrol, and I had to force myself. I knew that if I resisted panicking I wouldn’t sink and probably wouldn’t drown. But after passing that survival test I always splashed straight back to solid ground, glad to have made it. I still do that, even when getting back from the deep end of a swimming pool. Naturally it was also a question of interest and desire. During a similar summer outing, also in the evening, there was the episode of the pony ride. I was a little younger, maybe no older than six, because I was physically still quite small. As with the rowboat tour, I was alone with my parents, and in a summer entertainment park we happened on a place where a number of Shetland ponies were giving children rides. I had no hesitation about ponies. I wanted to ride. But when Mother went to talk to the man, he told her that we were too late. It was past six o’clock and he was closing for the day. Well! Mother’s ingrained reflex to confront men who made arbitrary decisions about what she could or couldn’t have kicked in. She argued with the pony man, and for once I was glad to see her standing her ground. She wasn’t going to take no for an answer. After all, she pointed out, it was a simple enough thing that she was asking for, with the ponies lined up right there, and there was no reason for not letting me have a little ride. Bert and I and the ponies watched while Mother harangued the man, although the ponies were being led away as she talked. At last there was only one animal left waiting at the rail, and Mother hadn’t given up. The man threw up his hands. Okay, he said, okay, he’d give me one short turn around inside the fence. Satisfied, Mother gave him a dollar, or maybe fifty cents, and I was picked up and set on top of the tousled little beast. What mother hadn’t reckoned on, and what I hadn’t yet learned, was how intelligent ponies are. That pony’s day was supposed to be finished. By then, the others were chomping feed in the trailer. And just trudging around the corral for one more circuit, he managed to convey a message of the most intense rage. He’d put up with all the kids he could stand in one day, and through his body electricity – his aura, I guess – he let me feel it. Fortunately, I wasn’t expected to control him. The man was right beside us, gripping the bridle with a huge hand and a very thick wrist. I knew that the pony was furious, and I also knew that I wasn’t really riding him. I was sitting on top while the man led

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him around. But I loved it anyway. I stored the experience away as a first lesson in how not to deal with an equine. Do not keep a tired horse whose day is finished away from his well-deserved supper. Here in Trois-Rivières, in recent years, going out to ride a friend’s tall, sensitive dressage horse, I asked his son to help me saddle her. Although the son had no interest in horses, he was willing enough to tighten the girth for me. But then, hard-heartedly, he carried a measure of feed right past the mare’s nose and dumped it into her manger while she watched. He was putting feed into all the horses’ mangers and he didn’t want to bother coming out to the stable again later. While I was adjusting the stirrups, she was swinging her head around to see where her supper had gone. When I tried to console her with a piece of carrot, the son told me I wasn’t to spoil her. Carrots were for after the ride. The mare looked at him, and I looked at him. The pair of us waited for him to leave, and, as soon as he was gone, I gave her the carrot. I also grabbed a double handful of feed from the sack behind the door. I held both hands under her nose and said, “quick, snork this up before he comes back!” So she did, not dropping a grain of it, and we went out and had a happy ride. Weeks later when, with the owner, I walked out into the pasture to look at a different horse, that mare came over to see me and followed me back to the fence with her nose in my hair. She hadn’t forgotten – because I hadn’t forgotten the angry pony. • The last year that we rented an Ontario cottage must have been the year when we went to Wiarton on the Bruce Peninsula. Although the cottage was on Georgian Bay, my memories from that vacation are not of the water but of the land. Maybe the bay was too big and too rough for us. Maybe there were breakers rolling in and we backed away from them. Instead, what I remember is the property that the cottage belonged to, because it was an eight-hundred-acre farm, and to me those acres seemed endless. The farm had its own little dirt road leading up from the shore, and we could stroll up through the woods, cross the asphalt road, go in through the farm gate, and up to the house to buy ripe tomatoes. Or we could wander the farmland, which was rocky,

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irregular in shape, half wild, and very beautiful. Interspersed here and there amongst patches of woodland, we discovered secret fields of long silvery-yellow grass warmed by the sunlight. In one of those fields I came across a magic place where an area of turf had been clipped down in a perfect circle. But when I called Mother to come and see, wanting to show her the fairy ring, she told me it was a place where a goat had been tethered to a stake and had eaten everything that it could reach. I tried not to be disappointed. I did know that fairies didn’t exist, but for a few minutes, studying that mysterious circle in the grass, I’d been hoping I was wrong. In another pasture clearing, Doris and I made the acquaintance of Chub, a big whitish-grey plough horse. If we knew his name it was because the farmer came with us and introduced us. He boosted us up onto Chub’s broad back where we clung precariously, hanging onto an inadequate wisp of mane while the noble charger stood there breathing and radiating horsiness. He was as broad as a warm, soft, living sofa, and his slick coat was smooth and flat like the sun-warmed grass. He smelled like the summer grass too, but there was absolutely nothing we could do with him. His close-lying horsehair was too slippery to hang onto, and our legs were too short to reach down his vast sides. All he did was give off good vibrations. The farmer may have led him around for a few steps before lifting us down again. On our last day at the Wiarton cottage, Doris and I walked up the bush track to the farmhouse for some tomatoes to take home with us. The farm gate was standing open, and five or six black-and-white cows were dawdling in and around it. A couple were in the farm drive, one was eating grass in the ditch, and the others were on the road. I realize now that those cows may well have crossed the road every day, on their way home to be milked and on their way back out to the woods pastures. They could have been heading either way, but they knew where they were going. At the time, however, I saw their presence on the road as a major emergency, to be dealt with by two little girls, one seven years old and one nine. Assuming that she was the lead cow, I grabbed the one wearing a bell. “Come on,” I said to Doris, “we have to get her off the road.” I pulled on her collar and Doris pushed from behind while the cow stood like a statue. “Come on,” I said to the cow, “come on!!”

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This was more of a challenge than Mother’s attempt to move the Fallis horse, because that cow had no reactions whatsoever. She stood where she was, looking at nothing. She didn’t seem to have noticed me. The other cows went on grazing. I jerked at her collar again and leaned with all my weight in the direction I wanted to lead her. Nothing happened. I pulled again. Still nothing. I leaned and jerked until finally, like a seismic shift, the cow’s centre of gravity slowly, almost imperceptibly, began to ooze forwards. Like some geological feature about to collapse, a landslide or the sheering off of an iceberg, she was moving – until a hoof came out in front and propped her against the fall. It happened so slowly that at first I didn’t believe it. But a moment later, her other front hoof moved forwards. Amazing! The cow had got the message. She’d responded, and I was leading her! Tremendously pleased, I took her in through the gate, with the other cows following, and closed it behind them. But after that, for no conscious reason, I decided not to visit the family at the farmhouse. I told Doris we could forget about the tomatoes. We turned around and headed back down to the cottage on the shore, where Mother had finished packing the car and Bert was ready to leave. Since then I’ve wondered if my initiative with the farm’s dairy herd was right or wrong. Were those cows in danger? Maybe they crossed the road by themselves all the time. The farmer may have found the cows he’d sent out to pasture back in the yard. Anyway, our vacation was over. The whole gaggle of us climbed into the Meteor and got on the road for home. • Mother’s favourite warning about the dangers of traffic was “if you run out onto the road and a car hits you, there’ll be nothing left of you but a little grease spot!” I was past believing that. I knew it was a euphemism. The grease-spot theory might have been more believable if I hadn’t seen what a locomotive could do to a penny. Anyone mashed by a heavy vehicle was going to be much, much messier than a grease spot – and what would be left of a cow did not bear thinking about. Like all country children, I had some awareness of death. The decapitated chicken left by Mr Grabus on our doormat hardly counted,

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but I hadn’t forgotten the kitten that Bert had killed in the car door. I knew that farm animals, like Mrs Fallis’s turkeys, eventually went to slaughter, and I tried not to think about where the grey horse might have gone. From time to time, we had to avert our eyes from the corpse of an animal that had been hit on the road. There was a whole week when, on our way to school, we passed a dead sheep lying in the ditch, its belly growing bigger and bigger, and its lips shrinking back in a rictus that revealed its small blunt teeth. We all understood what the smell meant. The first time I passed that sheep, I took one look and kept going, and for the following days, giving its stinking cadaver the quickest of sidelong glances, I crossed the road and walked on the other shoulder. In the woods too, I avoided any place that had an odour of decomposition hanging over it. That recognition of the vileness of death would have been what caused me to repress any knowledge of what had happened to our second dog. Fiddler Fee was a small black-and-white bitch, maybe with some Border collie in her. She appears in my arms in the snapshot that Mother took of the four of us sitting on the kitchen steps at the Kennedy house. In the picture, I’m holding her fondly. Like Bluebell, she’d been given to us by Gran, and like the cat, she didn’t last long. Fiddler had been a backyard city dog – Gran’s own dog, in fact – but after she was left in our care, she ran out onto the road and was hit by a car. And we weren’t told about it. All I knew was that she wasn’t there when I came home from school. Maybe I did suspect her gory end, because I didn’t ask where she was. Fiddler Fee had become a grease spot. With my first bicycle, the dangers of the road were not my main concern. The challenge was earning the money to pay for it. Where Mother had heard of a bicycle for sale, I’ve never known, but one summer day she announced that if I could save up enough from picking fruit, there was a bicycle for me. I was getting an allowance by that time, but it was only ten cents a week. And earlier in the season, I’d had a disappointing experience picking strawberries for Mr Grabus. He hadn’t taken me seriously, hadn’t paid what I knew to be the usual price per basket – although I may not have filled them properly either – but had simply put his hand in his pocket and given me some change that he found there. When I reported the incident to

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Mother, she exclaimed about the injustice of it without doing anything to rectify the situation, and I continued to believe that I hadn’t been paid for my work. That wasn’t going to happen again. With the prospect of a bicycle to motivate me, I walked down the road to a farm near the Calverts’ place where they were hiring people to pick tomatoes. I did remember that Mother had earlier warned me about that farm because they kept pigs, but I went anyway. I’d already seen the huge pig there, deep in the filth of its pen, and had noticed that the pen was built of very heavy timber. The pig was fed on discarded scrapings from the plates in a Chinese restaurant, and here and there in the muck was a little chinaware dish of the kind used for plum sauce. But Mother’s message was serious. “A pig will kill and eat a child,” she told me. “There was once a little girl who went into a pigpen by herself and all they ever found of her was one shoe!” Had the pig actually eaten the child and her clothes and her other shoe? I wasn’t going to try petting any pigs to find out. The farmer took me on, and even though I was only eight, I really worked. Over the space of about a week, I was part of a group who made their way along the rows filling baskets with the tomatoes that had turned red. We were paid by the peck, and this time I earned the same wages as the others. Picking tomatoes turned out to be easier than picking strawberries because they were bigger, and I enjoyed the work, but then the job was finished because the tomatoes were finished. I’d made something between six and eight dollars. The bicycle cost twelve, so Mother made up the difference and the machine appeared. However, the bicycle wasn’t what I’d expected. It turned out to be a full-sized lady’s bike, tall and dark blue with a thin gold line accentuating its slightly battered fenders – and almost as old as Bert’s Durant. It had no gears, and the brakes were coaster brakes. The chain guard also had a thin gold line, as did the deep, curving frame originally designed to accommodate a long skirt. Mother took a wrench and lowered the seat as far as it would go, but still I couldn’t reach the pedals. “Oh well,” she said, “you’ll just have to ride it on the pedals for the time being.” “Ride it on the pedals?” I didn’t understand. Learning to ride it was going to be a challenge. “Yes, just stand up on the pedals and push them round that way.”

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So that was what I did. I learned to ride by lunging up and down on the pedals of a bicycle that was too big for me, with the point of the seat hitting me in the small of the back. For a week I bumped and toppled around on the lawn, falling, hurting myself, giving up for a while, and going back to try again. Remembering the roller skates and how they’d tangled and tripped in the grass, I reasoned that with the bike at least it should be possible. The wheels did turn, so I kept at it. Falling on the grass didn’t hurt, it was only when I hit some part of the bike that I got a bruise, and figuring out how to avoid hitting the frame with my shins was part of the learning process. It was less intimidating than the telephone because it was just me against the machine, with no other person involved, and by the end of a week I was able to ride it. I was provided with a bicycle lock and a chain, and I had transportation, I possessed independent mobility. I floundered back and forth to school, up and down on the pedals, and the teasing boys couldn’t catch me. Nor do I remember anyone laughing at the cumbersome old bike. Either I was too happy to notice or, in the cash-strapped postwar period, other children were riding similar velocipedes. But the first time I rode it into the turn from the Second Line onto Burnhamthorpe Road without slowing for the triangular deposit of gravel in the intersection, the wheels slid out from under me, and I fell hard onto the crushed rock. I was shaken and bloodied a knee but learned a useful lesson about the behaviour of wheels on gravel. When taking a corner fast, the wheels will not adhere. They slide out sideways. It was better to have learned that on a bike than with a car ten years later. Mother claimed that Bert, as a child, had been too coddled to have been allowed a bicycle and said that she was the one, early in their marriage, who’d taught him to ride one. He made no comment. There was no bicycle in the family until mine came along, I never saw either of my parents on a bicycle, and I definitely learned to ride mine on my own. As for their general attitude towards everyday dangers, both parents had been younger siblings who started life under strict supervision, Bert trapped between his possessive mother and his obsessively anxious father, and Alice inside a walled compound in West China. It was probably in Cheng-du, in fact, that my mother heard the story

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about a pig that had eaten a little girl. In childhood, neither parent had enjoyed the freedom to wander out and get into trouble, so it didn’t occur to them that we might. Once we’d been warned what to look out for, we were on our own. Beyond that, their awareness of possible threats to our safety tended in opposite directions. Mother had seen her family robbed by bandits on the Yangtze Kiang and at the age of three had been shot at, so she could be offhand in her dismissal of lesser dangers. She’d seen the real thing. Whereas Bert, by contrast, had been cossetted to the point where all danger, to him, was a joke – there was no danger. Later, admittedly, when they were young adults, both parents had lived through the stresses of the depression and the horrors of the war, in which they lost relatives and school friends. For all those reasons, however, the world we were born into seems to have appeared to them so much safer than what they’d survived that they saw no risk in letting us run loose. I don’t think their casual attitude was consciously intended to toughen us up. They expected us to be resilient, mainly as a credit to the genes they’d bequeathed us. Sometimes one or the other of them would let us know that we were lucky. They envied us the liberty that we took for granted and were annoyed at having to work while we ran around exploring and testing limits. If there were perils, it was up to us to keep our wits about us. Nothing that we had to face could be all that serious, our bad decisions were none of their business, and if someone was needed to worry, there was always Granddad for that.

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The Master of the Cutting Monosyllable

On a grey autumn Saturday, Bert had a rare impulse. He must have decided that the time had come to contribute to our gastronomic education because he arrived home from downtown bearing a flat white box, which he set down on the kitchen table. “What is it?” Mother asked. “It’s a pizza pie,” he announced with a bit of a flourish, the civilized man bringing world culture to a bunch of primitives. “A pizza pie, a piece-a-pie!” we screamed, laughing, running around, and crowding up to see. The box was opened and there was some debate as to whether or not the unknown delicacy should be heated. It was round, about eight inches across, and dark red. Mother said it should be warmed. She put it into the oven. We waited. After a while she took it out and cut it into six pieces. Almost ceremoniously, each of us was given one wedge of this new culinary phenomenon. I remember it as warmish, slightly dry, and a bit tough. It was thick with tomato paste, but I don’t think it had cheese on it. There may have been mushrooms, which I still didn’t like and would have avoided. For the rest, the flavour was a dark blend of basil and oregano, spices new to me then but recorded by my taste

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buds as not bad. We easily finished the pizza and Bert never brought another one home. The next pizza I encountered, years later, would be runny with cheese, and loaded with lumps of green pepper and garlicky meat. Because it was autumn, harvest time, much of what we ate came from the garden. Perishable vegetables like peas and beans had to be eaten as soon as picked, but baskets of muddy carrots, potatoes, and beets were stored out in the summer kitchen. Jam, from strawberries and raspberries, was already in jars, and later in the fall Mother made jelly from wild grapes, chokecherries, or crab apples, boiling them in a big pot and straining the juice through a cloth. Chokecherries and crab apples required no added pectin, she told me, because they set naturally. Then she harvested her most original crop, which was a basket of corn, the ears dried in their husks. The sweet corn that we’d grown over the summer had been eaten, but the dried ears were popcorn. We ate that in the winter, popped in a bumpy-bottomed aluminum saucepan and drizzled with butter. With this homegrown crop, we were pleased to have a whole winter’s worth, and Mother put the bushel out into the summer kitchen with the root vegetables. In the days when everyone cooked with a woodstove, summertime cooking and canning would have been done out there. But we had an electric stove, so the summer kitchen was used as a shed, with the wind blowing through its chinks. Once or twice, before we had hot water upstairs, I’d been sent out there with a basin of warm water to wash myself in privacy, but mostly it was used for ordinary storage. That meant a jumble of things heaped together: the potatoes and carrots in the middle of the floor, where they could be found, jars of jam in a cardboard box, a broken chair or two, some rusty skates, maybe Bert’s snow tires, a trunk and a squashed suitcase from Mother’s travels, as well as tumbled tools, buckets, and gardening implements. The things most recently tossed in were on top, while earlier strata sank out of sight. Shifting the mess to pull out something from underneath could be a struggle. A rake, for instance, didn’t let go and would bring other things with it, a tangle of clothesline or a punctured hose, and those in turn would upset a cascade of surprises. Digging through the clutter was such a chore that it wasn’t until December that Mother, looking for something both healthy and

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festive, went out to get the popcorn. At earlier Christmases, she’d shown us how to thread it into garlands for the Christmas tree, and we were looking forward to stringing our own popcorn. But she couldn’t find it. An empty bushel basket near the potatoes was left over from something else, maybe the beets. She shifted and rummaged but still found no popcorn. At last she went back to the empty basket. Surely that couldn’t be it. So where was the popcorn? There was no trace of it, not a single cob, and she came to the unwilling conclusion that an industrious rat, or rats, had carried it all off. As before, we were going to have to make our garlands from ordinary store-bought popcorn. For Christmas, during those years, Mother made almost everything herself, and her gifts could be touchingly inventive. I’m still using the wreck of a red velvet pincushion that she made for me from scraps stitched together in sections to resemble a tomato with a green fabric stem and some loops of green velvet cord for the blossom at the top. She worked late at night when Bert wasn’t home, and she couldn’t sleep. That gave her time to ruminate, however. If she decided that we’d behaved badly in the weeks leading up to Christmas, her favourite threat was that we were going to get nothing but “warm winter underpants!” I don’t remember ever taking that seriously. We knew she wasn’t consistent enough to carry through with it. What hung over Christmas, however, as over everything else, was the spectre of the poverty that had marked our mother’s adolescence. • When the Leonard family first returned from China, the children were fresh from a life of cultural privilege and presumed superiority, the status enjoyed by most colonizing Europeans during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Therefore, although it was a homecoming for Catherine and Etheridge, the little ones born in Cheng-du – Alice, her older sister Evelyn, and her younger brother Wesley – may have experienced their return as a dislocation and a comedown. The contrast with their previous situation was surely difficult as they arrived in the part of southern Ontario where Grandmother had grown up and where her brothers were professionals. The ambitious Edith Annie would have had to face the fact that her handsome blatherskite of a

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husband, who was over fifty and past doing manual labour, had not been a success in the Far East. He wasn’t even an ordained minister, but all he knew how to do was preach. As a result, the family endured humiliating stresses, not to be mentioned, about the difficulty of paying for the simplest of material comforts. I’m surmising that our grandmother suffered not only from her changed circumstances but also from the obligation never to utter a word about the real reason for the family’s return – that her husband had been recalled from China for behaving badly. When she recognized her situation for the genteel poverty that it was, did she avenge herself by making her children feel it? Something left a mark, and it wasn’t just the fact that those were the 1930s and the years of the Great Depression. A generation later, at Christmas time, our mother was constantly praising the virtue of practical gifts and “things for the whole family.” I expect Grandmother fostered that attitude by communicating her resentment, if only with a dignified Christian silence. Remembering her childhood and adolescence, our mother spoke of seasons when she and her siblings had eaten apple sauce from their apple tree on their mother’s homemade brown bread because there was nothing else – although that was what the Krajniks were eating, right across the road, and they were filled with fierce hope. Mother told me that after high school she’d been offered a scholarship to Bryn Mawr – and Doris has seen the letter, which she found among her papers – but that Grandfather refused her the bus fare to get there, and she had to give it up. There was something about a ten-dollar fee as well, maybe for residence, which was an insurmountable obstacle at the time. When she did enrol at Victoria College in Toronto, Mother claimed that she’d had one pair of brown Oxford shoes to wear with everything, plain or fancy, and that she’d “wept tears of blood” about it. And later on, after she’d gone out to work and earned money, she bought herself those gilt pumps that I never saw her wear. Thus her early experiences had motivated her to save, salvage, and recycle everything she could, including her wedding dress. Throughout childhood, we were taught not to waste anything. I once suffered an entire week of guilt at having lost an eraser on my way to school. Walking back and forth, I studied the roadside

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gravel, searching for that bit of pink rubber and blaming myself for carelessness. Or on an autumn day, left on my own at the midway of a country fair, I was given twenty-five cents to spend. One of the rides was a whirling spider-shaped machine with a revolving, dipping pod at the end of each tentacle. I wanted to try it, then decided that I’d rather ride the Ferris wheel. But first I headed for the hotdog stand where I learned that hotdogs cost fifteen cents as did the rides. I was going to have to choose, and I did. I wolfed down a dark red, greasy, savoury hotdog slathered with sharply astringent mustard. It was so delicious, so much better than the boiled ones we ate at home, that I knew there must be something bad about it, but I reasoned that at least I’d chosen food over entertainment. • Now I suppose that the seeming poverty that haunted my childhood was the combined result of Mother’s pessimism about money and Bert’s habitual stinginess. His CBC job would have brought in a reasonable salary, but he spent it in town on activities beyond our ken. After all, we were only children and didn’t need money. Since Mother was primed for poverty anyway, very little of his income trickled down. At Christmas time she was brave and creative, while making remarks about our happy greed and heedless wastefulness. As for Bert, he wasn’t haunted by much. He’d been born too late to share his mother’s nostalgia for nineteenth-century luxury, and he seems to have been untouched by his father’s earnest pursuit of quality. His approach to Christmas was whimsical. He did go out and buy presents for his brood of eager little consumers but at the last minute. His practice was to stroll into Eaton’s on Christmas Eve, late, pay five cents for a large Eaton’s shopping bag of the heavy paper kind with twisted paper handles, and amble around filling it, more or less at random, with whatever happened to catch his eye. Nothing was gift-wrapped – following on from Gran’s refusal to bother with fancy paper – and nothing seemed intended for anyone in particular. He brought the gifts home and stuffed them into the bottom of his closet. On Christmas morning, or closer to Christmas noon, he’d appear downstairs with the bag in his hand, nonchalantly pour himself some

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coffee, and sit down with it at his feet. Then he’d reach in and pull out whatever he first encountered, still in its Eaton’s packaging. Without appearing to know what he had, he’d survey the bunch of us. “Well, I guess … you, um … yes, you can have … this,” he’d say, and hand it over, to one or other of his progeny. When we realized how his system worked, we gathered round hoping to be lucky and get whatever was best out of the shopping bag. One year I was delighted to be given a small brass alarm clock made in France. Before the day was out, though, Hector and Paul had practised winding it until they’d broken the mainspring. The pretty little clock never worked, and I’ve never succeeded in having it repaired. Another Christmas brought me a very simple child’s microscope, which offered fascinating close-ups of small things like grains of sand or hairs. I kept it in its moulded flock-lined box until I forgot about it. Then in 2007, emptying my mother’s house, I stumbled upon it in the knee-deep mess in an upstairs bedroom. It had been passed down through the hands of my three brothers, and the box was gone, as were the glass slide and the pair of tweezers, but the solid little microscope was in perfect condition. Christmas dinners were a combination of the traditional and the improvisational. Mother was an excellent cook but was not good at organizing a meal so that everything was ready at the same time. The turkey might be stuffed and roasting while we children, already full of Peek Frean biscuits imported from England and the Black Magic chocolate provided by our grandfather, ran giggling through tangled drifts of paper and ribbon. The cats joined in by rolling in the torn wrapping paper or pulling tinsel off the tree and chewing it. Shrieking, we chased them while Bert finished his coffee. When the cats escaped we got down to business, tearing into our presents. For the whole family, there’d be the year’s edition of Giles cartoons, also from England, and new records offered by our parents to each other or, at Mother’s instigation, by us to Bert. To the sound of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana or Elsa Lanchester singing “Please Sell No More Drink to My Father” (which Bert found very funny), toys and clothing were tested, tried on, broken, fought over, or squirrelled away. Books were looked into. Most years sets of little interlocking rubber bricks appeared or inadequate Meccano sets, never enough to build

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anything to scale as we could clearly see. Those were thrown around in bits and vanished into the welter as food and drink were eaten, spilt, dropped, thrown, and or walked in. Wrapping paper was tossed into the fireplace and set alight. Cats, if not already puking, slid into other heaps of paper and rolled over and over, kicking and clawing. Dinner might occur at any time between three and six, with much grabbing and gorging. The animals got to chew bones, gristle, and fat under the table. When the main course appeared to be over, and we were about to slip our plates to whatever dog was with us at the time, Mother would remember the vegetables, or the potatoes, which she’d put on late, and she’d bring those to the table when we were hoping for Christmas pudding. So we’d have a potato or two, sometimes a little crunchy in the middle, while she rushed back out to the kitchen to put the pudding in the oven or to make a hot caramel sauce for it. None of our dinners featured wine, and it was in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, received as a gift at one of those Christmases, that I read about a pudding that was doused with brandy and set alight. Learning that, I realized that the caramel sauce wasn’t the real thing. But when I asked Mother about the tradition of the pudding being brought in blazing, she assured me that in Canada brandy wasn’t strong enough to burn like that. Brandy that alcoholic would be illegal, she declared. This further discrepancy between my world and the world I was encountering in books – like the inedible clams at the lake – added to my doubts about the value of the reality that I saw around me. The world I’d come into was not quite genuine. One Christmas, when Doris was too full to finish her pudding, Mother wrapped the wedge of it in foil and put it away in the fridge. Lots of things mouldered in the back of the refrigerator from one year to the next, so I don’t suppose she originally intended to mimic the Scottish principle stating that what a child hasn’t finished for supper should be served to him again on the following day. It was just that Mother did discover the shrivelled remains of Doris’s pudding the following year and was delighted to be able to plonk it down in front of her for a second Christmas. We all considered it a great joke when Doris refused her pudding for the second time, and it was given to the dog, who did eat it.

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At the end of Christmas Day, Mother might sit down at the piano and play a carol or two, urging us to sing along. Bert vanished upstairs while we went through that, Mother making mistakes on an untuned piano, and the assembled offspring singing only the first verse because that was all we knew. Since we’d hardly ever been to church, the carol singing was as close as we came to an acknowledgement of Christmas as a religious occasion. Otherwise we enjoyed the holiday as a sort of solstice potlatch with plenty of food and noise. And even when Christmas was over, the afterglow of its thrill lingered for a day or two, along with the remnants of the turkey and the last chocolates in the box. When the chocolates were gone, we worked our way down to the mysterious treat called halvah. It had a picture of a camel on its cellophane wrapper, and, because of its brownish consistency, I couldn’t help wondering (although I ate it anyway) if it was actually camel shit. I didn’t understand how camel shit could taste so good. What was special about camels? Eventually I learned that it was made of pounded sesame seeds and sugar. With no school yet, I was free to withdraw to my turquoise room upstairs, to contemplate the treasures I’d been given, or to plunge into a new book. One book that I read over the Christmas holidays was Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, and in it I first noticed the presence of an authorial voice and paused to consider who this Mark Twain might be. It didn’t occur to me to wonder whether he was alive or dead. What struck me was his arrogance. I found the way he bragged about Yankee know-how and the superior practicality of everything American tiresome and excessive. When he scoffed at the prince’s court, and the superficial behaviour and foolish expectations of the courtiers, I concluded that this Mark Twain simply did not understand the feudal system. By then I’d reread The Sword in the Stone for myself and decided that I preferred the bygone world as presented by T.H. White, although I didn’t take my analysis any further. After finishing The Prince and the Pauper, I set it aside and forgot about it. It was still Christmas, after all. Soon though, the week had moved on. The wonderful day was three days past, then four, then five, and New Year’s came and went like a less exciting echo of Christmas – I don’t remember any New Year’s parties – until the holidays were behind us. The first snow lent its

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special excitement, at least for a couple of days, while the holiday mess lingered for weeks, migrating bit by bit to the fireplace to be burned, with the rest settling in amongst the ordinary perennial wreckage. The Christmas tree in the front window might tilt there, dropping needles and ornaments, until the end of January or into February. • School started again, and outdoors all was cold and grey, with the whole of the winter to be got through. For our last winter in the redbrick house, my bicycle went into the summer kitchen while I resumed walking to school. On those mornings it took me an eternity to get up and dress. After the delight of books, I’d discovered the pleasurable escape of sleep and dreams and never wanted to get out of bed. Especially in the cold, I longed to stay under the covers and wait for spring. But that wasn’t allowed. I had to get dressed and face the world. I had to wear a flannel undershirt and underpants with a garter belt and ribbed lisle stockings. Then there was a blouse and a jumper and maybe a cardigan over those. I put my clothes on slowly, one garment at a time, pausing in between to muse, especially between garters. Those had to be threaded through the underpants and adjusted individually, shorter in front and longer at the back, to prevent the stockings from hanging in folds. I studied that, tugging on each garter and letting it go again, folding and unfolding the chrome clip that was meant to hold the elastic in place. Snap. The clip didn’t hold and opened again. I still had to find the other stocking too. Yells from downstairs to hurry up were background noise to my ponderings. I’d turn and scrape at the ice on the window to see the school bus going by, maybe taking the Krajnik girls to their convent school. But I didn’t have to catch the bus, so that didn’t matter. Back to the garters, pull a stocking on. Do it up. Too long. Do it up tighter. Again. Adjust the clip. Snap. Now, where was the other stocking? Eventually I’d trail down the stairs to face the porridge, and after that I had to endure another day of sitting in school. If there was homework, I hadn’t done it. Or if I had, I don’t know when. Maybe at my desk as the teacher started down the aisle gathering it up. During that dark season, however, suddenly it was Valentine’s Day, and little cinnamon-flavoured candy hearts appeared. They weren’t as good as

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Smarties, but they were slightly more palatable than Hallowe’en kisses, and I ate handfuls of them before deciding I didn’t like them. At school we were set to drawing red hearts on cards or cutting lacy heart shapes out of folded paper. We were told to give them to each other and to our parents. It’s possible I gave Mother a Valentine once or twice, although I’m sure I never offered one to Bert. He would have said something cruel about it. He let us know that all popular holidays, especially Father’s Day, were vulgarly commercial and that he wanted nothing to do with them. A few years later when Doris described him as “the master of the cutting monosyllable,” her observation was exactly right for the way he handled any challenging query from his children. He put us down with laconic efficiency. A month after Valentine’s Day it was Saint Patrick’s Day, and we were encouraged to remember our Irish roots by wearing something green. I was happy to do that because I’d been told that the colour went with my red hair. The fact that Saint Patrick’s Day was properly a Catholic holiday never came up, nor was there any mention of conflict between Catholics and Protestants. Both my grandfathers had told me that they were Irish, and for years to come I would remain unaware that there was a difference between the Cowans, originally Scotch-Irish Protestants from Tipperary, and the Leonards, originally Catholics from northern Ireland, although Grandfather Leonard had converted to Methodism. Since both my parents had cut their ties with anything religious they may have thought it no longer mattered. Mother made cookies and topped them with mint-flavoured green icing, while we drew more cards, this time with shamrocks on them even if we’d never seen a live shamrock, and the earth outside was covered with snow. For his part, Bert let it be known that he despised all folk music but most especially traditional Irish songs. Then, out of the frozen gloom, and never on the same date, a yellow and purple Easter would heave its globular form up over the horizon and we’d get to dye hardboiled eggs with food colouring and pile them in a basket on the table. Sometimes there was a crack in the shell, and the dye leaked into the egg white to be discovered in a burst of surprise colour when the egg was peeled. Mother showed us how to draw or scribble on the shell with a pale wax crayon, which resisted the dye. The crayon design would then come up in an interesting way when

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the egg was dunked. We never hunted for the eggs, however, because they were never hidden. We simply coloured them and displayed them on the table. We were expected to eat them too, within a couple of days, so they wouldn’t go to waste. We much preferred the Laura Secord Easter egg that Bert always brought home from downtown, one huge chocolate egg with genuine buttercream filling, to be sliced and distributed. We clustered, salivating, while the dark chocolate egg was cut through, streaking the white sugar and cream interior and the yellow yolk we knew would taste of real butter. Those Laura Secord eggs were the most delicious confection I’d ever eaten, better than anything at Christmas, better even than Black Magic. There was never any church-going at Easter either, and Mother made a point of telling us that all that business about eggs and bunny rabbits was actually about fertility and was derived from some forgotten pagan festival intended to mark the beginning of the breeding season. Christianity and Easter were an overlay on top of an older religion, she said, and had been adapted by ancient missionaries to usurp an existing holiday. In her opinion, no reasonable person could believe Christ had risen from the dead any more than we should believe in rabbit’s eggs. “Imagine!” she declared. “Rabbits laying eggs!? What’s so Christian about anything as foolish as that?” We didn’t know. We sucked on our slices of buttercream egg and didn’t argue with her. The weather continued cold, and the icy places along the road were still frozen. It might well snow again, even if spring was on its way. After a while the sun got a little brighter, and the frozen puddles started to break under our boots when we tested them. Then the weather changed. All at once everything was melting, and a big wet wind brought a smell of thawing manure. Birds appeared on the wires along the road. We walked home with our coats unbuttoned and were yelled at for it. We walked in the ditches and got our feet wet – called “getting a soaker” – and were yelled at again. Tomcats yowled at night. • In the kitchen one afternoon, maybe to avoid the subject of the dishes that were waiting to be washed, I asked my mother where books came from.

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Lifting a pot of boiled potatoes from the stove, she paused in the steam. “From England and the United States,” she said and went to drain them. “But … what happens if someone here writes a book?” Over the sink my mother heaved a sigh. “Nothing. Toronto publishers just print textbooks that they know they can sell in the schools. They don’t publish real books or not books that anyone would want to read. You’d have to send your book to London or New York.” “But why? Why aren’t there publishers for books for people to read? What if I did send them a book?” “They wouldn’t answer.” She set the pot back on the stove and started mashing the potatoes. “They only publish books that they’ve asked people to write.” “Oh.” Obviously, no publisher was ever going to ask me to write a book. How would they know I existed? They wouldn’t. The problem was insoluble. At school there was some mention of examinations, but they were too far off to worry about. Outdoors the hated sports activities began again. Anything involving a team, or collective physical activity, remained a torment. Standing frozen with timidity, I felt like a fool, was seen by the others as a fool, and hated myself for having to endure the disgrace of being incompetent. All I could bring to the sports field was resignation. All I wanted was to escape. Obliged to go out and stand in the field for baseball games, I’d learned to get as far back as possible and stay there, keeping an eye on the game from a distance. If the ball should happen to come my way, I’d have time to move aside and act as if I hadn’t seen it. On the other hand, I got to take my bicycle out. Mother produced a bicycle pump and showed me how to deal with the valve and put air in the tires. I’d already learned to adjust the seat for myself and could now reach the pedals. As spring advanced and the trees turned green, we did write exams, which I passed as expected. My near debacle in grade one had been forgotten, and it was assumed that I was going to get good marks. There were no congratulations for success, although sometimes, if Mother noticed, she’d reproach me for getting a B or a C. I paid no attention. Life was about to begin again, the freedom of summer.

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• However, 1952 was to be our last complete year in the Kennedy house. Those endless, dreaming summers did come to an end. There’d been five of them, finally, and if a recognition of the passage of time is what signals the end of childhood, mine reached that milepost in August of 1953. As usual, when the change was announced I was paying no attention. The first hint of the coming upheaval occurred at the end of the summer, as I was turning ten, so Doris would have been seven going on eight, Hector five going on six, and Paul nearly four. I was down behind the house, wandering along the stream. I’d outgrown the plastic animals. They were long gone, maybe into the water or just lost and broken, and the willows that had been small when we arrived were thick and solid. What was charming about them was that while they were still flexible Mother had twisted and looped them to make seats, and they’d grown that way. The trees had chairs in them. But I wasn’t perched in the willows. I was roaming along the edge, staring into the water, and poking around in the grass. The goldenrod was beginning to colour, its graceful torch shapes green at the bottom and shading to pale yellow at the top, while the Queen Anne’s lace was in the last days of its glory. Marching down the slope to the stream, the lacy blooms held their flat formal umbels up to the light. I tested the toughness of their stems. The white flowers couldn’t be broken off, they had to be pulled up, and I set about to choose the largest and the most elegant, ripping them out, twisting the roots off, and then splitting sections of the stems to thread them through each other. If this was lace, I was going to wear it as lace. By this time I had seen the portraits of Elizabeth I in her intricate starched ruffs. The flowers of the Queen Anne’s lace, in their delicate level rigidity and the way they repeated their pattern on a perfectly horizontal plane, really did resemble the royal ruffs. While working on my lace collar, however, I kept hearing voices from up the slope. It was a Saturday, because Bert was home, and he and Mother were talking to someone on the veranda. I finished the chain of flowers and lifted it on over my head. But when I looked down to admire it, all the lacy flowerets, so firmly spread while the plant was rooted, had gone limp. No sooner were they picked than they folded in on

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themselves. Disappointed, I abandoned my regal ruff and walked up towards the house. Mother saw me coming. “What do you think?” she asked, over the veranda railing. “Should we sell the house or should we rent it out?” “Sell the house?” I didn’t understand. “Well, that’s one possibility. Because we’re moving in the fall. We’re going to Winnipeg. In Manitoba. Your father’s going to work for the CBC in Winnipeg.” Past her, out of sight, I heard Bert and someone else exchanging remarks. I went around the corner of the veranda to the foot of the steps and saw an unknown man on the porch with my parents. In front of him, I wasn’t sure how to answer her. “It’s only for two years,” she said. “We can rent the house out and come back to it when we come back from Winnipeg.” Her consultation of me was more or less rhetorical, and I was too surprised to offer any sensible answer. The thought of leaving the Kennedy house was inconceivable to me. I’d assumed that our house, like all houses, would be there forever and that we were going to live in it forever. Now I found my parents talking to a stranger about how to get rid of it. It was too much to take in. On the porch, meanwhile, the real estate agent was waiting for them to make up their minds and sign something. Mother wanted to keep the house, and Bert wanted to sell it. When I understood that the move was still weeks off, maybe more than that, I left them to their negotiations and wandered away, refusing as usual to think about what I didn’t want to know. I remember no preparation and no packing for our move. Maybe I ignored it all, but it’s just as likely that Mother did nothing until the last minute. She’d lost the debate with Bert, the house was being sold, and I expect she simply let the movers tumble our belongings pellmell into the boxes provided by the company and hoist them into the moving van. As for what I did when the upheaval began, with strange men carrying tables and chairs out of the house, that has faded into the past as well. Maybe I treated the event like baseball and withdrew into the field to wait for the business to blow over. Irrationally, I was still hoping that it wasn’t true and that the move couldn’t be happening. But in September it did. I was sitting under a tree on the other side of the road, devouring a comic book that belonged to some child

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over there, when I heard Mother calling me. I closed my ears. We weren’t allowed to have comic books, or at least there was no question of buying them, so I read them whenever and wherever I found them. This one was what used to be called a Classic Comic, its narrative loosely derived from some literary work. The story was a fantastic undersea adventure. A voluptuous and scantily clad princess had been thrown into the sea swathed in strings of pearls, which for some reason were expected to shrink in the water and strangle her. I was eager to get to the part where she’d be saved because I wanted to know how this would be arranged, but I was having trouble concentrating. Mother kept shouting at me to put that thing down and come and get in the car. At last I couldn’t ignore her any longer. I was hesitating though. I wanted to find out how the story ended, and I was tempted to take the comic book along, even if it wasn’t mine. Where were we going anyway? What was the big hurry? Oh well, I thought, I’ll just leave it on the grass under the tree, and it’ll still be here tomorrow. It’s not going to rain. I can come back and finish it then. Reluctantly, I crossed the road to our driveway where Bert was waiting at the wheel. And in writing this I had no recollection of even turning around for a last glimpse of the house before climbing into the Meteor, but Doris swears that I did look back. She remembers because I told her to turn around and take a look too. All I recall now is that everyone else, including the cats and the baggage, was already in the car. I climbed in, and immediately we were off. Up against the back window, the top edge of the seat, where bouncing children and climbing animals had produced an eruption of yellowish fluff, was coming apart. Numbly, I settled in under those scratchy shreds. We were on our way to Manitoba.

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chapter thirteen

Nor th Kildonan

Our voyage out of Ontario was just that. We didn’t have to endure the whole trek crammed into the back seat of the car because we travelled on the SS Keewatin, a venerable passenger steamer that had been sailing the waters of Lake Huron and Lake Superior since 1907. Recently, I’ve seen a photograph taken by our mother of the four little Cowans gathered on the quay beneath the liner’s towering steel flank. That was in Port McNicoll, on Georgian Bay, as we were about to board. Then the Keewatin cast off. We steamed into Lake Huron and through a series of waterways to Lake Superior. Remembering the Cayuga, at first I loved the ship – the odour of coal smoke and hot, oily steel mingling in a thrilling way with the fresh wind from the forests along the shore, the deep rumble from under the deck, and the steady vibration of the hull pushing through the water. We were even invited below to view the Keewatin’s colossal engines thundering smoothly at their work. The ship took two days, or a little more, to reach Fort William (now Thunder Bay), at the far end of Lake Superior, and we had a stateroom. But before long I was too sick to notice the passage of time. And although I thought I remembered the eight of us, six people and two cats, bedding down together, Doris tells

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me there were only five humans in the stateroom. Bert wasn’t with us. After delivering us to the docks, he drove the Meteor on to Winnipeg by himself. Once we were underway, Mother was pleased to remark on how well Buttercup and the other cat (name now forgotten, but she was white and deaf) were adapting to shipboard life. All I remember is that they curled up and slept. Doris says they hid under the bunk waiting for the ordeal to be over. Her chief memory from the Keewatin is of the cabin’s dark wood panelling and the ice-water dispenser that was set into it. Maybe I should have tried the ice water, because it seems that Doris, like the cats, was not seasick. Mother made a production of declaring how much they were enjoying the roll and the lift then the drop of the ship as it wallowed in the waves. Her point was that they were doing better than I was. As we steamed across Lake Huron and into the ship channel at Sault Saint Marie, I’d felt uneasy but without suspecting what lay ahead. It was when the Keewatin set out into Lake Superior that I began to feel queasy and then got steadily sicker. Crossing that inland sea overnight was the worst. As the ship ploughed through the dark and choppy waters, I was hideously nauseated. I managed to keep my supper down – if I’d eaten supper – but the unexpected misery of seasickness was so debilitating that I was unable to notice anything else. In the years since, in another September, I’ve crossed the North Atlantic by ship and one night even went out on deck to watch a storm. As each long wave mounted, I was exhilarated to see, hanging over us, a wall of water higher than a thirty-thousand-ton liner. It was like looking up a hillside until, a few moments later, the ship churned its way up that heaving black incline. If they’d known I was out there I expect the ship’s officers would have ordered me back inside, but they didn’t catch me. I remained on deck, oblivious of danger, and not sick at all. However, the night that we spent crossing Lake Superior I spent in the stateroom and in bed clenching my jaws. The reason for my distress, or so I am told, is that the shorter waves of the Great Lakes, like those of the English Channel, are choppier and more sickmaking than the long swells of the ocean. At the time, I was astonished and humiliated. At last it was over. Morning came, the water levelled out, the ship docked, and we disembarked at Fort William. Getting on the train, we

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chugged and whistled through the forest to Winnipeg where Bert met us at the station. Then we set out to look for a house. One of the first places Mother wanted to inspect was outside the city. As we stood in a gaggle on the lawn, our parents wondering if the house would do, she happened to glance up into a tree. The Red River was nowhere in sight, but Mother did know that Winnipeg is built on a flood plain. When she noticed bits of messy debris caught in the branches some twelve feet up, she recognized them as driftwood, and our parents decided against that house. • The place they settled on was at 150 Irving Place in North Kildonan, a suburb to the northeast of Winnipeg and on the opposite bank of the Red River. The house was newer and more comfortable than the Kennedy place but smaller, and we had to adapt our expectations in order to fit in. There were only two bedrooms upstairs, with sloping walls shaped to accommodate the roof. The master bedroom was on the ground floor. I shared the larger upstairs bedroom with Doris, and our brothers were in the smaller bedroom along the hall. Under the slope of the roof in our room, running the whole length of that room and in behind our brothers’ room, was an extended closet, stacked with things left behind by the previous occupants. Fascinated, Doris and I spent days digging into the mysteries at its far end. The treasure trove turned out to be mostly books, magazines, and old clothes. It was in that long closet that I first saw a publication called The Boy’s Own Paper in which I read all that I’ve ever read of Jules Verne in English translation. It was out of the long closet, too, that the Nancy Drew mysteries emerged into my life. Still we rummaged onwards, fascinated, sure that there must be precious things deeper in. The best we found was a small jeweller’s box containing a stickpin for a tie and a pair of cuff links that looked like ten-carat gold. Our last substantial discovery was several pairs of skates, black and brown, in different sizes, with flat heels and puzzlingly long blades that stuck out in front. The stairs had a boxed-in wooden stairwell with a landing and a turn that arrived on the ground floor directly across from our parents’

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bedroom. It was there, through the open door, that once I caught sight of Bert heaving up naked out of the parental bed. Had he seen me? I slipped quickly past as if I hadn’t seen him. I kept going, through the living room, the nondescript dining area, and the little galley kitchen leading to the driveway and the garage. Outside, the house had less land than the Kennedy house but still plenty of space. Although it was fenced as one suburban lot, it was actually two or three lots side by side along the street. At the uphill end of the terrain were a generous vegetable garden and strawberry patch in the process of being overrun by dill. Downhill from the house the land sloped towards the creek, which was a wider, deeper watercourse than the stream behind our old house, with mature trees growing along its banks. And enclosing the entire lot was a five-foot wooden fence built in a grid of slats with a flat board along the top, easy to climb and perfect for walking on. I practised walking that fence in a straight line without looking down at my feet or losing my balance and having to jump off. It wasn’t very difficult, but I persuaded myself that I was a champion fence-walker. Between the house and the creek, a short driveway led to a single-car garage with a greenhouse extension on the back. What fascinated us about the garage was the door with its bucket-like counterweights filled with round, flat metal slugs. What treasure was this? Curious, we scooped out handfuls of them and carried them around, dropping and spreading them here and there, never putting them back. The garage door continued to open and close. The greenhouse, which was at least as big as the garage, was built in a Dutch barn shape with raised trestles for trays of seedlings. Although Mother declared that it was just what she’d been longing for, she never got around to growing anything in it. My mental image is of dead stems poking up out of one or two forgotten pots and nothing more. Maybe there were problems that I didn’t hear about. A couple of the greenhouse panes were broken, and it may have needed some kind of heating. Winnipeg was much colder than Toronto. During our first winter, Buttercup spent a night out and came home with the points of his ears frozen stiff. We’d never seen that happen to a cat. We expected his ears to stand up again, but when they thawed out, they drooped over. The points shrivelled and came off, and from then on he was

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a round-eared cat. The weather was still summery, however, when we first unpacked, yet we were warned that all public swimming was prohibited. We’d arrived in the middle of the last major polio epidemic. The causes of the disease were still poorly understood, and the first two or three weeks of school had been cancelled in case the transmission of the disease had something to do with warm weather. I don’t remember paying any attention to the risk. Except for the newly discovered embarrassment of seasickness, I was still young enough to feel immortal and invulnerable. The fact that there was no school was an unexpected blessing. Soon enough the autumn weather arrived, and I was enrolled in grade six at another redbrick building, Lord Kitchener Public School, out on the Henderson Highway. To get there, I rode my old blue bicycle along the shoulder of that busy two-lane artery. By this time I was growing fast and was considered a big girl. If reaching the pedals was no longer a problem, the stream of traffic passing inches from me on the edge of the asphalt was definitely a threat. But no one was concerned about that. I was expected to ride to school along the shoulder, wobbling in the gravel and the gusts of suction from passing trucks. With more childish confidence in my immortality, I worried only that the draft from those heavy trucks would lift my skirt and reveal my underpants. From the classes at Lord Kitchener, I remember nothing. When I try, all I can rake up is a fight in the stairwell with another girl. I’ve forgotten the reasons for our combat, but I do know that it was not a surprise. Remarks we’d made to each other the previous day meant that she was waiting for me, and I was ready for her. I elbowed her hard in the stomach, really hurting her, and then felt extremely guilty. Maybe I was the vicious creature that my mother accused me of being – but following that encounter, the other girl left me alone. The fight probably had something to do with the fact that all at once there were three of us in the school – Doris, Hector, and I – all new, all Easterners, and all redheads. Not that we necessarily attracted aggression, but we expected it, or at least Hector and I did. During our first winter, when he was barely six, he broke his arm in the schoolyard at recess. Those were less complicated times, and as far as I know the school took no

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responsibility for injuries sustained on the premises. The people in the office called me, his big sister, out of class to walk him home. As we trudged along in the gritty snow on the shoulder of the highway, he was pale and silent and offered no comment. I didn’t ask him how it had happened because I assumed that he’d been fighting. Hector had already fought plenty of battles, and I’d had enough fights with him myself to know what a stubborn adversary he could be. However, when I asked him about it recently, he was indignant. Now he tells me that he had not been fighting. Unfair, unfair! He hadn’t been doing anything out of the ordinary. Like the other kids, he’d been playing on a tempting slope created when snow was shovelled out of the skating rink and tossed over the boards. Sliding down it on his bottom with his feet in front and his arms stretched out behind, he landed with a twist and broke his left arm. That was all there was to it. But by then his reputation had been established. When they sent him to the office, the vice principal also suggested that he must have been fighting. And he claims that I wasn’t sympathetic either. He says I was annoyed because his accident had taken me away from a story that was being read in class and which I didn’t want to miss. I’d forgotten that part. If I could remember the story now, or what it was about, naturally I’d add it to the list of unfinished narratives that haunted my school days. At home, Mother took charge of him, and I went back to school. Hector tells me that they walked to the end of the streetcar line and took the streetcar into the city. He remembers that on their way to the hospital they crossed a big bridge on foot. That would have been the bridge over the Red River. In the hospital waiting room, in line for his turn in the operating room, he enjoyed a minor thrill when he saw a little girl being brought out on a stretcher and caught a glimpse of her underpants. Then they took him in, set his arm, and applied a cast, which he wore for a few weeks. The break healed and that was that. The fact that he hadn’t been fighting, however, is new information. In those days, I still thought there’d been a battle. Hector was turning out to be intense, and he could be grim. Although he never howled for help like Paul, he suffered from the stresses that assailed us all. Sometimes he talked in his sleep, and one afternoon in the car, again parked and waiting for our parents to come out of a store, I listened

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to him dozing in the back seat. Muttering and grinding his teeth, occasionally he said something comprehensible, apparently venting despair when he exclaimed, “Useless, useless!” at some frustration met with in his dream. Since then I’ve asked him what the problem was, but he doesn’t remember. Six months after his arm had knitted, defending him against an eight or nine-year-old bully, I shoved the bigger boy down onto the street hard enough to tear the knees of his trousers. That got me into terrible trouble. The boy wasn’t wearing jeans, and when his mother telephoned mine to complain about my having torn his good pants, I was heaped with blame for being violent. Mother declared that I was a criminal. She was going to send me over to that boy’s house to mend his pants for him. She informed me that I was the bully. I was mortified. Never was I going to mend that guy’s trousers. I turned my back on her and waited for her to shut up, with the result that nothing came of her threat except that the tensions between us worsened. Going on eleven and growing fast, I was almost as tall as she was, so she may have decided against challenging me. I was also getting better at keeping my troubles to myself. • When my mother yelled at me that I was a monster, I believed her, but at least I knew that I wasn’t a coward. It didn’t occur to me that what she yelled tended to defeminize me. For her part, she was increasingly resentful of my sulking and one day announced that I was destined to be a failure and a bad woman and that I was never going to get married or have children. I remember where I was standing when she said that, in the hallway to the living room – the spot, in fact, from which I’d fled at seeing my father naked. Rays of late-afternoon sunshine were reaching in through the sunroom, and I was briefly dazzled as I turned around to take a look at her. Had she really said that? There was nothing I could say in answer to her then, and there isn’t much to be said now. Her prediction came true. I haven’t married or had children, although that may relate as much to the way my father ignored me, and all his other children, as to the conflict with my mother. At the time, not knowing why, I was timid, angry, and

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arrogant all at once. I was combative because, if nothing else, at least I could fight. What was wrong with my mother anyway? Of course she was competitive, but her seeming eagerness to deny femininity in either herself or me, going right back to her contempt for Gran’s ladylike values, was more than the usual narcissistic fear of being displaced by the rising generation. I wonder if her fury to get the better of me wasn’t an aspect of some more complicated embarrassment. There was self-loathing in her as well, as if she was ashamed of her own female nature. Her remarks on what it meant to be a woman had a vengeful archness that I distrusted. Maybe she was looking forward to the day when I’d come home pregnant. Despite her negative prognostications, I think she would have liked that. She was waiting and hoping for life to teach me a lesson biologically. All I did was retreat upstairs, getting away from her, and read the Nancy Drew books as well as a novel entitled What Katy Did by a writer named Susan Coolidge. Flipping through it now, I’m astounded at how artificial and preachy it is. When I was ten and eleven years old, I loved the book. It’s a tearjerker in which the mother is conveniently dead, and fourteen-year-old Katy is paralyzed after a fall from a garden swing. Then an invalid cousin, a saintly lady, arrives to instruct her in the art of self-sacrificing devotion to her family. As a result, the courageous Katy, from an upstairs bedroom – with the help of three or four cheerful, devoted family servants – assumes responsibility for counselling her younger siblings and running her father’s household. After that, miraculously, she gets better. Katy’s situation sounded like the sort of self-sacrifice that I might be able to put up with. I devoured the book. So that was an example of what a good girl, with courage and resolve, could make of herself, although in a wealthy, upper-middle-class American family and in the nineteenth century. With servants. The book was an enjoyable escape until I realized that it was another depiction of a cultural reality to which I had no access. None of its lessons applied to my situation. Setting out into the struggle of life as blank beginners, some of us catch on faster than others. Being stubborn and occasionally violent did not mean that I was as good at defending myself as Doris was – or else my sister was better at avoiding conflict. In my adolescent fog, I

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was slow to learn civilized social defences, whereas Doris by then had both poise and fierce character. She’d ceased to be the compliant baby sister and was the first of us to stop calling our mother “Mummy” and begin addressing her as “Mother.” When the rest of us heard her, we followed her example. My sister had strong opinions and a clear sense of who she was long before I had. She was judgemental and decisive, even derisive as she rejected things that I admired, and backed our mother’s opinions while I fought her, hopelessly. My chief bulwark against my mother was a refusal to acknowledge that I could even hear what she was saying. Not letting her know what I thought was a way to avoid being cut down by her sarcasm. When one day in a fit of rage – and in front of my siblings – she declared that I was the least intelligent of the bunch, I had no defence against that accusation either. At some point in adolescence Hector informed me that I was “the dumbest” in a family where intelligence was given enormous importance. Of course I knew the decree did not come from him but from our mother. Because I resisted her, she also accused me of being “hard-hearted,” which only increased my repressed ambition to survive and surpass her. If I was hard-hearted, maybe I was tough enough to carry on, to progress, and one day to become a real person and deserving of respect. But I couldn’t reveal that I felt anything of the sort for fear of her crippling scorn. I didn’t yet suspect that my mother’s angry mockery, not just of me but also of the world in general, might be a symptom of her own disappointment. • In the atmosphere of family strife, music was a touchy subject and one in which egos were involved. Both parents having played the violin with the University of Toronto symphony, their fiddles were still in the house. But I’d rarely heard Bert play his and had never known Mother to touch hers at all. In fact, I never would hear her play it, probably because Bert had let her know from the start that she had no talent. Music seems to have been an early issue between my parents, dating from the time when my aunt Evelyn was first violist with the symphony and Bert’s girlfriend. Whatever happened back then, Bert had succeeded in quashing my mother’s ambitions regarding the violin.

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But there was still the piano. Ours was quite a decent Heintzman, bought for Bert by his parents in the 1920s, but he literally never laid a finger on it. It was Mother who tinkled at it and showed us scales, if not often and maybe not while Bert was in the house. Certainly there was no expectation that any of us would learn to play either instrument. Mother’s Christmas carol sessions at the piano, when Bert retreated upstairs rather than listen, had revealed to us that she didn’t really know how to play. As for my father’s violin, on the one or two occasions when he did take it out, rosin the bow, and run through a scale or an étude, I was impressed by the power and technique that he displayed only to be surprised and let down when he put the instrument back into its case and closed it. I’d been expecting more. Mother told us that he wasn’t satisfied with his own performance, had assumed he was going to be a great virtuoso, and couldn’t accept being just a good fiddle player. Perhaps as compensation, she encouraged us to believe that he was a distinguished critic and supremely knowledgeable about the concerts and ballets that he took her to as well as the classical records that he brought home. Throughout childhood, we were surrounded by symphonic music on records or heard over the CBC. Nor did the Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, and Bartok that poured out of the Heathkit leave me indifferent. I loved the music and I responded by dancing to it. All of it. Not caring which it was, or who’d composed what, I leapt and flung myself around the living room while Bert sat in the blue plush wing chair ignoring my exertions and jerking his arms in the air, pretending that he was conducting. I had my fantasies; he had his. On Saturday afternoons, over Mother’s roast beef dinners, we listened to the Metropolitan Opera from New York, sponsored by Texaco and introduced by the super-smarmy Milton Cross. That was glorious. In unreliable recollection, I expect that – when not actually eating – I danced to the opera as well, and thus my relationship with music was, after all, active and involved. Later on, Mother would declare that if none of us had been offered piano lessons it was because Bert had vetoed that from the start. His ears were too sensitive. A child practising in the house would have been unbearable. I wonder, though, if that was his true reason. As a child, he must have been forced to practise. And when I took piano

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lessons for a couple of years in my thirties and mentioned to him the challenge of learning to play different notes simultaneously with right and left hands, he responded evasively. His edgy, uneasy answer seemed to reveal that he’d given up on the piano and turned to the violin precisely because violinists play one note at a time or, at most, two. Mother claimed that he was exaggeratedly right-handed, to the point of being almost unable to use his left hand, and I wonder if his antilesson stance wasn’t, basically, that what he couldn’t do, his children wouldn’t get to try. Not that any of this matters now. I was musical only in the sense that I listened to music and enjoyed it. I wasn’t prepared for the discipline of lessons because I expected musical expression to come instinctively. From the age of ten to twelve or thirteen, sometimes I plonked experimentally at the piano hoping that harmony would reveal itself. Unfortunately, it didn’t, and all too often Mother was listening from elsewhere in the house. At the first wrong note, she’d yell to let me know that she’d heard that! So I gave up and turned away. During my year at Lord Kitchener, however, I did sing in the school choir and enjoyed that from the start. The Clarke Irwin Manitoba School Song Book is sitting on my piano as I write this. There’s only one line of music in it, for voice, but that’s all that I can easily pick out anyway, and the book is full of ancient and beautiful songs like “The Minstrel Boy,” “The Golden Vanity,” and “Bonnie Doon.” Sometimes, not very often, I leaf through the book and remind myself of their melodies. Since Bert reviled anything that could be identified as folk music, it’s thanks to the Manitoba school system that those traditional songs became part of my education, and it seems that I did learn something at Lord Kitchener after all. I wanted to sing, and I expected to continue with the choir but never returned to it after that first year, partly because of a strange experience that occurred during choir practice. I was singing so hard and breathing so deeply that I nearly passed out. Starting to hallucinate, I saw the face of another chorister, some innocent girl I didn’t know, turn into a pig’s snout. I wondered what that could possibly mean and had to stop to catch my breath, waiting to see clearly again. Shortly after that I gave up the choir. •

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If I feel some small regret about that abandonment it’s because the choir was probably the only venue where I might have met our Mennonite neighbours. Manitoba had a large community of Mennonites, most of them farming the prairie, but some of our North Kildonan neighbours were urbanized Mennonites, and, as was her habit, Mother took it upon herself to explain the peculiarities and relative values of religion. She let us know that the Mennonites were good people. They were serious and decent, if backward, and they deserved to be regarded with forbearance. This was because we were advanced and better informed. We were, well, freethinkers, more or less, and intellectually privileged. Therefore it was our duty to treat them kindly. What I was hearing from my mother was, I guess, an adapted version of the class attitude illustrated in Half Past Bedtime. Somehow we never did get to know our Mennonite neighbours. They didn’t seem interested in making friends with us, and my mother’s condescending magnanimity was never put to the test. Their avoidance was made clear when Hallowe’en came along. The first thing we learned was that in Manitoba children did not yell “shell out!” but the more innocent “Hallowe’en apples!” I expect this was because, at the beginning of the prairie settlement, apples had been a rare treat, not that it mattered by the time we joined the tradition. The candy kisses were the same tarry-tasting twists as those handed out in Ontario. Our second discovery was more thought provoking. Quite a number of our neighbours had closed their curtains, turned out the lights, and weren’t answering the door. Those were the Mennonite houses. I was surprised, then impressed, and decided that I could only admire them for staying out of the festivities. It meant that they were serious about their religion and also that they knew a pagan tradition when they saw one, apples or no apples. • Rather quickly after that, real winter set in, and I learned to skate. This was an activity that I’d previously tried and failed at. When I was smaller, maybe seven or eight, on a Christmas night out behind the Kennedy house, I’d ventured down to where the stream had spread and frozen into a sheet of smooth ice. I’d been given a pair

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of secondhand skates and told to do them up tight. In the cold and the dark, I did tug as hard as I could on the laces, but my fingers were small, and the unfamiliar skates were stiff. I hadn’t understood, either, why it was important to do them up tight, or not until I was sideslipping and falling. In the quiet gloom, I discovered that skating was difficult. Ice was extremely slippery. I couldn’t stand up. I tried again, fell several times, and was discouraged. I didn’t want to quit trying, so I settled for sliding around on my bottom, scratching the ice with the rear parts of the blades to make it look as if I’d skated. I was afraid Mother might be coming out to examine me about my progress, and I wanted to pretend that I’d succeeded, but that turned out not to be necessary. When I showed up at the house a little too soon, she wasn’t as tough on me about skating as she was about other activities. She confessed that she’d never been good at it because she had “wobbly ankles” and suggested that I try pushing a chair around on the ice. A chair? She wasn’t offering to come down to the pond and show me; she was telling me what she thought I should do. I looked around at the kitchen chairs and, not clearly understanding how any of them might help, decided to forget about it. In North Kildonan, however, where the cold came earlier, with less snow, and where the creek froze clear and dark and smooth, I was motivated to try again. Mother took the position that the strangely shaped skates Doris and I had dug out of the closet were our skates and that we should use them. Waste not want not. After all, there were several sizes, and some of them did fit us. We laced them on and tried them out. They were almost impossible to skate with. By then we’d been told that they were speed skates but found nothing speedy about them. We scrabbled and clashed and tripped and fell and, once again, I gave up. This was all the more disappointing because the frozen creek was just down the slope from the kitchen door, stretching away into the snowy trees like a magical winding avenue to some frozen fairyland. I wanted to skate on it. I wanted to explore its gleaming twists and turns. Then at Christmas, wonderfully, white figure skates, with heels and picks, appeared. That was more like it. This time I pulled the laces tight and my ankles didn’t wobble. I did get to skate on the creek, and later I actually skated with a group on the school rink, round and

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round, to music. That was a delight. We didn’t feel the cold and were told that this was because Manitoba had “dry cold.” We were advised to keep an eye on each other in order to warn anyone whose nose had turned white. That was supposed to be dangerous. A red nose wasn’t a problem, but a white nose had to be rubbed, either with snow or at least with a snowy mitten, because it was in the process of freezing. This was seen as an amusement, a chance to point at the white-nosed person and chant, “Your nose is frozen, your nose is frozen!” Luckily, my snub nose was close enough to my face not to freeze, so I never had to endure the treatment. For the first time, I enjoyed the experience of skating round the rink hand-in-hand with a boy and the thrilling fright of being pulled along fast by someone much stronger and surer than I was. On the other hand, a distressing part of the ferociously cold winter was being forced to wear leggings to school. I wonder when little girls’ leggings disappeared. During the 1950s in Manitoba, girls didn’t wear jeans to school. My brothers wore jeans lined with plaid flannelette – and I remember Mother yelling at them when she caught them not wearing underpants with their lined jeans – while I wore woollen leggings with buttons up the sides that did up under my skirt. The cloakroom was an open-ended passage across the back of the classroom, and in there, with the boys teasing us, we were supposed to remove our leggings before class and put them back on at the end of the day. What an ordeal that was. At least once I managed to get out of the house without the leggings and discovered the burn of minus thirty through my cotton stockings after which I endured the things for the remainder of our first Manitoba winter. I still hated them but had to choose between two different kinds of suffering: the pain of freezing my skin or the humiliation of being teased about lifting my skirt. Also during that first winter, because I loved the music, I was allowed to take ballet lessons. I was provided with a leotard, tights, and ballet slippers and travelled downtown on a rattly streetcar with wooden window frames and cane-bottomed seats. In a nondescript industrial building, I climbed the stairs to a huge room with a hardwood floor. This was the headquarters of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. Although I found the bar and the wall of mirrors impressive, I was disappointed that there was no symphony orchestra to dance

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to. Used to doing my own interpretive dancing to Bert’s music on the Heathkit, I’d expected similar accompaniment for the ballet classes. Perhaps I’d expected to wear a tutu as well. Instead, we wore plain black leotards and were accompanied by a woman pounding on a piano that twanged harshly against the bare walls and floor. The classes themselves, along with the business of first position, second position, and third position, turned out to be mostly bending and stretching, only slightly enlivened by le pas de chat, le pas de côté, and les grands pliés – if I’ve remembered the terminology correctly. It was serious training and, like music, it demanded discipline. But I’d never imagined dancing as anything but an exercise of free expression, and I was baffled. My next disappointment was the discovery that I was very, very bad at the ballet lessons. I was so inhibited and uncoordinated that I was utterly unable to carry through with a specific set of steps in time to music. I was constantly looking to see what the others were doing and trying to follow them, so I was always a step behind. I was ashamed, frustrated, and despairing. The music wasn’t beautiful, the place was gloomy, I had made no friends, and there was nothing inspiring about any of it. If I kept going for the number of weeks my mother had paid for it was because it didn’t occur to me that I could quit. I thought I had to tough it out, although each week I went with less conviction than the week before, and at home I didn’t practise. During the last class, Mother came to observe my progress, and of course she saw that I was out of step. The ballet mistress told her that I was the worst of the bunch. Therefore, although I may have expected to continue – because, after all, I’d gritted my teeth and kept on going to school – my ballet lessons lapsed and were never mentioned again except when Mother pointed out that they’d been a waste of money. She said she didn’t understand how I could be so hopeless. For the following year ballet would have been forgotten anyway because in the spring or early summer I fell and cut my kneecap wide open. I was roaming along the railway embankment near our house and, bounding down the grassy slope in long leaps, I missed my footing and fell on one knee. Someone had flung a bottle there, and its broken base was hidden in the grass with the sharp edges standing up. My right knee went directly into it and was sliced deeply in two

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places. I hobbled home with blood squelching in my running shoe and a huge cloud of mosquitoes pursuing me. I think now that the cut, which went right down to the bone, should have had stitches, but my mother washed it, disinfected it, and slathered it with ointment. Then she bandaged it and told me not to bend my knee. This was before Medicare, and I wasn’t taken to a doctor. Mother wouldn’t have paid good money just to hear a doctor telling her what she already knew. She observed that the wound was closing well and informed me that, “if you were an alcoholic, dear, your blood wouldn’t clot like that.” I spent the rest of the summer limping around straight-legged, afraid to bend my knee for fear of opening the wound. When eventually it did heal, my right kneecap was a slightly different shape from the left one. As an adolescent, naturally I considered that a monstrous deformity.

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chapter fourteen

Resi stentiali sm

It was embarrassing, too, to be limping when Mother and I made a summer trip to visit her elder sister, Catherine, in Minneapolis. Although I was interested in meeting cousins I’d never seen and had barely heard of, I imagined they must live a long way away. But after an overnight train ride, during which I slept soundly, suddenly we were there. The United States were closer than I’d expected, and I arrived in a state of sleepy blankness, surprised to find that the trip was already over. What struck me about Catherine was how unlike my mother she was – slender, dark-haired, and so soft-spoken that I would never have guessed she was a member of the Leonard family. Six years older than Mother, she was married to a doctor, Wilford Park, and had three sons: Robert, three years older than I am, James, about my age, and Warren, a couple of years younger. When we arrived they were nowhere to be seen. Setting foot in the Parks’ large, plushy house while still only half awake was like stepping into a dream adventure. In the silence and the dimness, with Catherine’s heavy drapes drawn against the sun, even the air was velvety. They had a maid, Mother told me, and I gazed admiringly at the uncluttered purity of the house. Coming out of my

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torpor, I was looking forward to meeting my cousins, but Catherine told us that her two younger boys were out while Robert was upstairs in bed. He’d had surgery, she said, and was recovering. While my mother explained about my knee – to which I don’t think Catherine said anything – what I took in was that Robert had had his appendix out, maybe because that was the only medical procedure I’d heard of. My aunt’s polite reserve plus the knowledge that she was married to a doctor, together with the mention of an operation, combined to enhance the mysterious gloom of the Park household. The other effect of the controlled dimness in that house was an air of intense feminine complicity. My mother and my aunt, who hadn’t seen each other for years, sat down in the kitchen and fell into a hushed conversation from which I was not so much excluded as ignored. Of course I listened, but they were speaking in veiled allusions and referring in undertones to people and events that they alone remembered. The gentle Catherine possessed a power I hadn’t seen before. My assertive mother was listening instead of lecturing. They’d forgotten I was there, and I hovered, not knowing if I should stay or leave them to it. While the pair of them went on sharing confidences, I wandered away. I slipped into the living room, parted the velvet drapes, and peered out at the sunlight over the trees and the lawn. All quiet out there as well. Finally I limped off to explore the house on my own. Which was Robert’s room? I skulked up the stairs. In the hall above the doors were all closed. Maybe he’d asked his mother not to let those unknown relatives bother him. Not sure how far I should go, I tiptoed up a second flight to the attic landing and saw a door standing open. Maybe that was his room. I peeked around the doorframe. Oops, no. In there a black-haired woman was turning this way and that in front of a full-length mirror, admiring herself in nothing but a rubber girdle. If that was the maid, she wasn’t like the maids I’d read about in books. Guilty of spying, I sneaked back down the stairs. My knee couldn’t have been all that bad. In the kitchen, my mother and my aunt were still deep in talk. Catherine looked up and smiled at me. She didn’t ask where I’d been. Over Mother’s protestations, she offered me a small lipstick, probably a manufacturer’s sample. Since my mother didn’t wear lipstick, I’d never

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had such a gift, and I was delighted. I practised screwing the lipstick up out of its tube and down again until a chunk of it broke off and fell onto the little mat between the kitchen and the dining room. Embarrassed, I stepped on it, mashing the greasy red stuff into the mat. Catherine told me that it didn’t matter while my mother exclaimed in disapproval at my clumsiness. Where were my manners? What I regretted was losing my first lipstick before I’d had a chance to try it. The most memorable part of our short stay came the following day when I went to the beach with my cousin James. In Minneapolis, this was the shore of a small, inner-city lake close enough to walk to. I’d been wanting to see my cousins, but on meeting James I instantly froze. I was so shy that I barely took in which one he was. However, Robert was recovering from surgery, and Warren was only eight years old, so it must have been James, my closest contemporary, who took charge of me. Our outing was a hesitant little expedition because I was timid, limping, afraid of the water, and, as always, afraid of the sun. Nor was there any clear reason for going to the beach. Had James been delegated to entertain me? I was hanging around listening in on my mother and my aunt. They may have wanted to get rid of me so they could have a tête-à-tête in privacy. James led the way out onto the crowded sand. He was suavely friendly, and all we did was sit and talk. I was relieved. It was a mild, sunless day, and he didn’t suggest that we should swim, so I could keep my clothes on. For once, the beach didn’t have to be a test of courage. During our brief visit, however, James showed me something unexpected. He told me that usually there was money to be found at the beach because, when people sat down in the sand, coins fell out of their pockets. Really? My cousin proceeded to sift through the sand with his fingers, methodically. He knew what he was talking about. While I watched, he found nickels and dimes and quarters. He was pleased to demonstrate his worldly knowledge, and I was impressed. The United States really was different. The beach sand there was full of money. When he was satisfied with his harvest, we walked back up to the house. That was the one and only time that I talked to my cousin James. As for Robert, he assures me, nearly sixty years later, that he still has his appendix. He says he once had a hernia operation. And

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James’s sand-sifting demonstration, that early search for values lost or forgotten, turned out to be a forecast of my middle cousin’s future occupation, because Robert says that James has made a lifetime career out of being a self-published existentialist. The day of the beach visit was our last in Minneapolis. That evening Mother and I were driven to the station, said goodbye to Catherine, and settled into the overnight train. We hadn’t even caught a glimpse of Wilford Park whom I never did meet. During our trip home my mother said nothing about our stay with the Parks. She didn’t criticize my stepping in the lipstick, and she didn’t tell me anything more about her sister. After other family visits, it was her habit to provide lots of background, with reminiscences about China, and a discussion of the person’s present life and projects, followed by the reasons for those. About Catherine, however, Mother was silent. As the train clacked along she sat with her hands folded, looking out at the lights of cars and farms flashing past in the dark. And I fell asleep without telling her about the maid or the money in the sand. • Back in North Kildonan while it was still summer, waiting for my knee to heal, I was at a loss for something to do. Mother saw me poking around for reading material and remembered a book that she thought I might like. She went down to the basement to search through the boxes for it, while I sat at the top of the cellar steps taking in her running commentary. “What’s this? Ah me! My uncle Weekes … from his set of Shakespeare … As You Like It … bet he wouldn’t have liked having his cover ripped off … somebody walked on it, slipped. How did it get down here? The others are upstairs. He came to Toronto in the thirties, while I was at Vic … gave me this Shakespeare. Uncle Weekes said you should never run after a woman or a streetcar because there’d be another one along in a minute … so he never married. Said he hadn’t been to the city in forty years. I asked him if it had changed, and he said ‘Well, it’s certainly dirtier.’” Listening while she was more or less talking to herself was the best way of learning from my mother. Her free associations, delivered

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in stream-of-consciousness style, had none of the judgement or the bossy criticism that accompanied straightforward instruction from her. I’d never heard of her uncle Weekes, and I felt a surge of empathy for a man long dead, whose first name I didn’t think to ask, because he’d made a special trip to visit his niece at university and make her a present of his leather-bound volumes of Shakespeare. Learning of his existence, along with a glimpse of his acerbic personality, helped me to feel connected to the past. Mother set the damaged As You Like It aside and dug deeper. “Ah! Here it is! Canadian Crusoes by Catherine Parr Traill. This belonged to my mother, and I read it as a child.” She handed the book up to me and dived back into the box, hoping to find the torn-off cover of the Shakespeare. What was interesting and unusual about Catherine Parr Traill’s novel was that it was set in Canada even if it had been published in England. Written for adolescent readers, the story was played out on the shores of Rice Lake in the days before the land was settled. The lake – near Peterborough in Ontario, Mother said – was then surrounded by deep forest. The general idea, about a group of children lost in the bush and over-wintering on their own, was appealing, so I read around in the book, skipping ahead, putting it down, coming back and starting somewhere else, until I gave up. It wasn’t as exciting as I’d hoped. Often I had the impression, not always mistaken, that I’d lost my place and was reading pages that I’d already been over. Mrs Traill’s style was too starchy for me, it was all of a sameness, and I couldn’t keep going. Only years later, after I’d seen Rice Lake, did I realize that Grandmother Leonard’s copy was the first edition, published in 1852. Naturally I went looking for it again, but too late, because it had vanished. Canadian Crusoes had been swallowed up by our family wilderness. Nor did I ever admit to Mother that I’d found the book dull or that I hadn’t got through it. But she didn’t ask either, because once she’d found it and handed it over, she forgot about it. Her offhanded treatment of me could sometimes be a mercy. When she pointed out an interesting object or idea, I was expected to catch on and take it from there. If I didn’t, I was dim, and she was cross with me. But it was worse when she wasn’t irritated, because then my clumsy inexperience might become a source of triumph

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for her. If I failed to get a paint can open or was caught folding a whole yard of cloth and about to cut a small piece out of the centre, she was cheerfully superior and enjoyed snatching the project out of my hands and doing it right. That was her teaching method. To her daughters Mother passed on her knowledge of traditional feminine handiwork, which we learned as she had, beginning in childhood. She taught me plain knitting – purling and ribbing or casting on and, eventually, off. Although I never learned to knit a sock, she did show me basic darning so that I could mend one. In sewing, I learned to use a pattern and how to cut out and sew a facing or an armhole. She taught me hemstitching, embroidery stitching, and basting with a herringbone stitch, as well as how to make and finish a buttonhole by hand. Those were the techniques for the making and repairing of clothing that she’d learned from her own mother and which must have come down through hundreds of generations of women, from the very beginnings of civilization. Society is losing those skills now, with the industrialization of the garment trade, but they were precious to me in adolescence, before I could afford to buy clothes or pay a dressmaker. Mother’s approach to her sons was different, however, and more thought provoking. Her boys needed to learn technical things, they were assumed to be brilliant, and she made sure they had every possible chance to display their capacities. When Hector was seven, I overheard her teaching him how to wire an electric plug and wondered why, when I was four years older, she’d never shown me that. Of course I might not have accepted her instruction, but she hadn’t offered it. Instead I watched surreptitiously while she taught my brother. As she demonstrated how to separate the wires, cut just so far into their vinyl sheath, strip them, twist the copper threads into points, and then wind the twisted copper around the little brass screws, I learned secondhand, pondering the difference in her attitude towards us. It seemed that boys got to learn about electricity and girls didn’t. It was important to her to share her knowledge with her sons, and her involvement with them was ambitious and individual. For her daughters, the gender role tradition was fine, but for herself she made an exception, and the accomplishments that she wanted to pass on to her sons were those she’d acquired in adulthood and

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with conscious effort. Mother was always sure she knew exactly how everything should be done, whether by a dressmaker, a plumber, a general practitioner, a librarian, or an electrician. Under her instruction I did acquire one mechanical skill, however, as part of my initiation into the use of our Singer sewing machine, beginning when I was about nine. A venerable cabinet machine adorned with a golden Sphinx, it worked with a treadle and a flywheel. The treadle was connected to the flywheel by a leather belt, and those two parts required maintenance. When the belt stretched and began to slip, it needed to be tightened. Mother showed me how to pull it off the flywheel, wiggle out the heavy staple that held its ends together, cut a quarter of an inch cut off one end, and then make a new hole in the belt with a hammer and a small nail. After the staple was reinserted and the belt forced back onto the flywheel, the sewing machine went back to working smoothly. That operation she outlined for me quite matter-of-factly. On the other hand, when a question of creative judgement came up she allowed herself more boasting. For matching fabric or paint, she claimed that she never needed a sample or a chip to match a colour because, unlike the rest of us, she possessed perfect visual recall of the exact shade. The information that it might be difficult to retain a precise nuance of colour was new to me. I hadn’t realized that it was a challenge, but I’d never tried it either, so I took her word for it. Maybe she was right, and it was pointless to argue. I learned some of what I needed and ignored the rest. My mother’s triumphalism also involved bragging about her resilience. She liked to declare, as she chomped on a raw green bean or a carrot with mud on it, that she had “a stomach like a goat!” When the rest of us were tormented by mosquitoes, she claimed they didn’t bother her because she’d been immunized as a little girl in China where she’d been bitten by great big Asian mosquitoes. Or to display her agility, she showed us how she could pick up a pencil with her toes. Gran tut-tutted when she heard about that one. The pencil performance served, opportunely, to justify her opinion that her son had married an appalling tomboy. Gran claimed that Alice’s feet had been permanently spread when she was a child “running barefoot in China.” Well, that was Gran’s take on it. I doubt if the Leonards went

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barefoot in Cheng-du. My mother’s parents would have subscribed to the values of a garrison culture that obliged them to dress in starched collars and laundered shirtwaists, as well as proper shoes with socks. On the other hand, any such strictures might have been enough to impel my rebellious mother to run barefoot in spite of them. • Treading the shifting waters of family strife, I had no idea what I might ever be good at. I literally did not know what to do with myself. Since I couldn’t ignore my mother all the time, I was holding my breath and hoping not to sink before I could find out who I was destined to be. Eventually, I expected things to come clear, and, extrapolating now, I wonder how much there is that I still haven’t figured out and how much time remains for me to understand what is really going on. Only later in life did it occur to me that none of us was given the slightest advice about how to navigate socially. Mother herself didn’t know how to deal with the outside world, and since her husband was self-absorbed and antisocial, in her forties she was still busy rejecting what her own mother had tried to teach her. She prided herself on being spontaneous and “natural.” She scoffed at etiquette until she noticed her offspring committing some blunder that reflected badly on her. Then she’d shriek at us, “Where are your manners?!” And we’d be taken aback. Manners were not a subject we’d heard mentioned at home, or not often. As a good-looking, resourceful woman who’d had a tough childhood, Alice should be forgiven, I guess, if she had little patience with a clumsy, anxious successor. After all, she’d grown up as the alarmingly smart youngest daughter of a perfectionist mother and a vain and selfcentred father. Arriving from China at the age of seven and dropped into the Ontario school system later than the other pupils, she’d surpassed them all. Amongst her own siblings, her role had been that of the youngest girl and the cleverest, used to impressing everyone with her quick, sharp retorts. So, if she had to rear a replacement, why couldn’t I at least be skilful and charming? In her view, I was squandering my advantages. Some of the time I was a beast, and the rest of the time I was a ninny.

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In the chronic, hopeless disorder of our house, she blamed her children for the mess we scrimmaged in. The way she told it, she’d been a perfect housekeeper until we came along, and the chaos was our fault. I knew that wasn’t true. In some long-ago discussion I’d heard my aunt Evelyn state that “Alice’s room was always a mess!” and I did not doubt her. My mother had that almost preternatural ability that causes objects to fall off hooks and shelves, to get wet, to crack, to spill, or to slip out of sight and vanish. She didn’t want to produce disorder, but she couldn’t help it. Chatting with herself while she waded around in the clutter of the North Kildonan basement, sorting laundry along the way, she didn’t always remember what she’d gone down there for. Faced with the morass of her physical milieu, and constantly analyzing the problem, she never arrived at synthesis. Often as not, searching for something – such as a roll of masking tape – she’d run across some other item that she’d been looking for earlier and be drawn into considerations that had nothing to do with the masking tape. “More socks! And those … oh … these must be Paul’s. But then whose boots are those? Well, that was top for the … I was looking for that … so this must be the other part for the … ah! … here’s the masking tape. And there’s the … uhh … ! I thought I’d told him to put it away … and who left that open!? Bag’s supposed to be shut. Cats’ll get into it. Oh, and these were supposed to … he told me he’d put them out. Hmmph … he’s a rich source of excuses. Now, about the floor drain. Where did the man put that big wrench?” When presented with clarity and order, she might exclaim admiringly but in a tight-lipped, mingy way because the effect was not her creation. Or she relieved her irritation by projecting her own limitations. Habitually involved in more projects than she could handle, and always hopeless at organization, she took out her frustration on her offspring. “Why do you never finish anything!?” But there were plenty of things that she’d never finished and never would, and it looked as if my place was with the projects that hadn’t turned out as well as hoped for. When suddenly I shot up and became tense and difficult, it was inevitable that the resentment between us should come out into the open and equally natural that it should appear to be my doing. I was the one who was causing all the trouble. A picture taken of me in

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1955, together with my younger siblings, shows me sticking up out of the group, at least a foot taller than the three others. Eleven going on twelve, I was perhaps five-foot-five and was led to believe that I was a giantess, although, from then on, I was to grow only another inch and a quarter and never quite reached five-foot-seven. My notion that I was too tall was the result of adolescent self-consciousness and self-doubt. • Thus my height was no indication of maturity when I set out to shop by myself for the first time. From the inside, the Eaton’s store in downtown Winnipeg looked exactly like Eaton’s in Toronto. And as in Toronto, I knew the way in but had never had to look for the way out. I didn’t know that the door opening to the back looked just like the door that opened to the front. On the day when I set off to browse on my own, agreeing to rejoin my parents at a precise spot afterwards, Mother was annoyingly insistent about telling me where to go, over that way and beside such-and-such, and when to be there, pointing out the direction and the place in a boring and bossy way. “Okay,” I said, “okay, okay,” closing my ears to everything she said because I just wanted to get away and explore. “Are you listening to me? Did you hear what I said?” I was looking at her, but I couldn’t hear her. “By the ………….! And at ……….. o’clock!” “Yes, yes,” I said and forgot her instantly. I marched off. I couldn’t have had much money, although my allowance had recently been raised to twenty-five cents a week, but I was shopping anyway. Or I was learning to shop, discovering what was on offer by examining and evaluating a panoply of tempting things, mostly clothes. Plunged into an escapist ocean of otherness, floating in a dream world of blouses and gloves and shoes and little pleated silk scarves, it was quite a while before I came up for air. Then I decided to go and find my parents. I walked back and forth, expecting to come across them immediately but didn’t. Hadn’t they been right over here? Wasn’t this where Mother had been standing while she lectured me? Or was it the other way?

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I walked over to what I thought was the front door, but the street outside didn’t look right, it was a small street. So I went back, but not to where I’d been. Well, where had I been? Now I wasn’t sure about that either. So where was I supposed to meet them? I hadn’t the faintest idea. Being lost in a department store is like being lost in a forest when you’ve forgotten to look behind you as you head in and therefore see nothing familiar when you turn around and try to find the way back out. I trudged hopelessly back and forth searching and began to panic until, big girl that I was, I started to cry. A passing couple stopped and asked me if I was lost, and when I confessed that yes, I was, they asked me my address and drove me home – across the bridge and all the way out to North Kildonan. There was no one home when they dropped me off, but the door was unlocked, and I let myself in. Seeking comfort in food, I took a package of bacon out of the fridge and began cooking some of it, an operation that I hadn’t tried before. By the time Mother and Bert walked in the door and found me there, the bacon was burning, and I was in trouble. In a swift, automatic gesture, my mother turned off the stove, letting me know as she did so just what an idiot I was. Everything I’d done was wrong but most especially what I’d put them through by not listening to her. I was incorrigible. She noticed that the bacon was still smoking and moved the pan off the element without pausing in her diatribe. Her blue eyes turquoise with rage, she transfixed me with an accusing glare while she demanded to know how I could have been such a fool, such a dimwit, as to accept a ride home with strangers. Didn’t I know how risky that was? In fact I didn’t. I hadn’t given it a thought. But cringing in the greasy smoke, I had to admit that she was right even if the unknown couple had been kind and generous. It was just that my refusal to listen to my mother was thoroughly ingrained. I really could not hear her, not when she’d given me directions in the store and not while she stood there listing my crimes and deficiencies. All I could do was wait for her to stop. When she’d said everything she could think of for the moment and had gathered up her shopping bags and taken them into the other room, I ate the blackened bacon. •

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Apart from the struggle with my mother, that experience was my first lesson in a genuine deficiency. Nature has failed to equip me with a sense of direction. In later years, after leaving Bert, Mother was to move at least six times, from one hobby farm to the next. The result was that when I visited from Quebec I’d find myself driving around, losing my way in the back roads of Ontario, over and over again. Too often her house was in a different place, and usually I didn’t reach the turn from the 401 until after dark, when there wasn’t even an angle of light to help me imagine which way was which. Exploring the countryside in search of her latest farmhouse, I was used to getting lost, backtracking, and stopping to ask for help. My mother laughed at my incompetence, and I had to recognize that a sense of direction is not a skill that can be learned. But her addresses did keep changing too. Once, after a weekend spent in a house that Mother owned outside Cobourg, I had a Québécois colleague stop to pick me up there. He’d been in Toronto, and we were travelling back to Quebec together. For him, finding the address was easy, and he stood on the front porch in the morning light, looking around with delight at the willow trees and the duck pond. He drew in a deep breath of country air and observed, sentimentally, “So you would have grown up here?” I had to tell him that I’d never even lived in that house. She’d been in it for a number of years but was about to sell it and move on. My mother was attached to the countryside and faithful to her small-town origins, but in serial fashion. With each new address she recovered more of what her Loyalist ancestors must have known. A part of the knowledge that I took in from her ongoing observations of the world around her were samples of southern Ontario folk wisdom. Musing over a basket of wild apples found deliquescing behind the back door one day, she offered traditional lore along with her monologue: “Could have made applesauce … too bad, gone to mush. Not wormy though … Now my mother always told me that if ever you find a single apple tree growing by itself in the woods, the apples won’t be wormy.” Or on another day, in I forget what context, she was delighted to announce that “a farting horse will never tire, and a farting man is the man to hire!” Which, for all I know, may be true. Her stream of consciousness had nuggets of both information and disinformation tumbling through its currents, and it was a long

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time before I could clear my mind of some of the zany declarations that she served up as jokes but which I took seriously when I was a child. An example of her lively invention might be her explanation as to why a slice of bread, when fumbled and dropped, almost always falls butter side down. “It’s just the general cussedness of things,” she assured us. “There’s a branch of French philosophy that deals with that. They call it resistentialism!” And in a related piece of wickedness, she claimed that the reason Jean-Paul Sartre had an eye turned aside was because, as a child, he’d been in the habit of doing it on purpose to shock his Alsatian aunties and that it had stuck. I believed that too. Until my first year at university, I thought that resistentialism existed, and to this day I wonder about the nature of Sartre’s relations with the Protestant side of his family. Mother’s theory of resistentialism was as good a creation as the snow polar bear that had so impressed me back in Dixie. In the dry cold of Manitoba, however, the grainy snow did not lend itself to making snowmen. During our second winter in North Kildonan, she found a different outlet for her creativity when she enrolled in drawing and painting classes. For a start she attempted a portrait of me in oil pastels. I did sit for her for a little while, but I was afraid she was going to make my face look fat, so I sucked in my cheeks. She quickly realized what I was doing and gave up in disgust. The portrait vanished. She proceeded to oil painting and produced a small snowscape of the creek behind our house. Looking at that painting now, with our unmistakable fence stepping down through the drifts and the snow-laden trees leaning over it, I am taken back to my fencewalking exploits, because that’s what the fence meant to me. But I hear Mother’s voice, too, sounding happy when she said, “Yes, that woman was quite a good teacher … she showed us how to get the snow right.” Sharing hopeful fantasy with us, my mother declared a couple of times that through her Loyalist ancestors she was descended from one or several of the British colonists who crossed the Atlantic on the Mayflower. In the long genealogical interweaving of the generations, I suppose that may be possible although I don’t know if it’s very likely. It hasn’t been documented in the family, even if her claim was interesting. Some of the Loyalists may have been the great-greatgreat-grandchildren of the settlers who came over on the Mayflower.

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What was effective about Mother’s claim was that there was no way for me to deny or contradict it. She said that it was so, and I might as well believe her. She also mentioned an aunt, or perhaps a great-aunt, who’d been convinced that her ancestors had been cheated out of some land they’d once held title to on Manhattan Island. That, too, had the quality of faint plausibility. History tells us that Manhattan Island was purchased, for very little money, from its native inhabitants, and Mother’s tale was vague enough to be difficult to refute. According to her, the aunt spent time and money fighting to have her claim recognized and got nowhere. If nothing else, the story suggests that my mother’s combativity was an inherited trait. A far sadder story that she shared with me – and one that I believe is true – was about a cousin of hers who died before she was born. His name was Ernest Frederick Aldred, and he was the son of Alice Weekes, the older sister of Edith Annie’s for whom my mother had been named. Ernest was born in 1892. As a young man, he joined the army, and in 1913 he was part of a British expeditionary force that put in at Vladivostok. His parents never saw him again because he died out there and is supposed to have been buried in Vladivostok. The family couldn’t visit his grave, and since his death dates from before 1914, and he wasn’t killed in action, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission has no record of him. Mother didn’t know what he’d died of. Census records, however, without giving the place of death, tell us that he died of typhoid on 31 August 1913. About her cousin Ernest, my mother told me only the little that she knew. Once or twice during my childhood Mother also alluded, in passing, to the existence of my cousin David, Sandra’s younger brother. That was before I’d met him, and the brevity of her comments seemed to suggest there was a story there as well, although she stopped with a mention, leaving the rest for later years. About Greta Cowan, however, David’s mother, my mother was cruelly inventive. Married to my hesitating, indecisive uncle Jack, Greta was prim, sharp, and clearly focused on whatever she happened to be pursuing. She could not have been more different from my brilliantly scatty mother, and there was not an iota of love lost between the sisters-in-law. The only opinion they shared was their dislike of Gran Cowan, who considered the pair of them equally unworthy, in different ways, of her distinguished

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sons. And in that atmosphere of mutual loathing, my mother invented a story about Greta – on the spur of the moment, I expect – that was convincing enough for me to have believed it for years. Her casual calumny was that during the long-dragged-out period that Jack and Greta spent courting, Jack had gone off on a holiday to Europe by himself. But, Mother claimed, Greta wasn’t going to let him escape so easily. She rushed after him, followed him through Europe, caught up with him in Egypt, and joined him for the rest of his tour. From then on he was snagged. When they got back to Canada, since they’d been travelling together, they had to marry. When I checked that tale out with Sandra, she told me the whole thing was “a complete fabrication.” Her parents didn’t travel to Europe together until years later, after Jack had retired from his teaching job. So what I recognize in it is my mother’s narrative impetus. She was delighted to make up a fiction that, according to the values of the time, reflected badly on her proper sister-in-law. The story would have insulted Gran too, had she heard it, but I don’t remember asking her about it. For once, I think I may have failed to blab.

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chapter fifteen

A L ong Vie w

For my second school year in North Kildonan, they told me that I wouldn’t be returning to the redbrick building that housed Lord Kitchener Public School. In Manitoba, grade seven was the first year of “junior high,” and I was sent along to a one-storey building at the far end of the playing field. It was in that new, yellow brick school that I would encounter the French language for the first time. Earlier in childhood, I’d played at inventing the words of a secret language but without making much progress. Now here was a different language – I thought it would be completely different – ready-made and spoken by real people. I still saw French as a school subject, and its appeal was based on my assumption that those who spoke it must live far away. My first French teacher wasn’t a regular member of the staff. He came to the school once a week to drill us in lists of words, mostly nouns and verbs. If he didn’t bother with the other parts of speech it may have been because their meanings and uses were harder to describe. His method was to lead us through each week’s list, making sure we knew what the words meant in English and giving us a fresh list to memorize for the following week. I made no effort and didn’t learn the columns of words. If I passed the course it was because there

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were always words on the tests that resembled their English cousins, and I could wing it. Our teacher gave the course in English, and I didn’t learn to speak a word of French. That one day I would launch into the translation of whole collections of Québécois poetry was not an activity that I could have foreseen then – although I would have welcomed the challenge if I had. It wasn’t until the following year, when we were already back in Ontario, that Mother would tell me my French teacher’s regular job had been as a milkman. He was from the French-speaking community of St Boniface, which, like North Kildonan, was across the Red River from Winnipeg and to the south of us. That was news to me. I hadn’t realized that Winnipeg had a French-speaking suburb. Too late, I discovered that the distant French-speaking elsewhere had been right next door. My first French teacher, with no specialized training, was a local and a native speaker. As for the quality of his French, I was in no position to judge. The man was an honest representative of his language, which he passed on in the way that seemed to him the most logical. By the time my mother told me about him I was into grammar-book French anyway, with lists of genders and conjugations that were no less dry than those vocabulary lists. There was also the fact that, as I entered junior high school, I could not have been less concerned about how anything was taught. At eleven, I was well on my way to being physically mature and was more interested in making an impression than in learning verbs. Of course my mother saw that. She enlivened my French education when she shared a joke based on the contrast between sound and meaning in French and English. Chortling, she sketched a scenario in which a suave French lover declares to an English-speaking woman, “Je t’adore!” and the object of his affection replies, “Shut it yourself!” It was the kind of humour Mother enjoyed because, apart from the interlingual play of words, it made the man look like the loser. And I did laugh at it too. • My second year in North Kildonan was the point at which I refused ever to wear leggings again and exposed my legs, in nylon stockings,

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to the rigours of the climate. I’d reached the onset of puberty, when the vanity balance tipped, and the sting of extreme cold was preferable to the sting of social embarrassment. For the first time I was seeing the boys around me as something other than combatants. One of them, a tall, grown-up looking guy, was at least fifteen and maybe sixteen. He was in an older class and appeared beside me on my way home from school. Lanky, bony, and smelling of strong tobacco, he didn’t look particularly clean. His dark hair was stuck back with grease, and his fingers were stained brown, but he dressed like a man, always in the same grey-and-white plaid sports jacket and grey flannel trousers with creases. He played country fiddle and was attentive to me in a new and unexpected way. In the fog of extreme youth I was flattered and too innocent to feel alarmed. What could I have said to him? Did I even try to talk to him? He didn’t seem to care if I didn’t say much and simply strolled along, walking me home. I noted his interest without knowing what to do about it. A more understandable friend was a Japanese boy whose family had been forcibly relocated away from the West Coast during the war. I had heard that story, and although I had some idea of its implications, I never asked him about his family’s uprooting. He and I were friends because we were both smart, and we were both artistic. At the back of the classroom when the others were gone I showed him the pictures that I’d drawn of horses, and he showed me the pictures that he’d drawn of cars. The only boy whose name has stuck in my mind was Victor Thiessen, bright and obstreperous. Poking around on the Internet, I recognized him as a sociologist now retired from teaching at the University of New Brunswick, and I e-mailed him. I asked if he remembered the day when he’d squirted a fountain pen full of green ink into his mouth and grinned at me with green running out around his teeth. He replied to my message in a friendly way, not denying that the incident occurred and even acknowledging that it was the sort of thing he might have done, but confessing that he didn’t remember it. As a grown man he was gracious – but it was the green ink that left a lasting impression. For the rest of my time in Manitoba, I looked at Victor Thiessen with admiration because of that drooling vampire grin. The books that we read as literature in English class are mixed up in my mind with what I was reading at home, so I’m not sure whether

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The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was taught at school or whether it fell into my hands from some other source, but I did recognize the name of Mark Twain. This time the story was set in a more familiar world than the fake Renaissance of The Prince and the Pauper, and this one was supposed to be worth reading, so I started into it with confidence. However, as with Catherine Parr Traill, I gave up without finishing. Before closing the book I paused to think about why I didn’t feel like going any further. The problem wasn’t that it was a boy’s book. I’d read plenty of other books for or about boys. What put me off was that there was something too cute about Tom Sawyer. His boyish cleverness – the fence painting incident, which I contemplated rather blankly – was contrived, it was insistent. More Yankee knowhow was what it was. And finding that just too boring I let the book to sink into the mess on the floor of my room and didn’t look for it again. It wouldn’t be until I read Huckleberry Finn in university that I was to notice not only the name of the author but also the period. Then at last, and in spite of his jingoism, I felt more respect for Samuel Langhorne Clemens, because I understood that he was a nineteenthcentury writer and working from a world profoundly different from either the Middle Ages or the twentieth century. In fact Huckleberry Finn was such a good book that I went back and took another look at Tom Sawyer, but still couldn’t get through it. As the autumn advanced, with my injured knee healed and bending again, the physical education classes settled into a regular weekly torment. I hated and feared gym to the point of feeling nauseated each week when the phys ed period came up. It was an ongoing nightmare, and it kept getting worse. Why do schools do this to children? I’m sure it’s still being imposed on suffering individualists, and I expect the physical education teachers are just as arrogantly dumb now as they were then. Everyone’s supposed to be a team player. The recalcitrant need to be encouraged; they need to be pushed into the action. After that, they’re expected to see the light and love the games. In those days we had to wear blue gym suits with bloomers, which I found revolting. They made us play volleyball in a small closed court where I could find nowhere to stand aside from the melee. I was supposed to charge in, shrieking and grabbing, trying to get at the ball. I couldn’t. The kind of shrieking and grabbing that I understood would have been to put

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some of the other girls, those smug, suntanned smirkers, on the floor and beat their faces into the stripes painted on the hardwood. But fighting wasn’t a legitimate sport, so I had to hang back, a reticence that could not be practised as discreetly as on the baseball field. It was seen and judged. Week after week I was forced to go in there and wait for the shame and disgust to be over with. Week after week I was sick with dread and loathing but, knowing there was no escape, continued to hover helplessly at the edge of the action, waiting for the bell to ring. Isn’t there a well-known social myth about the unhappiness of the unpopular student who suffers at not being chosen for the team? I could not have dreamed of anything more wonderful than to be shut out of their embarrassing ruckus. I longed to be excluded from the team, but it didn’t happen. They must have wanted to get rid of me as much as I wanted to escape, but they weren’t allowed to, so I had to stand there. Outdoors, however, it wasn’t yet too cold to cycle, and I still had the old blue velocipede. Another bike appeared too, army surplus like the long-gone parachute, but this time acquired from a consignment offered to the Canadian public by Eaton’s. It was a British military bicycle designed for use by a commando and intended as swift, silent transport for an agent air-dropped into enemy territory. It folded in two, one wheel on the other, and was camouflaged with flat, dull, olive-green paint all over. It had three gears but no fenders and no chain guard – nothing to rattle – and of course no reflectors. Those details lent it glamour, even if this particular bike was new and had never been dropped anywhere. Was it Hector’s or Doris’s? It wasn’t mine. Maybe the commando bike was a bicycle for general use. Hector claims that he used it when he and Doris and I rode out to visit our Manitoba cousins near the village of Oak Bank – where Mother’s elder brother, Etheridge Leonard, was operating a dairy farm. But I don’t remember that excursion. What I remember about the commando bike is how fascinating it was to drop it into the grass and see it blend in – and that later we lost it. Either it vanished intact or a car was driven over it and mashed it into the vegetation. The first meeting with my cousins Bruce and Barbara that I can recall dates from a family drive out to the farm. We made the weekend expedition to Oak Bank two or three times. On the way we’d pass a

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tract of vacant land with a sign announcing that these were the Public Nuisance Grounds, and Mother would laugh. Turning around to the back seat, she told us that was where we were going to be dropped off if we made too much of a nuisance of ourselves. And later on, Margaret Laurence, in her novel The Diviners, did use that notion because in Manitoba municipal dumps really are called the nuisance grounds, or they were then. My uncle Etheridge Leonard was a dour man whom I barely remember. As she did with our grandparents, Mother talked for him – not in his presence but on the way out to the Leonards’ place and on the way home – filling us in as to what he thought and why he was in Manitoba. She explained that Etheridge had been to agricultural college and was modern and scientific in his approach to farming. He’d been the first farmer in the province to demonstrate that dairy cattle could live outdoors over the winter if they were adequately fed. What she didn’t tell us, maybe because she didn’t know – since I’ve only recently learned this from Etheridge’s daughter Barbara – was that after high school Etheridge had asked Grandfather for the money to pay for his studies at agricultural college and was met with an adamant refusal. An angry row followed, and Etheridge was thrown out of the Delhi house. He was stalking out the door, off to work in a lumber camp, when Grandmother slipped him her secret savings of about two hundred dollars. That was a lot of money in the 1930s, although not enough, of course, to go to college on. But it was all Etheridge ever had to start him on his way. He did go to work in the lumber camp. He saved and struggled, got his degree, and was able to buy land and cattle. But he returned only once more to his parents’ house. At Christmas in 1942 he took Adelene, his fiancée, to introduce her to his parents. After that he never saw them again. Bruce and Barbara did not know their grandparents. Aunt Adelene was a big, friendly, loud-mouthed woman who could be coarse and bossy. Doris remembers having opened her eightyear-old mouth to make some reasonable observation only to have her aunt Adelene turn on her, bellowing, “Look who’s talking!!” But somehow I escaped being yelled at, or else I was too self-absorbed to notice. Relations with my cousins were also distant. Barbara was so much younger and smaller that I barely acknowledged her existence.

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Because he was closest in age to me, I did try to talk to Bruce, but he remained reserved and sceptical. There wasn’t anything he wanted to discuss with his eastern cousins. Maybe he had his reasons. When he took me out to the barn I played in the hayloft, searching for eggs in the hay until I crushed a whole nest of them, not understanding the crime that I’d committed. Despite our years on the second line Dixie, I’d never been a farm child, and now I was a suburban kid from North Kildonan, clumsy and incautious. In my view of it those eggs were just there, a fortuitous discovery and subsequently a slight accident – oops. When Bruce didn’t say anything about it, I don’t think I took in the stupidity of what I’d done. It took me years to realize that the eggs were part of the family enterprise. They had economic value and weren’t just left there haphazardly by some irresponsible chicken. The other incident that I remember from Oak Bank is having climbed a stack of hay bales on a parked wagon. The hay was slippery, and there were certainly no rails up there. I don’t remember whose idea it was to go up there, but we all climbed the stack – and then it was Bruce who slipped and fell off. We all thought he was hurt and instantly slithered back down to the ground. But Bruce displayed great resilience, considering how far he’d fallen, because he got up, turned his back, and walked away. He wouldn’t speak to us. If nothing else, he’d provided me with a lesson about hay wagons, but that was the last I ever saw of him. In putting the incident out of his mind, he opted to forget about the rest of us as well. • An isolated Manitoba memory is of the verdant plain stretching out from the city limits and of the sunny Saturday when I pedalled my clunky old bike across the prairie towards a place called Bird’s Hill. I’d been told that it was twelve miles away, and I set off with a small picnic in my bicycle bag. The road was straight and empty, and there was a bit of a breeze. The converging lines of perspective came together far ahead in the waving, blowing greenery, which was filled with singing birds. I pedalled slowly along, wondering what there was at Bird’s Hill. The day was bright but not dangerously so. The wind was warm. Would there be more birds, or some special kind of bird, at Bird’s Hill?

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Was there actually a hill there? All I could see in front of me, behind me, and all around me was perfectly flat. How far had I come anyway? If there was a hill somewhere up ahead, shouldn’t I be seeing it soon? After another mile, staring into the vanishing point, I thought I could make out a figure on foot coming along the road towards me. And for unknown reasons, on that glowing day, I saw something ominous about the dark stick-figure outline in the distance and walking my way. Was it even a person? It seemed to be a man. He had something over his shoulder. In the midst of those rippling green fields, he looked like a man with a scythe, and I imagined the shape of the Grim Reaper. Don’t be silly, I reasoned with myself. That’s a farm labourer on his way home from some job. Still pedalling, I stared ahead at the dark vertical shape. Yes, there really was someone up there at the point where the road and the sky converged, and yes, he did seem to be walking towards me, with a long shaft over his shoulder. I couldn’t make out enough detail to interpret the vision more clearly than that, but I stopped anyway, put both feet down, and tried hard to see exactly what the mysterious figure was. When I couldn’t, I decided that I’d rather visit Bird’s Hill some other time. I turned around and bicycled back home. Sometimes, riding a horse in the bush, looking down a forest perspective filled with tree trunks, I wonder if one of the vertical shapes I’m seeing at the point of convergence is a figure coming, someone on foot or on another horse, or just a tree. But now I rely on the perceptions of the animal I’m riding. Horses are such skittish, long-sighted creatures. If the horse doesn’t see anything threatening up ahead it must be all right. Horses can see farther than people can; they can see in the dark. They recognize another horse coming before the human even notices it. And they scare easily. They may well shy at perfectly harmless things, like a bird that’s hopped down from one branch to the next, or a tree that’s suspiciously pale because something has stripped the bark off it. A horse will panic and do a writhing step dance at the sight of an object that doesn’t belong in the bush, such as an old armchair someone has dumped or – horrors – a yellow school bus parked in the middle of a wood lot. Even the calmest, the stodgiest of them are alarmists, and having to reason with the animal and reassure it calms me. If I can persuade the horse to settle down, I

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can keep going until the illusion resolves itself. And if I can’t, because the animal is fighting me every step of the way, well then, we just have to turn around and trot back to the stable, which solves the problem for both of us. Maybe it was from Granddad that I learned or inherited a tendency to give in to atavistic fears. I’d much rather contemplate nature between the ears of a horse than walk into the bush on foot and alone. Atavism can be grounded in reality. Once I did meet a black bear that way, much to the bear’s puzzlement. Possibly he’d never seen a person on horseback before. He didn’t know what kind of monster we were. He ran to about fifteen feet away and behind a screen of leaves stood up to peer back out and wrinkle his snout at us, sniffing. The mare had never seen a bear either and was used to hearing from me that there was no danger. This time she could feel me trembling. When I turned her around and released the bit, she and I were in complete agreement. Humans aren’t supposed to run from bears, but Charlotte was a twelve-hundred-pound horse. We turned tail and thundered out of there. No more bear. So I’m confident that Granddad would have agreed with my preference for rambling in the woods on four feet rather than two. Many of his family were horse people. A couple of his brothers were passionate riders, and I expect I come by my own equestrian inclination as honestly as I do the apprehensions of doom, with the result that at the age of eleven I was unhappy and insecure out on the prairie with nothing but a bicycle for company. If I’m admitting my fear only now it’s because I knew then that it would have sounded too loony to confess that I thought I saw the figure of death coming along the road towards me. • With the arrival of the cold weather, bicycle expeditions were over anyway. We ran around outside but close to home except for the Saturday afternoons when, with Doris and Hector, I took the streetcar into the city to a movie house where noisy crowds of children paid twenty-five cents each to see grainy black-and-white adventure serials aimed at the adolescent market. We wallowed in those melodramatic

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stories, not caring if we missed some episodes and rarely seeing the whole of anything. What was more, we were told to hold onto our ticket stubs for a prize draw after the film, and one Saturday they called out the number on my stub. I was amazed that such a thing could happen to me, and at first I froze. But when they called the number a second time, I went up to the front and handed over my ticket. They escorted me out to the lobby where I was invited to choose from a table full of prizes. Overcome by the profusion of tempting gimcrackery, I hesitated, then seized a box of plastic dollhouse dishes. Could they really be mine? On the way out I pried open the end of the box to admire them. But then, tramping back from the end of the streetcar line through a snow-filled laneway, I didn’t notice when one or two of the little cups fell out through the torn end of the box. It wasn’t until I got home that I realized some were missing. That was sad enough, but worse was to follow. As soon as Mother saw the contents of the box and heard the story she turned on me with contempt. A stupid box of plastic doll dishes! How could I have been so selfish and so silly? Why hadn’t I chosen something that the whole family could enjoy? “Yes,” said Hector, with an air of collaborative reasonableness, “there were some badminton rackets there that she could have taken and she didn’t.” I was wounded, crushed. I’d made a fool of myself as soon as something worthwhile was offered. And immediately I hated the set of little plastic dishes, no longer even complete, and everything else around me. I was an idiot. I put the box away, probably in the long closet upstairs, and do not remember ever seeing it again although we did go back to the movies a few more times. A different sort of disappointment arose on a day at school when we’d been told that the assembled students were going to be treated to a movie: The Last of the Mohicans, adapted from the novel by James Fenimore Cooper. From the little that I understood, the story involved suspense, daring, and nobly felt eighteenth-century sentiments expressed by handsome people in period clothing. We were deep into those when, after about half an hour, there was a flash and a snap, and the movie came to a halt. We sat and waited for it to be repaired, but instead one of the presenters stepped up in front of the screen

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to announce that unfortunately the film could not be spliced. In its place, he told us, they were going to offer us an excellent documentary about the history of the Coca-Cola Company. Then he cued up what amounted to a long commercial featuring lovely ladies in gay nineties dresses, laughing and flirting at a picnic in some grassy parkland while a mellifluous voice-over recounted the benefits of the marvellous, healthy, natural ingredients (shown flowing from a crystal pitcher) that went into the creation of that delicious and refreshing elixir, Coca-Cola. There was no sign of any Mohicans. Watching it, I felt as I had when my grade four teacher took away the story of the boy crossing the quicksand or when I had to relinquish the comic book as the princess was about to be strangled by her pearls. Now I wonder if the film’s breaking wasn’t a put-up job. The Coca-Cola Company, even in the 1950s, would have wanted to get their advertising into the schools. Letting us see just the first half hour of a real film may have been their bait-and-switch technique, but instead of leaving me with a longing for a Coke, the ruse left me with yet another incomplete story to catch up on. When, years ago, I found a whole row of James Fenimore Cooper’s novels at a used book dealer’s, I bought the lot, not discovering until I got them home that The Last of the Mohicans was the only volume missing from the set. Later, when I did find the book and encountered in it the nineteenth century’s view of the eighteenth, I was surprised at how gory and racist it was. The movie version that I’d seen a bit of may have been a prettied-up adaptation. James Fenimore Cooper was much closer to the 1700s than we are, and for the original novel, keen to document long-vanished attitudes, he researched the period that he was presenting. When a woman leaps off a cliff rather than marry a Mohican, are we supposed to understand it as pathos? Her motivation is representative of her time but what was James Fenimore Cooper’s? Also interesting are secondary details from the lives people lived in that earlier century. About the horses, Cooper repeatedly stresses that the kidnapped ladies are riding Narragansett pacers. Extinct by the middle of the nineteenth century, Narragansetts were popular in the eighteenth. They were small, brown, ladies’ horses – not handsome and not fast but sure-footed, mild-mannered, and gifted with an extra smooth action thanks to their four-beat gait. The tracker scout who’s

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following them cannot believe the footfall pattern that he’s reading from their hoofprints. “What are these waddling horses?” he demands. At least the breaking of the film left me curious enough, years later, to seek out the novel and encounter some echoes of a bygone world. In North Kildonan a different but equally unknown cinema world was the Eldorado Drive-In situated near the end of the streetcar line and within walking distance of our house. The name “Eldorado” had a resonance that thrilled me, although I wasn’t sure why. Yearning for answers to dream questions, I knew that Eldorado had connotations of antiquity, remoteness, and gold. There was something to do with jungles as well and danger. Since I knew nothing about commercial names or why they were chosen, for a while I imagined that there might be something fabulous and enigmatic about the drive-in itself, until we went as a family group to see a movie. Then, eating popcorn in the back seat, I discovered the big, dimly focussed image on the grey screen and the speaker with the woofing, fuzzy sound clamped onto the car window. There was nothing exotic about it. We went once, and I have no idea what we saw. Later on, others at school told me that it was easy to get in without a car – just slip under the chain at the back, hunker down, listen at one of the speakers on a post, and see the movie for nothing, but I was too timid to try that. The only revelation that the Eldorado Drive-In ever afforded me occurred one day when I was walking past it on my way to the streetcar. As I skirted some yellow barricades around an open manhole in the street, a construction worker surged up out of it and whistled at me. Startled – and flattered too – by his unexpected appearance, I made a mental note of it. By this time I was almost fully grown and looked older than eleven. Mother had warned me that men were going to start noticing me, but she hadn’t said that it would happen before I turned twelve. Growing up also meant that I was getting more out of what I read. Since earliest childhood I’d been pondering James Thurber’s cartoons in The New Yorker, when I expect I scrawled on them in competition with Thurber’s own scrawl. Later, from those single cartoons, I advanced to his book-length cartoon collection, Men, Women and Dogs, which was among Bert’s books from as far back as I can remember. I was to examine and reexamine that collection

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from an age when the whimsy of it was lost on me until I began to understand the satire in Thurber’s images and declarations. Subsequently, I went on to laugh at The War Between Men and Women and then laughed more thoughtfully as I came to suspect its subtext. Thurber was making unkind comments about human foibles, and I was being drawn in, intrigued to find that his men were like my father, clever and sarcastic in their dealings with women, and capable of devastating understatement. Thurber’s women, on the other hand, were given to dramatic posturings not all that different from some of my mother’s wilder assertions. I understood those as a skewed rendering of feminine nature – it was clear that they were intended as foils for his men – but just the same, parallels with my parents could be seen. Intellectually, my clever mother was still no match for my father, and in Bert I did detect something of Walter Mitty, the resemblance arising from a common tone of evasive detachment. I didn’t know the term then, but my father and Thurber’s fictional fantasist were both passive-aggressives, and at that stage in our family life any adventures, real or imagined, that Bert may have indulged in were just as secret as Walter Mitty’s. As for Thurber’s disdain for women, I dissociated myself from his target group. I was never going to be as loony as his female characters because I was never going to be like my mother, so I read on, imagining that I was learning how men’s minds worked. I devoured The White Deer and The Thirteen Clocks, savouring their laconic combination of magic and irony. Thurber’s simultaneous acceptance and rejection of ordinary reality offered a better answer to unfulfilled intellectual curiosity than any phoney Eldorado. His books were an entrée into a world whose existence I was just beginning to suspect and one that I wanted to learn more about. What puzzles me now is that I read the Nancy Drew and Rex Stout mysteries – different from each other but similarly trivial – with almost equal interest and sat through some very ordinary movies. I wasn’t quite the self-absorbed child any more, hiding upstairs to read anything in print, but I wasn’t fully conscious either. Without realizing how combative and judgemental I’d become, I was curious to discover what else was out there. •

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What was really new in 1953 and 1954 was television. Our family was the first in the neighbourhood to own a television set because it was the setting up of the CBC television news in Winnipeg that had brought Bert from Toronto. The walnut-stained box was ceremoniously installed in the living room on its mahogany-stained base (the store being all out of matching bases) and afternoons we watched while the Indian-head test pattern emerged through a blizzard of electronic snow, waiting for programming to begin. That test pattern had a mysterious significance too. Why was it there, and who was the Indian chief in the feathered headdress? Like the Eldorado, it communicated a reference to some hieratic otherness. But then the test pattern went off and we watched the Ed Sullivan show or Wayne and Shuster. I liked Ed Sullivan, maybe because his voice reminded me of Granddad’s. He introduced his performers with a flourish, they said or did whatever it was they were known for, there’d be applause or laughter, and then it was the next artist’s turn. I guess it was vaudeville. Not understanding its derivation, I watched it uncritically. Once there was a ventriloquist with a puppet. We were supposed to be impressed that the ventriloquist could “throw” his voice and make it appear that the puppet was answering him. He explained to the studio audience that it was very difficult to produce the letter B without moving one’s lips and then proceeded to demonstrate how well he could do it. “I’ve got a bottle of beer,” he said to the puppet, which responded, “Oh, you’ve got a gottle of geer,” and the audience applauded, apparently because he’d succeeded in projecting his voice as promised. On television both statements came out of the same speaker on the box, so the act demanded a double suspension of disbelief. Wayne and Shuster enjoyed a different status. Mother told us that Bert was friends with them because they’d been classmates of his at University College, so I considered them almost family. Their frame of reference was familiar too. Their jokes were based on a school curriculum in which almost everyone had been exposed to some Latin and some Shakespeare. If the skits were a little wooden, a little heavy-handed, I had nothing to compare them with and found them wonderfully funny because I did understand what they were making a mockery of. They were gloriously brash as they acted out Julius

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Caesar’s final day, the Roman emperor arguing with Calpurnia, his wife, before going out to be assassinated. Wayne and Shuster played him as an Italian mobster, and when Calpurnia pleaded with him not to leave the house – as, historically, we are told she did – the pair of them had a domestic spat. “Don’t go, Big Julie! Don’t go!!” Calpurnia pleaded, but Big Julie was superbly unconcerned. He refused to listen, turned his back, and headed out to the Forum anyway, while we laughed, cruelly, because we knew what was going to happen to him. For years after those early performances, Wayne and Shuster continued to turn up on television, usually with the same routines, still nattily turned out and looking exactly as they always had, while Bert aged. Seeing my father slumping, growing bent, whitehaired, and baggy-bodied, I marvelled at the pair of them, slim and seemingly energetic forever, with youthful faces and dense brown hair. My respect for show business was increased if only because it meant knowing how to resist the ravages of age. As for the CBC news, which had brought us to Winnipeg, I don’t think I watched it. I remember only that all programming came to an end at or just after ten o’clock in the evening. Then it was back to the test pattern. When did I go to bed? Later and later, I think. Being tall, active, and yet still a child I was used to playing wildly outdoors until darkness fell. In the summer that meant staying up until past ten o’clock. As autumn advanced and the daylight shortened, I paid no attention to the disappearance of the light and was still running around long after nightfall. With a gang of rampaging children I sneaked through the woods or skulked along the creek, sometimes hiding in the bushes, creeping up to peek in people’s windows, and then running away. We lived about a block from the Red River where several of the older houses along the riverbank, although painted and covered with siding, were said to be log houses from the earliest settlement. In the dark my playmates and I became Indians discovering the smug, alien culture inside the houses. Or with a gang of galloping outlaws, I played horse, stamping and whinnying. Since I couldn’t have a horse of my own, occasionally I became one. At other times, flitting in and out through the trees and the underbrush of the wooded rift along the creek, I was a spy escaping from capture by hostile forces.

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All this was a freedom different from the early emancipation that the Kennedy house had offered and more exciting. Once I was chased by an angry man who’d caught us peeking in his windows, and another time by a tall boy who was furious with me for hitting him. But I ran fast and neither of them caught me. Now I wonder what might have happened if either of them had, especially that long-boned adolescent. But if there was danger in prowling around in the bushes at night I thought of it only when I actually had to run, and as far as I know my parents never thought of it at all.

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chapter sixteen

The Cracked Mir ror

The trains whistling past on the rail embankment where I’d cut my knee were a reminder of my grandparents’ house in Delhi, and by our second year in North Kildonan I was ranging farther along the tracks to see where they went. The railway line led down to the Red River, as did the creek behind our house. Following the creek, I came to the colossal pillars that supported the trestles of the railway bridge, because the trains crossed the river at the point where the creek flowed into it – or it flowed until December. By Christmas, everything was frozen. In the summer the rail line was easier to follow, but in the winter, with all the vegetation shrunken, buried, and leafless, the creek became a clear avenue of solid ice, and I could wander along that to the frozen wilderness beneath the bridge pillars. Above me on the embankment the snow had engulfed everything but the rails themselves, which were blasted clear by the passage of the trains. One deep white day, though, trekking through the snow beside the tracks, I was tempted by curiosity and jumped into a huge drift that hung curled and lopping over the crest of the embankment. As soon as I went in over my head and couldn’t see, I knew I’d made a mistake. From above, the drift had looked inviting, soft and fluffy,

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and it was, except that for a few panicky moments I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get out of it again. Snow wasn’t like water; it didn’t buoy me up. And even if it was smothery soft, it was a lot denser towards the bottom where I was kicking and scrabbling with my feet. I had to try to swim and breathe in stuff that wasn’t meant to be swum or breathed in, and it was pulling me down, so all I could do was to claw and flounder until I’d made a hole in it. When I’d reoriented myself and was touching the slope of the embankment, I beat a channel through the drift and scrambled back up to the top, wiser than before. That was another experience that I didn’t mention to anyone. On another truly frigid day, Mother came out and walked down the creek with us and out onto the river’s shining windswept ballroom surface. She had her camera with her and wanted to take a picture of us, but the camera jammed, she said, because the film had stiffened and wouldn’t move. We peered down through the pressure cracks in the ice and saw that it was more than a yard thick. Happy that there was no danger of falling through that, we tramped back home in a cloud of vapour, our nostrils freezing shut with every breath. A picture taken in the Irving Place house at Christmas in 1954 sums up a number of our family realities. We’re gathered in front of the white-painted brick fireplace in the living room. Over the mantle is one of Mother’s paintings, this one a fairly good copy of Paul Gauguin’s Tahitian Landscape. To the left are the piano and some bookshelves with a slither of records and a tilting encyclopedia. The turntable from Bert’s hi-fi appears in the picture as well as a bit of the tuner. The big speaker is on the right, and its wire can be seen running across the mantle under Mother’s painting. A detail that I notice only now is how narrow the living room was. Our North Kildonan house was tiny. Although the piano and the Heathkit speaker are on opposite walls, between them we’re crammed in. From left to right, seated, there’s Doris, smiling a faint smile but looking pretty and poised, with Buttercup in her lap. The cat is completely at ease. Next to Doris is Hector, wearing a dark plaid shirt and an air of impatience. He’s taken time out from eating the piece of candy cane in his hand, and he’s waiting to get back to it. Standing behind the two of them, I look unsure and hopeful but am also smiling. I seem to be a little shorter than my mother, but I think she was wearing heels whereas I

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wasn’t. Doris and I are both wearing little silk scarves tied around our necks, like the ones I’d been admiring in Eaton’s. Bert, sitting in the middle in front, is not smiling. He’s wearing a Black Watch jacket with what looks like a beige flannel shirt, while Mother, behind him and gussied up in a black dress and a pretty pendant, smiles the broadest smile of any of us. I think I can reconstruct the discussion between them – our mother trying to persuade him to put on a white shirt and a tie for the picture and Bert saying, “but this is a shirt.” So he kept the flannel shirt on. It was cold. And down in front to the right is Paul, then the smallest (now the tallest), looking apprehensive and standing close to his father. In fact Mother has a hand on his shoulder as if to keep him there, while he has a hand on Bert’s wrist as if he needed reassurance from both of them. This was still the period when the rest of us tormented Paul, and he did a lot of shrieking. He was five years old. In the photograph he’s wearing a cowboy shirt with a sheriff’s star on the pocket and is holding his candy cane down the side of his trouser leg like a revolver from which he’s just blown the smoke off the muzzle. Like my father, my brothers face the camera soberly, accepting being photographed but not showing any enthusiasm. I wonder if Bert felt trapped or constrained in the little house. During the two years that we spent in North Kildonan he was more present than he’d been in Dixie. His new managerial job would have demanded a nine-to-five schedule, and in Winnipeg, after work, he didn’t have his cronies to hobnob with. By six o’clock he had no choice but to come home, and in the evenings he watched television with the rest of us. He was home on weekends too – when he wasn’t out shopping with, or for, Mother – and he seemed to have little to do. During the Winnipeg years I don’t recall seeing him read. When the television set was turned off, or before and after the limited hours of programming, he listened to music. He went on pretending to conduct the symphonies that came blasting out of the Heathkit, and we were used to seeing him sitting in the wing chair jerking his arms about. Or else he’d be pacing back and forth cuddling and sweet-talking one of the cats. Cat worship is a problem that runs right through the family and may be what prompted Granddad, long ago, to toss Gran’s tortoiseshell cat out of an upstairs window. This adoration of felines has left me feeling reservations, not so much about cats as about people who indulge in

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lavish displays of affection for them. The cats were innocent enough, but our father kissed his cats instead of kissing his children. Bert also maintained his policy of never having anything to do with the yard or the garden. I was too involved with my own fantasies to notice, but our lawn must have been as wild as the lawn in Dixie and the vegetable garden a riot of competing species. All I saw was that the fence I liked to walk on demanded more and better balance as it became increasingly shaky. Of course Bert would never have touched it. If Mother had asked him to do something to stabilize the fence, he would have said, “Fence? What fence?” I never saw him outdoors except when he walked from the kitchen door to his car, and as far as I know he never spoke to anyone in the neighbourhood. His Winnipeg period may have been a time of isolation for him. If he was still telling Mother stories in bed at night, I no longer heard the voices because in the North Kildonan house our parents slept downstairs. So I don’t know, either, if Mother repeated for him the chat that she picked up from our neighbours – like the CPR watchman down by the railway bridge who’d boasted to her that in the bottomland around the base of the huge pillars he grew the biggest carrots anyone had ever seen – or Mrs Matheson. Mrs Matheson, the very old lady in the house across the street, was the granddaughter of one of the first Scottish settlers sent out to Canada by Lord Selkirk in the years between 1811 and 1814. For her pioneer tales she found a willing listener in Mother who later shared her recollections with us. To begin with, I was surprised to learn that the prairie province of Manitoba had a seacoast, because that was where the Scots had disembarked, landing at York Factory on Hudson’s Bay. And following the enterprising lord’s instructions, Mrs Matheson’s grandfather and the other settlers had to slash and paddle and wade their way south through a scratchy, trackless, insectinfested wilderness of unknown lakes and rivers to the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers, where they founded Winnipeg. Mrs Matheson recounted her family’s story of terrible winters and how hard they’d worked to open up the land. At the very last she told of the summer evening when her Scottish grandfather had gone out to bring the cows in, and never came home again himself. She remembered how, when she was a little girl, the cows had straggled back on their

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own, and how the family organized a search. They looked everywhere for the old man, hiring Indian trackers and dragging a stretch of the Red River, but never found a trace of him. He’d simply vanished into a lovely summer evening. I thought Mrs Matheson’s story was immensely sad. Her grandfather had sailed all the way from Scotland to Hudson’s Bay. He’d proved his courage in fighting the climate, the mosquitoes, and the topography only to be swallowed up by the landscape anyway at the end of his life. Having seen life in the absolute, however, Mrs Matheson could be kind and wise, and when I confided in her, she listened. With childish egotism, I claimed to have learned something from my ballet lessons and was proud to show her how, after cutting my right knee wide open, I could swing that leg higher, straight from the hip, than I could the uninjured leg, and she smiled. “There you go,” she said. “It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good.” Mrs Matheson wasn’t shocked, either, when Mother ran out to gather up a freshly killed rabbit from the road between our houses. Not that Mother had ever cooked a rabbit before. She grabbed it because it was there, because she’d just seen it killed, and because she didn’t like to see it to go to waste. After skinning, gutting, and deboning it she cut it into pieces and made rabbit stew. But unhappily, we little Cowans did not share Mrs Matheson’s oldtime prairie practicality. We knew that poor bunny was an accident victim, and none of us could eat it. Mother had no idea how to tan its sad little brown pelt either, although she did save it in the basement, where it stiffened, cracked, and kicked around until it was thrown out. • Since I was as tall as my mother by then, and soon to be taller, I was beginning to stand her off when she wanted to cut my hair. Not that I’d made any firm decision about whether I wanted it long or short. I was just demanding that she leave me alone, and soon my hair was down past my ears. It wasn’t even all that long, but it was longer than the all-over chop she’d been imposing on me. In pictures now I see that my blob of hair has a helplessly dumb half-grown look, but it was my hair, and I wasn’t letting her have her way with it any more. That and other arguments were becoming more painful, however, because her

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increasing resentment could cause her to lose control. If, with typical adolescent reasoning, I hit back at her, saying, “Well if you don’t like my attitude, it’s your fault because you’re the one who brought me up,” I might provoke a passionate storm of tears. Her sudden vulnerability was amazing. I’d never indulged in the drama of rushing into my bedroom and slamming the door, but now my mother did. It was after that, maybe, that she reminisced about how easy it had been to manage us when we were smaller. On the other hand, when Mother was feeling sure of herself she was brutally nonchalant, and that treatment could turn into a test for me. One day she handed over a cheque that had come in the mail. “Here,” she said, “this is for you.” I looked at it in bewilderment. I’d never seen a cheque before. It had “five dollars” written on it. Five dollars! That kind of money was close to what I’d earned by picking tomatoes for a whole week, and it had been an important part of the purchase of my bike. Where had this come from? And how did I get at the five dollars? Mother told me that Grandmother, towards the end of the war, had bought me a savings bond, no doubt having something to do with the war effort, and that it had just come to maturity. All I had to do was take it to the bank – and that was the test that I failed. I’d never set foot in a bank, had no bank account, and had not the foggiest notion of how to open one or persuade the authorities to give me the money. I didn’t even know where to find a bank, and my mother did not help. She’d fulfilled her obligation when she gave me the cheque, so she turned away to some other task, choosing to assume that I could handle it. But I couldn’t. I put the cheque away, it was never cashed, and I still have it with my papers somewhere. Then came the day when Mother arrived home with my first bra. I hadn’t realized that my breasts were growing, and she certainly hadn’t taken me to be fitted or even mentioned that they were starting to be noticeable. She walked into the house with an Eaton’s bag out of which she pulled a very small white cotton bra of the brand that used to be called “Gothic.” And she threw it at me. “Here,” she announced as it sailed across the room, “put this on.” Since I never could catch anything, the bra went straight past me. But I picked it up and took it upstairs to try it on. Experimentally, I pulled a sweater on over it and turned around to see what I looked like in the mirror. Before I’d had

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time to decide how I felt about wearing it, Hector and Paul arrived to take a look. “She thinks she’s smart because she’s got two bumps,” said one of them, probably Hector. Smart … really? I would never have dreamed that there was anything intelligent about having breasts, or at any rate not such small ones, even if my mother had made it look as if they were already an embarrassment. But immediately I didn’t care because my little brothers had let me know how the male half of the population saw breasts. They were trying to conceal it under sarcasm, but theirs was an approving view, and if they assumed that having breasts should make me feel smart, well then, I did feel smart, sort of. Soon after that I started to menstruate, which seemed entirely stupid. Mother had already let me know that it was likely to happen, but her explanation was sketchy and more mythological than biological. She’d informed me that it was called “the curse” because it was supposed to have been imposed on women as a punishment for Eve’s misdemeanour with the apple and the serpent. All right, but our mother had long ago made sure we knew that the Bible was merely a bunch of tales, so the apple myth couldn’t be serious. While I waited for her to come up with a better explanation, instead she quoted from Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The mirror crack’d from side to side; The curse is come upon me, cried The Lady of Shalott! Then she informed me that menstruation was a result of the human race’s having got up off all fours. Walking upright was the reason for it. And that was about the extent of her explanation, except for another joke about “falling off the roof,” that I never did figure out. An inexact suspicion of its biological aspect had come through earlier in bits and pieces, as I could bear to take it in. It was awful, anyway. When my mother tried to explain about sex, I’d refused to listen and only took in the facts, vaguely, a couple of years later when I overheard the lecture being delivered to Doris. The most important part of Mother’s message was that it would be a disaster should either of us come home pregnant – even if I still wasn’t clear as to how that might happen. Subsequently, Mother would confess to Doris and me that her own mother hadn’t bothered to warn her about menstruation. Grandmother

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had already detailed the facts for two previous daughters, she said, and was fed up with the subject. When my adolescent mother found her pants full of blood, she thought she must be dying of some unexplained internal injury. With that precedent in mind, I wasn’t in a position to complain about the facts or how they were delivered. Mother also told us that the only firm information Grandmother had passed on to her about human reproduction was that sexual intercourse invariably resulted in pregnancy, every single time – which may, in fact, have been Edith Annie’s experience. After all, our grandmother had been married at thirty-six, and between the ages of thirty-seven and fortyfive, had seven pregnancies resulting in five living children. The climate between my mother and me improved a little after she gave up trying to chop my hair. Left alone, it was growing longer and thicker all the time. One day I was surprised to find her taking an admiring view. She’d been reading a women’s magazine when she looked up and held it out to me, smiling. She wanted to show me a photograph of a group of American college girls. Most of them had short 1950s hairdos, but one of them had hair to her jaw line. “Look,” she said. “There’s one rebel in every group. See this one, with her long hair? She’s a rebel, just like you.” There was no criticism or reproach in her tone. She seemed to approve, and I was relieved but taken aback. She was accepting my long red hair – a little longer, in fact, than the pageboy style on the girl in the photograph. Maybe she saw it as a credit to her own genes. I relished her approval anyway. On the other hand, my mother’s advice about men was along the lines of her lifelong battle with them. Rarely did she mention that it might be a good idea to be polite or charming. That we were going to attract the opposite sex was, in her world, taken for granted. Good looks were more or less an indignity. Men were destined to chase after us, and the thing to do was to stand them off, cleverly. If a man should at some point become “too attentive,” she told me, and if I was having trouble getting away, the best defence was to threaten to vomit. My mother illustrated her advice with grimaces and imitation retching, clutching at her abdomen. “Just say … ‘ooh, you’re making me terribly nervous and … urp … when I’m nervous, I get sick to my … oog … sick to my stomach.’ That’ll put him off!” I believed her but never put her advice into practice. As the boys around me grew to be bigger than I was, they also became more distant.

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And although I still believed that I could fight, it was less and less necessary. Instead I admired them and became extremely shy about speaking to them. • Summer returned and escape into the wild outdoors. Once the vegetation had burst into leaf, the creek was all different again. Under a lush cover of greenery, slipping through the six-foot weeds that grew along the bank, I found secret footpaths and followed them down to the river. Where four months earlier there’d been nothing but snowdrifts, I explored the swampy boreal jungle growing up around the bridge pillars. Although some of the boys used that railway bridge to cross the river, I never tried it. All too easily I could imagine the horror of being caught there by a train, and I shuddered when the boys claimed that you could lie down between the rails and let the train pass over you. That would have meant trusting the CPR not to leave any projections hanging from the undersides of their boxcars. And there was that CPR cop too – the watchman who grew the enormous carrots – living in his little house in the shadow of the bridge. If he didn’t catch the boys, he would probably have caught me. For one or maybe both of our Manitoba summers, in July, we rented a cottage on Lake Winnipeg where we treated ourselves to two weeks of steamy mosquito-plagued heat amongst the stands of poplars and yellowish birches. From the second of those vacations I recall a view of flat, brownish, lake water overflown by a swarm of flying, dying insects that plocked and rustled against the cottage screens. Although inoffensive, the things were much larger than mosquitoes and truly disgusting as they flipped and tumbled all around. The locals called them “fishflies” and told us that they swarmed in their hundreds of thousands for a few days only. Then they fell down dead and crunched underfoot. Was it just our luck to have taken the cottage for the two weeks that represented their summer life span? Maybe not. Native Manitobans probably knew better than to book a cottage for those weeks. Like all the cottages we’d ever rented, this one was rudimentary. It had a toilet but no complete bathroom. Instead there was a generalpurpose sink outside the toilet, with a little shelf and a mirror above

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it. When we arrived, I found that an earlier occupant had forgotten her mascara on the shelf. I’d never had my hands on a tube of mascara before, and immediately I tried it on then stood back to judge the effect. Wow! My pale eyelashes, always invisible, turned out to be long. Darkening them dramatically improved my appearance. Gazing at my large-eyed reflection, for the first time I envisaged the possibility of feeling as pretty as other girls. And although there wasn’t much left in the abandoned tube, over the following days I made the most of it, scraping out the last smudges and parading around with my eyes enhanced. I lost interest in swimming and dipped in and out of the tepid cloudy water without putting my face in. That Mother hadn’t noticed the mascara was the best part. Towards the end of our stay, having given up on the beach, I faced into the storm of wings and ambled out to where the Meteor was parked in the trees behind the cottage. I’d had enough of this vacation, and the car was my link with civilization. It would take me home. Drifting back and forth, I tuned out the whoops and splashes from the lake, wishing I was somewhere, anywhere else. Other cottages were strung out along the shore, and other people’s cars had been driven into the sand and parked haphazardly under the birches, but we hadn’t met or talked to anyone since we arrived. Spending our holidays at a lake then was less fun than when I was small, not that going back to North Kildonan would have made much difference. I’d had few girlfriends in Ontario, but from the Manitoba period I don’t even remember the names of the children that I roved around in the bush with. I was on my own and suffering from ordinary adolescent disconnection while I waited for this family vacation to be over. Then, unexpectedly, a girl of my age or a little older materialized out of the trees. Had she come out of some other cottage? Maybe she’d been sitting in one of the cars scattered about in the vegetation. Unconcerned by the blizzard of fishflies, she spoke to me. “Hi.” “Hi.” She looked a bit like the tobacco hands from the fields around Delhi, a stocky girl of middle height with greasy hair, widely spaced teeth, and dirty fingernails. However, she was a contemporary, and she seemed willing to talk to me. We sized each other up from several feet apart. I don’t think we bothered with the basic exchange about our

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schools or our likes and dislikes – a test that I always failed because I’d never heard of the songs or singers I was supposed to admire. We didn’t even exchange names. Names didn’t matter because she quickly got down to what she wanted to tell me about. “Listen, d’you know how easy men’ll give you money?” I looked at her. “Money … ” “Yeah, guys. They’ll give you money!” “No. What for?” She snorted. “For nothing! Just like that!” “I don’t see why. I don’t believe it.” “Come on! Sure they will! On Friday night? You know, payday? You just go down by the hotel, outside the door there … and when they come out, guys’ll put their hand in their pocket and they’ll hand you five dollars, just like that!” Not knowing what a hotel looked like, I imagined a featureless edifice with cement steps. What did a hotel have to do with payday? Did the men work in the hotel? I pictured myself standing outside a mysterious building, at the bottom of a flight of blank steps, and looking upwards seeing the dark silhouettes of unknown men crowding out through a doorway. The vision was in black and white, like a movie. “I really don’t see why.” “Because it’s the end of the week, and they got money, and they’re happy, so if you’re there and when they see you … ” What she was telling me was so foreign to my experience that I listened to her, trying to figure out what she was talking about. I could not imagine anyone handing out money to another person just for standing there. Even if I lacked the information needed to decode what the tough-talking girl was getting at, I knew there had to be more to it, and of course my face revealed my puzzlement and my hesitation. “They don’t care what they do with it!” she scoffed, looking me steadily in the eyes. “I mean, they got money, they’ll give you five dollars, easy, give you ten.” She seemed to be bragging, and I couldn’t imagine why or what about. Her story didn’t make sense. Seeing that I still doubted her, she got mad. “You don’t believe me? It’s true!” So I told her that, okay, I believed her, although her story was incomprehensible. What hotel was she talking about anyway? I saw

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nothing around us but the weedy trees, the parked cars, the warm muddy lake, and the clouds of horrible insects. I turned away and when I looked around again, she’d vanished. • After that, our two weeks of vacation over, we returned to North Kildonan, and as soon as I had the chance, I biked up to the Henderson Highway in search of a drugstore. With my accumulated allowance money, I was setting out to look for mascara. No more pale rabbityeyed look for me. At the same time, my enthusiasm for playing at being an Indian or a horse or a spy was waning. I was still out roving around after dark, but the nature of the games was evolving. Late one night, in the tall trees down near the river, I got to sit by a bonfire with a bunch of other adolescents singing songs and drinking soft drinks. If they were drinking beer as well, I didn’t notice. Coke and Seven-Up, banned at home, were evil enough, and all of it was new to me. Thrilled at having been allowed into the group, I forgot my earlier games, even if it was one of my spying playmates who’d taken me to the party. Most of the kids were older than I was, and I assumed that the others had always been there. Night after night they must sit around a fire like this, encircled by dark trees and watching orange sparks crackling up into the black sky. If this brightness and this intimacy, singing and drinking, were what life was meant to be, if this was the freedom of growing up, I wanted more of it. It was all magical. Then they showed me that you could throw a raw potato into the fire, just in its skin. When the flames died down, you raked your potato out with a stick, tossed it from hand to hand to cool it, broke it open, and ate it. The outside was a quarter of an inch of blackened ash, but the inside was fluffy white and delicious. That bush party took place about a month before we left Manitoba, and I never experienced anything like it again. • Looking back towards the end of that second summer, I find time telescoping. We’d been in North Kildonan for only two years and they closed more abruptly than our five years in the Kennedy house. Earlier, I’d found my mother weeping in the kitchen because she’d just

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heard that my aunt Catherine, who’d been so friendly and so kind, was ill with breast cancer and was expected to die. In her hand she was holding the letter from Catherine’s husband, Wilford. “She knows what she is facing,” Mother read, snuffling back tears, and then folded the letter, sobbing, “but she isn’t even fifty!” I didn’t know what to say, troubled by the knowledge that Catherine had been Wilford’s second wife and that the first one had also died. Uncle Wilford was a doctor. How could he just let his wives die? But seeing my mother crying, I didn’t dare ask why it was happening. I remembered my mother and my aunt talking in the kitchen and how I’d been sent down to the lake with James. Mother may have suspected what was coming. She dithered a little about making a trip to Minneapolis to see her sister one last time but in the end did not go. Much too soon the news arrived that Catherine was dead. And rather quickly after that – because in the meantime we’d been away at the lake, fuddled by all those disgusting flies – Mother announced that I’d be making a trip back to Ontario to visit Gran and Granddad. I’d be staying with them for the last two weeks of August. What at the time I failed to take in was that my Minneapolis cousins, Robert, James, and Warren, were already in Manitoba, out at Oak Bank, and that they were coming to stay with our family while I was away. My being sent to my grandparents was a way of freeing up a room so that Mother could take in her sister Catherine’s boys for a couple of weeks. So where was Doris sent to sleep? Maybe downstairs in the sunroom. At any rate, I was being sent back east while the Park boys moved into my room. They’d been out at our uncle Etheridge’s place, supposedly helping with the cows and the hay, but at the end of the summer they arrived rather suddenly in North Kildonan. • Since I’d been sent off, Warren Park is my source for events at the end of that summer. From his own memoir he’s sent me the pages describing the sad time that he and his brothers went through. What I’d noticed on my visit to Minneapolis – Wilford Park’s absence from the household and its silent orderliness – seems to have covered a subdued distress. And after Catherine’s death, the reason for her sons having been packed

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off to Canada was brutal. Impatient to marry again, Wilford wanted time and privacy to court his third wife. He sent his boys to Etheridge’s farm to get them out of the way, and there they were told they had to earn their keep by working in the fields or the barn. Warren, the youngest – and the only one of the Parks to have been born red-haired like the Cowans – confirms what Doris has told me about our aunt Adelene. He too was shocked by her rough manners, and he has his own hay-wagon accident to relate. He describes riding on top of a load of hay on a flatbed trailer, with his brothers and his cousins Bruce and Barbara, when one of its rear tires deflated. The load began to tilt, and Etheridge yelled at the kids to jump, which the bigger boys did, but Warren says that he and Barbara “opted to ride the bales down to the ground in an ecstasy of free flight … It was an unexpected moment of pure joy for me, that floating through the air from on high.” He was only nine years old and he’d been badly traumatized by his mother’s death, so a brief thrill of danger was liberating for him. But because the Parks were city boys – well-to-do city boys – the farm experience was all the tougher for them. Robert has added his commentary to Warren’s account. He says that being fifteen and the biggest, he was expected to make a real effort, whereas the other two were considered children and got off more easily. Then he and James, in revulsion at the primitive conditions on the farm, made the mistake of joking about it. When a fly fell into the frying pan and was cooked along with their supper, James made a joke about “fried flies,” to which Robert replied, “What’ll they feed us next?” In a rage, aunt Adelene nearly hit him with the spatula, then ordered him out of the kitchen – and he’s pretty sure it was the next day that the boys were told they’d be leaving. But when they arrived in North Kildonan, Mother was given a different reason for their expulsion. Robert was the only guilty party, and the crime he’d committed was having commented on a shirt that Bruce was wearing. Robert recognized it as one of his own, from when he was smaller, and he said so. Wanting to help, Catherine had been sending Adelene hand-me-downs. But Bruce had not been told that his clothes were secondhand, and he was insulted. Robert supposes that in mentioning the shirt he was guilty of having made “Bruce and/or Adelene feel badly about being poor.” Maybe. I wonder if Adelene didn’t prefer

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to bring up the shirt remark rather than admit that flies did get into her cooking. The atmosphere must have been unhappy all round. At our house, even if things were more relaxed, Mother also decided that the boys should contribute, so she set them to work painting the rickety fence. And in an echo of Twain’s Tom Sawyer, Warren recounts how he was able to display enough incompetence to get out of the job. Robert and James both had to paint, but he didn’t. On the other hand, Warren’s cleverness in dealing with his aunt Alice had a positive side. He found her very interesting. No doubt because of the loss of his own mother, he was unusually observant about ours. In his memoir he describes having heard her joking with the milkman, half flirtatiously and half condescendingly, as she made a production of telling the man how lucky he was to be supplying enough extra milk for her three ravenous adolescent nephews, presumably because of the money he was going to make. And Warren says he watched her showing a plumber’s helper, while the plumber was out getting a part from his truck, that he didn’t understand the workings of a water heater as well as she did. The helper didn’t want to listen to her explaining that the tank needed an air intake in order to let the water flow out, so he told her she was wrong. As soon as the plumber came into the house she insisted that he back her up, which he did. She was pleased with herself, and Warren was impressed: “How would she know about stuff like that, I wondered at the time. She was always surprising me with information about something.” Warren’s portrait of my mother is touchingly keen, especially from such a little boy, and it does ring true. That’s exactly what she was like in her prime. After that single visit, however, because the Park boys had a new and different “mother,” our families were to lose contact for half a century. Warren didn’t meet his aunt Alice again until the very end of her life when she was in a diminished state and not sure who that big bearded man was, although she did seem pleased by his concern and attention. What I conclude from the water heater story is that the Park boys always had their juice cans opened for them by the kind and protective Catherine, whereas the little Cowans, at an early age stabbing at cans of condensed milk or apple juice, were yelled at to “make another hole on the other side, silly, or the stuff won’t come out!”

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chapter seventeen

Is abel’s Chalet

While Warren and his brothers were in North Kildonan, coping with grief and culture shock, I was trying to resign myself to the cramped climate of my grandparents’ house in Toronto. Everything there was exactly as it had been two years earlier, except that now I towered over Gran. And Granddad, if still tall and straight, was nearly eighty and seemed stiffer as he climbed the stairs carrying my “grip” up to the little back bedroom. There, nothing had changed for decades. The brass paper knife that Jack had brought back from Venice, its handle shaped like the prow of a gondola, was still on his desk. The books in the desk’s slatted shelves had been there since he finished university. I took a couple out and opened them. Jack had written his name in Tolstoy’s War and Peace in 1932 but not in Anna Karenina. By the time I looked at the books, he’d been teaching Latin in a high school in Hamilton, Ontario for many years. I put them back. The permanence of my grandparents’ establishment was both reassuring and slightly numbing. Downstairs in the dining room, eating what I’d been given, I didn’t know how I could face being stuck in the back room for the rest of the summer. But then Gran said, “Don’t unpack your grip.” I looked up at her, and she said, “Tomorrow we’re going to Montreal.”

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So this wasn’t to be a visit to Ontario after all, but to Quebec, and the next morning we got on the train. Apart from those few weeks of my infancy spent in Victoriaville, I’d never seen the French-speaking province, and the visit with my grandparents allowed me a glimpse of the elegant old French-Scottish city that Montreal once was. I was lucky to see it when I did because much of what impressed me then was soon to be retired or demolished. We took a sightseeing tour up the mountain on a golden open-air streetcar with seats that rose towards the rear, like bleachers. From the belvedere at the top we had a panoramic view of the city and especially of Westmount, a formal townscape of grey stone mansions set in rustling green trees. Back down on Sherbrooke Street, I gazed in awe at the stately perspective of carved stone façades, their sober colours and the repeating shapes of their casement windows curving away into the misty city sheen with a glamour that no Toronto street had ever possessed. The scale and style of those tall, dignified houses revealed a world that I hadn’t suspected could even be a part of Canada. It was a world that I wanted to know more about then and one that I am still exploring now although, by the time I came to Quebec in the 1970s, the grand old Montreal houses were vanishing. The Van Horne mansion was demolished before I knew which one it was. Only pictures of it remain. Sherbrooke Street is no longer the vista of elegance that it must have been from the late 1800s up through the 1960s because most of the palatial houses built by the fur and lumber barons of the past have been torn down to make way for slab-sided towers. The Montreal of the twenty-first century is a chaotic-looking place and conveys the picture of a city that, at some point in its history, might have been bombed and badly rebuilt. But there was no bombing. The battle was economic, in a war of wild speculation and untrammelled and tasteless development. Naturally the tour on the golden streetcar had been for my benefit. Sightseeing played no part in Gran and Granddad’s reasons for stopping over in Montreal. What they did while there was to make contact, briefly, with the remnants of the society where they’d first met. Gran was in touch with the surviving members of her brother’s family, the McQueens, and I have a faint recollection of having dropped in somewhere, probably with the cousins who had not wanted to take

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my parents in during the war. We didn’t stay for long. When Gran had paid her respects, we travelled on, up into the Laurentians to visit my great-aunt Isabel at her cottage outside Shawbridge. Leaving the highway before reaching the village, we turned into a tree-shaded gravel road that climbed gently for another mile or two. Then we turned left, sharply uphill and in through a wire gate, and came to a stop on a sloping lawn. While we got out and looked around, the woman who’d driven us – one of the McQueen cousins, a generation younger than my grandparents – patted the hood of her car and told us that she’d named it “Lizzie.” Then she got back into Lizzie and drove off without waiting for anyone to appear. The ragged lawn where she’d deposited us stretched down from a cedar-shingled chalet with a porch across the front. This was the summer residence of Gran’s elder sister, Isabel McQueen. I followed my grandparents up the lawn to the porch where the first person we met was a Mrs Cherry. For background on her I consulted Sandra, and my cousin looked up that summer in her father Jack’s diary where he notes that Mrs Cherry, whom he calls “aunt Kate Cherry,” was indeed in Shawbridge at the time. Certainly my grandparents greeted her as a longtime acquaintance. Not only was aunt Kate an old friend of Gran’s and Isabel’s but she’d been married to Will Cherry who was one of Granddad’s wilder pals in his distant youth and almost certainly my grandfather’s accomplice in the episode of the stolen streetcar. When I arrived at the chalet he was long dead, but his widow, along with Gran and Granddad, had settled into the habit of spending a week or two of every summer at Isabel’s country retreat. Over the two weeks that I spent with them I was made acutely aware of the past, not so much by talk of bygone times as by the bubble of tacit understanding that enveloped the four of them, filled with all their shared experience. When Isabel came to the door and invited us in, I saw instantly that she’d once been red haired. She was small, if a little taller than Gran, and had an air of reserved authority. My great-aunt had never married and had worked in a school as assistant to the principal. She’d spent most of her life sharing accommodations with Margaret O’Connell, known in Sandra’s family as Mamie. Why my side of the family called the same woman Maggie has not come down, but whatever her name was shortened to, Margaret O’Connell deserves to have her existence

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recorded. Born in 1860, she’d emigrated from Ireland to Montreal in the 1880s and was discovered by Gran’s mother, Elizabeth McQueen, washing someone’s front steps on Jeanne-Mance Street. When Elizabeth stopped to speak to her, it was a year or two before the early death of Gran’s father, John McQueen. Perhaps because her husband was ill with tuberculosis and she was planning to open a dame school in her front room, Elizabeth needed a hired girl for housework and childcare. She noticed the big strong Irish girl, stopped to chat with her, and hired her then and there away from the people whose steps she’d been scrubbing. The story goes that Elizabeth promised Maggie lifelong security, saying, “I can’t pay you very much, but you’ll always have a roof over your head.” So Maggie took the job. She became Gran’s nursemaid – when Gran was the three-year-old Baby Bessie or just Baby – and Elizabeth McQueen kept her word. Maggie remained in the family, first with Elizabeth and later on with Isabel, until she died, well into her nineties. My mother once mentioned that during my infancy, on a visit to the Cowan elders, she’d overheard Maggie and her sister Lillie arguing about my upbringing. The Irish sisters had noticed some aspect of my early conflict with my young, impetuous mother. One of them approved of what she was doing with me, while the other didn’t. Would this have been after one of those sessions when Mother, fed up with my howling, held her hand over my mouth until I started to turn purple? She didn’t reveal that much. What she passed along was that she’d overheard one of the sisters criticising her. Without knowing which sister it was, I’d like to think that it was Maggie and that she was defending me. Sandra says that when she was little she adored Maggie – or Mamie – because Mamie treated her like an equal. Our grandmother’s nursemaid played games with Sandra, even crawling into a scratchy hiding place under the drooping boughs of a spruce tree outside the chalet. She was a large, imposing woman, and past eighty by then, but it seems she was always loving and indulgent with children. I remember meeting her once, in the front room at 131 Evans Avenue, when I was very young and she was very old. All I saw was that she was big. And after she and Isabel had left, I heard Gran telling my parents that Maggie was beginning to be confused and suspicious, hiding her jewellery in her underwear for fear the family would steal it

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from her. By the middle 1950s, when I visited Isabel’s chalet with Gran and Granddad, Maggie had died and Isabel was alone. Surviving family stories about Isabel seem comparatively sketchy, as if Maggie was the one with real substance. I spent two weeks at Isabel’s chalet, and she did talk to me, but the direct, gossipy, downto-earth contact that I enjoyed with Gran never happened. Was Isabel cool with me simply because I was her younger sister’s granddaughter, or did she see in me some distressing echo of her younger self? Was I an embarrassment, in all my blazing ignorance and hope? For all I know, Isabel was reserved with everyone. A portrait of her in middle age, taken by the Notman studio, shows her looking a little like me and a little like Doris. She also looks rather sad. Gran once whispered that for years Isabel had entertained hopes of marrying a certain gentleman who, unfortunately, chose another girl. Sandra knew our great-aunt better than I did, and in the summer of 2006, visiting Quebec City with me, she brought her back to life. Walking along the Grande Allée, heading for a restaurant, my cousin paused to gaze northwest through the evening air at the misty, receding lines of the Laurentians. “Look at the mountains,” Sandra said. “Isabel always claimed that if you could see the outlines of each successive range fading away to blue like that, it was a sure sign of rain coming.” And later on, when it did rain, Sandra said, “See? Isabel was right.” Bert, on the other hand, the callous nephew, betrayed little tenderness for his maiden aunt. He took the view that she was feisty and independent. He reported that Isabel had been one of the first women in Quebec to hold a driver’s licence, in the days when those were acquired by going down to the town hall and swearing on the Bible that one knew how to drive. He maintained that it was her habit, when travelling the back roads of the province, to stick to the centre of the road at all times. Isabel considered that the safest part, he said, because there was less danger of running off the edges. The practice must have worked for her. She went through two or three cars and as far as I know never had an accident. Her last car, a Chevrolet coupé, probably a 1933 Eagle, was sporty enough to have had a rumble seat. And she must have driven that little Chev for close to fifteen years because Sandra remembers riding in it. She also remembers her father,

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scared and indignant, leaping out of the rumble seat into Montreal traffic because Isabel was driving in the middle of the street. Yet Jack was the man who’d been able to hang on and stay with the car when Granddad borrowed one from the Rowntree’s factory for his first and only automotive experiment. • By the time we visited her Isabel was no longer driving. In the winter she rented a tiny house down in Shawbridge, and in the summer she lived in her rustic chalet, perched on the slope of one of those hulking hills that in Quebec are called mountains. The chalet overlooked the valley and the highway that followed the North River – known these days as la Rivière du Nord – to the village. Somewhere over there, in the farmlands across the river, was “the boys’ farm,” a rural prison camp for delinquents from Montreal. From the porch, I never knew which patch of green it was, and if any actual farming went on at the boys’ farm, I never heard. Uphill behind us was nothing but trees crowding down from the forest. The chalet was comfortably large, with a veranda running across most of the front and a big living and dining room inside. At the rear of the ground floor were the bedrooms, although I never saw into those because they were the old people’s rooms and their doors were kept closed. I slept in the attic, a vast bare space with exposed rafters. Back downstairs, the kitchen was a summer kitchen, attached but separate, and between the kitchen and the bedrooms a small empty room was provided with a chair and an enamelled washbasin. That was the bathroom – for taking baths. Hot water, if required, must have been heated on the stove and carried into the little room in the washbasin. The toilet was an outhouse. During my stay the weather was very warm, and when Isabel instructed me in the art of taking a bath from a basin she simply filled it with cool water, set it on the chair, handed me a washcloth, and pointed to the soap on the windowsill. “First you wash your face and your ears and your front,” she told me, “and your neck. You wash down from the top. Then you wash below the waist and after that you wash your feet.” All with the same water, of course. That must have

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been the normal nineteenth-century way of taking a bath. Isabel went out, closed the door, and left me to it. After living through the early years at the Kennedy place, that was no challenge. What I found difficult and stifling was the constant supervision of the elderly, especially after my two years spent running wild night and day through the creek bottom in North Kildonan. At Isabel’s chalet, even if it was more interesting than being stuck in the back bedroom at Evans Avenue, there wasn’t much to do. Most disappointing was the discovery that there was nowhere to swim, absolutely nowhere to get close to or into water. The river was inaccessible, far off downhill and across the highway, as well as being lined with scrubby bushes and filled with unpredictable currents. It was too dangerous for swimming. Higher up the mountainside was a lake, but I had no idea how far away it was, and my grandparents showed no interest in going up there. They told me that it was part of a private resort, exclusively for people who owned property on the lakefront. I’d noticed cars driving up that way, sometimes rather flashy convertibles, and envied the people in them. Knowing that they were on their way up to a lake only increased my dissatisfaction. What’s more, I’ve learned since that the resort above us was the infamous Lac Guindon, commemorated by Mordecai Richler for displaying a sign telling visitors that “no Jews or dogs” were allowed. I first read that passage during my years at l’Université de Sherbrooke, and a Jewish colleague confirmed that in his adolescence he’d seen the sign with his very own eyes. If I never saw it, it was because I didn’t get that far. And although there was a swimming pool down in the village, it was off limits for the opposite reason. Isabel stated, categorically, that I couldn’t go there because that was where the Jews swam. I didn’t question her judgement then. Now, having also read Mordecai Richler’s reference to Montreal Scots as “red-faced and fussy,” I conclude that the two sides gave each other tit for tat. Richler’s tales of Shawbridge confirm the existence of a Jewish summer colony in the village, and from his description of it I can readily imagine a young Mordecai smoking on the street with his buddies, scowling, and scaring off my great-aunt Isabel. So my instructions were strict. I was not to go down there. Instead, aimlessly, I wandered out and scuffed along in the gravel of the road wondering how far it was to the

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lake resort and how both the lake and the swimming pool could be out of bounds. After a day or two, deciding to go for a real walk, I set out to tramp uphill along the road, which was narrow and bordered by forest. Isabel’s was the only cottage on it, and the trees grew right down to the gravel verge. Maybe, without admitting it to myself or anyone else, I was heading for Lac Guindon. Ambling past the forest face, looking for something, anything, other than the road and the bushes and the sky, I was thinking of making a detour into the woods, to explore a little, scramble up to a point where I could see out across the valley, or maybe even find a shortcut to the lake. Then somebody whistled. I stopped. That didn’t sound like a bird; that was a man. I listened, staring defiantly into the leaves, and changed my mind about venturing in there. The whistler stopped too. Silence. I walked on. He whistled again. This wasn’t like the whistle from the guy in the manhole outside the Eldorado, this was more sustained and musical. I paused, he whistled, I paused again, and he whistled again. I decided not to go any farther. I turned around and strode back down towards the chalet while the whistler, concealed in the bush, followed parallel to the road. He whistled over and over again, trying to call me to him, but when I looked into the foliage I saw no one. I heard no rustling either. Out of sight, he moved silently and went on whistling as I kept going, hearing my pulse roaring in my ears. Up the sloping lawn I marched and into the chalet, the screen door slamming behind me. When I told my grandmother and my great-aunt about the man in the trees, they were visibly alarmed, far more than I’d been. They must have realized, suddenly, that I was more of a responsibility than they’d bargained for, and they gave me strict orders never to walk along the road like that again. “Red hair to a Frenchman’s like a red flag to a bull!” said Isabel, who may have had good reason to know what she was talking about. After that I moped around inside. I played with a nineteenth-century instrument called a stereoscope. It had a series of worn little cards with two versions of the same black-and-white photograph side by side, each shot taken from a slightly different viewpoint, to be set into a slot at the end of a stem and peered at through a viewfinder. Looked at that way, the images of European churches and palaces came together and

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appeared to have focal depth. That was interesting for a while. When I’d finished looking at the historic sites, I wandered out onto the lawn. I was allowed to go that far, and I happened upon a brass sundial that I hadn’t noticed before. Sitting on the level stump of a sawed-off tree, it was crusted over with verdigris and badly needed to be polished. Isabel was happy to give me a rag and a can of Brasso, and I set to scrubbing the sundial back down to shiny brass. The job took quite a while, and only after I’d finished did I wonder how to tell time from the thing. Placed as it was, the shadow from the gnomon was clearly wrong. And why should the numbers fan out in opposite directions like that? The hands of clocks went round and round. The sun went round the earth. I didn’t see why the sundial’s shadow shouldn’t go round and round. When Isabel came out to compliment me on the shiny sundial, I asked her how it worked, and she confessed that she had no idea. It had been a gift from a friend. She’d never tried to understand it, in the first place because it had never been properly aligned. It wasn’t even screwed down but was simply sitting on the stump. And in the second place, she told me, it could never work in the summer because it wouldn’t recognize daylight savings time. Those were her reasons, and I had to accept them. She went back inside while I gave up on the sundial and drifted around to the other side of the chalet where a mass of hollyhocks was growing up against the kitchen window. Through the hollyhocks and the open window I heard Gran and Isabel talking. They were looking out at me, but for some reason it didn’t occur to them that I could hear what they were saying. “Look at her hair in the sunlight!” Gran was saying to Isabel. “Just look at how shiny it is!” “Hmm, yes,” said Isabel. Gran was admiring my red hair, short again because I’d given in and let my mother cut it for the summer. But Gran had never said anything complimentary about it before. She hadn’t mentioned my hair since the days when she used to chop the tangles out, complaining about what a mess it was. It was certainly shiny, but Isabel’s must have been just as flashy when she was young. And even then, at the start of self-centred adolescence, it occurred to me that Gran wasn’t being entirely kind when she reminded her sister that her own hair had faded to no noticeable colour at all.

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In childhood, red hair means having to fight quite a lot. In adolescence, it means attracting more attention and flattery from men than one knows how to handle. But for both of those reasons, it becomes an important part of one’s identity until, not long after the age of twenty-five, and certainly by thirty, when one has learned at last to assume the colour and the social myths that it excites, a day comes when one is forced to recognize that it isn’t red any more. Subtly, it’s turned a reddish-golden colour, and then, with the passage of time, to a sandy shade, or to sand streaked with beige or cream, and finally to a whitish cream. Politely, people describe it as blond. They’re amazed when they hear that once it was red. “What…? You? You were a redhead!?” And for a few moments a silent, secret, identity crisis is aroused and then suppressed. Isabel would have known all about that. Gran and Isabel had one summer practice that astonished me, considering how proper they were. It must have been another habit left over and adapted from the previous century. During those hot summer days the two of them, rather than wear anything so heavy as a dress, were in the habit of walking around in the kitchen wearing only their slips. They were decently covered, but still, at eleven going on twelve, in jeans and a shirt, I did not approve. I even saw Isabel answer the door in her slip, speaking French to a deliveryman who handed over a package. She was from another era, however, and back in the dog days of the 1890s maybe it was considered simple but decent for a lady to circulate at home in a linen shift. For Isabel that may have been as normal as driving in the middle of the road. As for her speaking French to the man at the door, I listened curiously but didn’t hear enough, or know the language well enough, to discover what her French was like. Some of those old-style AngloQuebeckers were content with a French vocabulary of about seventyfive words, but Isabel claimed to speak the language. Maybe she’d once had an affair with a French-speaking lover. After all, where had that remark come from about red hair being like a red flag to a bull? In the week following the incident with the whistler, I made friends with another girl. She came idling along the road while I was hanging on the gate, longing for entertainment and contemplating escape. She was about my age and could confirm that there was a lake higher up. But she had no way of getting there either, and for two or

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three days she joined me in my boredom until we hit on the game of picking chokecherries from the bushes by the roadside, hiding in the leaves, and throwing them into passing convertibles. That was mildly entertaining until a man slammed on his brakes and came looking for us. We ran. He didn’t catch us, but we abandoned the chokecherry tossing. After that I didn’t see the other girl again. I wandered back up to the chalet and talked with Mrs Cherry, who was quiet and stayed in her room or went out to read the paper on the veranda. Gran had told me that she was the mother-in-law of the society columnist from the Toronto Star, a lady named Zena Cherry, but that meant nothing to me. Mrs Cherry was not pretentious. She was large, gentle, and placid. One evening as we left the supper table, she looked down at my white running shoes and said, “Oh my, I don’t know how you can walk in those. I have to have a little heel.” I jumped around to show off in my flat canvas shoes then looked hesitantly at her big phlebitic legs and wondered if I would ever be like her and have to have a little heel. It seemed inconceivable. After supper, we all sat out on the veranda in the dusk, and on one of those evenings Isabel mentioned her astonishment at the line of cars on the highway below. The little mountainside road to the chalet wasn’t used by a lot of drivers, only those going past on their way up to Lac Guindon, but farther down the slope, on a Friday night, the two-lane highway through the village was plugged with traffic. From our vantage point, it was an endless stream of lights. Arriving from Montreal, the luminous snake was slowly inching its way into the Laurentians. And gazing down at that double line of red taillights going north, and the few white headlights coming south, Isabel, who’d been there since the days when her Chevrolet coupé was the only car on the road, commented on how crowded it had been all summer long. “It’s been like that every weekend. So many people going up north, so many cars, they just keep coming.” Little did she know that within her lifetime her modest old chalet would be expropriated by the Quebec government to make way for the Laurentian Autoroute – l’Autoroute des Laurentides. Towards the end of her life, obliged to sell the chalet, Isabel gave up her rented village house at the same time. She moved to Toronto, spent a few months staying with Gran and Granddad – until Granddad couldn’t stand her

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there any longer – and then went to Hamilton to live with Sandra’s family. Sandra remembers having her in the house as she declined into distressing confusion. At the end, Isabel went into a nursing home, which Sandra says was “horrible, as they all are.” Driving through Shawbridge a few years ago, down the main street and out along the old highway, I pulled over and stopped to look up at the mountainside. The slope overlooking the road and the river was still there, with probably some of the very same trees. But everything else that I’d known up there, the gravel side road with the chokecherry bushes and the cedar-shingled chalet with its lawn and its sundial, was gone, blotted out by a four-lane expressway taking cottagers farther north. When Isabel remarked on the traffic crowding the road on a Friday night, what she was seeing was the coming end of her own gentle, simple, country life. On the Saturday morning following that conversation, Gran and Isabel set off to walk to the village for groceries. Mrs Cherry settled into the cretonne seat of the wicker armchair at the far end of the veranda, and I went out to wander back and forth on the lawn. Granddad, who may not have been any happier there than I was, was hanging around down by the gate, waiting for the mail. When I saw that the postman’s car had come up the road, stopped, and gone by, I skipped down the slope to join my grandfather. He handed me a letter for Mrs Cherry and told me to take it up to her. As I approached her on the veranda, however, I halted. She didn’t look right. She was slumped in the wicker chair, and her dentures had slipped down in a disturbing fashion. I hesitated for a minute and then went back down to Granddad by the gate. “I think she’s asleep. I don’t think I should wake her up,” I told him, and I gave him back the letter. “No, no,” he said. “You just speak to her. Touch her on the arm and say, ‘Mrs Cherry, there’s a letter here for you.’” I didn’t want to. Feeling unease and great reluctance, I went back up to the veranda. Aunt Kate did not look good. Her colour was grey and her teeth were still out of place. But as instructed, I touched her on the arm. Her flesh felt chilly, and my fingers seemed to make small impressions that remained indented. Back down I went to the gate with the letter still in my hand.

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“Granddad, I think she’s dead,” I told him. Granddad jumped as if he’d been stung. He grabbed the gatepost, hung onto it, and stared at me. “No, no! She’s just dozed off. You have to give her a little shake to wake her up!” But I wasn’t going back up there. “I did that. I touched her on the arm, and it was cold. And she doesn’t move, and I couldn’t wake her up, and she looks funny.” If the situation was more than I could handle, it was also far too much for my grandfather. He didn’t rush up to the chalet to check on Mrs Cherry. He didn’t go near her. He stayed right where he was, hanging onto the gatepost, waiting for Bessie and Isabel to come back and deal with the situation. I couldn’t bear to wait with him, so I went back to pacing the lawn. When my grandmother appeared and heard the news, she went to look. Then, immediately, she ordered me away from the house and out of the way while she and Isabel telephoned the authorities. Feeling justified in my diagnosis but a little shaky, I climbed the hillside behind the chalet and went up into the woods. There I sat on a rock and waited for things to calm down. It was an ordinary sunny midday. For about an hour, or maybe less, I heard vehicles coming and going below, with doors opening and closing. I couldn’t see them from where I was, so I looked around me and up into the trees. Maybe the whistler was still up there, or else he’d gone back to the boys’ farm. Anyway, he didn’t matter any more. Whatever danger he represented had been preempted by the angel of death, and I could forget about him. When I ventured down to the veranda, Mrs Cherry was gone from the wicker chair, and Gran and Isabel were busy making phone calls, “arrangements,” they said, which consisted mainly of trying to reach Mrs Cherry’s son Westcott on a weekend. With that, as if in a foreordained way, our visit came to a close. It was Saturday, and we’d been intending to leave on the Sunday. Mrs Cherry had departed a little earlier than the rest of us, but the summer was over anyway. The weather had turned, and suddenly it was cool and cloudy. The dark came earlier than I expected. We spent one more evening, a very quiet evening, with Isabel, who made me a present of the Fables of Lafontaine, in French, in two pretty little bound volumes. Then we went to bed. On the following day, Gran

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and Granddad and I were driven down to Montreal and got on the train for Toronto. • After Gran’s death in 1967, Granddad refused ever to spend another night at 131 Evans Avenue. While he was being taken away to Jack’s place in Hamilton, and I was looking into Gran’s closet and thinking back to its treasures, Doris explored his room. What she found there, hidden under the back of a drawer, was a package of memorabilia that included an ancient photograph. Those were the days during which Granddad was burning whole bundles of family correspondence in the kitchen stove – including, probably, the photograph of Gran as a young bride in her wedding dress. Sandra and I both wanted that, but in his grief at her death he seems to have sacrificed it. And what my sister found was just the sort of souvenir that he would certainly have destroyed if he’d remembered it. For that very reason, however, he’d stashed the picture in a place so hidden that he forgot it himself. The photograph shows Granddad and Will Cherry posing on a plaster balustrade in a photographer’s studio. A note on the back, in pencil and in Granddad’s handwriting, says: “W.W. Cherry & Myself – Taken 1896, or a little before.” The two young men are wearing Panama hats, they have cigars in their mouths, and they’re making a production of examining a magazine containing pictures of women. Being bad is what they’re doing and recording it. Because the photograph was taken in the 1890s, it’s not likely that Gran or aunt Kate Cherry ever saw it. After all, the young Ed Cowan didn’t arrive in Montreal until the very first hours of the twentieth century. And sixty years after the naughty photo was taken, when Will Cherry’s widow happened to die in a chalet where Granddad was staying, it was more than he could deal with. For the record, there’s an addendum to the story of Ed Cowan’s friendship with Will Cherry. “Vague indications” uncovered in Ireland by Jack Cowan on one of his tours of the British Isles suggest that the Cherrys, from a long way back, may have been related to the Cowans, so it’s possible that the two young rakes in the photograph are cousins and that aunt Kate Cherry really was an aunt, at least by marriage.

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• Back at my grandparents’ place in Toronto, with the Shawbridge episode behind me, my thoughts of Mrs Cherry’s death receded into something resembling mild delirium, as if none of it had really happened. Everything at 131 Evans Avenue remained as it always had been. I wandered around, out into the yard, and up and down the stairs to my room. I looked at War and Peace sitting on the bookshelf but didn’t touch it. There was one more day to kill before I got on the train for home, and maybe because Gran saw that I was upset and at a loss, she decided to take me to the Canadian National Exhibition. We walked down to Bloor Street, climbed onto the streetcar, rattled into town, and changed for the exhibition grounds where we strolled around. I remembered the CNE from earlier visits, but I’d been smaller then and, trailing after my parents, had got no farther than the livestock barn. This time Gran took me to see the horses. Lively, gleaming, wideeyed thoroughbreds, more beautiful than any horse I’d ever imagined, wheeled around in their boxes to find out who we were and what we wanted. Imperiously, they stuck their velvet noses through the bars at us. We petted them. We stood aside while others were led prancing out to the ring, their iron shoes clashing on the cement floor. From the bleachers we watched riders in black velvet hats and tight boots take them over the jumps, each time with a little grunt of effort followed by a two-then-four-legged thud into the sand and sawdust of the ring. What was graceful from a distance looked more difficult and violent from close up. The horses sweated streaks of white foam down the folds of their necks and slobbered it over their bits. Their veins stood out, they blew and shuddered, and their nostrils flared red. In the central space between the horse-boxes, other riders in cowboy hats led chubby blond horses out and brushed them to a shine. I watched as white manes and tails were combed through and hooves were daubed with polish. Then the palominos were saddled with high-fronted, light-coloured saddles encrusted all over with silver. Those saddles looked mythical, mediaeval, like something used by the Knights of the Round Table. All at once it occurred to me that Gran had grown up during the age of horse-drawn transportation.

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“Gran, did you ever ride a horse?” I asked her. “No, but I’ve driven them.” “Really? How do you do it?” “Nothing to it. All you do is just slap the reins on their backs, say giddy-up, and they go.” My grandmother acquired a new status in my eyes. The young Bessie Haig McQueen had actually driven the wonderful animals and thought nothing of it. From the musky magic of the horse barn, we stepped out into the sunlight, and Gran looked across to where a Ferris wheel was revolving into the blue. “Would you like to go on that?” “Yes!” It wasn’t every day that I got a chance to ride on the big wheel. We headed for the midway. At the ticket booth Gran bought two tickets. I wasn’t going to be riding the thing by myself. She wasn’t going to wait on the ground. Amazed, I followed as she led me through to the platform where it touched down and climbed into a seat. The man clonked the greasy chrome bar into place across our knees, and the machine began to move. Up and forwards we soared, nothing in front of us but space. Up and up, and outwards, rocking slightly. The earth receded. We were swinging into the sky. A minute or two later we were high enough up to see far away across the rooftops. I clung to the bar and looked over at my grandmother. Chin up, wind in her hair, Gran was taking in the view of Toronto spread out beneath. It wasn’t every day that she got to ride the Ferris wheel either. She looked happy at the top of the big wheel, creaking slowly over the summit of its revolution. But then, too soon, we were turning backwards with the ground coming up behind us. The thing stopped, the man threw the bar open and plucked us out of our seats. I’m sure Gran knew she’d made an impression. That night, lying in bed in the back room, I heard the soft, creaking sound of Granddad in his slippers, padding up the stairs. As always, he’d been through the house checking the windows, the doors, the stove, and the furnace. Over supper Gran had told him about our ride on the Ferris wheel, and he wasn’t surprised. Although no one could have enticed him onto any kind of midway ride, he was nostalgic about seeing Bessie tobogganing down the mountain in Montreal more than

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fifty years earlier. “Oh, you should have seen her flying down that hill!” he said. “She was a wild thing … long hair out behind her in the wind!” I listened as his footsteps turned the corner at the top of the stairs, and I heard his bedroom door close with a gentle click. After that there was only the intermittent rumble and screech of the streetcars being shunted into the car barns in the yards over on Lansdowne, and I listened to those until I fell asleep. The next morning they put me on the train to Winnipeg.

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chapter eighteen

The Ines capable

Thrust back into the family melee, I had to endure a certain amount of talk about whether or not my encounter with death had traumatized me. I didn’t think it had. Other events that year – nearly smothering in a snowdrift or on a dark night in the creek bottom having to run from a big boy who really wanted to hurt me – had been more frightening than discovering kindly old Mrs Cherry dead on the porch. It was true, though, that I didn’t fully take in the fact that my Park cousins had been and gone, so maybe that first sight of a dead person had unsettled me. My summer trip to Shawbridge, brought about by the earlier death of my aunt Catherine, had culminated in a profoundly educational experience. But it was mainly the reaction of my grandparents and my great-aunt, their solemn response to the mysterious prestige and the aura of inaccessibility that envelops the dead, that had left me pondering and withdrawn. Another piece of news that I’d missed was that our time in North Kildonan was coming to a close. The move had been decided on while I was in Quebec, and soon we’d be on our way back to Ontario. But the Kennedy house had been sold – over Mother’s objections, as I clearly remembered – so for me the information remained meaningless.

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We wouldn’t be returning to the place that I’d loved. We were heading into the unknown again, and I didn’t care where we went. The only sure thing was that Bert had finished his stint as Prairie Regions Supervisor with CBC Television in Winnipeg. Within a couple of weeks he’d be heading back to Toronto to resume his former job as a radio news editor. None of us was surprised, since we’d known from the start that we were going to Winnipeg for only two years, and I hadn’t given any thought to his future expectations. Nothing was said about the fact that his contract with television news had not been renewed. It seems, however, that on his return to Toronto, Bert should have been in line to move up into television management there. As we prepared to leave Manitoba, that was no longer on the program. Only when we were older would Mother let us know that his being sent back to CBC Radio had been a demotion. Our father had not been a success in the hard-hitting world of television. His originality – or his lack of interest in others’ ideas – had been a hindrance rather than a help. He had not displayed the initiative or the adaptability required. His most outstanding achievement had been to make an enemy of an influential local colleague, whose opposition meant that Bert was out. And once he realized that he wasn’t appreciated, I’m sure he responded with a display of arrogant whimsy: any poor dolt who didn’t understand his jokes was a dimwit best left to his natural idiocy. That wasn’t how Mother put it when she did tell us. “He fell flat on his face,” she said, not concealing her satisfaction at his failure. While this situation was unfolding, however, I was either off in Quebec or insulated by adolescent self-absorption. It’s only now, reading another incident from Warren Park’s recollections of his two weeks in North Kildonan, that I suspect what the atmosphere may have been. Warren tells of a day when his uncle Bert, whom he liked and admired, arrived home from the CBC and rushed into the house. There was something coming up on the news that he was eager not to miss, so the whole family, including our American cousins, gathered in front of the television set. First they watched a news clip showing a sixty-foot press cruiser out on Lake Winnipeg on a windy day, in heavy swells. Then came a five-second close-up of Bert on the boat, clearly identified, and, according to Warren, looking sick. It was followed by whatever the report was supposed to be about, and after

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that CBC viewers were treated to a posterior shot of my father and a couple of his colleagues bent over the side, apparently vomiting. What their assignment was, or why the three of them wanted to be filmed crouched at the rail instead of reporting the news, isn’t part of Warren’s story. His view of his uncle Bert wasn’t quite as perceptive as his understanding of his aunt Alice. After the pioneer conditions that he and his brothers had suffered under at Etheridge’s Oak Bank farm, Warren considered Bert a nice guy, easygoing and funny, and his take on the seasickness scenario was that his uncle had shown impressive insouciance and even humility. Not only did Bert not mind being filmed in such an undignified posture, but he’d called the family in to view it. Although Warren took that little drama seriously, as far as I know Bert was never seasick. Instead, it occurs to me that my father must have wanted to be sure that his angry joke had made it to air. For once, he was emulating the antics of Allan McPhee. The vomiting scene would have been a sarcastic parting shot from him to his employers, letting them know what he thought of his situation at work. At the time, though, all I knew was that I’d barely returned from the east and already I was being sent off again. Within a few days Bert was setting out to drive the Meteor back to Toronto, and Mother decreed that I’d be travelling with him in order not to miss any school. Until my parents found a house in Toronto, I could stay with Gran and Granddad and go to whatever school was nearest. She and the younger children would stay on in North Kildonan while things were packed and the sale of the house was finalized. Once the logistics of the move had been dealt with, the family would return to Ontario by air, on Trans Canada Air Lines. I had no say in the matter. Flying in my own personal cloud of resignation, I missed out on the family’s first plane trip. “Yeah, in a Vickers Viscount,” Hector has told me recently. “The plane was a turboprop, one of the first. The Americans had something called a Convair but it wasn’t as good.” He would have taken that in. Privately, I did wonder why my schooling was so much more important than Doris’s or Hector’s. They were getting two weeks off, maybe even three, and I wasn’t. But my mother kept finding reasons for sending me away, so I travelled

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with my father in the decrepit Meteor. Although I was unaware of his situation, my return to Ontario was also a kind of demotion. I was leaving Manitoba’s junior high school system to return to grade eight in the Ontario primary school system because Ontario had no junior high, and regular high school didn’t begin until grade nine. The trip back with Bert should have been a special chance to talk, but I was ill at ease with him, he had nothing to say to me, and I responded with a similar reserve. Only now can I speculate that he may not have been feeling as gleefully irreverent as the scene on the television news cruiser suggested. Maybe he was regretting having laughed at the wrong people or having treated them high-handedly. But he didn’t share his feelings with his eleven-year-old daughter, and it would never have occurred to me to wonder what he was going through. I hadn’t seen or heard of the film clip, and my father was an adult. Therefore he had no problems. We spent the next couple of days on Highway 1, a two-lane asphalt road through fields and forest, with little traffic. Only half awake, a captive in the front seat, I watched the trees marching past. The wires between the telephone poles rose and fell in a regular rhythmic flow, dipping away after each pole then surging up to catch on the crosspieces and the insulators of the next. There was a hypnotic fascination in watching them swoop up and down, then up again. Sometimes on an open stretch a watery blue-grey mirage shimmered on the road ahead, and I waited for the splash of driving through it, but it vanished before we got there. We stayed over one night in a motel. In the 1950s, rural Canada was not quite the puritanical place that we now imagine, and the motel operator began by offering Bert a room with one double bed in it. I didn’t hear what was said, but once we were all back in Ontario Bert told Mother about it – how he’d been scandalized and had demanded proper accommodation – “What did he take me for, a Turk?” Mother didn’t report that misunderstanding to me until years later. For me, the trip was an endurance test anyway. We must have stopped for at least one meal, but what we ate, or where, has vanished from memory. All I remember are the snack biscuits that we had with us in the car. They were called “Triscuits” and resembled small flat pieces of shredded wheat. In those days none of us had heard of gluten intolerance, but eating those dry Triscuits left me with a sick,

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disgusted feeling that I couldn’t shake off. I loathed them forever after, long before learning that I couldn’t properly digest cereal gluten. Then early on the second evening we were in Toronto. Bert took me straight to his parents’ place, turned me over, and left. Shifting from foot to foot in the archway between the entrance hall and the living room, he muttered, “No … no, no thanks” to everything they offered. He insisted that he had to get a move on. There was no talk about our trip, and he volunteered no information about his job situation. There was no suggestion that he would even consider the possibility of staying over – as in fact he never had, not since his marriage to Alice, and never did again. My father had left his parents’ house for good. When he took himself off they didn’t know where he was going, and neither did I. Expecting that he had to be at work in the newsroom the following day, I assumed that he’d gone to check into a hotel downtown. • As for me, finding myself at 131 Evans Avenue brought with it a sense of the inescapable. Already the thrill of my adolescent adventures in North Kildonan was behind me, and once again I was shut in with my grandparents, where adventures were unthinkable. For the rest of September and the beginning of October, I was back in the little room that had been Jack’s, then Bert’s. I laid my suitcase out on the bed and poked around in it, not sure what I’d brought with me. Gran came in to help. She made no comment as she sorted out my tangled clothing and put things away in drawers. Then she told me that downstairs supper was waiting. Dazed from the road, I sat at the table and ate, still seeing swooping wires and glimmering mirages. Afterwards, I retreated upstairs while they read the newspaper. That was the pattern of the days to follow. When they were in the kitchen, if I left my bedroom door open, I heard their voices through the iron grating at the top of the stairs, talking in low, conspiratorial tones, keeping track of events. “What’s the time?” “Almost eight-thirty.” “She upstairs?”

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“Yes.” “She’s quiet. What’s she doing?” “Knitting.” Hunched on the bed, I was knitting a scarf of multicoloured stripes in a mixture of yarns. Some I’d brought from with me and some I’d scavenged earlier from the leftovers of Gran’s crocheting and Granddad’s mitten knitting. I knitted in the only way I knew, with a straightforward purl stitch, and wasn’t bothered if the yarn wasn’t all of the same weight. Probably not all of it was even wool. Some of the bands of colour were thicker and wider, sticking out from the rest, but I found that interesting. The edges were loose and lumpy too because I hadn’t yet learned to slip a stitch at the beginning of each row. Gran had taught me one crochet stitch, however, and I used that to bind the edges with black yarn, hoping to straighten them out. When I showed my creation to Granddad he laughed and asked me if I was in mourning for someone. After the death of Mrs Cherry – and I couldn’t forget how upset he’d been – I was reassured that he could joke about mourning. It helped to put the summer’s shock into perspective, and it seemed to mean that my grandfather wasn’t expecting to die any time soon. Even when I was small, Gran and Granddad had confided in me about events from earlier in their lives, and as I grew older, maybe because of our shared encounter with death in Shawbridge, a different closeness was developing. Despite his lighthearted remark about mourning Granddad had started to give me things, evidently handing down what he intended to pass on. I think a tiny, locking oak box dates from that September visit. It looked like a nineteenth-century filing case. He set it on the kitchen table and opened it to show me how solid and perfect it was. While he went to the basement to look for the key, Gran remarked, acidly, that she hadn’t known there was a box or a chest left in the house that could still be locked. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard her make a comment like that, and I was starting to catch on. Going on twelve, even if not quite ready to grasp all the implications, I knew she was revealing a hidden aspect of Granddad’s character. It wasn’t until later on, however, when Gran made me a present of Elizabeth McQueen’s folding writing desk, that she would explain its damaged condition by stating flatly that Ed was preoccupied with

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knowing whom she was writing to. Frantic at the thought that Bessie might have a secret admirer, Granddad had long since broken the lock in the mother-of-pearl setting on her antique escritoire. To me he could be jovial and charming, sharing salty wisdom and confiding the misdeeds of his youth, but with Gran he was an old-fashioned authoritarian husband. To be fair – although of course the idea didn’t enter my head then – having been put out of the conjugal bed must have had something to do with his fits of jealousy. Early in childhood I’d accepted my grandparents’ separate sleeping arrangements without question. As time went by, though, I had wondered, naïvely, why they slept in different rooms and asked Gran about it. She told me that Granddad was just too big, too long limbed, and too bony. She said that he took up most of the bed and that he thrashed around. “It was like sleeping with a horse!” As for Granddad, obsessed with the fear that his wife might be hiding something from him, in return he took the trouble to hide things from her. Back in the kitchen, the key to the little wooden filing box had probably been retrieved from the basement shelf where he kept his secret stash of beer. While he dusted off the box and tested the key, Gran picked up a paring knife and stepped out into the back yard to choose some flowers. When I went with her, she showed me how to clean a steel knife by stabbing it into the earth. That worked surprisingly well, and we proceeded along the flowerbeds, cutting a few stalks of cosmos and phlox for a bouquet. At the end of the yard we came to a pile of old plumbing pipes heaped beside the lane. A day or two earlier I’d seen Granddad breaking those up. He was very strong, raising the sledgehammer high above his head and bringing it down with massive impact, paint flakes flying and the pipes bouncing and shattering as he reduced them to lengths that the garbage men would take. Gran glanced at the tangle of smashed metal. Making a circuit around it to drop a handful of leaves and stems into the garbage can, she whispered, “Your Granddad’s a man of iron!” During the same period, Granddad came into the back bedroom and plucked the two small Morocco-bound volumes of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina out of the shelf at the end of the desk. The red leather of Volume I was fragile but intact, but the spine of Volume II was crumbling, and he’d mended it with red cloth tape. “Those belonged

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to Jack,” he told me as he handed them over. “That’s a very great book by a very great writer.” He didn’t offer me War and Peace although it was right beside them. Did he choose the Anna Karenina because its title was a woman’s name? Would he have given it to me if he’d read the story? I accepted Granddad’s description of it without question. Only years later would I get around to reading it and discover that the beautiful Anna is seduced and impregnated by the glamorous Count Vronsky, rejected by her husband, and subsequently abandoned by Vronsky as well, after which she throws herself under a train. That suicide scene, so convincingly described by Tolstoy, is ghastly. I’m glad I didn’t read the novel until later in life, and I’m sure Granddad never had the faintest idea of what was in the book that he had so faithfully mended. School started a couple of days later, and Tolstoy was not on the grade eight English syllabus. I set my knitting aside and glumly trudged the five blocks over to Runnymede Public School at the corner of Runnymede Road and Colbeck Street. It hardly mattered that I wouldn’t have time to accomplish anything at this unknown school or belong to the group. I’d never felt that I belonged at any school. Runnymede was another big redbrick building, this one with separate girls’ and boys’ entrances, and what was most familiar was the sensation of first-day nausea. In the schoolyard a crowd of children milled around with teachers circling the mass trying to get us sorted out and lined up. I fell in without trying to talk to the others. Even my usual alienation was temporary, and my weeks at Runnymede were merely time to be got through. But despite my short stay at that school I did manage to create one unhappy situation. In the schoolyard, at recess, I met a German girl. Like me, she was an outsider. If we said hello, exchanged a few remarks, and were beginning to be friends, it was because we were both different and both lonely. I have no idea what experiences she might have suffered during or after the war. And since she spoke English fairly well, it didn’t occur to me that her speaking ability might be better than her comprehension. We weren’t friends for long. After about a week, beginning to feel free and easy with her, not taking into account her possible apprehensions about her new country, new milieu, or me, I made a bad blunder. Leaving the schoolyard on my way

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home for lunch, I tried to show cheerful familiarity and confidence by yelling rudely across to her – and what I yelled was “Hello, stupid!” To me, this crude remark meant that we were friends and could say such things. I was briefly puzzled when my new acquaintance turned away and didn’t reply. Oh well, I thought, she must have something else on her mind. I flounced on over to Evans Avenue and had a prim little lunch with my grandparents, Granddad austerely spooning up stewed fruit and Gran asking me how school was going, while I sat between them trying to swallow my feeling of unease. On my way back to class a shock awaited me. My friend’s mother had posted herself on the street corner opposite the school and rushed up to screech protests and insults in German-accented English. How could I have been so terrible? How could I have said such a terrible awful thing? I was the one who was stupid! Why? Why? I was very, very dumm! I was struck dumb with fright and shame. When I’d called her stupid, my German friend had taken me literally. What could I say? I had not the faintest idea how to explain or smooth things over. The only positive thing I can say now is that the experience gave me an insight into my own blithering social incompetence, as well as a first realization of the dysfunctional family background that had made me what I was. Any kind of intimacy or closeness was to be represented by rudeness, by rough-and-tumble, or by sarcasm. At home I’d had little preparation for kindness or empathy. Yet I could imagine only too well the state of rage and despair in which my former friend must have run home, weeping, to tell her mother the story of my inexplicable attack. To her it was an undeserved betrayal by the one friend she’d made at school. Naturally her mother wanted to defend her. She’d been right to call me stupid. I’d blurted out what I might have shouted, jokingly, to my sister or my brothers without considering how an insecure newcomer would take it, and I was never going to be able to repair the wrong that I’d committed. Nor could I tell my grandparents about it. For my remaining days at Runnymede I skulked to school along a different route, keeping an eye out for the malevolent mother. I didn’t see my German friend and never spoke to her again. She must have made an effort to avoid me as well.

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That autumn stay with Gran and Granddad, in a second stage to the Shawbridge visit, was turning out to be a stressful period. While I was stewing in guilt and anxiety, one of my back teeth began to hurt, and not for the first time. I knew it was a wisdom tooth, and I decided that it had to go. I’d been provided with money when I left North Kildonan, so I didn’t bother to tell Gran about it. I telephoned a dentist whose office I’d seen on Jane Street, got an appointment immediately, and walked over there, pleased to be acting grown-up and practical. The dentist froze the tooth, broke it up, and plucked out the bits. But he wasn’t satisfied. The lower wisdom tooth on the other side was impacted, he announced. It was butting sideways into the rest of my teeth. Therefore he was going to take that one out at the same time. Might as well. And I did know that he was right, but I didn’t like his attitude nor had I planned to pay for two extractions. “No, thank you,” I told him. He glowered impatiently. “No point putting it off. You’re going to have to have it out sooner or later.” “I’ll have it out later.” “I can do it right now.” “No, thank you.” “You’ll be back,” he scoffed. Not to you, I thought as I stalked out of his office – in what I now recognize as a performance learned from my mother. Just because I fought her didn’t mean that I hadn’t taken in her message about male authority. It was automatically suspect, to be questioned, and, whenever convenient, defied. Since I was a grown-up girl who’d decided on her own to have a tooth extracted no mere dentist was going to take that tone with me. Back at the house I told Gran that I’d just had a wisdom tooth out, and she was surprised. “All by yourself? Aren’t you brave!” “It didn’t take long. But I didn’t like that dentist.” “Oh, you must have gone to that one over on Jane Street. I don’t think anybody likes that man. Everybody says he’s awful.” Sucking my bleeding gum, I was all the prouder of having stood him off. “He wanted to take out the other wisdom tooth on the bottom, and I wouldn’t let him. He said I’d have to have it out soon anyway.”

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“Well,” she said, “there’s no help for that. Teeth. Yours must be like mine. Soft. They broke when I was in my thirties and I had to have them all out … but there’re plenty of other dentists. And they’ll give you an upper plate.” For Gran’s generation that would have been normal. But looking at her dentures, I decided not to believe that my teeth were just like hers. I didn’t want them to be “soft” and I definitely did not want an upper plate. • Then, abruptly, it was my birthday. At last I really was twelve. I remember a cake with candles on the supper table and beside my plate a couple of small gifts, bundled in white tissue paper. What they were, I don’t remember. There was nothing from my parents. They were busy, and the time was too short for them to have sent anything, but Gran understood that a birthday required presents – even if she never could be bothered with fancy wrapping – and I was pleased. It wasn’t exactly a party, but it was an occasion. Granddad was sentimental about birthdays and full of counsel for the future. He acknowledged the value of education but advised me that family counted more. “Yes, the friends you make now, and later on in university, will be your friends for the rest of your life, but your family will always come first.” And so it did. Having officially become a big girl of twelve, and looking closer to fifteen, I was expected to go out with Gran on Saturday while she did her “messages.” That meant shopping for groceries in various distinct and specialized shops. I particularly remember the butcher shop with sawdust on the floor and the negotiations between Gran and the butcher. She’d give him a report on what he’d previously sold her and ask him what he had to offer that day. He’d hold up pieces of meat, she’d make her selections, and then he’d cut them, trim the fat away, and scrape off the bone fragments. When he’d wrapped the roast or the chops in shiny brown paper and tied the package up tight with very thin cotton string, Gran handed it to me to carry. On our way home, sometimes we took the north side of Annette Street and walked along to the fish and chip shop at the top of Evans Avenue, leaving the cooking for another evening. Those fish and chips were

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delicious, the twisted golden pieces of battered fish pulled straight out of the bubbling oil and wrapped up in layers of newspaper. They were still hot when we got back to the house. But first we had to cross to the south side of Annette at a point where there was no traffic light. In those days there were no crosswalks either, and Gran would take my arm when we stepped into the street. One day she stopped where she was, on the centre line of Annette Street, and sank her pointed fingers into my flesh. “Judith!” she said, “I’m not a little old lady, am I?” What could I say? I had to assure her that, no, I didn’t consider her a little old lady, and in truth the thought had not crossed my mind. She was my grandmother. Although she would have been seventythree that year, I didn’t know her age, and she didn’t seem all that old. Gran didn’t look young, but in many ways she was ageless, always original, and always herself. What impressed me most was her honesty in sharing such an identity crisis with her startled granddaughter. She had a critical, questioning mind and – most of the time – a frank understanding of where she stood in the world. Sitting down to a meal at her dining room table, beside my plate I was used to finding my napkin rolled into a silver napkin ring. Gran had a variety of them, all different and easily identifiable. After dinner one evening, turning her heavy silver ring in her fingers, she recounted having long ago heard a story of how, when the Prince of Wales was invited to a dinner given by a grand bourgeois family in Montreal, he had been puzzled to find his napkin stuck through a silver ring. He’d never seen one before, and he asked about it. When his hosts explained its purpose, the Prince was shocked. “Good Lord! You don’t mean to tell me that you use them twice!” Gran did relish the irony of that – in a palace a napkin once laid beside a plate was whisked away to the laundry – and she savoured the discomfiture of a wealthy family discovering that what they had considered elegant appeared coarse to the Prince. Granddad’s stories were less succinct. He approached them obliquely, in a saunter down memory lane that sometimes led on from the mundane to the revelatory. Late one afternoon, watching a crow tearing clusters of orange berries off the rowan tree in the back yard, he remarked, “A crow’s a very smart bird” and was drawing breath to

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say more when Gran took her paring knife and opened the kitchen door. The bird flew away, so Granddad forgot about the cleverness of crows. Instead, gazing at Gran out in the yard, he spoke of his regret at not having invested in some Bell Telephone shares back in the early 1900s when they were going cheap. “If I’d done that,” he murmured, while Gran plunged her knife into the lawn, “I’d be a millionaire today.” Gran came back to the house with a few pea pods in her apron, and he held the door open for her. “If only I’d known.” He closed the door and rambled off through the dining room. “Now my uncle John, he knew what he was about.” Granddad’s voice faded into the hall, heading for the front porch, and I followed him out there and sat on the glider. He lowered himself into a chair and leaned forwards, clasping his hands. “I had another uncle,” he said. “My uncle Richard. He disappeared before I was born.” This was a story that Granddad had heard as a small boy from his father and his uncle John. Richard had been their younger brother, and in the 1860s, as a young man, he’d been boarding at the house of an aunt in Ontario. On a Saturday night he went out and got drunk. The way Granddad put it was that he “got pretty lite,” meaning “lit up” with booze. And the next morning, perhaps when Richard’s aunt got home from church and saw the shape that he was in, she gave him a tongue-lashing. “That,” Granddad said, “he evidently didn’t like, so he put on his hat and went out.” After that minor quarrel, his uncle Richard was never seen or heard from again. Granddad explained that during the American Civil War, men who’d been drafted and who wanted to get out of fighting sometimes came north – if their families had the money – and hired Canadians to fight in their places. When Richard Cowan’s older brothers heard nothing from him, they thought he must have signed up to fight in the States. But when a substitute soldier was killed, dying under another man’s name, it wasn’t likely that his family would ever learn his fate. Granddad drew a deep breath, “So that’s what uncle John and Pa decided happened to him.” The story was troubling. It was even sadder than Mother’s tale about her cousin Ernest, buried in Vladivostok in a grave that no one had ever visited, and I understood that Granddad was passing it on for similar reasons. His uncle Richard was long dead somewhere,

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somehow, and Granddad was the last person on earth to remember his existence. So even if he’d never met him, and no one had ever found out what had happened to him, Granddad was telling me about him to make sure that Richard Cowan wasn’t entirely forgotten, because he was family. A related snippet of information that Granddad did not share with me was about his own exemption from military service. Arriving in Toronto towards the end of the nineteenth century he might well have been conscripted and sent off to fight for Britain against the Boers if not for his right leg, broken in adolescence by that kick from a horse. His bad leg, as well as a misaligned toe, made him unfit for service. I never saw Granddad’s leg or foot, but Hector tells me that he had an ugly black lump on his shin. As for his toe, Mother learned about it when my other brother inherited it. Paul, who’s never had to worry about being marched anywhere, confirms that he has an overlapping toe on each foot. On that same autumn afternoon in the porch I seized the occasion to ask Granddad about Sandra’s brother David. By then I’d heard the basic facts – how after Sandra’s birth her parents had lost a second child and were unable to have any more so they adopted a baby boy. David Cowan was six years younger than Sandra and was a member of their family throughout our childhood. If my siblings and I were barely aware of his existence it was for two reasons. The first was simple: our Cowan cousins lived in Hamilton not Toronto. It was rare enough for us to visit our Ottawa cousins, and never once did we visit Sandra’s family, seeing them only if they happened to show up at 131 Evans Avenue when we were also there. That was how I did meet David some three years later – in Gran’s living room. He was a stocky twelve-year-old by then, and I was fifteen. We looked at each other and said nothing. That was the only time I ever laid eyes on him. It was the second reason for our not knowing him that was perplexing: Gran and Granddad, who always had news of Sandra, literally never mentioned David’s name. Eventually Mother shared what there was to tell about my adopted cousin. She told me that he was turning out to be a big boy, not particularly intellectual, but strong and practical and completely unlike the fussy, anxious Jack. He was such a nice normal fellow, Mother declared, that he was

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destined never to be happy with tense, controlling parents like Jack and Greta – and she seemed to pity him. He just too open, she said, too easy going, and physically too large and rambunctious. Then she told me the rest. David had been born in Halifax in 1946 and was the biological son of a “girl from Halifax” and a Polish sailor. Therefore his crime was not just that he’d been adopted. In Granddad’s eyes that was bad enough, but his origins were suspect as well. Granddad must have assumed that David’s mother had been a dockside prostitute. It’s more likely his birth was a result of the wild celebrations at the end of the war, but Granddad never accepted him. In his view David wasn’t respectable and wasn’t properly a member of the family. So on that September day when I took the plunge and asked about him, Granddad displayed steadfast, unfair, old-fashioned prejudice. All he said was, “That fella’s not one of us.” My question was disingenuous. Mother had told me all there was to know, but I’d begun to realize how rigidly conservative Granddad could be, and I wanted to see his reaction. I was intrigued by the thought that David must have a “real” father in Poland and maybe a better father than Jack, who couldn’t even parallel park his car. I wondered how my cousin felt about being secretly Polish, and I wondered if he wished that he could know his biological father. But what I got out of Granddad was only what I’d expected, and after that conversation, I confess that I forgot about David. I wasn’t to hear his name again until fifteen years later, when Doris passed on the news that he’d got into motorcycles and drugs and had overdosed and died – on laughing gas. Granddad was gone by then himself, but that ironic end would have confirmed him in his rejection of his adopted grandson. If only Granddad could have lived long enough to view our cousin David the way he did his unknown uncle Richard, as an adventurous fellow who died young, unjustly, and in dodgy circumstances. After all, he was buried as David Cowan, even if, somewhere in Europe he had a father no one knew and who may not have suspected his existence. We were David’s only family, and he was one of us.

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chapter nineteen

Sylvan Avenue and the Bluffs

Down through all the years since that evening when Bert dropped me off at Evans Avenue and left without saying where he was going, I’d assumed that after checking into a hotel in town he would have gone out to some favourite bar. If I’d given it any further thought I might have supposed that he’d rejoined his coterie of drinking buddies. By the following afternoon I imagined him ensconced, as before, behind a desk in the radio newsroom. In all of that I would have been wrong, however. My father was under more pressure than I knew, and he must have been trying hard to keep things together because that’s not what he did. From my uncle Jack’s diary entry dated 16 September 1955 I learn that after my father left me at Gran and Granddad’s house he turned around and drove back out to Hamilton. He parked the Meteor in his brother’s garage and immediately “left to catch train at 8:15.” It seems he went straight back to Winnipeg. Our move from North Kildonan was made in a rush. Ten days later, on 26 September, Jack notes: “Bert … been here to get his car. They came from Winnipeg by air, and he came here direct by limousine from Malton” that being the airport where, four years earlier, I’d waved a flag for the young Princess Elizabeth.

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The family, including Bert, flew from Winnipeg as arranged, and presumably they all showed up “direct by limousine,” piled into the Meteor, and took off for the city in search of accommodations. With the end of September in sight the whole tribe, including Buttercup, motored straight through Toronto and on out to Scarborough where, according to Hector, they set up housekeeping in the Hav-a-Nap Motel on Kingston Road east of the city. He says the motel was still there the last time he looked. While I was serving time at Runnymede Public School, his recollection is of having followed along while Mother and Bert went through real estate offices and subdivisions looking for a house. They settled rapidly on a raw, new, beige brick bungalow at 118 Sylvan Avenue in Scarborough; I was collected from Evans Avenue, and we moved in. Our second bungalow (counting the tiny, long-ago place in New Toronto) was functional but unlovely. The hardwood floors were unvarnished, the plaster was unpainted, and outdoors the yard was a sea of mud and boulders. The living room had a picture window, but all we saw from it was a dense row of trees across the street. At first I didn’t realize that beyond those trees was a house that looked out over Lake Ontario. Nor did I know that its vantage point was from the top of the Scarborough Bluffs. I must have been told that the bluffs were over there, but I had no idea how grandiose they were. I was more impressed by our new house’s modern bathroom with a counter, a huge mirror, and a built-in bathtub. I’d never seen a bathroom like that. Just inside the door from the carport, moreover, there was a second little bathroom with a sink and toilet. That was a luxury that we’d never enjoyed before. The house’s main level was laid out in an L-shaped design featuring an open living and dining area with a grey cement-brick fireplace at the living room end. That layout is universal now, but it was new then, and I was pleased that at least we had a fireplace. The kitchen was shaped in a complementary L with corner space for a kitchen table and a large freezer, which was another innovation. Built on a split-level plan, the house had five or six steps leading up from the entrance hall to the bedrooms. On the upper level was a big bedroom for our parents and two smaller bedrooms for Doris and me, Doris’s with a shelf-like obtrusion in the corner that served to

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accommodate the side door to the kitchen below. Hector and Paul were in a bedroom in the basement, the rear half being the only part of the lower level that was habitable. The front part of the basement, under the living room and kitchen, was a crawl space too low to stand up in. Settling into my new room, I could not have cared less about the semifinished state of my parents’ house. As with the old house in Dixie, I overheard any discussion of finishing and improvements as mere background noise. Ensconced on my bed, I returned to my scarf of many colours. Already close to six feet long, it was both a creative experiment and a stimulus to reflection, and I thought how Granddad would laugh when I showed it to him at seven or eight feet. I hadn’t realized that I wouldn’t be seeing my grandparents as often as in the old days. From the Kennedy house, a visit to Gran and Granddad had been a short drive. But in this new house, Mother let us know that we were far out on the eastern edge of the sprawling metropolis that Toronto had become, nearly twenty miles from Gran and Granddad’s place. Visiting them would be an expedition requiring some planning. Bert certainly hadn’t chosen the Sylvan Avenue house because it was close to the CBC, and Mother claimed that one of his reasons for buying the Scarborough bungalow had been that it was a long way from his mother’s house. A telephone call from the western side of Toronto to Scarborough was long distance in those days and considered too expensive to use for anything but essential communications. Gran did not fail to let us know how disappointed she was. She’d been longing for the return of her son and her grandchildren only to find that we were out of local telephone range. • However, Grandmother and Grandfather Leonard were even farther away. Calling them had always been long distance, and we hadn’t seen them since before our move to Manitoba, so it was time we paid them a visit. Not long after our arrival in Scarborough we made a family expedition to Delhi. The drive was the same, and Delhi’s main street was as flat and dusty as I remembered. Mother told us it was only at night that the bars lit up, and then the migrant tobacco pickers, drunk, could make the strip dangerous. “Sometimes on a Saturday

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night you can see a good knife fight!” She hadn’t mentioned that in earlier years. There was also a local character who was new to me. As we passed the taxi stand I caught a glimpse of a vastly obese man filling the driver’s seat, and then some, of a parked taxi. Rudely, I pointed – look, look! But Mother had the information at her fingertips. “Oh, yes, him. Everybody knows him. He’s been driving that taxi for years. He weighs six hundred pounds and he’s had the lower half of the steering wheel sawn off so he can get his belly in under it!” I pondered that. Did the man eat in his taxi? He must get out of it to go to the bathroom. I wondered what it would be like to see him rolling across the sidewalk, but already we were past him. The railway underpass and the turn onto the lawn at Grandmother and Grandfather’s house were unchanged, but as we got out of the car and they came to greet us, my mother’s parents had aged dramatically. They appeared to have shrunk. They were pallid and taciturn, and foremost in what little they had to say was their sorrowful mention of a crystal ornament that aunt Catherine had wanted Grandfather to have because it represented a harp and was a symbol of Ireland. Unfortunately, she’d sent it by ordinary mail labelled “fragile.” What arrived were thousands of glittering shards and splinters, not recognizable as anything, and of course worse news had followed. They’d learned that Catherine, their eldest daughter and probably their favourite, certainly the most dutiful and affectionate, was dying. The saddest part was that the news had not come until the last days of her life, leaving them with no chance to say goodbye. Now our grandparents, both over eighty, seemed preoccupied with the process of withdrawing into the silence and private reserve of very old age. A corresponding change was that Mother was no longer intimidated. She could breeze in with her diffident urbanite husband and her squabbling brood of self-centred offspring and take over. She could let the old people know what she thought. The way they washed dishes was primitive and unclean. They heated water on the woodstove, poured it into a basin on the kitchen table, and washed each plate from the stack in just that water before passing it along to the person with the dishtowel. There was no rinsing, and the water grew sludgier and sludgier. The dishes were more or less rubbed clean. When Mother found food stuck to the underside of a plate she criticized her father,

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sharply, for not washing both sides of the plates. It was the first time I’d heard her speak to him like that. A nicer development had been to find our uncle Wesley there. We remembered him from the early days at the Kennedy house when Mother called on him for repairs and improvements. He was a small, bearded man with a bright smile, who was afflicted with lifelong deafness. We children liked him because he was kind and friendly. He couldn’t be given orders by Mother, and her scoldings and arguments produced no effect. When she refused to give her younger brother credit for any sense he simply smiled back at her. Had he even heard what she’d said? He possessed a charming inscrutability. Mother claimed that his hearing problem was the result of his having fallen out of the hayloft in the barn when he was eighteen, landing on his head on the concrete below. That was why he was a little cracked, she said. And during this visit, finding something to reproach him with, she jumped at her chance. Wesley had wanted to help his frail elderly parents by harvesting the green beans from their garden and putting them up in jars for the winter. Mother interrogated him minutely as to exactly how he’d done it, and although I never understood what was wrong with his method – as probably neither did he – she decided that he was going to poison everybody. “Botulism!” she yelled. She gathered up the jars of beans from the root cellar and rushed out to empty them into the compost heap. Whether she was right or not, she wanted to be right, she wanted to impose her authority, and in the domain of cooking and canning she could, so she got away with it. That summer’s crop of beans was dumped. Poor Wesley. He was just as intelligent as his sister, no more cracked than she was, even more adventurous, and certainly better organized. When I was smaller I hadn’t realized that he couldn’t hear, maybe because when he talked to me I listened without trying to answer. During the days when I was struggling to ride my tall old bike, lunging and flopping and falling over, he’d encouraged me by telling me that the training wheels on a child’s bicycle were an impediment anyway. The two outer wheels could never touch the ground at the same time, he pointed out. Tipping and wobbling from one training wheel to the other could never help anyone to learn balance. So I was

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doing well by starting with a real, full-sized bicycle. And he’d smiled at me, and I’d smiled back. But that had been several years earlier. By the time I was twelve I did understand that Wesley was deaf, and I was also beginning to see that he was out of the ordinary. He wasn’t simply opinionated and individualistic; he was an adventurer. If we hadn’t seen him for years it was because he’d been away on a round-the-world motorcycle trip. This would have been his personal journey towards self-discovery and a feeling of independence and self-worth, inspired perhaps by the knowledge that his father, at the beginning of the century, had made his way around the world carpentering ships and buildings. In the different context of the 1950s, but using similar church connections, Wesley and his Indian motorcycle had crossed the Pacific, taking ship from one island and one Methodist mission to the next. He was a skilful natural mechanic and he’d paid his way by doing makeshift repairs to vehicles of all sorts, everywhere. A photograph taken in 1950 (on the same day and the same roll of film as the group picture taken under the tree on the lawn) shows him shaved, dressed up in a jacket and tie, and standing over his motorcycle, which is equipped with a large crate for a sidecar. The crate, filled with tools, bears a sign announcing him as “The Travelling Mechanic.” That picture would have been taken shortly before he left, and although I’m not sure when he returned, that autumn, for me, he’d just come back. The bean-botulism incident shows that Wesley, who was two years younger than Alice, was a natural competitor for her. Yet there was attachment between them too, based on the memories and influences that they shared: the same childhood in China and the same early transition to Canadian life in the tough rural society of southern Ontario. So now it was Mother who passed on the details about his trip. She began by conceding that he could fix anything. In the Solomon Islands, she told us, when the missionaries’ Jeep had needed a cylinder and none was available, Wesley had cast one for them – had dug a hole in the sand on the beach, had heated metal – steel, brass? what are cylinders made of? – in a fire, had taken an impression, somehow, of the old cylinder, and had cast a new one in a tin can in the sand. I’ve always wondered if the cylinder worked and for how long. But Mother added that while in New Zealand her brother had contracted

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an enthusiasm for Social Credit, which, despite his skill as a carpenter and a mechanic, she considered to be certain proof of craziness. I’d never heard of Social Credit and had no idea what she was talking about, so I took her word for it. When we met him again in Delhi, Wesley was using both a motorcycle and a Jeep. The venerable Indian that he’d set out with had died in Australia, and he’d replaced it with the secondhand British Panther that brought him home. The toolbox sidecar had been retired and the original passenger sidecar – in which I’d been photographed as a baby – was now attached to the replacement motorcycle. So I’d seen all that before. What was new to me was his Jeep. It was a genuine army Jeep and would certainly have been second or thirdhand when it joined his family of machines. Wesley’s Jeep was the first car I ever drove. His putting me into the driver’s seat was the best present he could have given me. All I did was drive it in circles on the lawn, but for me, at twelve, the experience was amazing and marvellous. He’d shown me how to turn it on, with a starter button on the dashboard, and how to release the clutch, and then he simply let me go. I don’t think he mentioned changing gears, so I must have left it in first. The steering wheel jerked to life in my hands instantly conveying its message of choppy, thrashing power and impatient forward movement. I pulled the steering wheel over and discovered the magic tension of holding the machine into a curve then letting the wheel spin back through my hands. The Jeep straightened itself out like something living. I relished the sensation of all the little indentations on the underside of the steering wheel rippling back under my fingers. I was so thrilled by my accession to mechanized force that I forgot about the rest of the world and the immovable objects that it presented. I drove the Jeep right over a small tree that my grandparents had planted near the back door. The sapling bent down and stood up again behind me, but I doubt if it survived. Yet nobody blamed me, or if they did, I couldn’t hear them because I was too happy. Nor do I remember how I stopped the Jeep. That detail hadn’t been part of my first lesson, but I expect I simply braked and stalled it. The circuit around the lawn and over the tree in Wesley’s Jeep was a rite of passage that obliterated everything else about that autumn’s

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visit to Delhi. At the end of the day I expect we climbed the enclosed, echoing staircase and went to bed in the slope-ceilinged bedrooms under the roof, but I no longer remember. That short visit may in fact have been the last time we stayed overnight at Grandmother and Grandfather’s house. The next morning we headed back to Sylvan Avenue and into the fray. • Once again we had to settle into a new neighbourhood and establish ourselves. Our bungalow was one of many in a subdivision that was progressively invading what had previously been farmland. Behind us there remained a section of field overgrown with long grass, but week by week there was less of it. My brothers tell me that at first there was a two-acre lot behind us belonging to a little old lady, probably a farmer’s widow, in a little old house, and that the widow protested to Mother about our undisciplined behaviour. She complained about things being thrown over onto her property. Were my brothers tossing something over the fence? Whatever it was I had nothing to do with it. That fall would have been the season when I first began to ruminate about the unceasing destruction of the natural world around me, all woods and meadows under attack by the spread of roads and buildings. Of course we were part of the movement ourselves, starting in Dixie when we’d joined the flood of city people moving to the countryside and spoiling what they admired, but I’d been too young then to realize what was going on. At least our house in Dixie had been an old one, settled almost organically into its surroundings. We hadn’t built anything new nor had we ripped anything out or torn anything down. And in Manitoba the suburban community of North Kildonan had seemed quite stable. The pioneer houses along the Red River were still standing. The creek bottom, the riverbank, and the wild jungly places that we’d explored when we first arrived were unchanged when we left. Neither of those earlier neighbourhoods had suffered anything like the bulldozer business that encircled us in Scarborough. Sylvan Avenue was no longer sylvan. All around us, sad vestiges of what had once been a small pocket of paradise were being swept away, and we were playing a role in the wave of its ruination.

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The only natural feature of a scale sufficient to withstand the onslaught of the building boom was the Scarborough Bluffs. Along that part of Lake Ontario there’s a frightening drop to the water, maybe as much as two hundred feet. The bluffs are crumbly, eroding clay cliffs that tower over the lake and a narrow fringe of beach below. Whatever the great geological upheaval that produced them, they’re dangerous because of their height and also because they’re unstable, on a millennial timeline shifting and breaking away as wind and weather go on eating the land back from the lake. From our side of the street we didn’t have direct access to them, and the house across from us blocked our view of the lake. It belonged to Marion Hilliard, one of Canada’s first woman doctors, although all we saw of her place was that row of trees against a blank-looking white clapboard wall. I don’t think I ever saw Dr Hilliard in person. Her windows faced the other way, towards the water, her large treed lot was firmly fenced in, and we didn’t dream of trespassing on her property. As usual it was Mother who’d recognized her name on the mailbox – rural delivery having only just been replaced by a postman who brought our letters to the door – and who told us about our reclusive neighbour. Mother also let us know that the smaller cottage in the grounds was for the gardener and handyman, an elderly Yorkshireman who, according to her, spoke incomprehensible English. I was curious about that, and did catch sight of him once or twice, but never heard him speak. My brother Paul, however, says that he and Hector “were in and out of his shop all the time” and found no difficulty in communicating with him. Paul thinks his name was Peter, adding that, “he was the first person I ever knew with girly calendars on the wall, and I was fearfully impressed.” Hector hasn’t mentioned the calendars but remembers Peter sending him out to buy cigarettes and giving him chocolate in return for his services. In those days an eight-year-old could buy tobacco with no questions asked. Towards the east end of Sylvan Avenue were other long-established individual houses overlooking the lake, and Ralph McPherson’s family lived in one of them. He was to become our paperboy and a lifelong friend of Doris’s. A chunky adolescent with an air of worldly wisdom, Ralph was strong enough to pick any of us up by an arm and

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a leg, even me, and whirl us round and round, face down, in what we called “an aeroplane.” That was fun and exciting. And Ralph had his roots in a milieu that seemed to offer enviable security and continuity. I assumed that the McPhersons had always lived in the same house and that they’d always enjoyed a view of the water, although Doris now says no. She tells me that, a little like us, they’d moved to Sylvan Avenue after living in a farmhouse in the country. It was the setting of their place that made me imagine a happy stability. Their driveway was lined with two rows of tall poplars that had been planted years earlier by a former owner. Not only that but the ancient lady who’d planted them was still there, still living in the house. I was touched and impressed to learn that she’d sold her property to Ralph’s parents on the condition that she remain there, share the place with them, and be taken care of until the end of her days, which she was. Farther along, past the McPhersons’ place and partway into the woods, two or three other long-established houses were set back in large leafy lots. Walking by and gazing in at them I envied them their seclusion, for having room enough to be seen singly, and for being different from each other. I was starting to appreciate how a house should belong to its surroundings and to notice how the facade, the window shapes, and the trees around it delivered a message about those who’d built it and those who lived in it. What it came down to was that a house should have an identity. In lots of the British children’s books I’d read houses had names that were also their addresses. In Canada, as far as I knew, that wasn’t possible, although the Kennedy house had had an identity and so had the house in North Kildonan. But now we were living in a bungalow crammed in a few feet from its neighbours and almost exactly like them and a dozen others along the street. Hoping to discover more interesting houses, I walked on, gawking in at them, until the street petered out into bush. The first time I ventured into those woods, with Doris, we roved through dense brush and saplings exploring footpaths until we found a way to the bluffs and a place where we could peer over the edge. That was a scary thrill. One look wasn’t enough. We stepped back, rambled on, and here and there crept cautiously up to the brink again. Sometimes clasping a tree, we looked down, shuddering, at tiny waves

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rolling up along the distant beach. We’d been told that it was possible to climb down but where? That time we gave up and went home. Soon after, by myself, I wandered along the street in the opposite direction. That way were construction sites where still more houses were being built. The larger, more expensive ones looked out over the lake while the modest ones like ours faced across the road. The western end of Sylvan Avenue finished at what must once have been a farm gate. No gate remained, but there were traces of a fence and a couple of decaying posts. The field beyond was wide open, and since I first saw it at the high point of autumn it’s that picture that has stayed with me, a glorious vision of what our bungalow and the others had supplanted. No one had farmed the land for a very long time. Lit up by long shafts of afternoon sunlight, the stretch of neglected pasture was enclosed by woods and invaded by saplings draped in wild grapevines and orange bittersweet. Clusters of dark fruit weighed down the chokecherry trees, under attack by a flock of starlings. Wading through tall fluffy seedheaded grass, dusty shrivelled goldenrod, and scratchy purple asters I set out across the meadow, heading for a line of treetops that I could see catching the rays of the sun on the far side. Those trees defined the lip of a ravine that cut its way towards the water, and there I found the way. Plunging into a leafy maze of light and shade, I scrambled down through a network of winding paths to the beach. Those pathways have come back to me in dreams, as dream wanderings, so often that I’m no longer sure how much of what I remember may be real and how much is mind labyrinth. Parts may even be memories transposed from other places: overlapping images of vistas glimpsed through tree trunks, tufted grasses sprouting from the level parts of a slope, transverse ledges with sod curling over and hollowed out underneath, or weedy plateaus opening to a view across glittering water. Those steep, slippery paths to the lake, some stony and some muddy, seemed to promise a different discovery every time I picked or slid my way down them because the mesh of trails, wet in places with spring-fed streams, branched off in all directions, and it took time to learn their twists. Hoping that something wonderful lay ahead, for a week or two I kept trying new ones until I’d explored them all and settled for the easiest way down.

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The beach below was a narrow strip in the shadow of the bluffs, its sand scattered with rocks, pebbles, and a few water-scoured shells. The magnificent thing about it, though, was that it stretched endlessly out in both directions. Like my adolescent notion of the future, there was always more of it farther along, reaching into the distance, and I kept meaning next time to pass the spot that I’d got to this time, and the next and the next, to see more. The lake itself was endless. I did know that out beyond the misty wet horizon line was Niagara-on-theLake and New York State, in a different country, but it looked like the sea, vast and blue, with big waves breaking on the boulders and the sandy incline, and the far shore out of sight. Fifty or sixty feet out from the beach, moreover, and settled on the bottom, lay the rusting remains of a wrecked ship, a lake boat that had run aground in a storm in 1915. All that remained above the water line was the boiler and around it the tilting, rusted rim of something like a catwalk. Local history said that when the vessel foundered it had lost its cargo of household goods including a load of wheelbarrows that the waves cast up for miles along the shore. Still troubled by the suspicion that what surrounded me was a second-rate version of reality, I was reassured by the presence of that wreck. Maybe Lake Ontario wasn’t the ocean, maybe it wasn’t salty, but if it was stormy enough for a ship to be broken up on its shore then surely it had the status of a sea. • Paul turned six that autumn, and for the first and only time, all four of us were enrolled at the same school. We didn’t trudge through the artificially curved subdivision streets to get there. We trekked directly across the field adjoining our backyard, where our unhappy neighbour’s hay still rippled in the wind, even as the sod was torn up and tumbled with disinterred boulders. Maybe we were trespassing. Maybe that was what she objected to. Across another street of construction sites, past half-built houses and a rubble of road grading, through a chaos of excavated foundations heaped with lumber and bricks, we found a cinder path that led into the bushes and up the hillside – the second escarpment after the bluffs – and made our way up that, into the modest streets of older bungalows above.

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Up there our new school, for me the fifth, was named in honour of George P. Mackie, probably a departed school trustee. It was another in the long, low, 1950s style that I’d first seen when I entered junior high in Manitoba, although by then all my schools were merging into the same blur of educational bureaucracy. From G.P. Mackie only two clear impressions remain. The first is of the sports ground surrounded by more bungalows. I remember standing at the far end of that long field, putting as much distance as I could between myself and the baseball game in progress. Ignoring the shouts and bursts of scuffling, looking towards the action just often enough to be able to avoid the ball, most of the time I turned away to watch the light descending in shafts from the clouds. The probing rays reached down between the little houses, and occasionally a finger of light would strike a poignant flash from the windshield of a car passing in the street behind. The second impression is of the corridor inside the school, hung with a series of Group of Seven silkscreen prints. Those must have been produced expressly for the school system because later I saw them in the high schools as well. I was puzzled by the big flat prints of drab landscapes in blobby washed-out shapes because our teacher had informed us that they were beautiful, and I couldn’t see it. It was years before I discovered the actual paintings, much smaller than the silkscreen versions but incomparably more colourful and dynamic, and understood how those reproductions hanging in the corridor might have represented beauty for someone who’d seen the real thing. As for classes, or the curriculum, if we read a book or two, prudently vetted by the school board, they’ve been expunged from my mind by the books I was reading at home. Back down on Sylvan Avenue other people were moving in. Our next-door neighbours to the west were a family named Arnsby. Their bungalow was identical to ours but better done up. They’d had it painted and decorated – although all I saw of that were their heavy drapes – with a properly sodded lawn and flowers. Their tall, dark-haired daughter would have been in high school or maybe in a secretarial college. She wore lipstick, plucked her eyebrows, shaved her legs, and sported an interesting poodle cloth coat. She also had a car of her own parked in the carport, an Austin-Healey Sprite. How I envied her that. Coming and going she acted disdainfully grown up, and

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when she did speak to me it was with an air of kindly condescension. Then, as if to go with her poodle cloth coat, the family took on a pair of prancing standard poodles. Gazing across from our carport to theirs, I admired it all as if from across continents. We did acquire a dog, however. Doris and I were followed home from school by a small, bright brown hound who elected to move in with us. Because she was a sinuous, close-haired animal, Mother called her “Pretzel.” Whatever she’d been called in her previous situation she gladly forgot and responded enthusiastically to her new name. “Pretzel, Pretzel!” we shouted, and she came running, although later when we tested her reactions with similar-sounding names like “Freckles” or “Kettle” she responded just as eagerly. To Pretzel, consonants didn’t matter as much as vowels did. Besides Ralph and the Arnsbys, that first autumn we made the acquaintance of a gung-ho British couple – Doris thinks they may have been Australians – who’d moved into another bungalow like ours two or three lots to the east. They were reported to have been opera singers, and once, in the early light of dawn, I heard them out warbling in their back yard. Mother was friendly with them until the day she expressed an admiration for Gilbert and Sullivan, and they squelched her. Gilbert and Sullivan were “too light!” Mother bit her lip and said no more. Later on I was to observe the pair of them and wonder why, when she went out for the evening, the operatic lady wore her plain scruffy coat but with a scarf slung around the shoulders like a stole. That scarf was serving no purpose. During subsequent years in suburban Toronto I was to notice others doing the same thing, and I surmised that it must be a small symbolic gesture towards evening dress. But I’d never seen a Canadian woman wear a scarf that way, or not yet, only certain British ladies who were otherwise – in my unflinching adolescent opinion – dowdy. At the same time I was still knitting at my long lumpy striped scarf, convinced that it was going to be really quite stylish. • While I brooded over my early gropings towards aesthetic values, Mother’s first challenge on Sylvan Avenue was her struggle, once again,

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with an unfinished house. Although we were to live in it for five years, and although the floors were eventually varnished, the walls painted, and the lawn seeded, the place continued to have a provisional air. My mother could never see the whole effect of anything. Somehow her choices for the interior didn’t come together. And anyway it was still a mess, always a mess, and the shambles was worse than in previous houses. This was because, in our new suburban life, the family dynamic was changing. Once our move into the Sylvan Avenue bungalow had been completed Bert vanished downtown for the whole of the working week and was seen only on weekends. He’d never been interested in being anyone’s father, and with his children older and less dependent, he was almost free to be the person he always had been. Central Toronto was his element, and he’d been exiled from it for two long years, cut off from the radio newsroom that was his natural milieu, concerts at Massey Hall, his Yonge Street pals, and the liberties of the night shift. So he returned to his familiar haunts and was even less of a presence than during our years in Dixie. I gave no thought to his disappearance. I was used to his behaviour and wasn’t yet prepared to analyze it. Bert was just the acerbic fellow who slept mornings at the house, did the shopping on weekends, and liked to impress us, his inferiors, with his biting wit. During my adolescent years my father’s vagaries were less important to me, anyway, than the battles with my mother. So he was never home, so what? That was nothing new. What was new and different in Scarborough was that Mother also took off downtown. Having all four of us in school was more liberating for her than for him. As soon as she was free to get out of the house, she hiked up to Kingston Road and took the Gray Coach into the city where she succeeded in being taken on as an underwriter with an insurance company. After that she was out from early morning until nightfall, and when she did get home she had a fresh stock of stories to relate. The company that she worked for dealt in farm insurance, and she was able to share with us approximately how many farmers were killed by bulls in any given year and by what sort of bull. They were generally dairy bulls, she told us, but the big black-and-white Holstein-Friesians were not as dangerous as smaller, more active bulls like Jerseys. She also told us one day that

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she’d talked to a man who’d shot and killed another man – although he claimed, she said, that it had been an accident. By that time she may have given up fretting about where Bert was spending most of his nights or with whom. The years were gone when she’d stretched out on the chesterfield by the light of the red knob on the old Heathkit, listening to music while her babies slept and waiting into the small hours for her husband to come home. In Scarborough, knowing that she had to be at work in the morning, she had a reason to go to bed. She was going to have to roll out early, while he slumbered on, and get herself up the hill to the bus. And if sometimes, even in those days, I did hear their voices in bed at three and four in the morning there wasn’t the same laughter. Maybe they were discussing practical things, maybe they were negotiating. Whatever they were talking about, Mother was probably happier. There was less need for her to keep up a brave front about our father’s absences. She was still spending half of every night alone, but she was asleep, marshalling her forces for the morning when she was going to charge back out to fight some more, move on from the insurance company, make a career for herself, and maybe even compete with her feckless husband. • As a general rule parents must assume that they know their children well, and maybe some do, but for our parents I don’t think knowing us was an issue. From the younger side of the generational divide, it was we who were observing them. Mere bystanders to the parental power struggle, we’d grown up absorbing a knowledge of their characters as, year by year, they played out their passions and their follies. They weren’t worried about revealing themselves. They were too busy fighting each other and the outside world to give us much thought – not that they quarrelled openly. Their weapons were irony and disdain, and their angrier arguments must have taken place during those late night discussions in bed. Whatever their disagreements, we were on our own, and maybe we were supposed to be pleased about it. During their childhoods Alice and Bert had never been allowed the liberty that we enjoyed. They may have thought that feeding and housing us was enough. We were healthy, and they could see us growing bigger

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and more demanding with every passing week. The result was that the pair of them made increasing efforts to defend themselves and escape the noisy needs of the rising generation. Throughout that time I was storing away my view of their stances and declarations so that one day – now, these days – I might be able to work out who they really were and why they acted as they did. In 1990 when Bert was dying of alcoholism and denying it (“just old age,” he muttered even if he’d stopped eating, was unsteady on his legs, and occasionally hallucinated), I told him that I was writing stories. He didn’t seem surprised, but he announced, “If it’s about me, I’ll sue!” Doris Tidy, his second ex-wife, had moved back in with him during his illness and was present at that conversation. She looked at me when he made his threat, and I looked at her. Was he joking? We couldn’t be sure. She and I both knew that he wasn’t going to be around to sue anyone, although neither of us wanted to say so. He still had that much power over us. And then, when he saw that I was leaving, he got to his feet and staggered across the room to kiss me. He’d never done that before. I never saw him again. So now I suppose that instead of suing, my father may have settled for haunting me, his spectral presence being a part of my motivation for writing this memoir, to record, along with all the rest, what I’ve retained of his satirical condemnations and defensive fantasies. In Scarborough, observing my parents from the sidelines, what I should have learned was that the challenge of being an independent person was going to require effort and courage. Like my mother, I should have been preparing my escape. But I wasn’t ready. Although the family quagmire was troublesome, the world beyond the confines of home scared me more. And if Bert had always supported the family financially – perhaps with reluctance but apparently with no difficulty – it was because he knew how and we didn’t. My mother’s struggle to get out into the market and find gainful employment should have been a first lesson in the necessity of coming to terms with the real problem of economic survival, if I had wanted to learn. At the time all I took from her example was a horror of the whole situation. What I wanted most was to avoid being like her. But since I was the eldest I was the first to start hearing what a good thing it would be if I could find myself a part-time job. I was alarmed to

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the point of feeling sick. I hadn’t the faintest idea of how to find work. What work could I do? And how could I find it? Just the thought of it produced paralyzing discouragement and a black, hopeless despair. Naturally my mother had no patience with that nonsense. As soon as she’d left university, and more recently when her youngest son was finally in school, she’d proved herself to be resourceful and energetic about finding work, so she scoffed at my timidity. I should stop being a ninny and get out there and make an effort. “Ask around,” she said. “Stand up straight! Smile! There must be lots of places that need a girl to work. Let them know you’re available.” Her view was that if she’d been able to do it, I should be able to do it too. I didn’t think so. I was more than scared. Deep down I was possessed by a fundamental revulsion. Supposing I did find a job of some kind, how could I bear it? As if she’d read my mind, Mother came up with a more specific proposal. “One thing you could do would be to babysit!” Babysit. Well, yes, with my experience as a big sister, possibly I could handle that should anyone ask me to do it. There were families along the street with small children. The suggestion of something that I could at least imagine doing changed the perspective a little. Then the revulsion returned. If I was supposed to work, if I had to work, why wasn’t there anything better? I knew that some of my school friends were used to being set up in student jobs by their fathers. I couldn’t imagine Bert taking any interest in my employment situation, but to confirm the hopelessness of any such request I asked him about it. True to form, when he realized what I wanted, he shrank down in his armchair, scratching convulsively at his chest – which was a tic, all his undershirts had holes in the front – and responded with a brief, evasive mutter. What had he actually said? I didn’t understand. My mind had gone blank with the effort of trying to speak to him. All I knew was that Bert was sure I was unemployable, and so was Mother despite her exhortations. She had no interest in hearing about my fears and hesitations, and neither of them wanted to be trapped into any silly heart-to-heart talk. Thus the subject of a job for me came and went, and nothing happened. I was glad to forget about it. It was just their fate, and my luck, that both parents were out at work most of the time and couldn’t

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keep at me about it. They pursued their careers, passing late at night or early in the morning, and neither of them was home when I got back from school. The result was that for a little while longer I was free to live life as it came. I fed myself out of the fridge and afterwards I curled up in a chair and chewed my fingers over their books.

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Abstrac tion s

From then on family life became, if possible, even more chaotic. It was everyone for himself. We all cooked – Bert, Doris, my brothers, and me – using whatever we found. The refrigerator was as much of a mess as the rest of the place, but we were used to picking through it, and the freezer came in handy even if it did accumulate surprises. Sometimes a saucepan was set in there with an unfinished dinner in it not to be rediscovered until it was unidentifiable. After a week or two no one felt like thawing it out to discover what it had been. If Pretzel showed up at the right moment she might be called upon to deal with it, although the frosted, desiccated mess was often worse than even a dog could face. None of us had ever heard of meal planning. If we found food we ate it, and certainly we were never hungry. There was always something to scarf down, and our immune systems, given a good start in Dixie, were further reinforced. As for where the groceries came from, I do know that Bert was the one who did the shopping because he was still the only one who drove. I recall trailing after him through the supermarket while he swiftly, methodically, tossed basics or whatever he deemed basic into the shopping cart: milk, cornflakes (now eaten by all of us),

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canned tomatoes, iceberg lettuce, ham, and ground beef – as well as frozen fish and vegetables, canned fruit, ginger snaps, and vanilla ice cream. Sometimes my father would pause over an item. An artichoke, an exotic novelty at the time, needed to be identified: “Is this a chrysanthemum?” He didn’t buy it. But a package of rye crisps derisively described as “hardtack” did get tossed into the cart. From as far back as I can remember one of Mother’s culinary staples had been a mixture of ground beef, onions, marjoram, cayenne pepper, and canned tomatoes dumped over rice. She called it “Spanish rice,” a misnomer that I believed until I discovered paella. There was nothing Spanish about Mother’s rice, but we’d all learned to concoct it so we did and we gobbled it. Naturally the unwashed dishes and pots piled up. Dishwashing was sporadic, left most of the time for someone else, and all too often done by Mother, tired and protesting, after she’d tramped down the hill from the bus. I think that was the period when Hector took in a principle that he was to share with me while we were both studying at l’Université de Sherbrooke – that yes indeed, he did wash his dishes at every meal – before he ate off them. There was a weekend when, surprisingly, Bert brought a cookbook home from the Toronto Central Library, opened it to a recipe for cabbage rolls simmered in beer, and made some. They were delicious, but he never repeated the performance because he’d taken the book back. A simpler operation was the making of a cheese omelette. The practice of putting cheese into an omelette was new to me until I saw him do it, but when I tried it, I liked it. He also advised me on how to make a green salad. First, he said, the inside of a wooden bowl should be rubbed with a garlic clove cut in half and the lettuce swirled around in it to pick up a subtle hint of garlic. Once the fresh garlic flavour had been distributed throughout the lettuce, a little olive oil could be drizzled on and the lettuce leaves tossed again in that. And only then, only after the garlic-enhanced lettuce leaves had been coated with the oil, should the salt and the vinegar – elements that would otherwise cause the leaves to bleed and wilt – be added. I still make green salad more or less that way because it’s good. The resulting vinaigrette is completely unlike the thick mustardy sauce à salade favoured by the French, and my father may have got it from an Italian cookbook, although, recently, it has occurred to me that his

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unexpected culinary sophistication could also have been due to the influence of a new girlfriend. Of course Mother cooked, when she was home, and she baked too. Occasionally she still threw together some perfect tea biscuits, made us her caramelized Chelsea buns, or produced a batch of the oatmeal cookies that we’d eaten all our lives – and which were better than any I’ve tasted anywhere else – but most of the time we fed ourselves and very simply. We got in from school and made western sandwiches or buttered rye toast, which we washed down with milk or milky tea. In those days we drank instant coffee too. We rummaged in the freezer for frozen peas and fish sticks. On one occasion Hector, aged eight or nine, was told by his cubmaster that for the following week they were planning a supper and his contribution would be a cake. It didn’t occur to my brother to ask Mother to bake him one. He looked up “cake” in the stained and tattered recipe book and made his own cake, a little lopsided but not bad. He submitted it, and presumably it passed and was eaten. If the cubmaster concluded that Mother wasn’t much good at baking, that was not Hector’s problem. He’d produced the cake requested and delivered it. This would have been around the time, anyway, when Doris and I began to be concerned about body image. Not that I was capable of dieting, and I’m not sure my sister was either, but moving into adolescence, and on my own as far as meals went, often I ate once a day. Because there was no pressure either way, and I could eat or not, sometimes I didn’t eat all day and stuffed myself at supper. Then the following day I might skip eating and make do with coffee. Anorexia was unheard of, and I liked to imagine that I was living like a member of some hunter-gatherer forest tribe, used to gorging or going without. Adaptation was all, and I remained healthy, my body a normal shape. Actually, I suspect Bert may have been a lifelong oncea-day eater. Breakfast was minimal for him, I don’t remember seeing him eat lunch, and during the week he had supper downtown. Maybe he bequeathed me his slow metabolism. Food was necessary but not three times a day. More interesting to my sister and me was our early research into ways of enhancing our appearance. Being red haired presented challenges, and we could both see that other redheads were often

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washed out and plain looking, so we practised with the cosmetics that we hoped would complement our colouring: pearlescent nail polish, green eye shadow, dark brown mascara that we held under the tap and scraped up with a little brush, and pale pink TanJay lipstick, promising at first but which turned an ordinary red on our lips. We had to wipe it off again. After that, however, painted and primped, we studied ourselves in the bathroom mirror, identifying what was an advantage and what wasn’t. That was the period, too, when I made my first stabs at designing and creating clothes, even if at the outset I was too impatient to bother with details like bust darts or hem allowances. Failures accumulated with a resulting waste of material. I visualized what I wanted so clearly that I expected the cloth to fall into place simply because I hoped it would. Occasionally, out of dumb luck, it did, and every fortuitous success helped to justify my slapdash method. Unsuccessful attempts, half-finished skirts and dresses, were stuck away and forgotten in the backs of drawers and at the bottoms of trunks. I may still have some of them. On the other hand, my knitting project did reach completion. I’d learned to cast off and came to the end of my formerly endless striped scarf. It was seven feet long, and I wore it wrapped several times around my face and neck as I trudged through the damp chill up the hill to school and back down to the bungalow. Sewing or knitting could never provide me with everything I needed, however, and wearable clothes were a constant preoccupation. One good thing about our mother’s having gone out and got an office job was that she’d started to put together a working wardrobe. More and better pleated skirts appeared, printed silk blouses, and dresses with ruffles or buttons. She couldn’t wear all of them all the time and therefore – although her things weren’t what I would have chosen for myself – I observed a truce in our fashion war and helped myself to what was available. By then I was a couple of inches taller than she was, so her skirts were short on me, not that I cared one way or another. I hadn’t even heard of the practice of rolling the waistband to hike my skirts up. As for Doris, she was still a little smaller than Mother, and although she must have worn her clothes too, as she grew into them, I doubt if she got as much mileage out of our mother’s downtown outfits as I did. I needed clothes, so I took what I could find, and what I found

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was in my mother’s closet or on her bedroom floor or slung on the furniture or heaped on the freezer in the kitchen waiting to be ironed. • A further result of Mother’s liberation was that, off and on, we went through a series of charwomen, none of whom stayed. The house was too dirty and too messy, all its surfaces too cluttered to be easily dusted or scrubbed, and our mother was cruelly abrupt with the poor women. There were a lot of newly arrived Germans in Toronto in those days, like the girl I’d insulted so badly at Runnymede Public School, and I remember one youngish woman, possibly an academic or an intellectual, who was desperately unhappy at having been hired to clean our impossible house. She arrived early in the morning, was given some swift, high-handed instructions by Mother, and left to figure it out. It’s quite likely there weren’t even the products she would have needed, but Mother was out the door and off to the bus while our new cleaning woman was still trying to decide where to begin. The perennial litter of leftover food and scummy dishes was strewn everywhere, mingled with clothing, tools, toys, books, newspapers, and miscellaneous items stuck to each other or the surfaces they’d been set down on. Laundry – washed, waiting to be washed, or waiting to be ironed – had accumulated in drifts. Often the couch cushions would have been slung about, on the floor by the fireplace or under the dining room table, while the table was stacked with forgotten sewing, letters, schoolwork, or bills to be paid. There might be cups or glasses on the piano keyboard, running shoes in the kitchen sink, saucepans on the mantle, and usually combustible garbage waiting in the fireplace. When their litter box was too disgusting sometimes the felines would shit in the fireplace ashes. There might be cat vomit on the floor and hairballs under the furniture. Cat hair was everywhere. Once, weeks after harvest time, I came across a scatter of corncobs turning green and furry behind the piano. They’d been dragged back there by the cats to gnaw on in privacy. And that was what a decent, upstanding German immigrant found herself faced with. I’m sure she’d never seen such a vile mess, and I was ashamed. But I couldn’t stay to watch what happened or try to help her – not that I wanted to,

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since I considered the pigsty hopeless – because I had to go to school. But later on I did hear how her day of housecleaning turned out. As the morning advanced, Bert had rolled out of bed and shuffled around on the upper level shaving and dressing. He would have emerged by about noon, smirking self-consciously as he descended to the kitchen for coffee, only to find the unfortunate woman not making much progress. I can imagine her picking things up, helplessly, not knowing where to put them down again and not seeing how to clean anything or with what. But Bert liked women, especially women who were distinguées. I expect he spoke to her sympathetically, asked her where she was from, and decided to cheer her up. That night he told Mother that he’d put Der Rosenkavalier on the turntable for her to listen to while she worked. He said she’d settled down to sloshing the floor with a wet rag, snuffling back tears as she listened to Richard Strauss. It was Mother’s turn to weep, however, when she discovered that our one-time cleaning woman – because she never came back – had washed the unfinished hardwood floors with soap and water, and left pools of it under the chairs and the couch. The result was dark water stains on the raw wood. Naturally Bert hadn’t noticed. Despite that and other setbacks, Mother did keep trying, when she was home, to decorate her new house. She bought and hung some unlined grey cotton curtains printed with a pattern of pinecones. She painted the walls in what she considered a subtly coordinated shade of pale grey. The old blue chesterfield was no longer with us, having been bounced to bits and left behind in North Kildonan. All that remained was the surviving wing chair. That went into our parents’ bedroom where it was engulfed under heaps of clothing. Our living room now featured a rectilinear Scandinavian couch and two stark armchairs, all with flat lines and bare teakwood arms. Their colour was something neutral, maybe charcoal. The migratory seat cushions were made of foam rubber that sank into wrinkled depressions and shifted around on the webbing underneath. Couch and chairs were flanked by a couple of lamps, a tri-light that didn’t always have the proper bulb and a tottery goose-necked lamp that often had no bulb at all. There would have been a carpet, but I don’t remember it. The black-and-white television set on the mismatched base was still with us, but Bert’s Heathkit had gone the way of all electronics. His sound

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system was now one of the new “stereos,” a long teakwood veneer cabinet with a Gründig radio tuner and turntable in the centre and whomping huge speakers at either end. He’d bought it from a furniture dealer on Weston Road who called himself “The Bad Boy,” but whose real name was Mel Lastman. Perhaps to make our piano look better beside the stereo, Mother modernized it by using paint remover and a razor blade to scrape all the varnish off it along with the Heinzman trademark. • Another breezy British neighbour – a Mrs Morgan – came in for tea and quickly sized up my mother’s attempts at interior decoration. For a start, she assumed that the pale grey walls were raw plaster and assured Mother that they’d look better “when you have them painted.” Assessing the cotton curtains, she remarked that she’d had the drapes for her own picture window lined and made in detached panels so that they could be opened anywhere. That sounded like a worthwhile idea. Her advice to treat the water-stained floor with a product called Hippo Oil was probably good too but was never to be followed. While Mother made a valiant effort to engage in social chat, thanking Mrs Morgan for her suggestions, I wondered how our neighbour could possibly imagine that our walls were unpainted plaster. We’d already hung pictures on them. From a mail-order house, Mother had purchased a series of nineteenth-century Impressionist prints, pressed them between cardboard and glass, edged them with coloured cloth tape, and hung them with stick-on hooks. Some of the hooks had let go and dropped their loads, but those that had proven their staying power were still on the walls. I watched as Mrs Morgan appraised the surviving Impressionists. She smiled, drank her tea, and offered no comment. Maybe she was also putting up a brave front because she appeared not to see the clutter. Then, her inspection almost complete, she noticed the sterling silver teaspoons that Mother had brought out for the occasion. Telling us that she herself had “bags of the stuff,” she said goodbye and took her leave. I knew that Mother had only six of the little spoons and was impressed by the English lady’s obvious detachment from material things.

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The paintings that Mother had done in North Kildonan were still with us, but I don’t remember seeing them on the walls in Scarborough. Once we were settled into the new bungalow the art prints replaced them. The one or two paintings from the Manitoba period were her last, produced as a survival stratagem during the years when she was shut in with four children. And although she did take us through art galleries whenever she had the chance, for years it was her subscription to the Time Life series of art books that provided our principal contact with painting. Leafing through the books from that series, coffee-table books, for the first time I saw reproductions of the world’s great works of art. And it would have been from one of those volumes that Mother chose to copy Gauguin’s Tahitian Landscape. Those Time Life books are on the bottom shelf of one of my bookcases, in a collection enlarged later by other volumes from the same series and left with me by an angry boyfriend. His subscription had been bought for him by his mother, and since he had only contempt for established art he was glad to dump them on me when he lit out for British Columbia. My mother, however, was genuinely interested and had ordered the collection for herself as well as for us. Probably she meant to carry on working in oils, but once she had a job and was out of the house, she never found the time again. She did find another source for paintings to hang on our walls though. In downtown Toronto, on Charles Street, she discovered the Picture Loan Society. It offered the works of living, local artists. For a fee you could borrow a painting, take it home, and hang it on the wall for a specified length of time. The idea was to allow potential purchasers the leisure to appreciate the work, presumably to let it grow on them until they could decide whether or not to buy it and go on living with it. The first picture to arrive and be hung above the fireplace was an autumn landscape so thick with red, yellow, and orange impasto that it was almost an abstract. If I wasn’t ready to notice an artist’s name, or care who’d painted what, I did try to see what was supposed to be good or beautiful about that brightly coloured landscape. Unfortunately it struck me as flashy in a trite way, and I didn’t miss it when it went back. Of the paintings that followed, some were too experimental to leave much of an impression. Out of dim recollection I can pull up one that was a welter of swirling

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blues and greens suspended above the swirling jumble that we lived in but whose eddies of colour, if pretty, failed to resolve themselves into meaning. After a couple more in the same genre there was a last picture that I remember as well as the first. Although it was another abstract it was called, mysteriously, Storm over Toledo, and in one of the Time Life tomes I happened upon the El Greco painting that had inspired it. The original is a landscape. It depicts the city of Toledo under a thunderstorm, with slashes of livid colour – no doubt meant to be seen as lightning – enlivening a darkly brooding sky. Looking at that I could see that our Storm over Toledo had used the same colours, and at last I understood what the Picture Loan Society’s stormy painting had been trying to say or, rather, to repeat. It was a copy but done by a painter who’d been too lazy, or too modest, to reproduce the image of Toledo. He’d imitated only the colours. We didn’t buy that painting or any of the others. They all went back. I don’t know how Mother got them home, whether she lugged them on the bus, had them delivered, or sent Bert to collect them. But once their time was up I’m sure it was he who had to return them. • Winter came down on us, and there was snow in Scarborough, although, after the Manitoba deep freeze it seemed hardly worth noticing. The weather was simply chilly, damp, and depressing. Winter clothing was turning out to be a problem. With our mother working full time, we were on our own for coats and jackets and tramped to school in whatever we happened to have. We were bigger by then and could take the chill, even if the icy lakeside vapours had a sharper bite than the frigid dryness that Winnipeggers had liked to brag about. Fingers and toes burning with the pain of it, we learned the childhood practice of running to get warm or to get inside. Despite our races with the cold, the pleasure of my trailing multicoloured scarf was wearing thin. Although it was long and bulky, it was no help whatsoever in protecting hands and feet. I decided that it didn’t suit me any more, and I concluded that Doris needed it. I handed it over to her. If it was too long for me, it was much too long for her, but she accepted it and even wore it for a while.

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What we were both in chronic need of was winter footwear. Mother’s generation was still wearing the clattery rubber galoshes that buckled on over shoes, and neither of us wanted anything to do with those. The only tall leather boots I’d ever seen were Gran’s “snowboots from Montreal,” and they dated from the 1910s. So when Doris threw herself on her bed and lamented about “troubling deaf heaven with bootless cries” it was to no avail. We remained bootless and slopped to school in ugly overshoes because we had nothing else. As for shoes, they appeared once in a while without our having tried them on because Mother liked to browse the sales tables in the department stores downtown and bring things home when she happened to find them. Her method was to try them on herself and decide that they should fit us. That may have worked for Doris, some of the time, but could never work for me because my feet were bigger than my mother’s. She was having none of that, however. I wasn’t supposed to have surpassed her, not even in foot size. If my feet were too big it was my fault. I just had to flex my toes and tramp harder, hoping to stretch the shoes, and sometimes, with the cheaper ones, that succeeded. But a pair of blue-and-white saddle shoes stands out in my memory because I particularly liked them and wanted to wear them - except that they were just too small. They were solidly made and couldn’t be stretched and as a result produced painful, cramping blisters. After a while, when she noticed me scuffing around in my old shoes, Mother demanded to know why I wasn’t wearing those perfectly good new ones. When I told her they didn’t fit she said, nonsense, of course they fitted, she’d tried them on herself. With the cold weather, at school the physical education classes moved indoors where the torment of baseball was replaced by volleyball, which was as awful as ever even if my earlier dread of sports had faded to disgust. I no longer suffered from the heartthumping trepidation that I’d felt when I was little and simply stood on the court shutting the business out. None of the others liked me anyway, and I had nothing to prove. I’d decided that all sport was bumptious and unfeminine. The pack of eager female flesh leaping and grabbing around me was a mere embarrassment, and I was having no part of the galumphing. Even if I was unclear and insecure as to what feminine identity was supposed to mean – femininity still being

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a touchy point with my mother – I could make a start by ignoring the volleyball. Another way of affirming my individuality was to take refuge in the protective coloration of makeup. I’d been getting away with mascara since finding that tube of it in the cottage on Lake Winnipeg, and my practice sessions in front of the bathroom mirror meant that sometimes I wore eye shadow as well. Now I went further in my experiments. I applied dark eyeliner, white highlights, and rouge and stood back to study the beautiful stranger in the mirror. At that my mother, who claimed to be allergic to all perfumes and rarely indulged in any kind of makeup, decided the time had come to voice her disapproval. Knowing that she couldn’t stop me, she fell back on sneering: “Oh, look at her, it was bound to happen, she wants to be pretty, she’s trying to attract attention!” I didn’t argue with her, but I didn’t stop drawing a line over my eyes either. I went up to my room to get away from her, or I shut myself in the bathroom and stared into the mirror. I would have gone out if I’d had anywhere to go. • At the end of one cold blank afternoon, getting home from school, I found a gang of children playing on what Bert was pleased to call “Lake Arnsby.” There’d been a thaw, and our neighbours’ back yard had flooded and then frozen into a clear, smooth ice surface. Five or six little kids were skating around on it, screaming with joy. Directly adjoining the rear of the Arnsby’s property, however, was a house where the two full-grown sons were of below-normal intelligence. In the warmer weather those big boys had actually been kicked out of the house and had been living an old, round-backed Volvo that was rotting at the back of the yard. Their parents seemed to have let them inside again for the winter, but they were spending their days out by the old car. When the younger of the two, who was perhaps sixteen or seventeen, saw the children skating on that natural rink on the other lot he wanted to join in. He was six feet tall, but his mental age was similar to theirs so he slid out onto the ice in his boots and began shoving the little ones. When one of them fell down and cried, he moved along and shoved another, amusing himself.

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From our carport I yelled at him to stop. When he paid no attention, I was seized, insanely, by a murderous impulse. I grabbed a rake that was leaning against the bricks, forgotten there since the ground had frozen, and went for him with it. It was a solid garden rake with steel tines, and I swung it downwards, hard, from the very end of its handle. With mindless twelve-year-old fury, I knew it would come down with greater impact that way, and I eagerly imagined the tines sinking into his skull. I could have killed him, but for those few seconds all I wanted was to get him. And all that saved him – and me – was that he saw me coming and ran away. Luckily for both of us he was strong and fast, and he escaped. But I hadn’t thought of that when I attacked him. I hadn’t thought at all. Shivering in the carport I came to my senses, put the rake back, and went inside. If Mother had seen that set-to she would have used it as a clear example of what a dangerous lunatic I was. Fortunately, no one else was home, and I calmed myself by making a heap of French toast and eating it with pools of syrup. Then I went upstairs to the bathroom where I spent twenty minutes outlining my eyes in black and green, and after that I retreated to brood in the basement. The crawl space under the front of the house, although uninhabitable, did have a cement floor and a lightbulb. About five feet high, it offered a good-sized storage area, with the result that that was where Mother had told the movers to shove in the trunks and boxes that didn’t need to be unpacked immediately. And there they’d waited. Some of them had travelled with us from Dixie to North Kildonan and back without ever being opened. Strewn about on the clammy surface of the recently poured concrete, the cardboard boxes were starting to dissolve and open of their own accord. When I went stooping in there, I was mainly just escaping. And when I poked around in the boxes it was because there was nothing else to do in the crawl space. I did think of Granddad’s double knit mittens and turned things over in the hope of finding another pair of those. But after rummaging in vain through flattened, wrinkled summer cottons, I switched my attention to a smaller box that was bulging at the corners with the weight of its contents. Folding back the flaps I found a medley of my parents’ books. On top was a heavy tome bound in black cloth, and I pulled it out.

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The book had the gilt image of a fluted column up its spine, and its dusty cover was decorated with the dimly embossed image of a winged lion. Since there was no name written in it I don’t know which of them might have wanted to read Montesquieu’s Persian Letters in English translation. Maybe neither of them had, maybe the book was a gift from one of their long-ago university friends. It looked like that sort of handsome edition. I made a circuit to avoid the cat-litter pan, carried it across to a trunk that was closer to the lightbulb, and sat down to look at it. Possibly I’d been expecting something like the The Arabian Nights, although I didn’t know enough about Scheherazade and company to have given the matter much thought. When, logically, the volume turned out to be a collection of letters, I was interested. That was an arrangement I’d seen before, and instead of thumbing through the pages in handfuls, I began to read. The book wasn’t what I’d expected. It wasn’t structured as a clear back-and-forth exchange between two people. First the traveller Usbek writes home from France to a number of his friends, and then, in what appears to be a random order, they write back. Or they don’t answer. From Persia they write instead to common acquaintances, gossiping about Usbek or discussing politics. Some of them are the men who are his friends, and some are the women whom he’s left behind in his seraglio. They also write to other travellers or to each other or to their mothers. The thread of the narrative was difficult to follow because it kept shifting around through a variety of voices, and it was spread all over the map: Ispahan, Paris, Venice, Smyrna, and “the Glorious Monastery of Tauris,” wherever that was. They all had different concerns, too, involving a lot of boasting, flattery, complaints, and threats. Writers who swore that they worshipped the truth could be assumed to be lying, at least according to other correspondents. I found the level of unabashed nastiness surprising. Some of the letters dealt with social questions, which I neither understood nor cared about, so I skipped those and read on in search of more news from the seraglio. I was realizing that these were not real letters. This was fiction; it was all made up. But I kept going, still feeling the sting of my mother’s mockery, and groping for an understanding of where femininity began and ended. It didn’t occur to me that trying to kill the big kid from across the back fence was unfeminine – and maybe it wasn’t, maybe that sort of aggression is typically feminine. Anyway, turning the pages, I forgot about him.

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In Montesquieu’s Persians I was discovering a version of malefemale relations that I’d never considered. I did know that a seraglio was a harem, but I was intrigued to learn that a cloistered wife could write intelligent letters to her husband on his travels. On the other hand, hints of jealousy amongst the wives meant nothing to me. Surely they all had the same status. And what kind of an official was a eunuch? One of the Usbek’s wives wrote to tell someone, not her husband, that she was worried about a slave girl who was scheming to elope with one of the eunuchs. That was supposed to be tragic. I didn’t understand why. Onwards I riffled, wanting to find out how the slave girl’s adventure turned out but without success. There was too much eighteenth-century political stuff, some of it criticizing France, which I found strangest of all. There were also too many declarations about virtue, fidelity, and honour, so I decided to skip the attitudinizing and go straight to the end where I read Roxane’s suicide letter. But she wasn’t the slave girl; she was one of the wives. Usbek had plenty of other wives. Mystified as to why she wanted to take poison, I was not exactly pleased but more or less gratified that someone in the story had taken decisive action. She hated him, she wrote. Good. I closed Persian Letters and left the big black volume where I’d found it, another in a growing list of works that I’d looked through without actually reading them. Having consulted Montesquieu’s book, I was satisfied that I knew enough about his Frenchified Persians. I wandered back upstairs to stare out through the picture window at the frozen lawn and across at Dr Hilliard’s leafless trees. Sifting down with the dusk was a snow so thin and grey as to be almost invisible. Soon, as the dark deepened, it really was invisible. Seeing my own reflection in the pane, I remembered my exotic eye makeup and went upstairs to wash it off. That wasn’t even winter’s lowest point. A string of grey weeks followed. Upstairs in my room, I hunched at my desk – Jack’s desk with the slatted ends because Granddad had given it to me – and chiselled ink engravings into its oak surface with a steel-nibbed pen. Some of my doodlings were original, others merely enlarged and improved upon what Jack, or maybe Bert, had started long before. I don’t remember what they said or represented, if anything. On paper I drew pictures of prancing horses. At school we’d been learning the differences between Holstein-Friesian, Jersey, and Ayrshire cattle, so I

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made coloured pencil sketches of those breeds, noting that the cow I’d hauled off the road in Wiarton had been a Holstein-Friesian. I drew stylized female faces with huge eyes and pointed chins. I may even have done some of my homework. After that I wrote the names of my school friends in a small address book, without their addresses. And I experimented with changing my handwriting from the slanting script that they’d taught us to an upright cursive printing. Then I practised signing my name both ways. The empty white days dragged on until, little by little, the light in the evening sky was stretching out till supper time, the cold and muddy part of spring had crept past, and the lawns were starting to show some green. School finished, and I turned my back on George P. Mackie Public School without giving it another thought. In the fall I’d be going to high school – West Hill Collegiate Institute – but that challenge was still far in the future, so I put it out of my mind. The liberty of summer was about to begin again.

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c h a p t e r t w e n t y - ONE

No Per fec t Time

That year when the hot weather arrived nothing was said about going to a cottage. Instead we climbed down the bluffs and waded into Lake Ontario, flinging ourselves into the big murky waves that came rolling up the shelving sand. Maybe earlier I’d shunned Georgian Bay, but after Lake Winnipeg and the fishflies I was ready to find waves exciting. There was the wrecked ship to explore too. Paddling out to the hulk and climbing aboard meant swimming into water that was over my head, but I ventured out there twice and the second time succeeded in getting onto the thing. Although the rusty iron was scratchy and bruising – except where it was clothed in slippery waterweed – I braved the horror of the green slime and scrambled up. Once clinging to the remains of the boiler, however, there was nothing to be seen but what was already visible from the beach. I’d expected more, an opening of some kind or a way to peer inside the ship, but there was no inside. There was no ship because only the boiler was left, so it wasn’t very interesting, and there was nothing to do but jump off again into that deep water and go thrashing back to the shore. From the same day a picture of Doris has stayed with me. She hadn’t been out to the wreck. She was closer in, perched on a weed-

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grown boulder in the surf. The big rock’s fluttery hula skirts were lifting and settling, rhythmically, as heavy waves heaved up around it, then withdrew with a sucking slosh. Mugging, my sister draped herself in clinging fringes of the green stuff, struck a dramatic pose, and declared that she was a mermaid. I’d had to touch the waterweed when I clambered aboard the hulk, but I couldn’t have dressed up in it. Being fish-belly pale was bad enough. Decorating my paleness with streamers of sopping green glop was beyond the bearable. And then, in a fit of revolt, I decided that I no longer believed in all that nonsense about not being able to tan. Anybody could colour in the sun or so the other girls kept telling me. White skin was sick looking, and if nothing else I should be able to acquire a better coat of freckles. So this time I was going to be beautiful even if it had to be a freckled beautiful. At noon on a hot bright day, in a bathing suit and with the sun shining directly down on me – as well as reflecting off the water and the bluffs – I strolled eastwards along the lakeshore. There was no one around, and I went farther than ever before, discovering other ravines, rockslides, boulders, cast-up logs, and in one place the remains of a bonfire with empty beer bottles strewn around. I paused over that circle of blackened stones, remembering North Kildonan and the late night gathering in the trees. So people held that kind of party here, too, down on the shore and after dark. Maybe if I looked over the edge one night I’d see their fire. But that would mean tramping out into the pitch black woods. For the first time it occurred to me that in Scarborough – although I’d roamed day and night through the man-high weeds in North Kildonan – I’d never gone prowling out into the neighbourhood’s wilder sectors after dark. Something told me not to. Contemplating the ashes left by those unknown partygoers, I decided that they probably didn’t come down to the beach in daylight, and I rambled on. Never before, with my skin exposed to the air and the light, had I felt quite so free as on that empty beach with no one to be astounded at my pallor. This was all I’d needed, just a chance to freckle and harden up before anyone could stare at me. I kept going for half an hour then turned around and headed back to our familiar spot at the foot of the ravine. All in all I got a full hour of exposure and persuaded myself that because I wasn’t actually lying in the sun, because I was moving

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with the wind on my skin, there was less risk. Plus I was older and tougher and could stand some sun. It was natural, and its warmth did feel very pleasant. By that evening, however, I was feverish and in pain all over. After one ironic glance Mother told me where to find the calamine lotion in the bathroom. As soon as I saw myself in the mirror the pain was worse because I most definitely was not beautiful. I was a deep, flaming red. And if the calamine lotion soothed my skin a little, its pale splotches made me look even weirder. In bed that night, blazing hot and unable to sleep, I tossed around with the sheets stinging my skin. Early in the morning I hurried back to the mirror for another look. Had the redness gone? Were my new freckles starting to show? But now I had no freckles, not even the pale ones that I’d had before. Instead my damaged skin was starting to blister. A couple of days later, when we drove across town to visit Gran and Granddad, I was still scarlet. Granddad laughed, telling me that I looked “just like a boiled lobster!” And if that wasn’t humiliating enough, I was peeling. Shreds of dead skin hung down and flaked off. I was a mess. For intuitive reasons, I hadn’t told Granddad how I’d acquired the sunburn. He had no idea that I’d gone walking, alone and in a bathing suit, along the deserted public lakeshore. In my view of the universe nothing would happen to me. Some of the time I was still childish enough to take personal liberty for granted. Harassment or sexual assault were – almost – unimaginable. But I was a big enough girl to know how horrified Granddad would be. While I waited for my skin to heal, the developing awareness that had prevented me from telling him about my beach promenade did prompt me to consider other dangers. The perils of the bluffs and the lake were plain. From the top, leaning outwards to peer over the edge, I’d seen how easy it would be to step onto an overhanging shelf of sod and plunge to my death. But because I could imagine the threat I’d never gone near those places. If paddling out to the hulk of the old lake boat had been a risk, it was a calculated risk. I had made it there and back. And how about the waterweed, that vile stuff, how bad was it? Wasn’t it a sign the lake was polluted? As far as I could tell I hadn’t picked up any water-borne diseases. Only the abandoned campfire was different and possibly ominous. It meant that sometimes there were grown-

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up strangers down at the beach, drinking. But I knew that now and hadn’t run into them, so it hardly mattered. But then I’d been silly enough to fall prey to the most obvious danger there was. Even as a tiny child, and after a couple of earlier sunburns too, I’d been taught to stay out of the sun. Yet despite those lessons, longing to look like the other girls, I’d given in to wishful thinking and had gone out and got cooked. The inflammation and the pain were bad enough, but the disappointment was the hardest to bear. The freedom that I’d imagined, walking along in the sun, was no freedom at all but folly. It wasn’t true that anyone could turn brown, and the injustice of that stung longer than the burn itself. I forgot about suntanning, and when I went back to the ravine a few more times it was only to explore its deeper, shadier parts. Pushing through the brush I climbed the sandy clay of its lateral slopes – never the bluffs themselves – and surveyed the shore from above, still curious about the partying below. But most days there was nobody down there, and I moved on, scaling the westward flank of the ravine and discovering a trail through someone’s woodlot. It led to a path that zigzagged easily down through a tumbled part of the bluffs. From those switchbacks I observed a different scene. On that stretch of beach, families were picnicking. Parents and children were lying on towels or playing games. They had coolers and beach balls and sun umbrellas. But I was just as scared of the families as I was of the beer drinkers. I couldn’t venture down there by myself. Maybe at an hour when there was sure to be nobody, when the shore was in shadow or on a cloudy day – maybe then I’d go down and splash in the lake. As time went by, however, I forgot about it. That summer’s early forays down the bluffs had been my last days of unselfconscious childish freedom. After that there never was a perfect time for swimming. • The summer’s outlook changed anyway when Bert bought himself a new car. That had taken some prodding from Mother who knew he had the money and couldn’t see why he was still putting up with the Meteor. My father’s attitude towards cars was ambivalent. Although he knew he needed a better one, he wasn’t interested in the research and

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shopping required, and negotiating bored him. “I don’t have time!” he protested, and then went out and made the rounds of the car lots. Mother told me that at one dealership, where the salesman seemed to have accepted the Meteor as a trade-in, Bert had written a cheque and was in the act of handing it over when he took a second look at the contract. At the last moment he realized that they were allowing him nothing for the old Ford after all, so he tore up the cheque in front of the man and walked out. But after that confrontation – which I expect he enjoyed – he visited a different dealership and bought himself a dark red Nash Rambler. Once he’d dealt with the automotive question our father decided, rather surprisingly, to take a weekend and a couple of extra days off and drive down to the Maritimes with Doris and me. We could visit Sydney, where I’d been born, and for the first time we’d see the ocean. I was looking forward to the trip. Mother wasn’t coming, so I’d get to ride in the front seat. Maybe we could talk, and I could make up for our silent journey back from Manitoba. On the Friday morning, while Mother was telling me what to pack, Gran phoned and heard about our travel plans. But that was normal. Long distance or not, she had to be kept informed about what was going on. Our bags went into the Rambler, and we were off, or so I thought. Not knowing one direction from another, I didn’t wonder why there was so much city driving until we pulled up outside 131 Evans Avenue. “Daddy’s coming with us,” Bert told us. What? Gran had told Granddad about our trip, and when he heard the news, and learned that we were leaving within the hour, our grandfather had declared that he was coming with us. As soon as I saw him nipping down the steps – with saggy-kneed urgency, clutching a small travelling bag – I understood that for him this was a crisis. He hadn’t heard until the last minute that his irresponsible son was taking his granddaughters on a long road trip, and he’d had to scramble to get ready. Granddad wasn’t coming with us for the pleasure of it. He was coming because he felt he had to. And for the first time I was angry with my grandfather. His company was unwelcome. Not only was he spoiling the fun by butting in on our holiday but his presence meant that I’d be sent to the back seat. Our father, however, respectful as always of “Daddy,” said nothing even if

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he understood what the rush to join us was all about. Granddad didn’t trust him to take care of us. Our grandfather’s supervision cast a pall. On the road there was no chat between my father and grandfather. Granddad took no interest in the landscape and showed no desire to join in our observations. He just hunched in the front seat, mute and motionless, riding shotgun. And with him there, Bert had nothing to say to me or Doris either. For the next two days, deep in the back seat of the bathtub-shaped Rambler, I sulked, ignoring the forests of Quebec and New Brunswick. At La Baie des Chaleurs, hoping to see the ocean, I sat up and looked out. What a disappointment. The seashore was an endless, muddy stretch of weeds and pebbles. Where was the water? Pictures of the sea weren’t supposed to look like that. Never having seen low tide, and with Bert not saying anything, I didn’t understand and assumed that the bay was always a mess. Later that evening, however, we stopped at a motel that faced the sea. There was still some light on the horizon, and the water was accessible, so Doris and I pulled on our bathing suits and ran across the road for a dip. Granddad came with us. Over there, a culvert piled with rocks was disgorging a stream into the ocean, and beside the rocks we spied a patch of sand. That was the beach. With Granddad keeping watch – he’d never seen the bluffs and had no idea of the heights we’d been up and down all the time – we climbed down through the black boulders to the edge where I put my feet into the chilly, sloshing grey water. So this was the mighty ocean, or at least a part of it. I waded in up to my waist and tasted it with my finger. Yes, it was salty. We scrambled back up to the motel, changed, and went to supper. The following day we arrived in Halifax where Bert took us straight to the waterfront. He would have been remembering wartime with soldiers and sailors crowding round the ships and a bustle of military activity along the docks. Even if his memories of the navy weren’t all good, he wanted to revisit the scene. Peering out of the Rambler, however, I saw no ships. The vast, empty dockyard was a vista of asphalt and bollards. But any chance to get out of the car was welcome, and I could walk along and look out to sea. Maybe a ship would appear on the horizon. Bert parked, got out, and was strolling off. Tugging at the door handle, about to follow him, I was startled

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when my grandfather forbade me to get out of the car. Granddad had locked his own door and was refusing to budge. “Why, why can’t we get out?” Granddad hunkered lower in his seat. “Water rats!” he muttered. “But where’s Bert going?” “Business” said Granddad. What business? We sat in the car, stymied. And water rats? I hadn’t seen a living thing. When Bert realized we weren’t with him he stopped, looked for us, and came back. I didn’t hear what was said between him and his father, but Granddad continued to sit there, immobile. After some moments of silence Bert started the car, turned it around, and headed for the highway. We were on our way home, just like that. End of holiday. If there was further discussion between my father and grandfather it did not take place in front of Doris or me. And it would be years before Hector, having heard it from our mother, told me the reason for Granddad’s behaviour. It seemed that he’d caught sight of a black man working at the port, and he’d been terrified. Bert knew it was pointless to argue with him, so I never did see Sydney because we didn’t get that far. Our trip home was as silent as our trip out but not as leisurely. Bert went into nonstop driving mode, and the forests of New Brunswick streaked past. Then late at night, as we were speeding along a dark road with nothing but bush on either side, the Rambler’s headlights went out, plunging us into blackness. Bert braked, we stopped, and he tried turning the lights, and the car, off and on again. The car worked, but the lights did not. I saw this as a dreadful situation. Now we were in real trouble. Of course it was impossible to drive a car in the dark. What could we do? I was sure we’d be stuck in those sinister woods all night long with Granddad, who was scared of the dark in his own basement, sitting speechless in the front seat. But all Bert said was, “Hmmph, fuse,” and drove on by starlight. There was no traffic on the road, and we kept going until we came out of the woods and found a motel. It wasn’t an emergency after all. We checked in and went to bed. In the morning Bert found a garage where they changed the fuse and sold him a couple more. His calm pragmatism was a side of him that I’d never seen, and I was relieved. We spent one more night on the road, and then we were back in

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Toronto pulling up outside Evans Avenue. Granddad said a quick goodbye and was out of the car and up the steps. He hadn’t enjoyed the trip. He hadn’t expected to, but his vigilance had not been in vain because he’d forced his granddaughters to stay in the car when danger threatened. • Whole days spent sitting in the back of Bert’s car were not the vacation I’d been looking forward to. Even calling it that – a “vacation” – reminded me that it was only a temporary reprieve from the confinement of school. More road trips were to follow, however, with my mother, Doris, and often my brothers along. We always went to the States. At the border Bert would pull up to the booth, and an American customs agent would come out to speak to him. The man would walk around to the passenger side, lower his head to the window, count us, and ask where we’d been born. Everyone had been born in Toronto, except for Mother, who’d been born in Cheng-du, and me, born in Nova Scotia. Only Mother had any explaining to do, but they never asked for her birth certificate – which, later in life, she would have difficulty obtaining – and we were allowed in. Once past the customs post Mother liked to tell us about a university friend of hers who’d been born in the Soviet republic of Georgia. When an American border agent asked for her place of birth Mother’s friend had said, “Georgia” with a big smile and was waved through. In those days, getting into the States was a game. For Bert, all the fun was in the driving. He never wanted to stop, so on we went, peering out at the passing scene in the hope that something might be different. The northern states appeared empty and rustic. The villages were small with wooden screen doors and handpainted signs. Some of those signs, though, on sleazy-looking places with dark windows, plainly said “bar.” There must be bars in Canada, but I’d never seen them identified in such a bold way, so that was new. Our first stop was usually for coffee and ginger ale, a bathroom break, and a short walk – what Mother called stretching our legs. She’d invite us to contemplate the view while Bert rattled the change in his pockets and fidgeted. Static landscapes were a bore. He preferred to view them

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in dynamic mode, fleeting past the car windows. The briefest of halts was enough, and immediately he was ready to move on or – depending on how far we’d come and how long it had taken – to turn around and start for home. Our abrupt about-face in Halifax, which had seemed dramatic at the time, was no great departure from his normal habits. When Mother protested that he never wanted to stay for more than a few minutes at any of the tourist sites we visited, he shrugged. He just wanted to get moving. One very hot day the whole family made a visit to the Buffalo Zoo, an old-fashioned place with an ice cream stand at the entrance and sidewalks between the cages. Licking our ice cream cones, we walked along to see the elephant shuffling back and forth behind the thick bars of his immense outdoor cell. To me he seemed ancient, rubbed and wrinkled all over as if worn out with pacing. Sadly whisking the naked concrete with the end of his trunk, he ignored us, and we moved on. In the next cage a big brown bear sat up and looked back out. He wasn’t impassive, he was sizing us up. Mother and the bear made eye contact. What he was looking at was the ice cream cone in her hand, so she scooped a fingerful of ice cream off the top and stuck it through the heavy wire mesh for him to lick. Bert shrugged and shook his head. Afterwards Mother confessed that only when she felt the texture of the bear’s tongue did she realize that letting him lick her finger wasn’t a good idea. “Ooh!! His tongue felt like a rake!” I remembered Grandmother’s story about the tiger whose tongue had drawn blood from his owner’s arm, but the bear must have been satisfied with the ice cream because he left Mother her finger. On that same hot, humid day in Buffalo we visited an art gallery set in a formal flower garden. Inside were three or four cool, spacious rooms displaying modern American art. It was a relief to get out of the heat, and I was glad to escape from the family, so I went off into another room and wandered along discovering colourful paintings of soda fountains and 1930s cars. But a man had followed me into the empty section and was also making his way from picture to picture. When he got to the one I was looking at he came up behind me and ran his hand across my buttocks. I was shocked. I didn’t turn around to look at him. Instantly I marched out of there and straight back to the rest of the family, not telling them what had happened. When I

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saw the man again outside, hanging around by a bank of delphiniums, I made a circuit to avoid him. I wasn’t enjoying all this driving, but that art gallery encounter had provided me with a clearer picture of the worse things that the big bad world had to offer. Back in Scarborough Mother accused me of “wasting” the summer reading in my room. Maybe I was, but I didn’t know what else to do. And from time to time I did have to put the books down because the American visits went on. In Stratford, Connecticut Doris and I were taken to a summer Shakespeare festival. I thought we were stopping to look at the setting, but no, our mother had booked seats for us, and we were going to the show. On the lawn outside the big barn-like theatre tourists stood around in shorts and sandals, eating hot dogs, while Mother remarked on how casual the Americans were. “But that’s for summer theatre,” she informed us. Inside the auditorium had proper seats, like a cinema, and we filed in and sat down. The play may have been The Merry Wives of Windsor. I didn’t follow the plot, but there were buxom women flouncing around in tight bodices, carrying baskets of laundry, while the spectators laughed. As the players began to get into stride, however, someone behind us was struggling to open a package. In the dark the rustling went on and on. When at last he got into it, the earlier sound effects were followed by crunching until, from a few seats over, a loud German voice asked, “Vy don’t you haff your picnic autside?” Instantly, without a crumple, the rodentlike noises ceased. I was impressed by the authority that a German accent could convey. Shakespeare might be fun, but it was that little drama in the audience that I remember best. Although I’d seen very little theatre, mainly the Nutcracker (which was ballet), the Christmas pantomime, and a school play or two, I’d been reading plays at home because Bert had Penguin editions of dramatists like J.M. Barrie and A.A. Milne. I remember Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton and what I think may have been an A.A. Milne comedy. In that, an authoritarian father forbids his daughter to read a book that has enjoyed un succès de scandale. Having looked at it himself, the father considers the book unsuitable for an innocent young girl. When all is revealed, however, he learns that the talented author of the offending work is in fact his own daughter. The young lady confesses that she was forced to publish it under a pseudonym

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because of her father’s refusal to recognize her as a writer. Naturally I loved that. I was also discovering George Bernard Shaw. His remarks about the English language and its spelling delighted me when he explained how “ghoti” might be seen as an alternative spelling for the word “fish.” On the other hand his mockery of American pronunciation was puzzling. Did I say “prawgress”? What was wrong with that? And I was intrigued by his criticism of social ills that I’d never noticed. What was Mrs Warren’s profession? What was Captain Brassbound converted to? I wallowed in the cut and thrust of the dialogue without grasping the main idea. When Mother caught me reading Shaw she scoffed. She informed me that Mr Shaw had recently died, in his nineties, as the result of having fallen out of a tree. He’d been an “arrested adolescent,” she declared, and as a writer he was shallow. Only the immature or the adolescent could enjoy reading him. I paid no attention and read on, devouring The Chocolate Soldier and Saint Joan, forgetting to ask what Mrs Warren really did. Then, with the summer winding down, our parents took Doris and me to a new Shakespeare festival in Stratford, Ontario. Although our mother’s complete Shakespeare was still kicking around the house I’d never looked at it. The little that I thought I knew about Shakespeare I’d picked up from Wayne and Shuster. It was Doris who’d been keenly interested in the theatre from an early age. She had read some of the plays, and later on it was she who would wear those handsome volumes out, lugging them back and forth to the theatre. The first time we went to Stratford, however, that tradition had not been launched, and no one thought of taking the printed versions along. It was 1956, the last year that the Stratford festival performed the plays under canvas. On a green lawn sloping to the Avon River the festival company had pitched an enormous tent resembling a lavishly convoluted circus tent with a flag flying from its uppermost pinnacle. Inside, although the foyer was splendidly formal with a carpet and thick red velvet ropes, the theatre patrons displayed a mixture of styles. Some were dressed up as if for the Royal Alexandra while others were in shorts and sandals like the Americans in Connecticut. The play was Henry V, and I knew too little history to understand what it was about. What I enjoyed was the trumpet fanfare that summoned us in

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from the foyer. That was regal. But when we crowded in to find our seats I was disappointed to discover that there was no curtain and no scenery. In Connecticut they’d had a proper proscenium stage. Here the actors were pacing back and forth on a plain wooden platform that stuck out into the audience. And to set the scene they had nothing but a few props that they had to carry on and off for themselves. What was worse, the evening began with a raucous interruption. Some member of the public, injured or deranged, came tumbling down the aisle from the back of the tent and cartwheeled right past me, shouting as he floundered. That was even more disgraceful than the guy in Connecticut trying to open his bag of chips, and I expected a pair of security guards to collar the intruder and drag him out. Only when the man leapt up onto the stage and kept on shouting, not missing a syllable, did I realize that the kerfuffle was part of the performance. This was Christopher Plummer making his entrance. I was astonished, then insulted. Actors were supposed to enter from the side or the rear of the stage, and I felt the audience had been badly treated – bamboozled in fact. Yet as the play progressed I had to recognize that performing the unexpected must be one of the functions of the dramatic art. Maybe what Mr Plummer had done was admirable precisely because it was astonishing. So was theatre intended to be more energetic than real life, louder, crisper, and more intense? After the show, as people dispersed across the lawns, chatting under the starry sky and praising the play, I heard them agreeing that Christopher Plummer had been wonderful, so I conceded that, well, yes, maybe he was all right but that the apron stage was pretty pitiful. Trailing after my parents, out to the parking lot for the drive back to Toronto, I knew there should have been more to the evening. People in books didn’t go straight home after the theatre; they went out for supper. • My dissatisfaction was becoming a generalized malaise. Everything in life was wrong; somehow everything was out of joint. The summer, which had been a letdown, was nearly over. Where had it gone? I’d spent it either wrapped around a book or crouched in the back of the Rambler watching the landscape rushing past. Now it was time that

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was rushing past. When I was little, summer had meant deliverance, pure and simple. Year after year the season had opened out with the flowers, and I’d taken its endless freedom for granted. As a big girl I’d been expecting more and better summer liberty, longing for it. But the season was finishing, and nothing I’d done had been of my own choosing. Worse than that, a painful sunburn and a foul man in an art gallery had given me an idea of freedom’s limits. The world was not a friendly place. What I was dreading most was high school. Fall was almost upon us, and the next stage of my education hung over me like a prison sentence. I don’t recall shopping for school clothing or supplies, and I expect I left all that to fate and my mother. Either I’d wear what I had or, depending on what Mother brought home from downtown, blouses and maybe a plaid skirt would appear. I had a school bag. Exercise books would materialize. High school would mean wearing a navy blue gym tunic, which was a slight improvement over the blue bloomers. A bright spot was a pair of new shoes, beige with T-straps, that fitted. When the subject of school came up I tried to act as if I didn’t care, but along with a stirring of anticipation I was also swallowing a small, leaden lump of fear. Change was in the air. I was about to become a teenager, and I didn’t know how I could face it. Mid-century popular psychology was broadcasting images of the teenaged years as a time of revolt, and I wasn’t just put off, I was scared. Any feelings of rebellion that I might have harboured had to be suppressed for fear of my parents’ sarcasm. Arguing was futile because they never put up any attackable opposition. Bert was too fast and too clever, and Mother, whose impulsive ironies I could sometimes refute, might resort to hysterics. To give them their due, I should admit that in the preceding generation it was they who’d succeeded in the more difficult revolt. The pair of them had had to fight the stiff, punitive values of their respective families – but the lifelong outcome of that struggle was that well into their forties they were still refusing to grow up. They’d had a lot more experience at adolescent nonconformity than I had, and at twelve and thirteen all I could do was to shrink back into sulking. Outside the family I was stiffening against the newer conventions imposed by those of my own age. Whatever the social myth was

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supposed to be, I couldn’t imagine fitting in, nor did I want to. I feared and hated what I thought the high school world must be. What was I expecting? Cheerleaders, maybe, with suntanned legs and bouncing pom-poms, leaping and chanting. At any rate some role that I could never play, and the closer the prospect came the more dread I felt. Mother lectured me about what a sourpuss I was, laying stress on what a lot of fun high school was supposed to be. “Maybe if you’d smile once in a while!!” she yelled. • Just before school started one last escape was offered. Gran and Granddad were going to Michigan to visit Granddad’s side of the family, and they invited me along. I accepted out of pure passivity. It was only a weekend, I was glad to get away from my mother, and it was a break from stressing over school. After my summer spent in the back seat, I was ready for some spoiling too. So Bert drove us down to Union Station – with me and Gran in the back seat – and put us on the train. Several of Granddad’s younger brothers, with their children and grandchildren, were still living where his father had first settled, in and around the town of Deckerville, Michigan. They were farm people, none of whom would have dreamed of setting out for the big cities of Toronto or Montreal even if the extended family had cross-border connections that went back for over a century. In the 1950s Granddad’s brothers took it for granted that of course the homebodies had stayed on the land – and they expected the expatriates to keep in touch. My grandfather, who was to live and work in Canada for seventyfive years, never became a Canadian citizen. He collected the oldage pension – telling me, with awe, that even E.P. Taylor (millionaire breeder of thoroughbred horses and one of his heroes) was receiving the government pension – but Granddad remained an American. In Toronto I’d heard him defending U.S. congressional arrangements, and once he gave me a talk, which I did not understand, about something he called an “electoral college.” Yet his loyalties were divided. On our first evening at his nephew’s in Michigan I heard him delivering a short lecture in praise of the British parliamentary system. The next morning we set out to see Granddad’s closest brother, who was a horse lover. When I confessed that, yes, I would like to

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ride, they let me clop around the yard on a big rangy plough horse. Only after he’d come to a stop and I’d slid down off his tall frame was I invited into the stable to admire a much smaller, livelier-looking equine. Their letting me ride the big horse was, I suppose, equivalent to Wesley’s having let me bump around on the lawn in the Jeep. The horse was patient and imperturbable, and I couldn’t go far wrong. But in the stable, on clean straw in a large box, I met the old man’s beautiful saddle filly. She was in an entirely different class because he treated her like a pet, and she responded like one, curious and affectionate. And for a few moments of delight I did hope, passionately, that I might be allowed to ride her. Although I hadn’t the faintest idea of what was involved in handling a sensitive horse I was determined to try. Sure that I’d know how, I was oblivious of, as well as indifferent to, the real danger involved. But Granddad wasn’t. Sagely, not looking at me, he said there was no time. We were expected back at the house for lunch, and afterwards we had another visit to make. What?!! I could not believe it. Granddad’s image, already damaged by his behaviour in Halifax, came down another notch. How could he do this to me? Wait! Wait! I looked from one to the other of the old men’s faces, expecting one of them to relent. But I was steered firmly back to the car and ushered into the back seat with Gran. On we went. Disappointed and very, very peeved, I sulked against the seat cushions, not thinking for an instant that Granddad’s decision might have saved me from injury or death and certainly from humiliation. I put in a few minutes swallowing my rage, then realized that I was being a wicked girl again. So I succeeded in keeping my mouth shut but only just. And as I write this I realize, belatedly, that they’d been watching to see how I handled the plough horse. They wanted to know if I’d learned to ride, and I showed them that I hadn’t. Their tall gelding simply ambled around with me as a passenger on his back. I wasn’t being spoiled. I was only the granddaughter – Exhibit A – being taken along on a stultifying tour from farm to farm. That afternoon the next great-uncle invited us to the cemetery to view his tombstone, all set up and waiting for him. If I’ve forgotten his first name my only excuse is that I was still enraged at not having been allowed to ride the filly because it was right there, carved into the stone with the day and year of his birth and one empty space left for the year of his death. Even the decade was chiselled in: 195—. Grinning

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bashfully, he allowed that he was being given a ribbing about that. Now he wouldn’t be permitted to survive into the 1960s, he said, in order not to spoil the stone, and for all I know he may have met his deadline, although Granddad, who was the eldest, was to live on until 1969. Nor did Granddad smile at his brother’s joke. After complimenting him on his future grave, he announced that we were ready to move on. Back at the farm, his nieces and nephews were in the midst of haying. Early the following morning everyone sat down to an amazing breakfast. They had porridge, which they ate with brown sugar and cream, as well as a choice of packaged cereals. There was coffee, orange juice, toast with jam or marmalade or honey, and bacon and eggs – such a variety of foods and so early in the day. There were even sausages, which I hadn’t seen at breakfast before, and apple pie. Pie for breakfast? Some aspects of American life were startlingly selfindulgent, and the luxury of pie for breakfast was almost in the same league as harvesting money from the sands of the beach. While I was taking in their loaded table a woman in work boots and overalls came into the kitchen, exchanged a few remarks about getting the hay baled, and walked out again. I forgot about the pie and gawked after her. Everything about her was masculine: the way her hair was chopped flat, her heavy boots and shirt and overalls, and her ways of walking and speaking. She was a man – except that she was a woman. The family saw me staring. “Yep,” said one of the cousins, “works just like a man.” Nothing more was said, and from the attitude of those around her it was clear that she was accepted as herself. We finished breakfast and piled into someone’s car for a second day of visiting. On the road we passed the tractor hauling the hay wagon on its way to the fields. The man-woman was riding on the back, and she ignored us. I’ve tried since to find out who she was but came up with nothing. The family must have closed around her and let her live out her life on her own terms. On that second day when we dropped in on another niece or nephew – maybe a great-niece or great-nephew – I was astonished all over again. The young couple were living in a house that had almost nothing in it. In contrast to the pie-for-breakfast situation, this looked like real poverty. I considered my parents’ household a shameful scene because of the mess, but here there wasn’t even mess. The place may

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not have been dirty, but it could never look clean because everything in it had been scrubbed grey. That pale, polite young couple were starting out in an echoing, ramshackle building whose previous occupants had bequeathed them nothing but the evidence of seventyfive or a hundred years’ scouring, patching, and mending. It was the starkest of American Gothic. In the empty rooms all the bare spots and the splinters, the hollowed floors, and the flaking paint were tragically exposed. Under a hanging lightbulb in the kitchen the plain wooden table had two straight wooden chairs, while the living room featured only the rubbed linoleum on the floor and the remaining kitchen chairs, four of them, lined up along the wall. There were no books in the house either, and I realized that there’d been no books or magazines in any of the places we’d visited. For perhaps twenty minutes we sat in a row against the wall and had a stilted conversation, with Gran being correct and friendly but saying very little until we could bring the talk to a close and move on. During that whole weekend Gran’s manner was polite but circumspect. Except for our trip to Montreal and Shawbridge, her family’s milieu, I’d rarely seen her outside her own neighbourhood, and throughout our visit with Granddad’s family she assumed the role of the well-bred city lady accompanying her husband. Bessie was simply keeping her mouth shut and not criticizing the country folk. Most intriguing about our duty visit to that unfurnished house was the way it presented the opposite end of the spectrum from the houses I’d glimpsed during my earlier exposure to the chocolate Cowans in Toronto. Although Granddad treated them all with the same consideration, the contrast between the rural lives of his American brothers and the luxurious establishments of his Canadian cousins could not have been greater. It was as if the United States was the old country and Canada the new land of expansion, self-improvement, and handsome furniture. The American Gothic farmhouse was the last stop on our circuit, and I expect I behaved there as I had all along, staring and saying nothing. As far as the social graces were concerned, I’d behaved like Exhibit A. Those American relatives could hardly have seen me as anything but a blank and voiceless adolescent. With that, however, our tour of the farms was finished. Our bags were in the car, and we

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were driven from the young couple’s empty house to the train. It didn’t occur to me to ask which of the places we’d seen was the farm where Granddad had been born – if indeed any of them was – because I wasn’t ready to take an interest in the past. I was losing faith in my grandfather’s wisdom as well. What I didn’t realize was how little time we have to ask our grandparents about their lives. • Summer was over, and soon I’d be turning thirteen. In Toronto, before they sent me back to the menagerie at 118 Sylvan Avenue, Gran gave me a very old gold watch that had belonged to Maggie. Although it ticked it didn’t keep time. Remembering how Maggie O’Connell had feared having her treasures stolen from her, I felt slightly guilty about it. She was dead, but still, I was carrying off her gold watch. Then Granddad took me downtown to a jeweller he knew and bought me a white gold ring set with a dark synthetic sapphire and a couple of zircons. He chose it, I didn’t. Was the new ring supposed to mark my passage to the teen years? Bemused, I put it on and wore it home. Later I was to shift that ring from one hand to the other, not sure I wanted to wear it, although on my little finger I was still wearing the tiny gold signet ring that my grandparents had given me on my fifth birthday. The first day of high school didn’t feel like fall. It was a lovely day. I could have been climbing around the ravine, or I could have been reading – anything – Anna Karenina, Ellery Queen, or Bugs Bunny. Instead the jaws of the educational trap were about to close upon me. I trudged eastwards along Sylvan Avenue and up the hill to Kingston Road. The bus surged into view and I climbed aboard, on my way to enrol at West Hill Collegiate, which was east of us and north of the highway on Morningside Avenue. I saw other adolescents on the bus and was afraid they were looking at me. With my heart thudding exactly as it had on my first day in primary school I made my way towards the back, slid into a dark red vinyl seat, and clung to the chrome bar along the top of the seat in front. The bus was an ordinary Toronto Transit Commission bus, and its hollow metallic smell added to the fluttery, breathless sensation. How long would it take the others to find out that I wasn’t a real teenager? They hadn’t noticed me yet,

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but farther up the aisle, there they were, laughing and shoving each other. I wasn’t looking forward to more sitting at a desk, and trying to fit in with a bunch like that would be impossible. High school was going to mean improvising in a role I hadn’t learned. I wondered what they’d do to me when they caught me. As the bus bounded along Kingston Road I blinked out through its smeared, rattling window at the variety stores, gas stations, and struggling snack bars that edged the highway. Those were the places where my mother wanted me to ask for work. They were part of the heartless world that offered me no way to justify my existence. The future was a black hole. It was embarrassing to think back to the year before, when I’d pranced off to G.P. Mackie Public School flaunting my multicoloured scarf. In those days, childishly, I really had not cared what anyone thought. Now I realized that the striped scarf had given away too much personal fantasy. And anyway, after I gave it to Doris she lost it. I never did find out when the scarf vanished because I had no way of knowing how long it had taken her to get around to telling me. Out of the blue one day she confessed that on her way home from a party she’d rolled down the escarpment. What kind of parties was my little sister going to? She offered few details except to say that she’d crawled or rolled through some bushes and that the scarf had unwound behind her, rewinding itself so tightly into all the burrs and branches that she’d given up and left it there. What could I say? Even if the feeling of hurt lingered, it was honest of her to tell me what had happened to it. I’d given the scarf away, and it wasn’t mine any more. In fact its disappearance brought a kind of closure to the whole muddled period following my visit to Shawbridge. Twisted into its colours and textures were the emotions I’d been struggling with as I crouched on the bed in Gran and Granddad’s back room, looping stitch after stitch round the needle, ruminating about the death of aunt Kate Cherry and Gran and Granddad’s different reactions to that crisis. Also knitted in had been my feelings during the silent drive back from Manitoba, slumped in the Meteor’s front seat and gazing out at the wires. Now, staring out the window of the bus, I saw the scarf as a long, secret stringing-out of childish introspection. I must have wanted to get rid of it. Maybe that was why I’d given it to my sister. I visualized the lumpy thing, black-

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edged stripes fluffed and matted, fading in the weather and returning to the earth, and decided that I didn’t care. When Doris confessed what had happened to it I certainly hadn’t rushed out to comb the hillside searching for it. With a drone of heavy tires the bus was gearing down. Up the aisle the boisterous cohort got to their feet. There was a clonk of brakes, we came to a stop, and the rear door opened into a backwash of flying dust and grit. Filled with misgivings and convinced that five years of high school were going to be five years out of my life, I slid out of my seat. Ready or not, this was it. I waited for the others to be off the bus before stepping down onto the shoulder of the road. Yet there was hope as well as terror in the shivery thrill that had picked me up and was carrying me along. Keeping my distance behind the shouting, jostling group, I walked with my head bent, studying my new shoes on the gravel. I imagined them turning around and taking me back to Kingston Road, then climbing into a different bus, going the other way, to some different life, far off and adventurous. But how to find that other life? So far I had nowhere to go but back to my parents’ bungalow, and this time I couldn’t pretend that the school door was too heavy. Looking up I discovered that Morningside Avenue was yet another recently bulldozed street. West Hill Collegiate was new and was the last building on it. Behind the school a fringe of damaged trees straggled over the edge of a slope and down into some woods. While the kids ahead of me tramped into the building, I paused, heart still fluttering, to scan the landscape. The street wasn’t exactly a dead end. It narrowed to a footpath leading into that wooded hollow, which then dipped out of sight. And looking out over the treetops and across the valley, what I saw beyond was a vista of rolling green hills. The footpath and those hills stretching to infinity seemed to say there might be a future after all. There had to be. So I gave up and followed the others into the school.

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