Born Naked (5 page)

Why perfume? I cannot say. Water would have done as well but perhaps I thought the stricken flies would die happier this way. In any event, when my parents returned home I was accused of fooling about with Helen's toiletry. I denied the charge, which was idiotic because the scent of Attar of Roses hung around me like a cloud.

Helen cried a little at the wastage of her treasured perfume and I had a little cry myself after getting seven whacks with my father's razor strap on the palm of each hand. It didn't really hurt that much, but since this was the first time I had been strapped, the shock was considerable.

After the ordeal was over, Angus and I solemnly (if somewhat gingerly on my part) shook hands while he assured me the incident would now be forgotten. I understood that I had not been punished for taking the perfume so much as for having lied about taking it. Lying by others was a cardinal sin as far as Angus was concerned, although he was a skilled practitioner at the art himself, especially when he was engaged in concealing his affairs with other women from my mother.

During the Belleville interlude I also dabbled in theft. Angus had a habit of leaving small change on top of his bureau. Since I had no fixed allowance I took to pocketing the odd penny. When I had amassed five cents, I would buy a special kind of candy bar sold at a little shop on the route to school. It wasn't the candy I was after but the wrapping. This consisted of stiff, perforated cardboard designed to be converted into a little glider that would actually fly quite well. I acquired several of these bars but guilt tormented me and I was afraid either to eat the candy or to assemble the planes. I kept my hoard in a hole in the limestone retaining wall behind the library. Eventually the squirrels found them and that was that.

My parents' bedroom and possessions exercised an irresistible fascination for me. I pawed through all their belongings at one time or another and can vividly recall the cold chill when I found Angus's .45 Colt service revolver under a pile of his underwear. I showed it to Geordie Sobie. Neither of us had the guts to touch this sinister-looking object but I nerved myself to steal one of the bullets. Possession of this shiny, brass cylinder with its ugly, snub nose of grey lead gave me considerable prestige at school for a few days—until an older boy took it from me.

Although it may seem odd, that incident is one of the few distinct memories I retain of my years in public school. Could it have been that my teachers were such singularly colourless souls as to fail to make a mark? Or did I simply dislike the servitude of school so fervently that I was able to eliminate its echoes from my mind? Whatever, my early school days remain as insubstantial in memory as a miasma.

 

STOUT FELLA
CONTINUED
to play a prominent part in my life. Because Belleville harbour was a filthy place, full of sewage and industrial refuse, Angus found a summer mooring for the little vessel at the mouth of Jones Creek, a few miles west of town. This became our summer home. When we were not off cruising, Angus commuted to work each day, leaving Helen to lie reading on deck in the sun, or belowdecks if it came on to rain, and me to wander about with the sons of a farm family who lived nearby.

These people were not really farmers. They had a cow and some chickens and lived in an old farmhouse, which was so dilapidated they dared not make use of its upstairs rooms. The several sons, all under fourteen, never seemed to wash, dressed like characters from
Huckleberry Finn,
and were free souls. I found them irresistible—but then all my life I have had a special affinity for social outcasts. They swore with casual abandon; drank homebrew bootlegged by their parents; trapped, shot, and fished with complete disregard for the law, and were, in fact, a law unto themselves. I suspect that my enduring affection for anarchy owes much to the time I spent in their company.

My friends did not all come from beyond the pale. After Geordie Sobie was finally forbidden to play with me because of the perceived threat to his morals, Alan Evans became my best friend. Alan and his widowed mother, Alice, a slim and faery lady much admired by Angus, lived with her father on a decrepit estate on the edge of town. It included a huge and rambling old house fast going to wrack and ruin, acres of overgrown lawns and gardens, and, best of all, an uninhabited gate-house.

Alan's grandfather was a mining engineer who had a dark and gloomy laboratory filled with equipment for metal assaying. This was a place apart—full of inscrutable machines, retorts, furnaces, piles of ore samples and drill cores, all in a state of mysterious confusion. To Alan and me it was the sorcerer's workshop. Although it was forbidden territory, we used to sneak in and root around. Once we came upon a small slug of gold, gleaming dully in the bottom of a retort. Captain Kidd's treasure could hardly have thrilled us more.

In the early summer of 1929 the adult world was awash in hectic talk of fortunes being made on the stock markets. The get-rich-easy mood must have infected Alan and me for we too decided to make a lot of money, with which to finance exploring expeditions to the far corners of the earth. Our first enterprise was manufacturing raspberry cordial from a gone-to-wild raspberry plantation on the grounds. This was not a commercial success. We made gallons of the stuff but drank more of it than we sold.

Our headquarters was the abandoned gate-house, full of wrecked furniture, dust, bats, spiders, and mice. One day inspiration came to me. We would trap the mice, skin them, and make a fortune selling mouse fur. The idea originated from my having read about moleskin smoking jackets. If moles—why not mice? We borrowed several mousetraps from the big house and eventually caught a mouse. But our attempts to skin it, using bits of broken glass for knives, resulted only in a small, bloody mess of fur and flesh, and two cut fingers.

Next we decided to start a rabbit ranch. Pooling our scanty funds we managed to buy a pregnant doe, whom we named Buffy. This project involved Alan's mother since we planned to keep our stock in a more-or-less abandoned greenhouse on the Evanses' estate. Alice Evans appealed to Angus to head us off. He was then attending a library course in Toronto, from whence he sent me the following:

 

Since you've formed the habit

Of keeping a rabbit,

Please follow these orders,

For rabbits as boarders

Are no joke in the least for Sweet Alice.

 

See Arthur and worry

Him til he does hurry

To build up a hutch

For fair Buffy, as such

Will be better by far for Sweet Alice.

 

Take it out by the barn

On the Ketcheson farm,

Where you'll have to buy it

Some food for its diet,

And relieve of her worry Sweet Alice.

 

Now do not forget it,

Or else you'll regret it,

Because it will die,

And your mother and I

Will be weeping, and so will Sweet Alice.

 

In the end Buffy was eaten by a cat, so this scheme too came to a dead end.

Alan then suggested we turn the gate-house into a hotel. We passed the word around that we would be happy to receive guests at two cents a head, with raspberry cordial thrown in. For a while there were no takers, but the word spread and one afternoon guests arrived. They were two teenage couples from the wrong side of town and they were not interested in our raspberry cordial. They were interested in the beds in the upstairs rooms, raddled with mildew and mouse nests as these were. Alan and I were turfed out of our own hostelry with the emphatic adjuration not to return or to tell anyone what was going on or “you'll get your little asses kicked up to your ears!”

 

IN THE FINANCIALLY
euphoric spring of 1929, Angus had felt flush enough to do away with old, black Henry and buy a car more nearly befitting his rising status. He chose a pea-green Model A Ford roadster equipped with a folding canvas top and rumble seat. He named this jaunty vehicle Eardlie, in gratitude to the dealer, Eardlie Wilmott, who had given Angus a bargain on it out of admiration for my mother.

Helen had always had many beaux and continued to attract men long after her marriage. Although I am certain she never succumbed to temptation, she enjoyed male admiration and was not above a little flirtation. This did not bother my father; in fact, he may have felt it gave him licence. With sporty little Eardlie to rip around in, he now became even more the dashing caballero and began exploiting his attractiveness to women to the full.

Either his successes made him careless, or perhaps the stories he told my mother to cover his tracks simply became too outrageous for her to accept. Whatever. The day came when she charged him with being unfaithful to her.

Both she and Angus thought I was out of the apartment, whereas I was reading in a corner of my room when the ruckus began. Since I had never known my parents to quarrel openly, I did not know what to make of the raised voices coming from the kitchen. Curious rather than alarmed, I padded into the hall, from whence I could see them.

Angus was squatting in front of the open door of our ice-box, balancing on his toes as he reached into it for a bottle of beer. Helen was standing right behind him brandishing both fists in the air. As I watched, fascinated, she drew back her right foot and, for the first and last time in their life together, struck my father. She kicked him so hard in the rump that he tumbled into the ice-box, hitting his forehead with sufficient force to make it bleed—though only a little.

Helen was appalled by what she had done. Her hands flew to her face, then she said, almost dreamily, “Oh, Angus. Oh, Angus,” and crumpled to the floor in a classic faint.

According to everything I have since read about the effects of such incidents on children, I should have been horrified, terrified, or traumatized. The truth is that I was excited by this little drama which sent a delightful shiver down my spine. Had I been older I might have been tempted to applaud. But I knew it would be a mistake to reveal my presence, so I padded silently back to my room where I remained invisible while my mother and father patched up their quarrel.

For weeks afterwards they were extremely kind to one another and to me. And Angus was much more careful in how he conducted his affairs. Thirty years were to elapse before Helen would find him out again.

My parents became very active in Belleville's “younger set” this year. Membership in the Bay of Quinte Yacht and Country Club was de rigueur for “gay young things” (homosexuals had not yet hijacked the word “gay”) and there they sailed and danced the summer days and nights away.

Stout Fella
was often moored to the club wharf on weekends so I saw and heard a good deal of what went on. I delighted in the music of the dance bands, the frivolity of young men in white ducks and young women in flapper dresses, and the general air of carnival. I even liked the smell of Martinis that used to hang like a mist in
Stout Fella
's cramped little cabin. The adults around me were a merry lot, all unaware of the darkness that was about to overshadow the lives of many of them. They were happy and carefree, and so were we, their children. It was the last fling of the crazy twenties, and an idyllic time to be alive.

 

 

 

5

 

 

IN MAY OF
1930
, A
few days after my ninth birthday, Angus travelled to Windsor, Ontario, to be interviewed for the job of chief librarian. He made the journey with no great expectations. Canada was then reeling from the shock of the worst financial collapse in recorded history, which had shaken the industrialized world in the autumn of 1929. Following the Crash, the mood had become one of uncertainty, apprehension, and retrenchment. Those who had jobs thought themselves lucky and neither expected nor sought promotions. Angus expected the trip to Windsor to be a pointless if pleasant little jaunt for he didn't believe he had a chance.

Neither did my mother, until he called long distance (something rarely done in those days) to tell her he had been offered the job, and had accepted.

Although Belleville styled itself a city, it was no more than a county town. Windsor was something else. When Eardlie drove into its outskirts late in August 1930, I found myself entering a different and intimidating world.

Windsor called itself the Border City. Together with several satellite communities, it encrusted the eastern shore of the St. Clair River which marks the boundary between Canada and the United States. Just across the river lay the vast, smoky , sprawl of Detroit, Michigan, the Motor City, where nearly half the automobiles that were already dominating the lives of North Americans had been or were being built. A lot of Windsor men worked in the Detroit auto plants and chauvinists on the U. S. side of the river liked to refer to the two communities as the Twin Cities, implying (and even assuming) that Windsor was no more than a northern suburb of Detroit.

This is not the way we felt about it. Our industrialist overlords and traitorous political collaborators had not yet succeeded in subverting our conviction that Canada was a nation in its own right. As far as my family was concerned, Detroit and the whole of the United States of America were alien ground and, no matter what similarities its inhabitants might have to us, they were foreigners.

Even though I was only a child at the time, the experience of living on the borders of a foreign nation which so obviously believed in its Manifest Destiny as the eventual master of the continent helped instil in me the fervent nationalism I still proudly maintain.

Our new home was a ground-floor apartment in a brick four-plex on Victoria Avenue, only a fifteen-minute walk from downtown, and the public library where Angus now lorded it over a staff of six.

I was enrolled at Victoria School, which was three times the size of the one I had attended in Belleville. Because I was a new boy and “a little squirt,” I became an instant target for a number of boys bigger and tougher if not meaner than myself. This was something I had not previously experienced but, since I was fleet of foot, I wasn't often caught. Nevertheless the humiliation of being frequently on the run did not endear Victoria to me.

Nor was this the only humiliation I endured. One of my few surviving memories of the place concerns a Home and School entertainment devised by a woman teacher who was insanely enamoured of the stage. Three other small boys and I were conscripted to perform an utterly idiotic, simpering version of a “folk dance” opposite four little girls. By the time the practice sessions ended, we boys on the one hand and the girls on the other had come to detest each other with a virulence extraordinary in ones so young. But this was nothing to the detestation I felt for our merciless taskmistress. By the time we actually performed our horrid little travesty, I hated that woman so much I believe I could have slipped a stiletto between her ribs, had I known what a stiletto was.

Boys facing girls, we pranced towards our partners, then backed away while shrilling a terminally stupid song, some verses of which are indelibly inscribed in memory: “Pray what is your intensir… intensir… intensir? Pray what is your intensir… with a ransom-tansom-tizza-matee?” whined the girls. To which we boys replied with ill-concealed loathing: “Our tension is to marry… to marry… to marry. Our tension is to marry… with a ransom-tan-som-tizza-matee.” For weeks afterwards, this line was iterated and reiterated by older kids in the school yard whenever any of us chorus boys appeared, and queries about how we were going to celebrate our wedding night rang in our ears like hellish carillons.

The only good thing about that event was that it brought Hughie Cowan and me together. He was one of my fellow performers, and our shared suffering made us friends.

Hughie's parents were Scots immigrants. His father, a cabinet maker in the old country, had set himself up as a house builder in Windsor and had done fairly well during the post-war boom years. When the stock market collapse initiated the economic catastrophe which would eventually engulf the majority of working-class and even middle-class Canadians, Hughie's father fell early victim. His little business failed and thereafter he could not find sufficient work as a carpenter or as anything else to earn more than the most meagre living.

The Cowan family was large and so suffered severely from the Great Depression, yet its members remained as open-hearted and open-handed as only people of adversity can be. I was always welcome in their crowded little house where Mrs. Cowan would urge me to eat more than my share of whatever food they had. Nor would I be allowed to go home empty-handed. If there was nothing better I would at least be given an apple to tide me on my way.

The Cowans owned a battered 1924 Dodge touring car and, when they could afford a few gallons of gas, they would drive out into the bountiful agricultural lands of Essex County to barter with the farmers for garden truck and fruit. I was sometimes invited to go along and I remember those foraging excursions as times of shared gaiety which belied the grimness of their underlying purpose.

Hughie and I spent much of our spare time exploring the river bank, factory dumps, and big patches of “waste” land which had been cleared and surveyed by speculators (“developers,” they now call themselves) during the boom years, but had since been abandoned and were now returning to wilderness. Rabbits, foxes, raccoons, and other wild creatures were recolonizing these regions although they had to share the space with unemployed and homeless men who had nowhere else to go. These destitute humans lived in what were beginning to be called hobo jungles, which Hughie and I often visited. We were always offered something to eat or drink, even if it was only a spoonful of beans or a mouthful of tea, and we were never offered any harm.

Once a jobless young man from Alberta entertained us by playing his accordion and singing songs about “life on the road,” which meant life riding the rods on the railroad. The songs dealt with a side of life far outside my experience. The refrain of one of them ran something like this:

 

Oh, the rails they is made of tempered steel,

And so's the hearts of the Bosses,

But the rails ain't never half so hard

As their hearts when they cuts their losses.

 

I didn't understand this until Hughie's father explained it to me.

“It means, laddie, that when things get tough the owners cut off the working stiffs, ye ken?”

It was an early but salutary lesson for me in the way the capitalist economy works.

Considering the limitations imposed on ten- or twelve-year-olds today, our parents accorded us an enormous degree of freedom. Nobody seemed overly concerned about where we might go or what we might be doing. Years later I asked my father whether he and Helen had worried about our tendencies to wander far afield.

“Certainly we worried. The way a mother cat does about a kitten that wanders off after a chipmunk. But we felt that keeping you in a nice safe cage would leave you with only the vaguest and perhaps the wrongest ideas of what life was really about. Chances have to be took even by the young.”

My reading had now taken me into James Fenimore Cooper's
The Last of the Mohicans,
and other tales of the Red Men. Indian lore fascinated me but it was not until I fell under the spell of Ernest Thompson Seton's
Two Little Savages
that I decided to become an Indian myself. I enlisted Hughie and we formed a tribe of two. We tried to emulate Jan, the hero of
Two Little Savages,
in learning and in practising Indian ways.

In the late spring of 1931 the Mowats had discovered Point Pelee, the most southerly point in Canada. Here, on the shore of Lake Erie, was a relatively untouched wilderness of forest, sandy beaches, dunes, and marshes. My family visited Pelee often thereafter, usually with Hughie in tow, and we two little savages were allowed to camp out in our own home-made wigwam to savour life
au naturel.
It is true that my parents camped within hailing distance but they made a point of keeping out of our sight and, as far as possible, out of our Indian lives. When we were in need of food (which was frequently) or of reassurance (as when a thunderstorm came roaring in off the lake), we went to
them.

One July day the tribe went hunting. For an hour we slipped through the forest glades, soundless as shadows, in pursuit of the elusive moose. We found none because there were none on Point Pelee. Tired and hot, we eventually decided to have a swim but were outraged to find our favourite strip of sandy shore pre-empted by invading white men who had driven their covered wagon (a big Buick) along the hard-packed beach and were noisily setting up an encampment on
our tribal land
! To make matters worse, the licence plates on the covered wagon told us the invaders were Americans.

This was not to be tolerated. Wiggling through the dunes and taking cover behind tufts of tussock grass, we stalked the unsuspecting pale-faces. When we were within range, we let fly two blunt-headed arrows at their big tent.

This was not mere childish posturing. We were both practised bowmen and, moreover, our equipment had been designed and its construction overseen by Angus. An enraged howl from within the tent announced that we had made a point. We swiftly withdrew over the dunes into the woods and headed back to our lodge, well satisfied that we had struck a telling blow in defence of our native land.

That evening a pair of policemen appeared at my parents' tent, enquiring about the presence of archers in the area. It appeared that a stray arrow had penetrated the tent of some tourists and had struck one of them in the ribs. No real harm had been done but the Americans had departed breathing fire and brimstone. Which, the policemen solemnly noted, was bad for the tourist business.

My parents kept their peace, so the police departed none the wiser. Then it was Hughie's and my turn to be interrogated. I knew that a flat denial would only get me a licking for having told a falsehood, so I modified the lie and explained that we had shot at a squirrel in a tree top near the shore without knowing, until too late, that there were people on the beach.
American
people, I emphasized. It was probably this attention to detail which saved our hides. We escaped with a stern lecture but were forbidden the use of our weapons for the rest of that stay at Pelee.

NOT ALL OUR
family excursions were local. My mother's parents had a summer cottage near Danford Lake in the Gatineau Hills north-east of Ottawa, and Helen and I joined them there for a month during the summer of 1932.

I loved the place. The cottage was constructed of rough-cut white pine and was pungent with the scent of turpentine. It was not a city home transported into the country, as are so many “cottages” of today; it was a place not only in but of the wilderness.

Ceilings and roof were one, consisting of a layer of tarpaper over bare boards through which one could hear, unhampered, the drumming of the rain, the skirling of the wind during a storm, or the clatter of birds' feet on the ridge-pole in a calm summer dawn.

There was no running water (therefore no obligatory baths for the likes of me). We carried our water up from the lake in buckets and it was not only fit to drink but tasted deliciously of balsam. There was no electricity but there
was
an ice-box, into whose maw we daily dumped a fifty-pound chunk.

The kitchen contained a cast-iron range which burned billets of hardwood and, for cooking during the heat of summer, there was a two-burner kerosene (coal-oil) stove. On the slopes overlooking the lake stood a marvellous outhouse through whose open door one could watch in comfort and seclusion the comings and goings of loons, ducks, and herons.

The mellow light of the well-named Aladdin lamps made the plank walls of the cottage glow golden at night, and enabled me to lie awake on my iron cot reading until all hours, engrossed in books about adventures in far places, Indian lore, or the lives of other animals.

On a sandy little beach below the cabin lay an old punt, square of bow and stern and heavy as lead, in which I could row wherever I chose amongst bays and coves still fringed by virgin forests. And there was not a single outboard engine or, indeed, any engine at all on the water with me.

There were no other children to play with but I did not miss their presence. I was by no means alone, or lonely, because of the plethora of other creatures including deer, beaver, squirrels, skunks, and a family of otters.

Once I spotted a young black bear snuffling along a beach and rowed quietly to within a few dozen yards of him before he saw me. We looked at each other for what seemed like ages. I was thinking about my dream bear at Bingen and I wondered how this one would look in a checked cap. The idea set me giggling. The bear cocked his head quizzically for a moment then lumbered off into the woods as if, perhaps, doubting my sanity.

There was more than enough to do. If I felt so inclined I could catch pike and bass and take them home as contributions to the dinner table. There were berries to be picked. There were little red-bellied snakes and wood frogs to be caught and secreted in tins and jars under my bed. At no great distance was a little backwoods farm whose house and barn were made of rough-hewn logs. The old couple who worked the place welcomed all comers. The farmer taught me how to use a Swede saw and an axe (well, it was only a hatchet), and told me wonderful stories of his earlier days as a logger, driving big timber down the Ottawa River.