Jack of Diamonds (2 page)

I stifled a giggle. Lucky I was standing behind her and she couldn’t see my face. As far as I knew, a girl couldn’t add the final ingredient like a boy could; she’d have to sit on the cold pail and put the ‘you know what’ in first. But it was better to add it last thing when the salt and cayenne pepper were mixing with the boiling water.

While I brushed her hair, I had the kettle going again. Our timing for the entire chilblain procedure had to be perfect so we could take turns using the bathroom before my dad came home. She’d go first, taking the hot water in the kettle with her to rinse her feet and legs carefully in a tin tub, before changing into her nightie and cleaning her teeth (we used salt for teeth cleaning). Then I’d clean my teeth and get into my pyjamas, and we’d padlock ourselves in the bedroom I shared with her.

With a bit of luck we’d see very little of my father. He left home at 5.30 a.m., one of the fortunate few men who had a regular job with the Toronto City Council, where he worked as a garbage collector.

I was six when the 1929 Wall Street Crash brought the industrialised world to a juddering halt and the Roaring Twenties to a whimpering close. The factory horns no longer signalled the start and finish of a working day, and the Great Depression that followed was a huge, crushing, grinding machine that demolished society. But we children didn’t know any different. We grew up with a set of rules for home, school, street and slum that were simply beyond our control. The strong ruled the weak and children adjusted themselves accordingly. But kids find ways to be happy even in truly miserable circumstances. The real trick was not to be seen to be a loner. Inclusion in any capacity – tyrant or slave, bully or victim – was the first rule of survival, as was knowing your place in the pecking order of a broken-down social structure.

Virtually everybody in the slum area named Cabbagetown where we lived belonged to the bottom of the working-class heap – factory-floor workers and pick-and-shovel labourers. All were ground down by the remorseless tread of economic depression, thereafter to be swept up like a pile of dirt into a hopeless, helpless heap of useless humanity.

The traditional male breadwinner in the family, despairing of ever gaining regular employment and dependent on a labour line already grown long by first light, too often took his misery and shame to the tavern. Drinking away his day’s pay, he then brought his anger and guilt home, usually to a small ramshackle two-storey rented workers’ cottage, occupied by two or more families crammed into each storey.

Most houses in Cabbagetown were shabby, their broken windows taped up or covered with cardboard. Most were rented, and neither the tenants nor landlords did much to prevent them falling into rack and ruin; you could often smell rotting wood and mould as you passed. Occasionally, you’d come across a house that you knew was owned by a family because it was well maintained, like a good tooth in a mouthful of decay. These few homes usually belonged to people who had government or city council jobs, like policemen, council foremen, clerks or firemen. Most people could never contemplate owning their own home.

Cabbagetown was dirty. The gas plant on Front Street, the silent, dusty factory yards and the railway yards along the Don River added to the grime. In winter, the acrid tang of the coal stoves filled the air, and when the wind blew, the smell from the gasworks would catch at your throat.

There was one good thing about the gasworks and the railway. Kids could sneak down to the railway yards at night with these little carts they’d made and steal coal. There was stuff leftover from making gas that you could burn in the stove and that was stolen too. The unemployed would get a voucher from the government every week for coke for cooking, but it was seldom enough in winter because the stove was what kept people warm. They also gave out a ration of staples and another voucher for milk but, because we were an employed family, we didn’t get them. If you were unemployed, you had to report downtown to the House of Industry to sign the unemployment register before they’d give you your weekly rations. Lining up would take the whole day and only the head of the household could go, so this knocked out one day a week on which a man might get a casual job.

The slum landlord and the bailiff from the sheriff’s department were both public enemies, feared by all. The bailiff would evict a family, then auction all their possessions until he had sufficient money to pay the landlord the outstanding rent. Finding the weekly rent was every wife and mother’s greatest preoccupation. It took precedence even over food and winter heating. While kids went hungry and some were definitely malnourished, no one starved. Food could be obtained from the Yonge Street Mission Soup Kitchen and other local charities. The classrooms were heated and people found ways of not perishing from the winter cold.

The major social problem, aside from a lack of gainful employment, was, as always, alcohol. Once-compliant husbands – essentially happy Saturday-night drunks who had dutifully handed their pay packets to their wives and kept only sufficient for a daily pint with their pals at the tavern after work – now frustrated, helpless and ashamed, became recalcitrant and violent when drunk.

The sound of a drunken man beating the living daylights out of his sobbing wife was not unusual. It didn’t pay to interfere – bashed wives and kids were too common to cause much comment, and the maxim at the time was that you didn’t intervene in the affairs of husbands and wives. Church and community workers learned to ignore the results of domestic violence and nobody thought to call the police. If they had, the multitude of charges for drunken, violent and disorderly behaviour would have brought all the provincial courts in Toronto to a standstill and put half the men in Cabbagetown in the clink. Teachers simply did the best they could with classrooms of largely feckless, soup-kitchen-fed, snotty-nosed children, often enough with a split lip or a black eye above a swollen cheekbone.

If a teacher – new, young and generally female – was silly enough to ask a battered child what happened to his or her face, she would receive the time-honoured reply: ‘I ran into a doorknob, Miss.’ Doorknobs had a dreadful reputation in Cabbagetown. In fact, many boys wore their domestic wounds as a badge of honour.

A beating from my father was usually a vicious backhand, the great knobs of hard knucklebone doing the damage and making a mess of my mother’s face and sometimes my own. My mom, who must have once had a handsome face, with her dark hair and obsidian eyes, had had her nose broken so often that it might well have belonged on the face of a veteran prize fighter. My father’s backhand swipe never extended to a second; if it landed correctly, it had enough power to knock my tiny mom senseless.

As I grew older I’d dream of some day growing big and strong enough to take on the bastard. No warning, just bang, bang, bang! Merely thinking about it would cause me to clench my fists and I could almost smell the blood on my knuckles, his blood, and see him on his knees, whimpering, both hands covering his broken nose, the way I’d so often seen my mom cowering on the kitchen floor.

A battered wife would very seldom leave her brutal husband, even before the Depression. Women’s wages were only two-thirds of men’s, there was no social security for a woman alone with children, and even should she find work, she couldn’t possibly care for her family. In the Depression she had no chance.

The fact that both my mom and dad had jobs was greatly resented by many of the Cabbagetown women, who would snub my mother in public or make snide remarks as she passed by. If we kids understood the pecking order in the playground, this was also true of the wives, who caused most of the problems that weren’t the result of liquor. While we were all in the same boat, there were deeply felt differences. A small family such as ours, with two adult wages coming in and only three mouths to feed, caused great resentment, even bitterness, among the women in our neighbourhood.

Most families had a clutch of four or five children, so when neither parent was able to find regular work, feeding and clothing that many kids was a terrible burden. I didn’t have any brothers or sisters due to ‘complications’. My mom gave birth to me at home, where, like most slum kids, I was delivered by Mrs Spencer, the local midwife. But, shortly after I was born, Mom had to be taken to the general hospital emergency department in Elizabeth Street. ‘It was to do with my plumbing,’ was how she later explained it to me. The doctor at the hospital said she couldn’t have any more children, and that if she did, then she’d most likely die. That’s why I was an only child.

While the perception of our financial circumstances was quite wrong, I suppose the envy and anger some wives directed at us was understandable. Had my dad not poured his entire wages down his throat each day, so that we were forced to rely on my mom’s tiny income, we would have been decidedly better off than most. In truth, my mom shared all the same fears about the landlord and bailiff as everyone else.

Nonetheless, many of the Cabbagetown wives snubbed Gertrude Spayd completely, never addressing her directly or even acknowledging her presence. Some even spat to the side of their feet as she passed. My mom referred to them as the ‘bitch pack’ and pretended she didn’t give a damn. I was too young to fully understand what was going on, but it must have hurt like hell and she must have been terribly lonely. The only women she could talk to were those she met briefly at work.

The leader of the bitch pack was Dolly McClymont, a very large, big-bosomed woman who lived upstairs with her diminutive, skinny husband, Mac, and twin teenage daughters, Clarissa and Melissa. The entire family had blazing red hair, and none of them was supposed to speak to us, under strict orders from the dreaded Dolly, who would sweep by my mother with a disparaging sniff and her nose in the air in her down-at-the-heel white summer shoes. We got to know ‘them upstairs’ from what we heard through our ceiling. They, of course, would have learned about us by what passed up through their floorboards.

In 1930, the McClymont twins were thirteen, nearly twice my age, but when they’d pass me in the front passage one of them would bump me aside with her hip or shoulder. ‘Oh, didn’t see you,’ she’d say with mock surprise. Then I’d hear them giggling as they went off down the front steps and into the street. When it was very cold, their pale Anglo-Saxon skin seemed to take on a bluish tinge. My mom would sometimes refer to Melissa and Clarissa as ‘them red-and-blue twins’. In summer they would turn red as a ripe tomato, burn, peel and blister.

My mom’s colouring was just the opposite of the twins’; she was, in Cabbagetown terms, tainted by a ‘touch of the tarbrush’. It was probably her black hair. Not only did she have Iroquois Indian blood but also French Canadian, and in the summer she’d develop a nice, dark, even tan. I was the same. No doubt her olive skin and dark hair were yet another reason why she was ostracised by the Dolly McClymonts of this world.

My mom referred to Dolly as ‘a nasty piece of work’, not only because of how she treated us, but also because of what happened when Mac was occasionally in his cups. A harmless drunk, he was nothing like my dad, and yet Dolly McClymont would always beat him up. We’d hear him begging her, his voice gone shrill with fright, ‘Dolly, Dolly, stop! I’ll be good. I promise, I’ll never touch a drop!’ But Dolly lacked a forgiving nature and would abuse him, cursing him as a ‘useless little shit’ and far worse. My mother said she had a mouth like a dock worker. Sometimes we’d hear the twins sobbing when Mac was being beaten up. The following day his face would be a mess – both eyes almost closed and a split lip were pretty normal. That woman was capable of doing as much damage to a face as my dad, but I never got to see her knuckles afterwards.

Mac McClymont was an upholsterer by trade but I guess not too many people, even among the city’s upper and middle classes, were too fussed about their tatty couches in those hard times, so he only occasionally got work at his trade. No more than five feet tall, he was seldom chosen from the dawn labourer’s line he diligently joined most mornings. But I have to say this for Mac McClymont, he was the only one of the family upstairs who would always smile and say, ‘Hello, young Jack’, if he was on his own. He once gave me a marble he’d found somewhere, a good aggie any boy would be fortunate to own. No one else had one anything like as good as it, and I never put it in danger when we played marbles at school. It became a precious possession.

Mac would have made a much better husband for my tiny mom, and a much better dad for me. Once, in the winter, when Dolly and the twins went to stay with her sister and Mac was on his own, he must have noticed my mom’s broken and battered snow boots. ‘Mrs Spayd, forgive me for being personal like, but  . . . ah, er, me trade is, er  . . . I’m an up-upholsterer,’ he stammered.

‘Oh, that’s nice,’ my mother said with a smile, not knowing where Mac’s announcement about his trade was leading. Seeing she was friendly and wasn’t going to bite his head off, he immediately lost his stammer. ‘What I meant to say is, will you let me fix yer snow boots? No cost, of course. I’m not a shoemaker but I can darn well repair them boots.’ He took them upstairs, returned two hours later and they were as good as gold. He had a cup of tea with us in the kitchen and we talked. It was nice.

See what I mean? He was the same size as my mom and they’d have been good together and I wouldn’t have minded. In fact, I’d have been happy to swap my dad for him. But then I suppose Dolly and the twins wouldn’t have agreed to take my drunken father at any price. Even by Cabbagetown’s standards, Harry Spayd stood out among the drunken bums and bastards. But here’s the weird thing: he never came in for much criticism and the men liked him, so their wives left him out of their bitchy gossip, even though he was lucky enough to have a job. It was my mom who had to take it on the chin and silently accept all their abuse, and she’d never harmed a fly.