High School and Beyond

         My friendship with Gordon had begun at the Montreal High School, when we entered grade eight.  My hopes for an academic career dimmed when my science teacher looked over the first few pages of my laboratory notes.  Mr. Wallace told me my future as a science researcher looked problematical.  My hopes further dimmed every time my English literature teacher rested his muscular arm on my desk and invited me to feel his biceps.  Physical Education was mandatory, and I quickly learned to hate it due to the unending bullying of Franky Eddols, a very large and aggressive classmate.  He constantly distracted those of us who sat near him in French by surreptitiously displaying his erectile prowess.  Why Madame never caught him at it we never knew, but it provided us with a great discussion topic!

         To my surprise I was promoted at the end of the school year.  In grade nine my grades and interest declined at about the same rate.  Soon after Christmas I told my father I was ready to leave school.  He was not surprised.  “What will you do?” he asked.  I told him I would get a job, that there were lots of jobs going for boys with bicycles.  My father played his card.  “You don’t have a decent bike.”  I trumped him with my ace of hearts.  “Buy me one, Dad.  I’ll repay you with a dollar every payday.  I’ll even give a dollar to Mom towards my keep.”  He said he would think about it.

         A week passed, then two.  I decided he was dithering.  On impulse, I withdrew my life savings of seventeen dollars from the bank and caught a bus to Ottawa.  By dark I had rented a room for a week and a newspaper.  Reading the classifieds over the cheapest meal I could buy, I learned no one in that city seemed to have a need for my services.  

         After a sleepless night I packed my few belongings in my knapsack and started walking home.  Coming to a village I found a bus bound for Montreal.  I gave the driver my remaining money, about four dollars, and asked him to take me as close to Montreal as possible.  That kind-hearted driver looked at me and nodded towards the seats, and later woke me in the Montreal depot.  A student trolley took me home.  I stood at my parents’ door not knowing how they would receive me.  Would they be angry, scornful, or just abandon me completely?  My father answered the doorbell, and he put his hand on my shoulder, drawing me into the hallway.  He called to my mother, “Let him be, Jeannie, he’s tired.”

         A week later I had a brand-new CCM bicycle and City of Montreal license plate.  My mother took me to school and helped me become an official high school dropout.  And now, in debt to my parents for twenty-nine dollars I was about to be set loose on an economically depressed city, in the early spring of 1935.

         

Family and Friends

         Since I was the last of Mother’s children, I did not know my siblings well.  During family get-togethers, much of their time was spent reminiscing.  The “Do you remember when . . .?”type of conversations held little interest for me, although my ears perked up when my mother was occasionally persuaded to talk about her girlhood in Scotland.  She giggled when she told of a game of hide and seek when she sought to hide in the outdoor ‘loo’. Colliding with her father, she sent the poor man backwards into the muck.           She could also recall in detail her home in Northern Scotland.  This is how she described it:  “  . . .we lived in a croft just outside the small village of Wick.  It was built of stone, like most of the houses.  Wood was hard to come by.  Our croft was small and narrow, and you immediately stepped into a small dark passageway where we hung our coats on hooks.  Then you would be in the kitchen.  It would look very strange to you, for you would see two box beds built into one wall.  My brother and I slept in these.  Under the beds were kist boxes where we stored our extra clothing and little treasures.  There was no stove; my mam cooked our food over an open fire in the corner.  She would leave the window nearby open so as to get rid of the smoke, but some days the wind was very strong and the room got very smoky.  Glass was very dear, so we only had one small window.

         There was a table with four stools.  My brother and I did our lessons there, when the evening meal was over.  We took turns doing the washing up – one of us would fill the pail at the pump outside and the other would clean the dishes.  There were only four plates and four bowls, as well as tin cups for our water.  We only had milk on our oatmeal in the morning.

         The other room had a rope bed for my parents, as well as an old bureau.  Mam kept our extra clothes in it.  We didn’t need a place to keep our extra sheets, blankets and pillows, for we didn’t have any extras.  Mam also kept her spinning wheel and basket of wool in that room.

         The floor was made of flat shale rock that my Da had carried piece by piece from the quarry down the road.  It seemed we were always sweeping with the straw broom he made.  There was an outhouse out back (you will remember me telling you about that!) as well as a small byre for the animals – two sheep, a cow, and a donkey.  Chickens ran in and out among the other animals.

         There, that’s the sum of it.  There are no photographs, for no one in Wick could afford a camera.  The only time people had their picture taken was when they were emigrating away from home.  It gave those who were left something to remember them by.”

         My eldest sister Mary was a shadowy and mysterious figure to me.  She had married and moved to Maine by the time I was old enough to be fully aware of my siblings.  The only real memory I had of Mary had to do with a dog my father had owned, a chow that slept on the basement steps.  One day as Mary was going down to the basement on an errand she tripped and stepped on the chow’s tail.  Startled, he bit her.  Dad took his beloved pet down to the basement.  The next day there was no evidence the dog had ever existed, and my father’s grim manner forbade any discussion.  For many years all I knew of Mary was that she had remained in Scotland with our grandmother Sinclair, and had come to Canada at the close of the Great War. 

         It was during a summer vacation spent with my sister Jean I learned more of Mary’s, and hence, my mother’s, story.  Jean lived and worked in Washington, D.C.   While she worked I mooched around the city.  On her days off, she treated me to several excursions – Arlington, the White House, Lincoln’s Statue, and so on.  Over lunch one day I asked her about Mary.  Why had she stayed in Scotland instead of coming to Canada with Mother?  Jean was talkative, and she told me what little she knew about Mother’s first marriage to a Scottish soldier named Angus.  He had not come back from the Boer War, and left Mother expecting a baby.  After Mary was born, Mother knew she had to leave Scotland to make a better life for herself and her daughter.  She came to Canada the only way she could afford, signing on as an indentured servant for three years.  Not able to bring any dependents, she left Mary in Scotland. Not to until 1918 were the two to be reunited. 

         The penny dropped.  That was why my second name is Angus!  Jean nodded at my outburst.  Just don’t tell Mother, I was told.  She keeps that part of her life very private.

         During our last lunch together Jean took me to a fancy restaurant that promised entertainment.  Midway through dessert the lights dimmed and a large blond emerged.  An ostrich-sized feathered fan covered her yin and yang.  Otherwise it was clear she was naked.  She pirouetted seductively for a few minutes.  As she backed off the dance-floor, right past or table, the dancer winked at me.  “Don’t you dare tell Mother!”  I didn’t!  For a boy of fifteen, life held educational mysteries.

         I spent another vacation with my brother Alex, still living in the house Jean and Alex had bought from our parents.  When Alex married Marie they continued living in that house, and it was there I met Marie’s young sister Helen.  She and Marie were the daughters of German-American parents.  I thought blond, blue-eyed  Helen was ravishing, and Helen and I became pen pals over the next few years.  I planned to bike down to New York to attend the world’s fair with her in the summer of 1939.  Of course, world events would trump that plan!

         At school I met Gordon Hopper, who was to become my closest friend for many years.  We had left school at about the same time, and our friendship prospered throughout our teenage and adult years.  We both enjoyed camping, swimming, fishing and hiking.  On weekends we would cycle out of the city to an isolated stretch of river or lake, perhaps hire a rowboat and ‘rough it’.  One Saturday we cycled from Montreal to a beach near Plattsbury, New York, survived on peanut butter and bread, slept and shivered on the beach and returned home the next day, having completed one hundred and eighty miles on single-gear bikes.  We arrived home very tired but very happy.  To this day I treasure a snapshot of Gordon sleeping in the bottom of a flat-bottomed boat on some Quebec lake or other.  

The City of Montreal

         In 1935 the face of Mount Royal featured the Montreal General Hospital as well as the affluent homes of the sons and daughters of the shrewd Scots and English entrepreneurs who had flourished during the previous century.  Prominent among them was the newer but more ornate home of the thriving whiskey distiller Samuel Bronfman who made a fortune as a rum runner.

         Continuing towards Westmount and Montreal West, one might stop on the corner of Bleury and St. Catherine’s.  Entering a magazine and tobacco store an adult could buy the latest of Britain’s “Women’s World” as well as seven-day old copies of United Kingdom and foreign newspapers.  Children could spend their allowances of “Girl’s Own” and “Boy’s Own” book with their themes that reflected British Public Schools, or the more plebeian “Beano” type comics.  During the Christmas season the boys’ and girls’ annual were available.  

         Carrying on towards the city’s center, one passed St. Phillip’s Square, with its underground very well appointed public toilets, built as relief projects during the Depression. The Orpheum was a popular site for live entertainment, and I well remember my Dad taking me as a small boy to a circus.  Along with trapeze artists, clowns and acrobats, the circus had several elephants joined head to tail, ponderously circling the stage.  We children screamed with delight as one defecated on the stage. 

         Along the north side of St. Catherine’s were the Anglican cathedral, Morgan’s (an upscale, now extinct department store), and Eaton’s, now also gone.  Christmas was magical at Eaton’s – the windows displayed wonderfully busy animated displays of toys against snowy backdrops.  Eaton’s bargain basement was a favourite haunt of my mother.

         The vigorous walker would eventually reach the Montreal Arena where the Montreal Canadians, cheered on by French Canada, and the Montreal Maroons, supported by English-speaking Canadians, played one another.  Both teams often squared off with teams from New York, Toronto, Detroit or Chicago.  It was there I once saw a goal-tender hit in the face by a puck, then leave the ice to spit out some teeth, and back to mind his net.  On Friday nights the arena was given over to the pro-wrestlers, among whom Gorgeous George starred.

         Down slope of this sector of St. Catherine Street were the districts of St. Henri and Verdun.  The former reflected much of Old French Montreal.  Verdun was more recent – it offered cheap, if too often unsanitary housing for the turn of the century’s European immigrants, as well as space for the factories that employed them.  Both districts contained the lines and railyards of the Canadian Pacific and Canadian National.  It was thus that between the two world wars the population mix of the two districts changed and more or less prospered.

         If you had arrived at the corner of Bleury and St. Catherine’s and were to turn eastward, you would be entering a different but no less remarkable Montreal.  Whether footing it or on the trolley, two short blocks would carry you past the horse and wagons featuring French fries in winter, ice cream in summer and hot dogs all year round, to St. Lawrence Street, better known as ‘the Main’.  You were now in the district of much, though not all, of Montreal’s Jewish population.  To the North lay Molson’s brewery, makers of the Black Horse Ale my Dad was so fond of.  When the wind was just right the heavy aroma of hops hung in the air.  Black Horse Ale was distributed throughout Montreal in wagons drawn by magnificent black Percherons.  Southward, the Main ended just beyond a slight ridge and the roads, train tracks, docks and vessels that kept the harbour of Montreal busy for nine months of the year.           Walk down towards the harbour and encounter discount stores – ‘Mom and Pop’ type grocery stores, such as that of the Steinbergs.  It was said Mrs. Steinberg made butter in the bathtub.  Their descendents even today quarrel over the control of the prosperous grocery chain.  The area also boasted pawnbrokers, tattoo parlours, pharmaceutical  dispensaries, a school for barbers where for fifteen cents one could get a sort of haircut, a wax museum (moth eaten even then) and a second-hand bookstore where for a dollar a week my father bought 21 of the 22 volumes of the Times illustrated history of the Great War. 

 a few blocks east was Bonsecoeurs market with its vegetable wagons outside and rows of meat, cheese and fruit stalls inside.  Nearby lingered the charred remains of the Laurier Theatre.  A few years earlier a number of children died during a well-attended matinee.  Many Montrealers attended the mass funeral, and subsequently movie houses were prohibited from admitting children under sixteen.  Many theatres closed; I never knew if it was because of the fire or the economics of the Depression.

         Continue east along St. Catherine’s, and you would pass by Woodward’s furniture store.  My mother bought a Secretary Desk there.  Next came Dupuis Freres, where ‘moudjit blokes’ was only one of four major household goods outlets in the city owned by a French Canadian – determined even then to gain French Canada’s rightful place in Canada and Quebec.  On the opposite side of the street stood the Majestic Theatre.  It’s manager paid only intermittent attention to turning away under-aged children.  Fines were levied; fines were paid.  This one had a special attraction.  Every Friday night during intermission five ticket numbers were drawn, and each claimant went home with a shopping bag of groceries.  Passing for sixteen, I went home on two successive Fridays with a bag of groceries.  I was so proud!

         On one of these occasions I heard a tap on a house window, as I turned off St. Catherine’s and onto a side street.  A woman’s voice invited me to come on in – “Come and see me, Sonny!”  I ran like a scalded cat for the next trolley stop.

         Parc Lafontaine lay eastward still.  It was a truly attractive place, with a lake, picnic spots, flowers, restrooms and tennis courts.  Once could rent a rowboat or swan-shaped craft to while away an hour on the water. 

         You would need a trolley car to reach the tip of the Island of Montreal, and the end of the tram-line.  There the brakeman and conductor would release the trolley wheel from the electric wire and reset the switch so as to now proceed to Montreal West.  All this to a boy of fifteen was fascinating, for at the cost of two student tickets (seven for a quarter) one could while away a longish Sunday afternoon.

Mother's Boarding House

         During the 1930’s, the cloud of the Great Depression hung over everyone, disordering the lives of so many.  By 1934 some

 60 000 Montrealers were unemployed and 240 000 were receiving government assistance of one kind or another.  Unemployment insurance would await the coming of 1940.  The provincial governments were near bankrupt, and the problem of providing social relief settled unevenly on the cities.  Hundreds of men would turn out to clear the snow off Montreal’s streets in winter.  For a dollar a day they would spend eight hours shoveling and pitching snow into the brigades of high-boarded horse-drawn sleds.  Few of them were dressed for the wintry conditions.  It made me shiver with cold to see them.

         Some of those afflicted by the Depression came to live at our house, and a few stand out in my memories of those years.  Mr. and Mrs. Stohmeir, a childless couple who had immigrated to Canada soon after the war, were early arrivals.  He, a sailor and tinsmith, had worked at Vicker’s shipyards.  She had been a domestic.  Both were now unemployed, and without prospects, apart from the seasonal snow removal for which he eagerly lined up. 

         The Wilson’s arrived.  She was married to an English immigrant and they had a rather sickly little boy.  Mrs. Wilson and Mother became quite close friends, although she never took to Mr. Wilson.  I knew my mother’s views on the English well enough!  However, Mr. Wilson and my Dad became friendly enough.  He would sometimes accompany us on fishing weekends at Brome Lake, in the Eastern Townships.  (In later years I would think of the place as the parish of Mordecai Richler.)

         Another one of Mother’s ‘Paying Guests’, as she called them, was an unmarried lady who was expecting a baby. Miss Knowles always seemed to me to be rather mentally undeveloped.  Perhaps because of her own experience, Mother took a proprietary interest in the lady.  She made it her business to meet the married man who had seduced Miss Knowles, and shamed him to the extent he agreed to pay her rent and provide for her and the child when the time came.

         Meals were a major feature of the boarding house.  My mother made a weekly meal menu that seldom varied.  Breakfast might be cream of wheat with eggs on toast, or baked apples and muffins.  If we had bananas and scrambled eggs on toast it was certainly Thursday morning!  I usually made it home for lunch, for I could look forward to bean soup with custard to follow, or baked potatoes, celery stuffed with cheese, and applesauce. On Mother’s laundry days we lunched on grilled cheese sandwiches  and dill pickles.   Fridays I always carried sandwiches to school, so as to avoid the creamed eggs with shrimp on toast followed by preserved figs with cream. 

Supper was always substantial.  Baked trout with mashed potatoes, or a beef roast with duchess potatoes, perhaps chicken a la king with carrots and peas might be offered.  There was always a nice dessert, for Mother was a skilled cook.  She made a wonderful angel food cake, and created all kinds of pastry confections. 

         If my mother’s cooking and baking were my comfort in those days, they were also my downfall.  One wintry night we dined on Irish stew, never my favorite dish.  Under the urging of my mother to finish mine because it was ‘good’ for me, and lured by the prospect of chocolate cake for dessert, I did so.  Some hours later, during a feverish night I parted with my supper.  By morning I was long past caring about anything.  I had come down with Scarlet Fever, and six weeks in hospital followed. 

It would be many years before I could face stew of any sort!

Life Lessons

         

         One summer afternoon word passed around our neighbourhood that something ‘awful’ had happened in the back alley.  We boys broke up our game and ran around to see.  We found a distraught truck driver, a policeman and the lifeless body of a boy I had often played with at school, his legs flattened by the maneuverings of the driver trying to get his truck as close as possible to the chute into which he was to deliver his bags of coal. 

The policeman chased us away; the images remained. 

         Not long afterwards I was coming home from school when I saw some people peering into a basement window.  A man was laying on the linoleum.  I caught some of the whispers.  “Gassed himself”, “Suicide”, “Put his head in the oven.”  Then I understood that bad things happen to grown-ups as well.

         Most of my childhood friendships were filled with fun, however.  A memory that now makes be feel a bit shamed were my frequent rendezvous with some equally mischievous friends by the garbage cans in the back alley.  We would run around to the front where we would tease the workers in the Chinese laundry.  They laboured from dawn till disk midst heat, clouds of steam, and pots of starch.  How they must have hated us!

         When I was about eleven I met love – pure and selfless love.  It was a cold winter’s evening when a small white dog followed me home.  My mother met us at the door.  She was a woman well aware of the ways of the world, but not indifferent to its tragedies.  “This is a girl dog,” she told me, “Girl dogs have puppies.  We can’t have a bunch of puppies in the house.  Give her a bowl of milk and put her out.”  I pleaded, pledged, prevaricated, postponed, promised and pressured.  At last Mother gave in.  “She can stay until tomorrow.”  That night I christened my little dog Daisy.

         Of course she stayed.  Some weeks later, when passing Daisy curled up in her box, I called to my Mother that something was sticking out of Daisy’s bottom.  Mother replied, “Daisy is having puppies.  Just let her be.  You can take her a bowl of milk.”  I sat with Daisy through her labours, feeding her milk as she became thirsty.  I can’t remember how many pups she had, but I watched her feed and care for them, day after day.  Friends came home from school with me, and gradually the puppies found homes. 

         In the person of one small white dog of questionable pedigree I had found love and encountered the mystery of birth. 

         When I was a bit older, fourteen or fifteen, I encountered a more carnal love.  One of my mother’s friends often brought her daughter Meta with her when she visited.  Meta was two years older than I and certainly more experienced.  While our mothers visited one moonlit spring evening, Meta and I chose to sit on the back balcony.  The night was fragrant and warm, and before long Meta had initiated me into the forbidden joys of what we in those days called ‘heavy petting.’  I will never know what led my father to switch on the lights in the kitchen behind us and casually ask if we were enjoying the breeze.  But that night he skipped the ‘birds and bees’ talk and bluntly outlined the consequences of such encounters with young women. 

         The very fact that my parents possessed a second-hand automobile attested to my father’s skill as a craftsman.  Our Chevy also reflected my mother’s shrewdness, experiences and awareness of my father’s mortality.  We often took Sunday drives into the countryside.  We went to the racetrack once or twice in season.  Before placing their bets, Mother admired the colours of the jockeys while my father studied the racing forms.  Occasionally we visited the amusement park, where my sensible mother lost her head over a set of cheap tawdry china that she ‘won’ over a few weeks of effort.  The china was perhaps worth one-sixteenth of the money she had to spend to get it.

         We were privileged to enjoy vacations.  The most memorable was a week’s trip to Bermuda, sailing aboard a vessel of Canadian Steamship’s West Indies fleet that carried passengers, goods between Montreal, Halifax and the more southerly islands such as Jamaica.  Bermuda in the 1930’s was without motor-cars, and unspoiled.  One outcome of those days was an enduring love of the sea and ships. 

         When my father was well enough we enjoyed a number of camping weekends, when we fished, cooked on our little campfire and explored the countryside. Our strong father/son relationship flourished through the years.

Allan's Parents

         In retrospect, I was fortunate to attend school in a working class area.  Although I witnessed the discordances experienced by many of the less fortunate children of families trapped in the years of 1929 – 1939.  The signs and effects of the Great Depression were abundant – soup kitchens, bankruptcies, hunger, enforced idleness, dispersals, despair and suicides.  It was not long before the ubiquitous hobos looking for a handout frequented our kitchen door. 

         Mother, always the canny Scot, kept a long list of chores handy.  She always fed those who were willing to work for a sandwich and a bowl of soup.  Those hobos saved my father from such heavy work as shoveling snow off our sidewalk.  Dad did not have to exert himself very hard to feel the effects of a bullet through his chest and back – I remember being wakened in the middle of the night to hear his painful whooping as my father struggled to get his breath while Mother slapped him on the back until the crisis passed.  The attacks became more frequent as he aged.

         My father, being a craftsman and union member, was never out of work during the Great Depression.  Each Friday he handed Mother his pay envelope.  She always handed him ten dollars (probably the equivalent of one hundred in today’s money).  Father’s personal needs included a mickey of rye, two or three quart bottles of Black Horse Ale, a couple of dollars for the local bookmaker, a few cigars and perhaps the luxury of a barbershop shave. 

         Mother, a careful shopper, shrewd bargainer and good cook, bought the groceries, replaced household wares as necessary, and managed to put away a little against a ‘rainy day’.  This, in my parents’ eyes was the way things were done.  Even so, whether impelled by true love or rational cohabitation, things did not always run smoothly.

         Both my parents possessed characters heated in the fires of events and hammered on the anvil of adversity.  Each contained a core of steel.  My mother’s was the harder, the sharper and closer to the edge of the blade.  Father’s was the more malleable, the more flexible, and lay deeper within the blade.  But when steel opposes steel, sparks fly.  And they did!

         When my parents clashed, accusations were leveled, charges were denied, omissions and commissions were revisited, and at some point my father would opt to, or be ordered to ‘get out!’

I can’t recall my father being ‘away’ for more than two weeks at a time.  However, there were a few Friday nights when, after supper, Mother would say “Your father wants you to meet him at the corner.”  On such Fridays, Dad would hand me his pay envelope, lighter by his usual weekly allowance, and I would deliver it.  Reconciliations, much more subdued but more meaningful than the occasions that preceded them, followed.  And life, so far as I knew it, returned to normal.

Berthelet School

          My new home was near an elementary school.  Berthelet School was old even then.  It was an imposing, two-story building, featuring a wide flight of stairs and two dark, heavy doors.  I only entered through the front entrance once, when Mother took me there to register.   On the east side of the school was an entrance for girls; the boys came on through the west door.  Each schoolroom held a cloakroom for outdoor clothing, and sometimes, recalcitrant students.  Desks, each with its inkwell, were bolted to the wooden floors in rows.  The teacher’s desk was always at the front of the room, and blackboards lined the front and side walls.  A bank of windows could be blocked off with long green blinds, pulled down with cords. 

         Physical Education was unheard of in those days, at least in our school.  Twice a day classroom windows were thrown open regardless of the weather; we were instructed to stand with hands on hips and breathe deeply as we marched around the classroom.  We were marched up one aisle and down another for ten minutes.  Afterwards we were given a half-pint of bottled milk and a straw.  Parents paid twenty-five cents a week for this; the Protestant School Board supplied milk for those unable to pay.

         I recall little of the seven years I spent there as a student, but a few memories remain.  A wispy Miss Reid taught us what little French she seemed to know.  Mrs. Vipond, who taught music terrified me so much I could not refuse her invitation to join her after school-hours choir.  I fell deeply in love with raven-haired Miss Evans, though I cannot remember the subjects she taught us.  Mr. Bennett holds a special place in my memory.  He was the kindly principal who refereed softball games after classes. 

         As I achieved the upper grades we received instruction in water-colour classes, usually of daisies, and woodworking.  For some obscure reason it was called ‘sloid’ or ‘sloyd’.  Nonetheless, we all looked forward to it, for we had to walk some distance to a more modern school that had a workshop.  Our teacher was strict, and I earned from him a strapping for horsing around with a sharp chisel.

         Recesses and lunch were taken during inclement weather in the dark, partitioned basement.  On the boy’s side, friends were made, secrets and candies shared, bullies bullied, alliances made and loyalties betrayed, and frequent fist-fights cheered on.  I recall Mr. Bennett providing us with some boxing lessons, probably with a view to minimizing the number of bruised and cut faces he sent home after school.  It became a point of honour for we boys to use them to settle differences.

         In fine weather we played ‘conkers’ in the fall.  It required each boy to attach a horse-chestnut to a string and face his opponent; each trying to break the other’s.  Glass marbles came out in the spring.  We called them alleys, and through various games we trained hand and eye.  Throwing a tennis ball against a slanted wall developed coordination of hands, eyes and limbs, if only to keep the often hard-won ball and treasure from being claimed by someone else.

         Whatever those who were Venus did in their yard during recess we from Mars didn’t much care, for in our yard we had the castle – a mound of hardened dirt left over from some long-forgotten construction project.  We would wait until any supervising teacher departed and then groups of boys would charge and counter-charge the rulers of the hill until recess was over. 

         I was not a scholar, and was almost happy to contract Scarlet Fever half-way through grade seven.  Six weeks in Montreal’s Isolation Hospital ensured a repetition of that grade.  And thus passed elementary schooling for me.

Allan's Story

Book 3:  Allan’s Memories

         My mother, newly widowed Jean Sinclair was left with enough resources to open her own rooming house business at 110 Centre Street in Montreal.  She shared the main floor with her children,  Mary, Jean and Alex, and rented out the remaining six rooms on the second and third floors.  Her  kitchen and dining room were always busy – meals being prepared, served and cleared away became her everyday routine.  With the help a “daily,” Mother cared for the needs of her family and roomers.  Though widowed but now finally with the companionship of daughter Mary, she was content with her hard-won independence. 

         My father, Arthur Christian Peterson, was born in 1880, of Danish-American parents.  He left his St-Paul Minnesota home as soon as he was old enough to enroll in the American army.  Trained as an infantry soldier, he joined up just as the Spanish-American war was ending.  Shipped to the Philippine Islands, he took part in quelling the Moros rebellions.  He told us of his only distinction in those years, working as the cook’s helper.  He received the nick-name ‘Coal-Oil Pete’ by his bread-hungry comrades, for stowing kerosene beside the flour supply.  My Dad would chuckle over that story, but would grow quiet and withdrawn if pressed to describe more serious exploits.  (I learned the implications many years later when my own children would ask me to describe my war-time experiences.) 

         In 1915 my father took his discharge from the American army and moved to Montreal, where he became a member of the Canadian army of King George V.  His battalion left Canada for England to receive further training later the same year.  Private Peterson was slightly wounded in France, receiving wounds to his right eye and leg.  Rehabilitated, he returned to duty, only to receive minor shrapnel wounds to his forehead and chest.  He was soon discharged again, only to be absorbed, along with his much- depleted battalion, into the 87^th. 

         Now Lance Corporal Peterson, he witnessed the horrors and heroics of Vimy Ridge, Cambrai, Passchendale, and finally the defeat of the great German offensive of early 1918 and at last, the advance of the allied armies.  It was during these last few battles that my father was shot through the chest.  He clearly remembers a battalion medic covering him with a blanket, and saying “You’re done for Pete.”  He was left to die on the field, like so many other wretchedly injured soldiers.

         My father was not prepared to die.  Holding his hands to his chest wound and with blood spurting through his fingers, he stumbled his way to the regimental aid post, where he was treated.  Labelled ‘dangerously ill’ he passed through the Canadian army’s medical system.  In February of 1919 he returned to Canada by hospital ship.  Back in Montreal he received a discharge category, beginning with a month’s sick leave.  Coincidence brought him to 110 Centre Street, where he recuperated in one of my mother’s rented rooms. 

         Mother saw something in this 38 year old soldier, who had been told he could not expect to die from old age, given the damage to his lungs.  I never learned their full story, other than to know they were married by the end of 1919.  Another child was born, but died too soon.  I came into the world in 1921, and named Allan Angus Sloss Peterson.

         By then my father had taken training to become a photo-engraver, then a much sought-after trade.  Lured by the prospects of better wages, he convinced my mother to sell her house and move to New York with him.  They bought a house in St Albans, a recently-developed suburb of the great city.

         My parents prospered during the 1920’s, as did many people.  I was too young to take in many memories of those times, but I clearly remember the day my father received a letter from the Canadian government department in charge of war veteran pensions.  It suggested the government was not keen to send disability pension cheques to ex-servicemen who chose to live abroad.  The decision was made to move back to Canada. 

         My siblings were grown and wished to remain in America.  Mary had married and moved to Maine.  Jean and Alex successfully proposed buying the house my parents had purchased, and so my parents and I returned to Montreal.

         Mother insisted on buying another rooming house, and so we settled into 244 Ontario Street, where we spent the rest of my childhood.