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.
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