Employment

         I soon discovered that Montreal did indeed have lots of jobs for boys with bicycles.  Even more, I discovered a sort of caste system among us.  Those who delivered telegrams and cables from the two national railway systems were mostly men who were paid more, frequently received tips, and wore a uniform.  They looked smart in their peaked caps, grey jackets and riding britches with knew-high black leather gaiters.  The rest of us wore what we had, worked for about eleven hours daily, and collected the princely sum of about five dollars weekly.  We worked as gofers and fetchers, delivering packages and small goods in all seasons and weathers.  Pharmacies, tailor shops and printers employed us.  There were always more boys with bicycles, so turnover was simple.

         An Otremont pharmacy accepted me.  Soon I learned to use the tradesmen’s entrance, smile brightly, and say ‘yessir’ or ‘nosir’.  Once or twice I was tipped a dime, but mostly I received a curt ‘thanks’ or ‘merci’.  The dying winter’s sleet and rain made the roads slippery, and often the bike’s wheels stuck in the trolley tracks.

         That job lasted a few weeks.   I was spending the day delivering packages of cigarettes, cough syrup or bottles of Canada Dry.  In between I shivered, cold and wet, in the basement storeroom.  Eventually it dawned on me that this job was not the high road to success, and so one pay night I took my five dollars and didn’t go back.  My wise parents didn’t comment.

         My next employer was a kindly Jewish tailor who lived by dry cleaning, pressing, altering and invisibly repairing costly garments.  He was patient and painstaking in his work.  My six-day a week hours were reasonable, beginning at eight-thirty and seeing me on my way home shortly after six.  Balancing hangers of freshly cleaned suits across one shoulder, I was easily able to steer with one hand on the flats; the hills proved more difficult.  It meant transferring my load so it travelled perilously close to the well-greased bicycle chain while I toiled uphill, and the results were predictable.  My boss merely frowned and sighed as he took the soiled and torn garment from me.  He could see I was truly penitent, accepted my remorse and promise it would never happen again, and set about ‘invisibly’ mending the damage.  For the next three days I could not have been more careful.  But then disaster struck on an even longer hill!  Mortified, I hurried back to the shop, placed the results of my ineptitude on the counter and fled, neither asking for my pay to date nor a reference.

         Answering an ad for messenger boy with a bicycle I was next employed by two young people who had inherited their late father’s small printing shop.  The work was not onerous – delivering paper samples and proofs for customers’ approval, collecting paper of various kinds for the presses, delivering completed work, and doing odd jobs around the shop, all within a sixty-hour work week.  I was still earning a five dollar weekly salary, but was now on the working edge of the print world.  It was enjoyable and in some ways exciting to hear the noise of platen and roller presses, the smell of ink and the crisp feel of printed paper, the sense of ever-fleeting time between start and finish of a job, and the pleasure of delivering the end result on time.

         Around this time a new soft drink came on the market.  Pepsi Cola was accompanied by a belief that if one held a half-empty bottle up to a certain light a very naughty picture would become visible.  It sent scores of my fellow workers scurrying to buy the soft drink.  The rumors were, of course, false, but it did put Pepsi on the market!

         My photo-engraver father understood the pleasure I was taking in this type of work, and saw to it I was interviewed for an opening in the photo-engraving department of the Montreal Herald.  True to the old tradition of union members with children to launch into the world, the wheels were greased in my favour, and Mr. Finn, the flat-footed shop foreman became my new supervisor.  Still earning five dollars weekly, my job, (and, I thought, probably my life!) depended on keeping the two cameramen supplied with a never-ending supply of clean, clear sheets of glass.  Watson and Bill photographed the black and white photos through a filter of very fine dots and developed negatives onto pretreated sheets of zinc.  Subsequent treatments eventually transformed the images ready for the newspaper productions. 

         I discovered the users of the images were not in the building – they were on the second floor of the Montreal Star, three blocks away.  And they always had to be delivered right now!  Both newspapers were owned by a minor member of the British House of Lords.  The Star provided its Anglophone readers an afternoon paper, and the Herald would come out in the evening.  A third newspaper, the Gazette, gave its readers a morning paper.  Thus the Anglophone residents of Montreal three papers.  Only the Gazette is still running.

         During the three years I was employed there my weekly salary climbed to eight dollars.  I received the occasional tip for the seasonal ‘bottle run’ to the provincial liquor control store.  It was enjoyable for the most part, and a useful education, of its sort.

         It was during those three years I found myself meditating on the wisdom of being a high school dropout.  Cap in hand, I found myself in night school three evenings a week, in an accelerated program designed to grant me a high school diploma before my eighteenth birthday.  My time away from school had changed my attitude towards studying, and my life now felt purposeful.

         It became more so when I realized my father’s health was beginning a rapid decline.  I suppose I knew my mother and I were looking at a future devoid of our husband and father, although we never spoke of it.  I will never forget the night my mother sent my friend Gordon to find me at the high school and rush me home in time to say goodbye the finest man I had ever met.