It was a white room, an uncomfortable strange bed. I felt an itchy, sticky thing on my chest. I picked and pulled at it – suddenly a burning pain ran down my side and under me on the bed. I heard screaming and realized it was me. A stiffly starched nurse bustled about me saying “I told you not to touch that!” Soon I heard another voice outside in the hall telling the nurse. “You never leave a young child alone with a mustard plaster.”
When I told my mother some years later, she was amazed that I remembered it, because it happened when I had flu and croup at the age of two-and-a-half and they worried that it might turn into pneumonia or whooping cough or infantile paralysis. Infantile paralysis was a big scourge then, and I knew a couple of kids in wheel chairs who had had that. My mother said that the nurse was probably Ada Squires, a good friend of my parents because she was looking after me. She must have been in nursing training then. This is my earliest clear recollection.
I have another memory from a year or two later. I was standing at the door of an upstairs bedroom in the old farmhouse in Aldershot. My parents were standing at the window with my Uncle Cecil and Aunt Madeline. Uncle Cec’ was looking through binoculars at the United Empire Loyalist cemetery across the road and said, “It’s coming closer” or something like that. For years after that I worried that the cemetery might come right into our house. Ghosts and dead people in our house? This was pretty scary for a three or four year old.
Beginnings
I was born in the Hamilton General Hospital on the 14th of December, 1930, a Sunday. My father’s 5th Field Ambulance compatriot, Daniel Kappele was our family doctor. My mother said that he was late for the delivery because it was a warmish day and he was playing golf. I guess it went alright because I’m still here. My mother had trouble conceiving, so I was an only child. But then in the Great Depression, there were a lot of “only children”. I remember visiting good friends of ours who had three children, all about my age and my mother told me later that I had asked her, “Is this a school?”
I was christened John Carruthers Deadman. John was my grandfather Deadman’s name. Carruthers was my father’s mother’s maiden surname. In our family, there was a tradition (at least for a couple of generations) that middle names would be family surnames. My mother was Helena Pingle Trenaman – the Pingle after her mother’s family. Her father was Joshua Dykeman Trenaman – the Dykeman after his mother’s surname. I don’t remember my grandfather Joshua, because he died before I was two. I remember my mother telling me that when I was out in my baby carriage on the front stoop, he would walk over and remark that I looked like a Trenaman. He was very proud of his new grandson.
I have vague recollections of our home at 91 Delaware Avenue in Hamilton. My father told me that he bought the house when he and my mother were getting married in 1923. The area between Wentworth Street and Gage Avenue, south of Main Street was a nice area of the growing city where many of his friends lived. It was a solid professional area which extended south to the T. H. & B. railway lines and the bottom of the escarpment which was called the “Hamilton Mountain” or just “the mountain.” The area now is still good but many of the big old houses have been taken over by lodging or retirement homes. On Delaware Avenue there are two lodging homes which I sometimes visited as part of my work in two psychiatric clinics in Hamilton. Every time I went to one of them, I would drive by our old house.
It was a three story detached house, entry and hall on one side, dining room behind the living room on the other side. The third floor was servant’s quarters and was not finished as well as the rest of the house. On rainy days I could play up there. I have some recollection of the living room, but not much of the rest of the house. This is probably because in our family room, there is a picture of me sitting in a chair in that room, and the same chair – and the picture – is presently in our family room.
My grandparents lived in a large house on Blake Street. Grandfather ran a business called Hamilton Domestic Specialties. It sold things like stove polish, something that the modern reader never would have heard of. In the old kitchens of those days, there would be an iron, wood-burning stove and it soon got rusty and dirty. The black stove polish would clean it up and made it look much better. Mother remembers that when I was a baby, grandfather would come over and sit on the front porch to hold his grandson. He died when I was two so I never got to know him.
Dad was the city pathologist at the Hamilton General Hospital, and sometimes when I was older, I went with him to the “Lab”. The door was on Victoria Street and I remember walking through the “Outdoor Department” on my way up to the Lab on the second floor. There were long slatted benches, and usually when I was there, only a few people waiting. I always wondered why they called it “outdoor” – it sure looked indoor to me. The lab smelled sharply of chemicals and stale pee. My dad’s office was next to the reception area at the top of the stairs where his secretary, Miss Hutchison, had her desk. There was a Coca-Cola machine down the hall and once dad gave me a nickel to buy a Coke. I guess I hadn’t had fizzy drinks very much ‘cause it went up my nose and burned. I wouldn’t drink fizzy drinks for a long time after that.
Sometimes dad was busy and I was put under the wing of Mr. Frank Elliot, the Chief Technologist. Once I got an interne who showed me all around and then suddenly pulled a skeleton out of a closet and pushed it at me. I ran crying back to dad’s office but couldn’t tell him what was wrong. I was scared of both cemeteries and bones after that. I remember a few years later going with my mother to the Royal Ontario Museum and she couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to go onto the second floor. But that’s where all the dinosaur skeletons were. It was years before I overcame that fear.
Grandmother’s Cottage at Port Dover
I remember my Grandmother’s cottage at Port Dover. The cottage was on Second Avenue which was about four blocks from downtown. There are many pictures of us on the beach and playing in the water. I remember the beach and the lake which was very shallow there. You had to walk out a long way before it was deep enough for real swimming. There were big waves that you could dive into.
It was about two blocks back from the lake and we walked down on the hot tar of the road to the beach to go swimming. I remember itchy wool bathing suits with tops, and having a bath in the old laundry tub behind the cottage. The cottage was large, with a high roof, but the inner partitions were only eight feet high. The windows in the end gables gave the impression of a second floor from outside, but inside they were just hanging in space. I could stand on the top of the wardrobe and look over into the other rooms. I felt like the king of the castle.
I never knew my grandfather who died when I was a baby. I remember my grandmother as a kind, white-haired women who was always dressed in dark clothes and she prepared all the meals. She introduced me to Shredded Wheat with a big picture of Niagara Falls on the box where it was made. She loved me, her only grandson. She also had a friend up the street who kept her supplied with pies and other goodies. My mother told a story about a time before I was born when she was at the cottage with the family including my cousin Harry. Grandmother was serving a cherry pie from her friend. Presently Harry said: “there’s an ant in my cherry pie.” Grandmother replied: “Nonsense, there would never be ants in (her friend’s) cherry pies.” Harry didn’t say anything but soon there was a row of small crushed bodies along the side of his plate. By this time everyone else had stopped eating the pie but grandmother ate her piece and said nothing more.
I remember playing with my friend, Peter Kapelle in my father’s Desoto roadster with the cloth top and the rumble seat. My dad told me later that I put the top up and down so many times I wore it out and he had to replace it. I remember walking the three blocks to the main street to go shopping. There were hills and gullies and the sidewalks continued straight across – concrete slabs hanging in the air on pipe struts like fairy bridges. I remember driving my imaginary car across them while making engine noises and the clash of changing gears. Sometimes I would pick up a stick and hold it out in front of me for a dashboard.
One time my grandmother took me to the toy store and I picked out a tin car. She bought it for me. My dad took a movie of me at the beach holding my car. It was made in Japan, and back in the ‘30s everybody knew Japanese stuff was “cheap and tinny”, but I felt like I was rich. I looked in an old National Geographic and found some pictures of Japan. The houses were of paper, and the cars had funny looking brushes around the tires near the road so when it rained, people wouldn’t get splashed. I wondered if the people were made of paper too.
We went to the cottage every summer when I was young. I got to know the road very well because I would be driving from the back seat every bit as hard as my father who was behind the wheel. We went through Hamilton and up the Jolley Cut to get onto highway 6 going south out of town. We soon ran out of houses and before long we went through Mount Hope to Caledonia. The bridge over the Grand River had a unique design. There were several piers across the river and the spans between the piers had poured concrete arches above the span on both sides of the roadway. When I first saw them, I imagined angels’ wings on either side of us. Most arch bridges I had ever known had the arches under the roadway.
We then went through Hagersville and on to Jarvis. At Jarvis there was an airfield that during the war was a training base for the Commonwealth Air-Training Plan. They had training centres all across Canada. They trained airmen from Britain and other parts of the Commonwealth as pilots and navigators and air gunners because it was too dangerous to train them in England with the Luftwaffe coming over almost every night.
Then there was a long straight road across flat country until we went down a small hill to the harbour at Port Dover, across the channel and up the main street then down four blocks to Second Avenue. The cottage was just about four doors up the street. When we got there, I wanted to get my bathing suit on and run down to the beach. My mother would always say “John your bathing suit is packed in the car. Can’t we even get the car unpacked first?” .
I remember walking to the end of Second Avenue and finding that I was in the country. I remember walking to the harbour and watching all the fishing boats come and go. I remember when the big house across the street caught on fire. It was the middle of the night and by the time the local fire brigade got it out, the inside of the house was gutted. This was exciting for a young boy but my mother pointed out that it was a beautiful house that she remembered when she was young and it was a shame because it probably would have to be torn down. And so it was.
In the centre of town there was a large park with a cenotaph and a big band shell. Sometimes there would be bands playing and parades especially on Dominion Day. When the war started there would be banners and bunting hung on all the lamp posts down the main street. It was an exciting place to be. I loved going to the cottage and hated to go home at the end of our holiday. It seemed to take forever to get there but on the way home, it seemed to take no time at all.
Theresa
Theresa was our housekeeper at Aldershot. She told me a lot about her family but my father also told me quite a bit. She was Irish, born to Irish immigrants who had settled near Campbellford Ontario, a village just east of Peterborough. She talked about her mother who was “as Irish as Paddy’s pig”. Her last name was Brunner which didn’t sound very Irish to me, but she told me that she had been married to a German man, but I was never too sure what had happened to him. Later my father told me that during the early days of the depression, like many of the unemployed, he had taken off for parts unknown.
This was quite common during the Great Depression. Men were traveling the length and breadth of the country looking for work, and seldom finding it. They travelled long distances “riding the rods” on the railway. This expression arose in the “Dirty Thirties” because men would climb on the reinforcing rods underneath the old wooden box cars and go wherever the train would take them. It was highly illegal and very dangerous, because if you lost your grip, you didn’t stand much chance under the freight train.
These men were also referred to as “hobos”, or “tramps”. They often came begging a meal at our back door, which Theresa usually gave to them. I remember one old guy – he sure seemed old to me, he was probably in his thirties or forties – sitting on the platform under the clothes line, eating his lunch. Another guy was more friendly and struck up a conversation with me. He told me some exciting stories about his travels “out west”. My mother cautioned me about talking to strangers.
I also learned that these hobos had a language of symbols which would indicate a good house to beg a meal. I was sure we must have such a symbol outside our house somewhere, but I was never able to find it. Gradually as times got better, we saw these men less and less often, and by 1939, hardly at all.
My dad said that my mother had hired Theresa while we were still living on Delaware. This was just after her husband had left, and she needed to support her two daughters, Kathleen and Helen. Kathleen was in her early twenties and was just getting married. I think that her married name was Palmer. Helen was in her late teens. Theresa had a small semi-detached house on Young Street, in an area of the city known as “Corktown”. The house next door was identical and it is still there. But Theresa’s old house has been replaced by a small apartment building. Otherwise the street looks the same today as my childhood recollection of it. Theresa then opened a restaurant in Hamilton called the Tam’ O’Shanter. Theresa always referred to it as ‘the Tam’. She always said she was: “…chief cook and bottle washer. I also took out the garbage and scrubbed the floor…” In the depths of the depression, it did not do well and before long, it closed.
One day, about the time that we were moving out to Aldershot, my father was in his office in the ‘Lab’ and his secretary, Miss Hutchison, said that there was someone there to see him, but she didn’t give her name. It was Theresa. Her restaurant had failed and she was asking if she could have her old job back. My father explained that we had moved to Aldershot, and she would have a big house to look after. Also, he could not afford to pay her much, as his salary had just been cut. She offered to work for free room and board, as long as she could bring her daughters with her. My father said that he gave her free room and board and $25 per month, which was later raised to $35. She had Thursday off each week, and on Sunday she only had to prepare dinner. She had a couple of weeks’ vacation each year, which wasn’t a bad deal in the ‘dirty thirties.’ Theresa was happy to accept my father’s offer.
In the meantime, her older daughter, Kathleen, had had two daughters, Theresa (Junior) and Helen (Junior) about one year apart. Her younger daughter, Helen was working, living in the house on Young Street but was also planning to get married, so things were very tight. When I first saw the two girls, young Theresa would be less than two and Helen was probably about six months. My Uncle Eric would often drive Theresa into Hamilton, to her house or sometimes down to Ottawa Street on her day off. Ottawa Street was the new shopping street in the east end of Hamilton. I would sometimes go too, and visit their place on Young Street and visit with the girls when they were there.
Then Kathleen was killed in a car accident, and her unemployed plumber-husband had little interest in the children, leaving the two infant daughters to the care of Theresa and her other daughter Helen. I learned when I was a bit older, that the ‘car accident’ was one of those freak accidents which would never happen nowadays. It was an old car with a wooden body on a steel frame and not in the best of repair. Kathleen was in the passenger seat, and as the car rounded a corner, her door flew open and she fell out, hitting her head on the concrete curb. She died later in the hospital. I remember cars like that in my youth, in which the whole body leaned and creaked when you went around a corner. And doors could fly open. Seat belts were unheard of, and even the double-set door latches were not made standard on cars until later the 1930s.
Her two granddaughters were now without mother or father, so Theresa decided to formally adopt them1. By this time the second renovation was completed on our house so Theresa had a small three room apartment at the end on the first level. She got bunk beds for her granddaughters to fit into the small bedroom. I had no brothers or sisters, so when we were young I sometimes thought of them as my sisters.
Aunt Christine
My great aunt was a mysterious figure in the old farm. She was stone deaf and spoke in a squeaky metallic voice and my mother said that was because she couldn’t hear her own voice. It also meant that she often was out of the conversation and would just start talking whenever she wanted to, usually interrupting someone else. She was also very stiff and formal and I felt she was always on my back about something or other.
She was an excellent lip-reader. As long as she could see your lips moving, it was amazing how well she could follow the conversation. I learned to turn my head or move away when I didn’t want her to know what I was saying. Theresa used to call her “your sainted aunt” but she too would be careful not to say that in front of her. It was Theresa’s kitchen but my aunt sometimes would try to take it over. That’s when Theresa would make remarks like that.
My aunt would spend a lot of time in her room or sometimes take a walk up the country road beside the cemetery. Dad always worried about her because she had to cross a busy highway and she couldn’t hear cars coming. But sometimes I would go with her and she looked both ways and held me back until there were no cars in sight.
Uncle Eric
My uncle’s name was John Eric but he was always Eric at home, first because his father was also John and later his nephew (me). Uncle Eric worked the farm and looked after the chickens. We always had fresh vegetables and eggs to eat and chicken most Sundays. I would follow him on his rounds some days. He would load all the grass and vegetable scraps to the mulch pit down behind the chicken house. He showed me how to feed the mash to the chickens and gather the eggs from the nests under the windows. He showed me how to kill and dress a chicken for Sunday dinner.
I remember that he told my about the different kinds of chickens. There were Barred Rocks and Rhode Island Reds and White Leghorns. I didn’t see any horns on their legs so he told me they came from a place in Italy called Leghorn. We also had ducks and he showed me the green heads on the Mallards and that the females were always plain brown. At one point we had a bantam rooster who was always fighting the others. My uncle said that he didn’t have regular roosters because he didn’t want chicks, just eggs to eat. I didn’t understand that until later.
One time he showed my some of his treasures that were in the little shed attached to the chicken house. He had two enormous dried grasshoppers which he called locusts and said came from South America. He had a couple of old brass clocks which he said came from the farm but he was never able to get them running. He had a jackknife with all kinds of attachments on it. He had a lot of old tools from his father and he oiled and sharpened them lovingly. I loved it in the old shed.
The Farm at Aldershot
I remember summers at the “farm”. It was just outside Wentworth County (later, the city) towards Burlington. The house had a long veranda around three sides and an old barn with a stable on one end and a wing out the back which was falling down. There was all kinds of stuff lying around which I could play in. Behind that was a long low chicken house. Really it was two chicken houses, because there was a passage-way through it, close to one end. It had big pens for the chickens with wire mesh that went up really high. Behind that was an asparagus patch and an orchard with lots of fruit trees for me to climb. Along the driveway and right down the County Line was a row of spruce trees which were prickly and hard to climb – not like the ones in front of the house.
I remember that we went out in the early summer and moved back in the fall, but one year, probably 1935, my mother said that we were moving out there to live all the time. I was still pretty young, probably about four, so I don’t think that I had much reaction to that.
But time was moving on. When I was about six, we were moving to the farm at Aldershot all year round. I don’t remember the actual move, but I do remember riding in the back seat of the car with my stuffed elephant on one side of me, and my bedside lamp on the other. All I knew was that we were starting on a new adventure.
Notes:
1 Some years ago I talked with Theresa (Junior) and her husband Daryl Buckle. She dated her mother’s death to 1940, which is several years later than I recalled. The Buckles also told me that the custody battles over care of Theresa and Helen were quite acrimonious and that my father acted as guardian so that Theresa would be granted legal custody. In those days a single woman could not adopt children.