Chapter Eight
The King and Queen Come to Canada
There was great excitement in our town when I was in grade 2. King George VI and Queen Elizabeth were visiting Canada in June of 1939. They decided to name the new highway which they were building near our house after Queen Elizabeth. There was a great rush to get it finished in time, but there were still a lot of gaps which didn’t get finished until well after the war. Father was a great Empire man so I knew all about the abdication of Edward VIII in 1937 and his younger brother Albert coming to the throne as George VI.
Dad was always talking about politics and public affairs at the dinner table. I knew more than any eight-year-old should have known about the failings of our Prime Minister, Mr. Mackenzie-King. Dad was a true-blue Tory and anything Liberal was automatically wrong. He wanted closer ties with Britain and less with the Americans. However, he admired the Americans for one thing—you knew where they stood on any issue. According to my dad, Mr. King didn’t even know himself where he stood on anything. Apparently, he must be crazy—he consulted his mother, who was already dead and his dog that was alive but couldn’t talk.
And all of my dad’s cronies, like Uncle Dan agreed with him. One time Uncle Dan said: “Mackenzie King is the leader of the flock. First, he determines which way the flock is going, then he trots around to the front and leads them.” When they got together they would talk about things that even in my politically naïve state, I knew were probably not true. As I got older, I really wondered if my dad was paranoid or something – his views on Mackenzie-King were so bizarre. Later as an adult, when I read Mr. King’s memoirs, I came to realize that my dad wasn’t so far off after all. This was another thing which may have predetermined my psychiatric career.
Anyway, the real King was coming to Canada. So, for a while, my dad focused on the King in England, not the one in Ottawa. The King and Queen would be going through on his special train, but he was stopping in Hamilton and there would be a parade down Main Street, right by the Kappele’s house. We were all invited to come and bring chairs and wave flags—the whole bit. My dad even got a roll of that very expensive new Kodachrome film for his movie camera. We used black and white film the rest of the time. I still have the movies he took.
There were big crowds on both sides of the street held back by the police. We had good seats up on the front porch of the Kappele’s place. It was all over so fast—the King and Queen were in a big McLaughlin Buick1 limousine provided by General Motors in Oshawa. It seemed to go by so fast that I had to pinch myself to realize that it was really our King and Queen inside.
My First Motor Trip
The King and Queen came in early June so I was still in school. But my dad was going to a medical convention in Montreal later in June with my mother. After much discussion—and pleading—it was decided that I was finally old enough to go too. Miss Huffman said it was OK. I was over eight and I knew everything about roads so I took great interest in dad’s plans for the trip. We would go through upper New-York State to Lake Champlain and then up to Montreal.
We would stay with Dr. Fred Burgess and his family in Montreal. Like my dad, Dr. Burgess was veteran of the war2 and had lost an arm in France. He had a son, John, about the same age as me, but I had not met him yet. I would stay with my new friend John, looked after by a housekeeper and a chauffeur/butler while the adults went to the convention. After the convention was over, we would visit Quebec City for a few days and then back to Ottawa on the way home. I was disappointed that we were not going to the Maritimes as they were on that trip a couple of years before when I was unceremoniously left behind, but it was still very exciting. Also, it meant that I got permission to miss the last two weeks of school.
Dad wanted to get to the Adirondacks the first day, so we left by seven in the morning. My parents were in the front and I rode in the back. I had to kneel on the seat to see out properly, but I refused my mother’s offer that I take a nap on the seat. We crossed over to the U.S. on the double-decker bridge from Queenstown over to Lewiston New York and then took highway #104 rights across northern New York. Theresa had prepared a lunch for us which we ate at some roadside tables near Rochester and then on towards the Five Finger Lakes. I was driving just as hard as my father or mother. My mother showed me the highway map of New York and I followed the funny red and green lines as we drove along. I used the window crank as my steering wheel and one time, my mother asked why I was opening and closing the window. I said: “Because we were going around a corner.”
When we got to Rome, New York, my mother told me that this town was named after the capital of Italy. I remembered that we had both a London and a Paris not far from us in Ontario. My mother told me the story of how Berlin, Ontario had been renamed Kitchener, after a famous British General because the people hadn’t liked anything German during the war. It was supper time but my dad wanted to get to Blue Mountain Lake before we stopped. We had supper there looking out over the lake but the cabins were all full. Dad phoned ahead to get a cabin but the best one was in North Creek which I could see on the map was still way ahead. The sun was setting by the time we got there. In June that means that it was about nine o’clock.
I remember that the cabins were called “Whispering Pines”. They were genuine log cabins—the first that I had ever seen. My mother told me later that I asked her several times: “Mom, is this real?” I think mom was annoyed that we had driven so long. It was well past my bedtime. But dad was proud that we had gone over 400 miles. He said: “This is the most I have ever done in a day.” That was something on roads where it was hard to average 35 or 40 miles an hour.
The next morning was a blur. I remember that we visited Fort Ticonderoga and Ausable Chasm on the way. Fort Ticonderoga has orange roofs and at Ausable Chasm we used our new Coleman stove for the first time. That stove is still going and has served the family well for four generations. The Burgesses lived in Westmount, which my mother told me was a separate city within Montreal where all the English people live. I only remember two things about that part.
One was that when we were getting out of the car, John Burgess fell down, skinned his knee and started crying. My mother was very upset because she wanted me to apologize to John for bumping into him. I refused because I hadn’t touched him. This turned into a bit of a scene in which I got a stern lecture on politeness to your host. All I got out of this was that sometimes to be polite, you had to lie or take the blame, and that didn’t make much sense to me, either.
The other thing I remember was the ride on the Observation Car. It was an open streetcar with the seats staged up like a theatre and it ran around Montreal to show tourists the sights. I have a vague recollection of going through a big church on the side of a hill. My mother later said it was probably St. Joseph’s Oratory. My parents were away at the convention all day so I didn’t see them much. But I have pleasant recollections of ‘Uncle Fred’ and ‘Aunt Rita’ and even of John, except that as I went further into my medical career, I found myself being compared to John Burgess who always seemed to be doing better than I was.
On our way to Quebec City, there was a traffic jam and we were tied up for almost two hours. A big truck backing into a lane, broke through an old culvert and part of the truck blocked the whole highway. Still, it was only 160 miles from Montreal to Quebec, so we were there by mid-afternoon. We checked into the old Clarendon Hotel—I have a picture and some movies of all three of us on the front steps. We did the usual sights. I think we went to the Citadel because I vaguely recall a lot of big cannons. But I clearly remember three things.
I remember Ste. Anne de Beaupré. It was only partly built and the spires were only low stubs. I have pictures of me on the temporary wooden steps in front which looked pretty flimsy. The second thing was driving along the south shore of Isle d’Orléans I was sure that on the other side of the St. Lawrence River, I saw snow-capped mountains in the distance. My parents tried to persuade me that it was only low-lying cloud banks, but I liked my version better. I was very disappointed when we came back a few years later and the mountains had disappeared.
The third thing I remember was that we went on-board a British Destroyer and two other navy ships tied up in Quebec Harbour. It was part of the Caribbean fleet and was on a courtesy visit to Canada. I have some movies of that too. My dad said that there was trouble in Europe and the ‘Huns’ were acting up again. He said that some guy called Hitler was not to be trusted. He thought that the British fleet was probably keeping track of German ship movements up the North American coast. He seemed troubled and didn’t say much more.
On the way back, we stayed a couple of days at the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa. I remember the War Memorial near the hotel and going up the Peace Tower. I also remember the Chateau Laurier swimming pool in the basement and my mother took me down. I could swim underwater pretty good, but I couldn’t breathe at the same time. Every time I needed a breath, I had to stand up on the bottom. The nice instructor showed me how to breathe and swim at the same time.
We got home the next day and I followed the map all the way home. It was summer and the bad effects of the Great Depression were lifting at last. There were more cars on the road and the narrow twisting roads of 1939 were slow with frequent traffic jams. The effects of that trip lasted the rest of the summer. But I have no other recollections of it.
The Second World War
Sometime in the late spring, I remember the Spenceleys came to visit us. Mrs. Spenceley was the daughter of Sir. Philip Manson-Bahr who had worked with my father and treated his smallpox in Port Said in 1915. Sir Philip had almost persuaded my dad to join the London School of Tropical Medicine and not return to the Hamilton City Hospital after the war. Sir Philip’s daughter, Patricia had married a London architect, Greville Spenceley and they had a daughter about my age. They came to Canada in the spring of 1939 when the war clouds were forming in Europe and they estimated—quite accurately as it turned out—that if they didn’t come then, they might not have another chance.
Their gift to me was Swallows and Amazons, a book by Arthur Ransome about children and sailing dinghies in the English Lake District. 3 I still remember reading in the very first chapter about Roger, who would have been almost my age at that time, pretending he was tacking a boat across the lawn and swinging his arm out to represent a sail. It made me think of playing car on the sidewalks of Port Dover with a board held out in front of me for a dashboard. Eventually at birthdays and Christmases, I was given all the books in the set, and they were a major influence throughout my life. As an only child living in the country with few friends, I was very familiar with the notion of imaginary companions. These children replaced any other playmates I had at the time.
By the end of August, my dad announced at the dinner table that the Munich Treaty was not working. I didn’t understand what it all meant but Mr. Hitler was doing something which worried my dad. He came home a few days later with a new black Oldsmobile. The Graham was three years old and had a lot of miles on it, according to my dad. If there was a war, maybe new cars would be hard to get. The Oldsmobile Company was advertising that their cars had the new ‘Hydromatic’ transmission.
I rushed over to look at it. It was lovely with a gear shift up on the steering column but I was disappointed that it was a standard transmission. But it did have the new divided windshield with a bar down the centre. The old Graham had a flat windshield and when I was playing in it sometimes, I would stick a narrow piece of wood up the middle of the windshield to make it look more modern. Now I didn’t have to do that.
We went to the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto, which was the last two weeks in August and ended on the Labour Day weekend. This was also the end of summer for kids. Labour Day was the first Monday in September and school started the next day. On the Labour Day weekend in 1939, all the adults were very upset and talking a lot about war. We listened intently for the news. I heard that Britain and France had declared war on Germany on Sunday. My dad was mad at our prime minister, Mr. King because he waited a whole week to join the rest of the Commonwealth in declaring war.
But when school started on Tuesday, all the kids were talking about it. Miss Huffman told us that this was very serious and that we should talk to our parents about it. Also, she encouraged us to bring in news clippings and to tell about them in class. She set up fifteen minutes every morning for what she called ‘current events.’ I didn’t know what the war had to do with currants—they looked like raisins to me, but my mother explained that it was a different word. As a result, I have a clearer recollection of the first part of the war than most people my age.
I remember the Russians invading Finland. We were all cheering for the Finnish Ski Patrols but the Russians won. I remember that winter, the story of the Graf Spee holed up in Montevideo harbour while the British ships sat around outside waiting. We looked up Montevideo Uruguay on the map of South America. It was high drama when Graf Spee finally came out and as she got beyond the three-mile limit, scuttled herself. I remember the invasion of Norway and then, later in the spring, the “Blitzkrieg” around the French Maginot Line which was supposed to be invincible. Miss Huffman told us that ‘blitzkrieg’ meant ‘lightning war’ in German.
By then, it was the summer of 1940 and school was over. We had regarded it so far as a kind of interesting spectacle in some far-off land, like the Civil War or the Olympic Games. But I noticed that my dad looked really worried at times so I asked him why. The idea that the war would affect us directly in any way hadn’t occurred to me at that point. But my dad said that France would fall and next it would be Britain standing alone. If Britain fell, we would be next. And the Americans were in their usual pacifist mode, some of them were even saying the Germans would win.
Then there was the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkerque. There were all kinds of pictures in the papers and most of them were brought to school for current events. But it wasn’t until I saw the movie “Mrs. Miniver” several years later that I really understood it.
My dad tried to return to active service, but he was too old. However, they made him Editor of the Canadian Army Medical Journal, and he had an office at the Armouries in Hamilton. My cousin Harry had just got married before the war. He had joined the navy before that, but when he got to Halifax, they found he had a heart murmur from Rheumatic Fever when he was a child and he could not go into active service. He returned home and went back to his job at the Dominion Foundries. By this time his first daughter, my cousin Carol, was on the way.
Life During the War
In the spring of 1940, we could see in our current events class that things were a lot worse. Every news report seemed to be a German victory. The number of countries on our side got smaller and smaller. That summer holiday seemed in many ways to be the same as others, but there was an ominous tone in the air. There was much talk of getting soldiers to Britain to help fight. Food and gas rationing was introduced. One day our milkman announced that he would have to collect butter coupons for butter and heavy cream was thinned to the point that it was hard to whip.
Ice cream was expensive and hard to get. Also, most fridges did not have freezer chests so we could only buy a small brick which would fit into the coils for the ice cube trays. If you bought a larger amount, you had to eat it right away before it melted. Theresa used to make ice-cream with the very heavy cream we got from Sovereigns’ farm next to the school. She whipped the cream and then added other stuff and froze in the ice-cube trays in the fridge. It always had some ice crystals in it but we swore it was better than the store-boughten stuff.
I was sent to the Sovereigns’ farm one day for a quart of heavy cream and was told that they had to dilute it. If I wanted cream for making butter, I must give them a butter coupon. I remember that a quart of whipping cream was fifty cents which seemed like a fortune to me. My weekly allowance was five cents in those days—raised to a dime when I was ten. Then Sovereigns said they had to put the price up to 60¢ so suddenly the home-made ice cream was not as good and had a layer of solid ice on the bottom. Theresa blamed it on the poorer cream, but later I found out that she was diluting it with milk to make it go farther.
Everything had to go farther. In the Autumn of 1940, gas rationing was introduced. Everybody who had a car got an ‘A’ book which allowed you to buy maybe 10 or so gallons of gas a month. Dad was a doctor, so he drove a lot more. But he was not in general practice—those doctors got an ‘E’ book. They gave dad a ‘C’ book which only lasted him about eight months. Finally, he talked the Ration Board into a ‘D’ book, but they warned him that he had to make do with that. By January of 1941, things were really bad. They added meat, sugar, jam, and other things to butter which was already rationed. My mother had a special pocket in her purse so that she could carry all our ration books and coupons which had become detached. It was quite slow at the check-out counter of the grocery store.
Self-service was a new thing. Cafeterias modeled on the “Automat” in New York were all the rage. Even the small Loblaws corner grocery stores were going to self-serve and calling themselves “Groceterias.” There was a new A&P in Burlington on Brant street, just north of Ontario Street. They also had Self-Service which meant that you didn’t go up to the counter and ask for stuff, you pushed a little cart with baskets on it around the shelves and helped yourselves. One time when shopping with my mother, I sneaked a bag of candy onto the cart. But candy had sugar in it so you had to give a sugar coupon. That’s when my mother said: “That isn’t mine! John, how did it get in my cart? Take it back!” So much for that idea.
London and other British cities had suffered the Blitz for six months now and the news sounded worse and worse. All kinds of ships were being sunk by the ‘U-Boats’ on the North Atlantic. We heard all this on the radio or read about it in the paper. My dad got both the ‘Globe and Mail’ and the ‘Hamilton Spectator’. The ‘Toronto Daily Star’ was popular too, but my father didn’t like it. He said it was a Liberal paper and he didn’t trust it. But it had better pictures so we liked it for ‘Current Events’.
The Globe was thrown out of a truck up our driveway every morning, but the ‘Spec’ was delivered by a boy with a paper route. John Lindley had a paper route for a while and I sometimes helped him with it. Papers were 3¢ delivered, and John got a quarter of a cent a paper for delivering it. he had about thirty homes on his route after school, so he got about 45¢ a week. He was rich. I was surprised how eagerly the grown-ups would grab the paper and start reading it. With such lousy news, I always wondered why they didn’t cancel their subscriptions.
Mother volunteered for the Armed Services Canteen in the Palace Theatre in Hamilton. They entertained and helped armed service personnel in the area and there were many of them. The Commonwealth Air-Training plan had training centres all across Canada. There was a base at Mount Hope and another one at Jarvis neat Port Dover. The troops from the Mount Hope base were in the canteen every day whenever they could get leave.
One day, mother came home from the canteen all excited. She told us that one of the airmen from Mount Hope had noticed her name badge and introduced himself. He was Clifford Deadman from London who was training as a navigator and would be there for several months. My father was aware that there were other branches of the family in London and had contacted some of them when he was in England during the First World War. But this was the first time that Cliff had been to Canada. He came to our place for dinner many times and we got to know him quite well.
But my life on the farm was not much affected by the war. There was school, and friends visiting and the occasional trip somewhere. My dad found that he could take the train to Toronto for meetings, and the bus if he had to do a “PM”4 or an Inquest in Niagara Falls or Brantford. This saved on gas so we could drive the car more for other things. By the next year, there were even more gas restrictions. The basic ration book was labelled “AA” and it only had half as many coupons as the previous “A” book. It gave my uncle’s car enough gas to shop and go to church and maybe the occasional trip in to Ottawa Street in Hamilton.
I began to use the big Gray Coach Lines bus into Hamilton. My first rides had been with Theresa when she still had the house on Young St and I was maybe six. I remember one time when she gave me my punched ticket to hold as we rode out over the High-Level Bridge and by ‘Easterbrook’s Foot Long Hot Dogs’ stand through Aldershot. I got bored and began chewing on my fingers, my sleeve and then on my ticket. When we got off the bus at Campbell’s Corners, the bus driver asked for my ticket. Theresa said: “What did you do with it?” I said sheepishly: “I ate it!” Theresa said: “You ate it? Glory be to God! Well give it to him anyway.” I delivered a few pieces of slobbery paper to the bus driver and got off the bus in a hurry.
But by this time, I was older and could go on the bus myself. On the weekends I would go to visit my friend Peter Kappele. The buses ran every hour and took about half an hour from Campbell’s Corners to the bus terminal next to the Royal Connaught Hotel. Then I would walk down Main St. to Peter’s place. Then later in the day, I would go the other way. Sometimes Uncle Dan would give me a ride in his new 1940 Pontiac.
I asked my dad for a ride on the train. We planned a trip from the T.H.& B. station to Toronto, and then on the passenger boat through Toronto Harbour and over to Queenston. Aunt Reba, my mother and the three kids went on the train and boat and Uncle Dan and my dad met us at Queenston and we had a picnic in the park at Queenston Heights. My mother took movies which I still have. It was great.
Dad loved the Falls. We were down there a lot. I remember when the ice jam in the Niagara Gorge took the old Honeymoon bridge out. We went down in March to see the old bridge lying on the ice in the river. When they built the Rainbow Bridge to replace it, they set the footings much farther up the bank so that couldn’t happen again. You can still see the old footings of the Honeymoon Bridge if you know where to look.
During the war, when gas and all kinds of travel was limited, we explored Ontario. My dad loved motor trips and I came to love them too. Even before the war, I remember going to Callendar to see the Dionne Quintuplets. They were riding their tricycles around in an enclosure and we walked around inside a long passage looking at them through one-way glass. During the war, dad decided to go to Timmins to see Dr. Smith, a classmate and old friend. Dr. Smith took us down the Hollinger Mine, one of the biggest gold mines in the world. We also visited some of my dad’s relatives in Kearney, north of Huntsville. I remember an old lady who was very nice to me, and a long lawn sloping down to the lake, but not much else.
Second Trip to Quebec
We also had another trip to Quebec. I think it was another meeting of the Canadian Medical Association or something like that. We took Uncle Eric on this trip because he had not been to Quebec before. We stayed in a pensione in the upper town. It was a grand old house, crowded in between other houses on a narrow street. We all helped carry in the stuff and up a big curved staircase to the second floor. My mother told the story of what happened next:
“…On top of the big radiator inside the front door was a model of a galleon in full sail, sitting on a lace doily. John was carrying in some clothes and one of the hangers hooked the lace doily. As he walked along, the galleon sailed majestically along the flat top until it reached the end—then went crashing to the floor. I somehow couldn’t say anything. John was quite oblivious to the whole thing and turned around saying: ‘what happened?’ We tried to fix it but it was never the same again…”
I remember three things about that trip. That’s when I discovered that there were no snow-capped mountains south of Ile d’Orléans. Also, near Ste. Anne de Beaupré dad bought some maple sugar in a big block. It was so hard that he couldn’t break it with his hands so he hit it against the end of the gear shift lever. The knob on the end of the lever shattered into pieces, but the maple sugar remained intact.
The third thing was the day before we left the pensione, Eric decided to have a shower. The big bathtub stood in the middle of the bathroom with a kind of hose on the taps that clipped to a bracket on the wall. There was a hoop of pipe sticking out from the wall to hold the shower curtain. Somehow, when he was trying to flick the curtain around the tub, the whole thing came off the wall and Eric wandered back into our bedroom dripping wet, wearing the shower curtain with the hoop around his shoulders saying: “Heh, heh, this thing came down!” That image is burned in my mind. My father said on the way home: “Well I guess we won’t be going back to that place again.”
I remember a Sunday morning in December just one week before my eleventh birthday. I was walking between the dining room and the kitchen when I heard about Pearl Harbour on the radio. President Roosevelt declared war on both the Japanese and the Germans, and with the Americans in the war, things were starting to turn around. ‘Current events’ took almost an hour on that Monday.
In the spring, a new minesweeper, HMCS Burlington came to Burlington to be commissioned, and it anchored off the breakwater near the Brant Inn. School was out for a day so that we could all attend. I was impressed because, during the ceremony, the sailors lined the top of the breakwater at attention for almost an hour. I had learned the rudiments of marching in Boy Scouts and I couldn’t imagine myself standing still that long.
It was probably that summer Theresa and the girls went for a holiday to the cottage in Port Dover on the bus. But you couldn’t take bikes on the bus so when I wanted to stay with them for a few days I took my bike on the train to Simcoe and then rode it down the highway to Port Dover. We had a good time riding around town and playing on the beach.
One night there was a big party at the cottage next door with a lot of drinking, carousing and what not. Theresa was very upset because it went on until four AM, keeping everyone on the street awake. To pay them back for keeping us awake, we got up about 7 o’clock and rode our bikes up and down the sidewalk to wake up the partyers next door. That’s when we discovered that the cottage next door was empty and the other neighbours were mad at us because they had been kept awake most of the night and they didn’t even get to sleep in because of our noise.
We then found out that this happened fairly often and people were pretty fed up with it. During the war, airmen from the air-force base at Jarvis (for the Commonwealth Air-Training plan) would rent a cottage for one night and bring women and booze over for a big party. The owners of that cottage had done this several times and they were very unpopular on the street. We were also unpopular so Theresa baked some cookies and we took them around to the neighbours as a peace offering.
The Summer of ’43
In the summer after I finished public school, my father decided I should go to a different “Y” camp. Camp Kitchikewana was on Beausoleil Island in Georgian Bay, and it sounded a lot better than Erie Heights. Wartime gas rationing was on and dad had used most of his coupons so it was decided that I should take the train. The train that ran north out of Burlington was a diesel self-propelled rail car. Local people called it the ‘Peanut’5 because it was so much smaller than most trains and had a whistle that sounded like the whistle on the peanut vendors’ wagons at the county fair. It ran on the old railway line from Burlington to the big junction at Allandale, now part of Barrie. We went right across the country through places like Milton, Georgetown, Tottenham and Beeton. North of Beeton, it cut across a corner of my grandfather’s old farm.6
Even without wartime gas rationing, trains were much more a part of our lives in those days than they are today. Trains were more frequent then, so that it was possible to travel long distances and make several changes and still arrive at your destination in about the same time as you could do it by car—at least on the roads of that time where you could only average 35 to 40 miles an hour. Modern expressways where you could drive 50 or 60 miles an hour was still the talk of futurists. But the Peanut was slower than most trains. It poked along at a leisurely pace. Sometimes it just stopped in the middle of nowhere while they loaded some big milk cans into the baggage compartment ahead of the passenger compartment. Sometimes it stopped at a so-called “flag stop” to pick up a passenger at the side of the tracks.
At Allandale, I caught the northbound train to Orillia and then another train to Midland. During the war, they were using any rolling stock that they had and I remember some old cars with stained glass panels, elaborate gas lamps and wicker seats. One car had hard bench seats like the old colonists’ cars of the beginning of the century. So, I had three trains and two changes. I felt like a world traveler.
The train went right down to the dock at Midland and we met some of the camp staff who helped us carry our dunnage bags7 across the big dock onto the “City of Dover.” This was a passenger ship which plied the inner channel of the 30,000 Islands right up to Parry Sound. We rode this ship to Honey Harbour where we were met by the motor cutter from the camp which took us over to Beausoleil Island—four changes in all.
This was more like a real camp in the north woods. There were lots of row-boats and canoes and good swimming from a very large raft with a diving tower on it. The cabins seemed a bit primitive. The bunks were a piece of canvas stretched between two beams. We hiked all over the island and I went on my first canoe trip. This was the great north with lots of lakes and granite rocks and fir trees and mosquitoes and real adventure.
When camp was over, I was met by the McLenahans from Penetanguishine. Dr. Claude McLenahan was a classmate of my father. He was also the superintendent of the big Ontario Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Penetang. The family lived in the superintendent’s house on the grounds. I was shown around by Ellen, a daughter who was about my age, and her older sister Mary who worked in Midland.
Ellen showed me the magic seat—a natural rock which was shaped like a high-backed chair. She said the Indians believed that if you made a wish while sitting in the chair, it would come true. She asked me to try it but I felt shy. Mrs. McLenahan was very nice to me and a good cook too. Dr. McLenahan was away at the hospital during the day. He showed me around too but would not take me up the hill to the jail-like high security unit up there. I never thought for a moment that I might spend much of my career in places like that.
After a couple of days, it was back to Midland where I caught the train for Orillia and hence to Allandale and home. But the train to Allandale was late and by the time we got there, the Peanut had already left for Burlington. I was very upset but the conductor told me to stay on the train to Toronto where I could catch a train to Burlington.
The rest of that trip was an anxious tear-stained blur. I got on the next train. It was going to Windsor and normally did not stop in Burlington, but they made a special exception for me. The train barely stopped and I was helped down by the conductor and someone in the station called my parents who were there in a moment. They had met the Peanut but I wasn’t on it. They had phoned Traveler’s Aid at Toronto who said that I had been put on a later train. I was sure glad to see them.
By 1943, the war was going better for the allies. Mrs. Gray had not had ‘current events’, but we were all following the news just like the adults. The Russians were now on our side and taking a pounding from the Germans and demanding a second front. Our guys were looking at the Germans across the English Channel but most of our fighting was at sea or in the air. The ‘Blitz’ of English cities was easing off and more and more, the Lancaster and Halifax bombers were pounding German cities. Now that the Americans were in the war, we were also hearing about daylight raids by B17s. Suddenly in August, we heard on the news that Canadian troops were involved in a raid on Dieppe with heavy losses. The Royal Hamilton Light Infantry (RHLI) was in that raid and there were lots of families in Hamilton who were in mourning after that.
I have one other recollection of that summer. My father’s cousin, Milton Dedman (the family he had stayed while he attended Bradford High School) was about the same age as he was and they had kept in touch over the years. Milton had changed the name by dropping the ‘a’ from Deadman, but my father always said that if he did that, he would change the name completely, into French or Latin. In French it came out as Morthomme and I wondered if Morton might be the French equivalent of our name.
Every summer, Milton and his wife Etta went to a resort the Matabanick Inn in Halliburton for the month of August. It was on Boshkung Lake, just north of Carnarvon. This summer, they invited us to go up there. This was wartime and we took the bus. I remember taking it to Toronto and then to Lindsay where we changed onto a funny little bus to go up to Carnarvon. It was just about as wide as it was long—a veritable cube on wheels with a long nose (engine compartment) on the front. It bounced and swayed over the curves and bumps and finally dropped us off where we were picked up by the owner of the inn.
Dad got us a cabin there for a week and we had a good time. I learned to back-dive off the raft and was very proud of myself. Later I demonstrated this for my parents, but I didn’t arch my back enough and landed flat on my back. It really hurt and I have never been able to do a back-dive since then even though I have tried many times.
One other recollection. Dad and Uncle Milt wanted to go fishing. They drove up to Lake of Bays and hired a guide. Meanwhile we met a lady who took us out fishing in one of the boats at the inn. We trolled over the stern as each of us took turns slowly pulling on the oars. I caught two nice bass and my mother caught one. The men came back from their day having caught nothing. We were able to lord it over them as we had bass fillets for breakfast the next day. I felt that I was a good fisherman. Then it was time to get back on the same bus for the trip home.
By 1943, the Germans were in retreat in Russia, and also the tide had turned in North Africa. We were hearing about plans for and invasion of Europe and soon there was talk of D-Day. Finally the Allies established a bridgehead on the beaches of France and then, slowly, slowly they fought their way through France, Belgium and Holland. There were big celebrations when the war in Europe was over, but even bigger ones when the Japanese were forced to surrender. But more of this in the next chapter.
Notes:
1 This car was named after Mr. Sam McLaughlin, the founder of the McLaughlin Carriage Works in Oshawa which made one of the first automobiles in Canada. It was bought out by General Motors in the 1920s and Sam McLaughlin became the first president of GM Canada.
2 My dad’s friends did not refer to the 1914-18 conflict as ‘The War’, or as “The Great War” or by any particular name at all. It was just the war—lower case, no emphasis or special note. Of course, it was not called the First World War then because the Second World War had not happened yet.
3 Swallows and Amazons was an adventure book for children which described the adventures of the four Walker children. John was the oldest and he was the captain. Susan was the first mate. Titty was the able seaman and Roger was the ship’s boy. They meet two girls named Nancy and Peggy who act as pirates. I remember that I was reading well enough that I could read the whole thing and became captivated by sailing. Later our scoutmaster, Bob Todd had a sailboat on the bay and I went out in it with him several times.
Swallowdale was the next one which described the adventures of the next summer with the four Walker children. The third book was Peter Duck, a fanciful tale about a voyage to the South Seas for buried treasure. Then came Winter Holiday, Coot Club, Pigeon Post, We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea. There were later ones written during the war, Secret Water, The Big Six and Missee Lee. I still have most of them on a shelf at home. Arthur Ransome wrote other books as well. I also have Old Peter’s Russian Tales.
4 Post-Mortem examinations, otherwise known as autopsies. Because my dad was the only formally trained pathologist in the whole area, he was the ‘Medical Examiner to the Crown.’ He had to do all the PMs on bodies of suspicious deaths for coroners and police departments from Niagara Falls to Brantford to Oakville. If the Coroner called an inquest into the death of somebody, dad had to attend and give evidence.
5 The “Peanut” was a single car with the front half for baggage and the back half for passengers. The whistle was different from either the old steam locomotives’ unmistakeable, shrill whistle or the low grumbly moan of the big pre-war diesel locomotives. When all the old steam locomotives were replaced by diesels after the war, they changed the horns on the new diesels to sound more like a steam whistle.
6 See map in Chapter 4. This was the old track of the Great Western Railway which ran out of Hamilton in the 1850s and ’60s. It was bought out by the Grand Trunk Railway sometime in the late 1800s or early 1900s. My father told me that the railway ran right across the corner of his father’s farm on the 10th Concession, 10th line, Tecumseh Twp. north of Beeton. Many lines, including the Grand Trunk went broke in the Great Depression, and were taken over by the newly formed Canadian National Railways, a crown corporation. The Toronto Hamilton and Buffalo Railway (T.H. &B.) never used that track. It came later and survived the Great Depression but was bought by Canadian Pacific Railways in the 1970s.
7 Dunnage bag was the term used by the army to describe the big heavy canvas kit bags used by the soldiers. My dad had a paint stencil from his days in the army so I painted “J. Deadman” on my bag by covering up the first part of the “Lt. Col. W. J. Deadman” on his stencil. Very official-looking!