Chapter Seven
Public School
Before I knew it, I was starting public school. Murray Peart, who lived across the highway, was a couple of years ahead of me so he took me on my first day to the one room country school less than half a mile down the highway. The teacher, Miss Huffman, introduced me to the class and then pointed to the blackboard and asked me to tell which words I knew. All the words which I had learned in kindergarten went completely out of my head and finally I pointed and said: “cat”. This seemed to satisfy her and soon I was seated at one of the double desks. I needed a slate and a notebook, which somebody lent to me.
School Section Number 14, Nelson Township, (SS #14 Nelson) was on the north side of Plains Road at the top of Maple Avenue. Inside the main front door, the girls cloak room was to the right and the boys to the left. The big classroom took up most of the building and it had large windows along the whole east wall. The toilets were on the back, at a lower level, again girls on the right, boys on the left. The school yard was ringed by large maple trees with a high board fence around three sides. It was all grass and weeds with a baseball diamond worn into it by many years of running feet. At recess, girls and sissies played beside the school under the windows where the teacher could see them.
School ran from 9 to 12 o’clock and from 1:30 to 4. Recess was at 11 and 3 o’clock. In the first two years of school you could go home at recess but after that you had to come back in for another 45 minutes after recess. When I started, we all used small slates with wooden frames, washed at the end of each day. We did our work on the slate, showed it to the teacher and then rubbed it out so we could do some more. By the start if my third year we were using pencils and notebooks and, in another year, we didn’t see the slates any more.
At that time all the desks were double with two kids at each desk. Since we left our books at school and I had plenty of time to do my assignments between classes, we never took any homework home. There were ink wells for each place and a bin for our books in front of our knees. We then had to learn to use straight pens with metal nibs. The nibs were scratchy and got bent easily. My attempts to straighten them only made it worse. Every kid had several nibs which were bent all out of shape and got blobs of ink over everything on their desk.
One time the teacher complained about my messy desk with torn paper and ink blobs all over it. She asked my seat mate to help me clean up but his place was only slightly better and that didn’t work. She then made me sit with a girl! Girls seemed to find this clean-up business easier and the ink and pen-nibs somehow behaved better for them. But were they ever bossy! …and to have to sit with a girl!
This was in the days before ‘grades’. There were four forms in public school but you spent two years in each form – for a total of eight years. I started in junior first form, then to senior first and so forth. All eight years were in one room with about half a dozen kids in each grade. I remember when they took all the double desks out of the school and replaced them with single ones. I was happy. No more sitting with a girl.
The teacher was constantly on the go. She would teach a short lesson to one grade and then assign some work while she went on to another grade. There was no talking. You got the strap for that. We usually got through our lessons and assignments long before the teacher got back to us, so we listened to what the teacher was saying to another grade.
She often taught two grades together so by the time you got into a higher grade, you already had heard the lessons more than once. When I was in junior second form, they introduced the new system with eight grades and I found out that I was now in grade three. When I was in grade 3, she decided that she would just put grades 3 and 4 together. That meant that at the end of the year, I had finished the work for grade 4, and the next fall I was promoted into grade 5.
One fall day blended into another. Before we knew it, the snow was beginning to appear and we could no longer play pickup baseball in the schoolyard. Some years they would flood the area beside the school to make a skating rink. But in warm weather the ice thawed and was ruined by people trying to skate on it. Then the teacher would ban all skating until it got colder and froze again. The boys in grade seven or eight seemed so huge and grown up. They acted as if they owned the place. In hockey, they took the puck away from everyone else. It wasn’t safe on the ice for us little guys. The older kids would play by themselves a lot and we soon got to know better than to try to break in.
I was walking home one day when some older kids started to tease me. They made me walk out on a deep puddle which had ice on the top. The ice didn’t break under my weight, so they made me jump on it till I broke through. I got two soakers and went home crying while they were laughing themselves silly. Theresa was mad at me for getting wet feet and didn’t believe my story about the older boys. That was the first time I remember that life was unfair. Soon that feeling of life being unfair grew quite familiar.
There were several kids about my age who lived up along the county line sideroad 1 and walked to school with me. There were the Zweeps, a Dutch family who worked on a farm near the escarpment, and James Sutherland—his name was James, “…not Jim.” The Job kids and the Atkins were on the other side of the county line so they lived in East Flamborough Township and went to Maplehurst School. Murray Peart lived across the highway but was two years ahead of me and that’s a big difference in grade school. Johnny Zweep was in my class and we would wait for each other both going and coming from school. Most of my other friends lived down Maple Avenue or further east along Plains Road.
We had from 12 o’clock to 1:30 for lunch. Many kids took their lunch to school but I was close and could go home. I always came back before 1 o’clock so that I could play with the other kids before the bell rang. Sometimes I took my lunch and after a bit I did this every Friday. One day I forgot that I had taken it and arrived home to be told by Theresa that… “Why are you home? You took your lunch to school.” She gave me something anyway and when I got back, the teacher took me aside to explain that she had given my lunch to one of the other kids who didn’t have one.
Broken Arms and Other Mayhem
I got a reputation for being accident-prone. In the winter when I was five or six, I went with Murray and some other kids to sleigh down a hill nearby. My flexible flyer bogged down in the soft snow so another kid let me use his sled with wider runners. I got going too fast and thought that I was going to go right into the little creek. I tried to grab an irrigation stanchion in the middle of the field to stop, but it hit me right in the middle of my left arm. I was in pain and fell off the sled. The kids took me home and it was only when my mother tried to get my snowsuit off that I screamed and she realized that I had a broken arm. I can remember that as if it were last week. I can still see the hill and the kids and the creek vividly.
This was my second bout in the hospital. The first I told you about as my earliest recollection. This second time I had a room at the end with a window, which my dad told me looked out on the nurses’ residence. I had a bad break which was hard to fix, so they put on a great big cast which went around my chest and one shoulder and right down to my fingers. My dad called it a shoulder spica, but I didn’t see any spikes in it. All I know is that it had lots of room for the kids at kindergarten to scribble and draw pictures on. I was an instant hit.
In the summer that I was seven, I broke that arm again. Peter Kappele and I were trying to jump off the top of a stepladder, only the stepladder collapsed when I tried it, and I landed on my arm instead of my feet. It was what my dad called a ‘greenstick’ fracture. Cracked and bent but not broken through. They just put a splint on it and I only missed one day of school. But my reputation was established.
Of course, I had mumps, measles, chicken pox and what-not, but every kid got that. Parents would expose their kids to another kid with measles to be sure that they caught it as kids. When you were older, it was a lot more serious. My mother caught the mumps from me and she was really sick. We had quarantines in those days so my friends couldn’t come over and I got bored. That is when I borrowed the table radio and found out about ‘soap operas’. I remember Ma Perkins, The Guiding Light, The Pepper Family, Lorenzo Jones, Old Widder Brown, and lots of others. At four o’clock when the kids got home from school, we had Terry and the Pirates, and The Lone Ranger. One time, I rigged up a system with string and screw eyes in the wall so that I could turn my light switch off and on and open my curtains without getting out of bed. My dad was impressed at my engineering skills, but my mother was upset and made me take it down.
Then when I was eight, Peter Kappele and I were playing on the teeter-totters in the big park by the canal on the beach strip. When we got bored with that, I just sat on the very end, holding Peter way up in the air, until he begged me to let him down. Next time he did the same thing to me and then jumped off the end. I suddenly came crashing down. My arm hit the handle and I felt it crack. Off to the hospital again.2
That was quite a summer. My mother was sick and at one point had to go to the hospital. I had yet another broken arm. Peter and I were playing with the old lawn mower and somehow Peter caught his finger in it, taking the tip almost off. Since mother was not feeling that well, Theresa and Eric took us to the old Emergency, just beyond the ‘Lab’ at the Hamilton General. Not too long after this, Theresa caught her thumb in the sewing machine and the needle embedded in the bone and broke off. When she arrived at the Emergency, the nurse said to her: “Oh, Mrs. Brunner, who are you bringing in this time?” She replied sheepishly: “Me!”
There’s more. A couple of years later, a friend of my father had parked his car in the barn and when he was leaving I went out to move the old door out of the way so he could get his car out. As I was standing watching him back out, I was suddenly knocked to the ground by a very heavy weight which pinned me. I remember the whole thing clearly, so I guess I didn’t get knocked out. I tried to call for help but I guess it came out as a blood-curdling scream. Then I couldn’t stop screaming.
My dad and his friend lifted the heavy barn door off me, and my mother picked me up. That’s when I saw all the blood – all over me and my mother. It took 41 stitches to close the big gash in my scalp. And my head was shaved and looked awful so I had to wear a cap, even in school, which was not allowed at any other time. By this time, my reputation was more than secure, it had become the talk of Burlington.
The Kids in School
I remember that we had a handicapped boy who was ‘Mongoloid’ as they called it then. Nowadays we call it ‘Down’s Syndrome’ but then, because of the unusual facial features, there was a suspicion that something Oriental was involved. We all liked him and helped him with his work, but by the time he was ready for grade 4, he went off to a special school and I never saw him again. I heard that the special school was the one in Orillia but that didn’t mean much to me in those days.
We had a lot of native Indian3 kids in the school. They were just like the rest of us and we all played together and everything. They were the kids of farm labourers from the Six Nations Reservation near Brantford who found work on the farms and brought their families to live with them. I guess some farmers treated them well but maybe not others. A lot of the farms had a house or shack for the hired man. There was a two-room, two-story house on the Atkins farm near our chicken house. But it was dilapidated and abandoned when I first remember it, and Mr. Atkins did not have a hired man at that time. He pulled it down when I was about six or seven.
There was a small, but rather nice looking white house on the Bell farm next to us on the east with another Indian family in it. I didn’t know the kids very well as they were girls and several years younger. But I knew that they did not have indoor plumbing because there was a well and an outhouse and the ground outside the back door had a sour soapy smell where they threw the dishwater every night. I remember when I was mad at Theresa and Helen one time, accusing them of playing with the Indian kids next door. Big Theresa pointed out to me that I played with Indian kids at school and that was not a nice thing to say. I felt so small I could have crawled into a knot-hole.
Some of my best friends were the Barnes kids, who lived on a farm down Maple Avenue. Even though we were good friends and sometimes came to my place, they never invited me to their place. One time, John Lindley told me why. He said the parents and four kids lived in a two-room lean-to behind the barn and the only source of heat in the winter was a coal-oil stove and the manure piled around the walls. Coal-oil stoves were dangerous and every winter, we heard about bad house fires. I never talked to the Barnes’ kids about that, but John Lindley, who was my source of all knowledge, said that it was a lot better than living on the reservation. During the Great Depression, this was probably true. I know that they never wanted to go back to the reservation even though they kept in touch with their relatives there. The relatives came to visit them but not the other way around.
Johnny Zweep and his two sisters and parents lived further up on the County Line in a house of the same type. They had come out from Holland before the War with only the shirts on their backs. The house had no running water – they used an outhouse. On the farm they had plenty to eat but not much else. The kids missed a lot of school but Miss Huffman never marked them truant. I learned that there were not enough winter boots for the three kids and so in the bad weather, they would take turns going to school. At least the Barnes kids were better off than that. They were always nicely dressed and had enough boots to go around.
As a kid, I just accepted that this was the way things were. I was lucky because my father had a good job and we had a nice house but I didn’t think of myself as any different from these kids. I was actually quite surprised when I went to high school that many of the kids I met there assumed that I was poor because I wanted to play with those kids. I quickly learned that if I wanted to be accepted, I had to shun those kids who, only a few months before, had been my friends and playmates. I always had great sympathy for people who were struggling to make a life for themselves and who were fighting prejudice and discrimination. I am sure that this had a big effect on my subsequent career, and my attitude toward life.
My father had a wonderful ability to treat everyone from the shoe-shine boy to the prime minister in the same way, and I found myself trying to emulate him. When my mother was pressed by her friends to take me out of that “terrible school before it is too late,” she resisted this, and I am glad that she did. It was an education, which could not be gained in any other way.
The Strap
The big boys played in the main yard but younger kids and girls tended to play in the side yard where the teacher could keep an eye on things. I remember the time when John Lindley was teasing a boy whom he accused of being a sissy. When the boy ran into the washroom right behind him – it was the girls washroom – John stood there waiting for him to come out holding a half-eaten apple. When the door opened John threw the apple and it hit Miss Huffman and John Lindley got the strap.4
In those days, the teacher was the only adult in the school and discipline was a problem. The strap was a heavy piece of leather that had been molded into a slab about 3 inches wide and a foot long. It came out fairly often in those days. The miscreant was paraded to the front and held out his hand, usually the left one for us right-handers. Minor transgressions earned two straps but serious crimes got four. It left your hand so sore that you couldn’t use it for a few hour or so after. And the bruises could last a week. I got the strap a few times but others were at the front of the class more frequently. Also your parents could tell by looking at your hand when you got home so often one punishment was followed by another. Nowadays it seems that more often the parents take the kid’s side and blame the teacher, but not in my day.
Friends
I had friends in Hamilton who came to visit us quite often. Alice Jane and Peter Kappele loved coming to our place because there was so much to do. We climbed in the barn or ran through the chicken house, disturbing all the chickens – who, my uncle said: “…would not lay for a week!” There were two small chicken-sized opening so that the chickens could get from inside the house to the big fenced in chicken-run outside, with board ramps on the outside because the floor of the chicken house was about two feet off the ground.
I remember one time, I stayed in the chicken house and Peter stayed outside in the run. First, I would chase them around the chicken house so that they would all crowd and climb over each other to get out the opening. When they were all outside, Peter would chase them back in again. It was really fun to see them crowding to get in the door two or three at a time or knocking themselves off the ramp in their struggles to get ahead of the next one. My uncle didn’t seem to think it was funny at all – we were banned from the chicken house for a long while after that.
Another time, we got up on the chicken house roof and ran back and forth playing tag around the little ventilator stoops on top. Then Peter was down in the chicken run, and I tried to take a run so that I could jump the gap from the chicken house on one side of the walkway to the roof of the one on the other side. When I was successful, I took a run to jump back. I must have landed on a weak or rotten board because with a loud crack, and an explosion of dust and chickens, I broke through the roof. I got stuck in the hole, with one leg sticking down into the house below. My other leg was folded under me somehow and Peter had to climb up on the roof to free me. I was all scraped and bruised, but I was lucky that I didn’t break a leg – or worse. This also added to my reputation.
Jane, Peter and I would give each other rides on the wheelbarrow but usually managed to dump each other off. We would wrestle on the lawn. We would climb the spruce trees in front of the house and get spruce gum all over ourselves. We would play on the old swing or the monkey bar my cousin Harry and Uncle Eric had rigged up between two trees in the front yard. We would dig holes in the pile of dirt beside the barn. We would push our toy cars around, accompanied by roaring engine sounds. One summer, I had a system of roads in the dirt, which rivalled the complexity of the Queen Elizabeth Way. Sometimes we would arrange the wicker garden furniture into a car or a train and play by the hour. We have some old movies of that.
Sometimes my cousin Jane Fletcher would come out, but she was four years younger, so we didn’t do much of the rough-house stuff. Her mother, my Aunt Madeline, didn’t like her getting dirty all the time, so we had to be careful. Her father, my Uncle Cec’, seemed to be away on business a lot. At one point he was in South Africa and brought back some pictures of lions and elephants and lots of other stuff. He said that there was a great big park there, called Kruger National Park and I said that as soon as I got big, I would go there. Like my dad, he was in the Militia between the wars. But he was younger than my dad, and when the war started, he joined up and went overseas after about a year. So, I didn’t see Uncle Ces’ much.
The Robertsons lived way up in Walkerton, but they had a summer cottage at Southampton on Lake Huron. I remember going up there for a weekend when I was only about five or six. They had three kids about my age, David, Margaret Ann, and Ronald. This was a new experience for an only child and my mother told me later that on my first visit I asked her: “Is this a school?”. Ronald was a great tease and he really kept me going. He was into all kinds of mischief and seemed to know all the kids in Southampton. I was used to dealing with adults all the time, and I can remember being very upset with all the teasing and games-playing.
The Robertsons visited us sometimes, but not too often. It was better to go there. They had a pony called “Punch”5 and we could go for rides in the pony cart. We have some old movies of that. Once when I was older, and visited Ronald at Christmas time in Walkerton, we hitched up Punch to pull us on skis. That was very exciting, not to say a bit dangerous. I remember going up in August one year and I was supposed to pick some of our ‘golden bantam’ corn to take up there. I guess I only picked a dozen or so and was very disappointed that I only got one ear. When I complained, my dad pointed out that I had picked it, so I shouldn’t be disappointed if there wasn’t enough.
The Brick Slinger
In those days, slingshots were popular and everyone had one, usually made out of a fork cut from a tree-branch and a strip of inner tube. A few kids had a B-B gun, or air rifle but many parents would not allow it. Murray Peart had a B-B gun which his parents didn’t know about so he hid it in one of the hollow grave monuments in the U.E. Loyalist Cemetery.
But slingshots got to be a bit tame, and Murray and I tried to design something more ambitious. There was a large opening on one side of our barn loft and we got an old bicycle inner tube which was more or less intact, cut it open and fastened each end to one side of the opening, creating the biggest slingshot we had ever seen. The only problem was that round stones fell off the inner tube or they hit the side of the opening or dribbled down on the ground outside. So, I found half a brick in the general rubble near the barn and tried that.
The first try, the brick fell off the inner tube before I could pull it back far enough. The second try, I pulled the inner tube with the brick on it back as far as I could and let go. It was a perfect shot – straight out through the opening, followed by a loud crash and tinkle of broken glass. When we peered out the opening, I saw that I had scored a direct hit on Mr. Atkins’ greenhouse next door.
We both took off. However, Murray said: “We should go back and own up. They’ll find out who did it sooner or later.” I agreed. We felt that Mr. Atkins would kill us when we went over to tell him. He was not pleased but he appreciated that we had owned up to our crime. I can remember us both on our hands and knees in the greenhouse, picking broken glass out of the small tomato plants and helping Mr. Atkins patch the hole. That was another time when I didn’t have any allowance for a year.
The kids liked coming to our place most of the time, but often I would go to theirs. Murray Peart’s place was just across the highway and I went there a lot. They had greenhouses and a big barn with shiny corrugated sheet metal sides. During the tomato season, there was much picking and big trucks came every once in a while, to take away the baskets and bushels of tomatoes. I remember one big burly truck driver pulling out a wad of bills as big as his fist and peeling off some to pay Mr. Peart for the tomatoes. I thought there were some fifty-dollar bills in there. They were a funny colour and I had never seen one before. In those days, ten dollars would buy a load of groceries that took two of us and the grocery boy to carry out to our car.
John Lindley’s place was down Maple Avenue. We would often go there after school. I remember Theresa getting me to memorize our telephone number so I could call her if I went somewhere else after school. I would ask Mrs. Lindley if I could use the phone and when you picked it up, there would be a pause and then the operator would ask: “Number, please?” I would say: “Seven-eight-four” and soon there would be a click and a ring. The operator rang the bell by pushing a button on the switchboard, and if someone didn’t answer right away, she had to remember to ring it again. Soon Theresa would answer in her most formal voice: “Doctor Deadman’s residence” and I would tell her where I was. She would then caution me not to be late for supper – it was a ritual we went through.
The Lindleys’ barn had an earth ramp up to the big door on the higher level. We played ‘kick the can’ which was something like ‘hide-and-seek’ except when you were ‘it’, you kicked an old oil can down the ramp as hard as you could while everyone else ran to hide. Then while you were chasing them, someone else would sneak up and grab the can. Then you were ‘it’ again. This could go on all afternoon. I can remember more than once, arriving home all out of breath to find that I was late for supper again.
I went to other places too, but not as much. The Sutherlands had a big house up the county line road but I didn’t go there as much. There was a big gully beside the house where the creek came down through the escarpment. It was fun to explore. Further up, we found the body of a dead sheep with the skeleton underneath. I didn’t want to look at bones and ran down to the road. The Zweeps were on that road too, but Mrs. Zweep made us play outside. We would explore the woods which were near the road north of the railway tracks and play that we were in the African jungle.
Lots of my friends lived in Hamilton. The Kappeles lived in a big house on Main Street near Wentworth. Uncle Dan had had it built when he and Aunt Reba first got married. He had a large office suite for his family doctor practice on the right-hand side of the ground floor, which was separate from the house. The rest of the house was a large three story one with servants’ quarters on the third floor. I remember it because the toilet was in a separate room from the rest of the bathroom. The toilet was the old-fashioned kind with the tank up near the ceiling and a long rope with a tassel on the end to flush it. When I was small, I had to stand on the lid to reach it. They had a pretty small back yard but we still found lots to do there.
The Fletchers lived on the second and third floors of my grandparents’ old house on Blake Street. It had been turned into a duplex when my grandfather died, and the Fletchers always lived there. It was a very nice place and the garden had a big fish pond with very large goldfish in it which I could look at for hours. But it was too formal for real playing. Mostly, Jane and I played inside or went for a walk over to the railway tracks at the foot of the Hamilton Mountain, but we weren’t supposed to go there so we didn’t do it much.
When Theresa had her house on Young Street, I went there sometimes. Her two grandchildren, Theresa and Helen were about five years younger that I was, but that was alright. There was a big railway yards nearby but we did not go there. I remember walking around the block and playing in the small back yard. Sometimes we visited a friend of Theresa’s on the mountain. She lived a few blocks south of Concession Street, and I remember many vacant lots and a farmer’s field just beyond. We played a kind of hand-ball in the vacant lot. One time, the baby, who was just learning to walk, got out on the road. I could see the thing happening in slow motion – but before I could grab her, she was hit by a slow-moving car, which was driving along the side of the gravel road. The driver insisted on taking her to the Mountain Hospital.6 Fortunately, the injuries were slight.
Piano Lessons
My mother was very musical. She was a graduate of the Toronto Conservatory of Music in violin and voice – she had a beautiful contralto voice and I remember one time she got to sing on CHML, our local radio station. She was an active member of the Duet Club, a Hamilton musical club which put on musical performances in an old building on James Street near the T.H.& B. underpass. Her violin was in the front hall closet and I used to get it out and imagine that I was Jasha Heifetz or somebody. Naturally I had to take piano lessons.
Mother played often on the grand piano which was in our living room at ‘Two Acres’. It was a Heintzman ‘E Miniature’ and had been a wedding present from her parents. I played it every morning when I was a child. One piece which my father liked was called “The Three Froggies” and involved a lot of trills and arpeggios. When friends came over, Dad would say: “John, play us The Three Froggies.” After a bit, I got to hate that piece. I remember once when he asked me to play it, I banged the keys so hard I broke one of the hammers inside the piano and Mom was very upset7.
My music teacher was Mrs. McIlwain and when I first started she lived near Campbell’s Corners, and I could walk there. When I was in grade five, she moved to Burlington and I got a ride with Uncle Eric or with Mom. She took me through Toronto Conservatory Grade Seven level and then I still went there for a year or two learning other pieces. She had a big recital every year for her students in St. Luke’s Parish Hall and all the parents came to it. This gave me a love of music which has lasted all my life. Maybe it started before that because even in Grade 3, I found that I could sing the harmony to songs at school.
Skating Lessons
My mother got me into the Hamilton Skating Club that practiced on weekends at the Victoria Curling Club in Hamilt on. I went by there a when we moved back to Hamilton 8 and it looked pretty much the same as I remembered it. My first skating was pushing a chair around the ice in Bell’s field, but later, my parents had taken me to Burlington Bay one year when it had frozen all the way across. And of course, there was pick-up hockey at school.
But this was real figure skating. I was probably only about seven or eight when I started my lessons, and I learned how to do simple figures. The club sponsored a big skating carnival every March and we all had parts in it. One year, probably 1939, they did the Wizard of Oz, because the movie with Judy Garland had just come out. All the boys in my class were Munchkins with wooden axes which we were firmly told not to swing at each other on pain of excommunication. The next year the war was on, and we were in the Air Force. I have pictures of us all dressed up in our costumes behind the old curling club.
When I got older, I took up hockey because all the other boys thought that figure skating was sissy. Also, it got hard to get black figure skates as our feet got bigger, and we sure weren’t going to wear white ones like the girls. I guess the men figure skaters must get their skates on special order or something. I still love skating although I have not been able to skate for many years. I tried skating when Grandma Bea and I were first married but I was so unsteady that she finally persuaded me that she couldn’t stand it. At our age, a fall on the ice can do real damage.
Sundays at the Lab
I didn’t see my father much because he was away early and home late. He even went to the Lab on Sundays because there might be an autopsy to do. The Laboratories at the Hamilton General Hospital were on the second floor of the old Victoria Street building and the morgue was in the basement. I remember going in there and on the first floor was the Out-Door Department. I guess we would call it Out-patients today. There were benches there and as I climbed the stairs to the second floor I could sometimes see patients waiting for the clinic.
I got to know dad’s secretary Miss Hutcheson whose office at the top of the stairs was right beside his. I also got to know Mr. Frank Elliott who was the chief lab technician. When they started the lab in 1920, they were the only staff but two decades later, they had a staff of fifty and it was one of the busiest labs in Ontario. I remember being there quite often but I was never allowed in the morgue.
When I was a bit older, we developed a pattern. I would go with him and sit in his office until he was finished in the morgue. I remember I had a nickel for the Coke machine down the hall. After dad was finished, we would go to the news stand at the Royal Connaught Hotel and buy a Sunday paper. He liked the Montreal Standard which was the Sunday version of the Montreal Star. Sometimes for a change we would get the Philadelphia Enquirer. All of them had very good colour comics that I really enjoyed on a Sunday.
One day when I was sitting in his office as he worked in the morgue, an interne offered to give me a tour. He showed me all around the lab and finally took me to a tall cupboard and when I opened the door there was a human skeleton inside. I was so scared that I just about threw up. The interne thought it was funny but I pushed it out of my mind and never told my father. I even forgot about it until one day, a year or so later, we went to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto and I walked into the dinosaur room on the second floor. One look at the bones and I ran out crying into my mother’s arms. She asked me why I was so upset and I then remembered the episode with the skeleton at the lab. It took me a few mote visits to the museum before I could walk into the dinosaur room without feeling scared.
Cubs and Scouts
My mother thought that I should be a boy scout. There was no troop in the immediate area – the nearest one was at Fairfield School the other side of Aldershot. At about age 7 or 8 I was duly recruited into Wolf Cubs and we met once a week in the basement of the school. We squatted around the wolf symbol and chanted “We’ll dob, dob, dob, dob” when our leader said “DYB” to us. This didn’t make a lot of sense until after a year or so, I found out that ‘DYB’ stood for ‘Do your best’ and we were replying ‘We’ll do our best.’ This was about as good as it got.
But it wasn’t all bad. I met another guy, Warren Ashcroft, and several of the Gallagher kids who became good friends. Finally, I became a ‘Sixer’ that meant that when we all stood around for opening or closing ceremonies, I had five other guys under my command. Just before I went up to Boy Scouts – you had to be twelve – I was the Senior Sixer, which put me in charge of all the guys. My dad began planning my future military career.
The Cub meetings were at seven o’clock and went for about an hour. Uncle Eric would drive me up and pick me up later. One time, Theresa and Eric had taken me shopping on Ottawa Street, and dropped me off on their way home. When I tried to get in, the school was locked and I couldn’t open it. I didn’t see anyone around and Theresa and Eric were long gone. I walked home. It was over two miles and it was getting dark by the time I made it. Feeling sorry for myself, I blurted out: “You left me there without even seeing if the place was open!” Theresa said that she thought she saw lights on at the school. I later found out that I was late for Cubs and the whole troop had gone on a short nature hike. I guess they didn’t wait for me.
When I was twelve, I went up to Scouts. That was better, with better things to do. We went on hikes and worked to earn badges and did lots of neat stuff. I also remember working at odd jobs to earn enough to buy a uniform. Mr. Dalgleish was our leader and he was also the principal of Fairfield School. I remember playing games like Prisoner’s Base in the school yard. Then in the various games, I was upset when the uniform I had worked for inevitably got ripped.
Since my mother was the Girl Guide commissioner for Niagara, I was asked to teach semaphore to the local Guide troop. Several girls I knew were in the group, and I was only a year or so older so there were a few problems getting them to pay attention. I guess it went OK, but they sent a few messages to me, and to each other which made me turn red and the girls laughed.
I also remember bicycle hikes with Warren Ashcroft and others on the weekend. At one point, another friend of my parents, Mr. Bob Todd, formed a troop at Maplehurst School which was a lot closer to me. He also had a friend who had a farm near Carlisle where we went for weekend camping. The farm had a dam on the creek and we swam in the pond behind the dam. We also sat under the water going over the dam and found out that by lifting one of the beams, we got a much better rush of water. Then it slowed down, so we lifted another one.
I guess we lowered the level in the pond too much and the farmer complained to Mr. Todd. He told us to put the beams back in, so we did that, even finding a couple of others lying beside the creek. The next day the level in the pond got so high that it partly flooded our campsite and even flooded one of the fields nearby. Mr. Todd was mad and gave us a long talking to. So, no matter what we did we were wrong. I don’t remember ever going back there again.
But I do remember learning to camp out in the open and cook over an open fire. I learned how to make a very comfortable bed out of willow branches woven together with string. I remember learning how to pitch a tent and put as many blankets under me as above me. I learned how to ‘orienteer’ in the woods and how to find my way back again. I could tell directions using my watch and a matchstick. You put the stick next to the hour hand and let the sun’s shadow fall across the hand. Then 12 o’clock pointed south. I always loved camping after that.
Sunday School
Religion was a big part of everyone’s life, especially in the country. I never remember my parents going to church much, but Theresa was Catholic and missing mass on a Sunday was unthinkable. We celebrated Christmas and Easter but I don’t remember church until I was older. I went to the Catholic church with Theresa one time; I bet I wasn’t any more than four. I got pretty restless because they weren’t even talking in English and I started to ask questions in my shrill piping voice like: “Can we go now?” “How much longer?” “I want to go home.” Theresa shushed me and finally gave me a book to look at. My next comment was “There aren’t any pictures in this book!” That did it. I was told to “shut up” and “sit!!!” Theresa loved to tell this story later but I don’t remember her ever taking me to her church again.
The Atkins next door had two daughters, Elsie and Dolly who were both Sunday school teachers at East Plains United Church not far from Campbell’s Corners. It changed from the Methodist Church when I was very young, but I don’t remember that. Soon I was going to Sunday school in the afternoon with Elsie every week. The Pearts and several other neighbours also went there so I felt very much amongst friends. It was OK at first, we mostly played games and drew pictures of angels and Jesus and stuff. Christmas was a big do and they decorated the church and the Sunday school and it was fun.
We were beginning to read passages from the Bible and talking about the terrible things which seemed to happen to Abraham and Isaac, Daniel, Joshua and all those other people. As kids we were unfamiliar with this stuff and life seemed pretty scary. Jesus was nice and I couldn’t believe that he would let this stuff go on. But they were even meaner to him. I was having more and more trouble with some of this. It didn’t seem fair.
One time we were talking about sin and how we sinned all the time. We couldn’t seem to help it and yet we were supposed to try to live without sin. Jesus was set up as an example of someone who lived without sin and look what happened to him. It didn’t make a lot of sense to me. We talked about the confessional which we were supposed to say every Sunday. In it we asked God’s forgiveness for all our sins, whether we knew about them or not. Then we promised not to sin until the next time. Next Sunday we were supposed to come back and say the same thing again.
I asked: “If I didn’t sin last week, does it mean that I still have to say it?” The teacher, who was somebody’s mother in the class, took me aside and told me we were born into sin and therefore, no-body, even the best person, could go a whole week without sinning. Without missing a beat, I asked: “Well then, why promise not to sin next week if it’s impossible.” There was an uproar in the class. Some kids were snickering, some looked shocked. I was told that I was a terrible sinful person and the supervisor of the Sunday school was called. I came home with Elsie in dead silence. It was awful.
My mother asked me about it the next day. I still didn’t know what I had done wrong, but my father agreed with me andI was soon transferred to the Sunday school at St. Luke’s in Burlington. It was in the afternoon and seemed like a great waste of time, but in those days, you couldn’t do much on Sunday afternoon anyway. My uncle drove me because he was a Sunday school teacher at the Presbyterian Church in Burlington. I didn’t know the kids but maybe that was an advantage after my disgrace at East Plains. I also noticed that my mother started going to church more regularly and I went with her.
One day, I decided that I didn’t feel like going to Sunday school. My father muttered something like “Come on John, your uncle is waiting.” I said in a clear and what I hoped was a sincere voice: “I’m not going this week.” Father said: “You are going. Get your coat on.” I said, a bit more emphatically: “I’m not going.” I never thought my father could move so fast. Before I knew it, I was frog-marched down the stairs to the front hall, thrown out the front door and my coat came sailing out after me, landing on my head. I didn’t try that again. You don’t fool around with fathers.
Summer Camp at Erie Heights
Summers continued on as usual, playing on the lawn, climbing trees, scaring the chickens. The year I was ten, dad told me that I was going to camp for a couple of weeks. It was “Camp Erie Heights” the Hamilton YMCA camp on Lake Erie, at a little place called Port Ryersie not far from Port Dover. By this time, I was reading “Swallows and Amazons”, the books by Arthur Ransome about some children sailing small dinghies and camping in the English Lake District.
I remember fantasizing about sailing my own boat down Lake Erie to the camp and showing off my knowledge of sailing. But it wasn’t like that at all. My parents drove me in the car and I had to line up to check in. There were wooden cabins with five metal double bunks in each one. There was a large grassy plain with the dining hall and the staff houses on the other side. There was an infirmary and a craft hut on the north side. And on the south side was the lake. There was a high bank, a sandy beach and, because Lake Erie is so shallow, a long dock going way out into the lake. Even at the end of the dock, the water was only about six feet deep. You weren’t allowed out there unless you passed a swimming test.
They didn’t have many boats, and the waves were usually too high for much boating. So, you had to be a super swimmer and pass a boating test to take out the boats. I never made it. We mostly hiked back into the woods behind the camp or worked in the craft areas or went swimming. I remember one time seeing exciting movies in the dining hall about a guy who crashed his plane in the Northwest Territories and had to find his way back to civilization. I was homesick.
The second year I was there, I was eleven and in the senior camp. We had a covered wagon trip over to the huge sand dunes which were further along the lakeshore. All I remember about that trip was the huge mosquitoes. We were swatting all night in our blanket rolls. One of my friends said that they were as big as Piper Cubs9. He said you had to carry a hammer with you. When a mosquito was chasing you, you would run up to a tree, the at the last-minute nip around the other side and when the mosquito’s stinger came through the tree, use the hammer to bang down the end so that he couldn’t get away. You know, we almost believed that one.
One other recollection of that year. I loved science and we had a science project about insects. My project was to collect as many bugs as came around a light in June and tell what kind they were. Dad helped me and we must have got more than twenty kinds in the old shoe box mom gave us. It was great—all kinds of flies, beetles and six June bugs. The next day I went into school with my prize box under my arm and couldn’t wait until Miss Huffman asked us to show our projects. I whipped the lid off the box and all the bugs took off. I can still remember kids trying to catch the flies, and the June bugs buzzing against the windows. That was the end of that science project.
At the end of the school year, Miss Huffman left the school to get married. In those days, teachers were supposed to quit when they got married although, with wartime shortages, many exceptions were made. I remember lining up to say goodbye and being very embarrassed when Miss Huffman gave us each a big hug and a kiss. Even though we sometimes played ‘Post Office’ then, I had never had this happen except from relatives who didn’t count. I went with some of the older kids to her wedding in Hamilton too. I felt really grown up.
I was at Camp Erie Heights for July, and I only remember one thing about that—my first pair of long pants. I had to have them for camp for hiking in rough brush and stuff. Up till then I was wearing shorts in the warm weather and “knickers”10 in the cold weather. I must have been the oldest kid in Canada still wearing knickers at the age of eleven. My mother was having trouble finding them big enough for me. Once I had my own pair of real long pants, I refused to go back to knickers and Theresa and my father sided with me. At that point my mother relented.
In August, we hung around the Bullock’s store and talked. They were closing all the one-room schools in Nelson soon, so they wouldn’t be hiring a new teacher like Miss Huffman. But the school would be kept open for at least another year. Then all the kids would have to go into Burlington Public School next to the High School off Brant Street. So, they hired Mrs. Gray, a retired high school English teacher for our school for one year. She was much more the image of the hard-bitten old teacher than Miss Huffman had ever been.
I remember that my dad had said that I had to be twelve before I got a bike but I pleaded and he relented. In August I got a black wartime bike—very basic. John Lindley and all my friends had bikes already, so I only had a couple of weeks to be a pro. I started off on the front lawn, which is not the easiest place to ride, but after a number of bumps and scrapes, I learned how to mount and get started, how to use the coaster-brake, and how to get off. I also learned how to extract the cuff of my new long pants from the front sprocket.
Mrs. Gray
On the first day of grade seven, Mrs. Gray announced that she was assigning homework. She seemed shocked that Miss Huffman had not given homework. She was sneaky too. She didn’t assign it until just before 4 o’clock when we were packing up to go home. I didn’t even take any books home—figuring that I would have time to do it first thing next day. As I was settling down the next morning, Mrs. Gray asked us all to turn in our homework so she could mark it. Consternation!! Many kids had done it, but I had to admit that I had not. Mrs. Gray said: “Then you high-tail it right home and don’t come back until it is done.” Everybody was laughing as I went out the door.
When I got home, Theresa said: “Well, bless my soul, what are you doing home?” I told her what had happened. She exclaimed: “The saints forgive us; you never told us you had homework!” She made me sit on the laundry stoop outside the back door until I had done the work and then sent me back to school without even letting me inside. She said afterwards that I sat there like a little ‘stoten bottle.’11 I never liked homework much after that.
But I got to like Mrs. Gray. She was tough but fair. And you always knew what she expected. There were only three kids in grade eight that year and about ten in grade seven with me. She decided to put us all into a combined grade seven-eight. She drilled us on all the subjects, particularly English, her specialty. I learned all about participles, and gerunds and how to use subordinate clauses and how to pick the right word for what you wanted to say. We even learned the subjunctive—there were kids in the first year of university who didn’t know about that.
And, wonder of wonders, I was getting interested in girls. I may have been a bit ahead of the other boys but we started playing ‘post office’12 and teasing girls in a different way. I even had my first girlfriend. Georgina Barnes and I were best friends for a while. We didn’t have dates or go steady, that was to come later in high school.
I read books which were at a high school level. I memorized the poetry of Shelly, Keats and Kipling. Also, I will never forget ‘Innisfree’ by W. B. Yeats’ and the “…bee-loud glade…” It was drummed into my head until I could recite it in my sleep. My love of the English language was due to that year with Mrs. Gray. She has one other thing to her credit. Of the 13 kids in the grade seven-eight class, 10 including me, were recommended for high-school Entrance without writing the exams. And two of the other three passed the examinations. I was going to high school at the age of twelve.
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’13 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.14
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 Allendale, 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 bags15 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.
I felt very grown up as I contemplated high school in September. It was another transition which I sort of vaguely recognized at the time. But in late summer, it is sometimes hard to think of growing up.
Notes:
1 We lived just to the east of the county line between Wentworth County, East Flamborough Township and Halton County, Nelson Township. The area was settled by veterans of the Napoleonic Wars and many of the place names reflected that. Names like Nelson, Trafalgar, Palermo. The town of Burlington was originally called Wellington Square.
2 This was duly recorded in the Burlington Gazette, 12 July, 1939, p. 5. The short note reads: John Deadman, age 8, R.R. 1 Aldershot, had the misfortune to fall off a swing at the Beach and fracture his arm. He received treatment at the Hamilton General hospital.
3 I know that this term is not acceptable now, they are now aboriginal. But that was the term in use then.
4 We mentioned this in Chapter 4, ‘A Child’s Christmas in Aldershot’.
5 I always thought that Punch was a Shetland Pony but Marg Ann corrected me recently. Apparently, Punch was a Hackney.
6 The Hamilton Mountain Hospital had a large obstetrical unit called the Nora Frances Henderson Wing. Later the hospital was known as the Henderson General Hospital. More recently the hospital was completely rebuilt and it was then called the Juravinski Hospital. Many people were annoyed by this because Nora Frances Henderson was a famous name in Hamilton.
7 We had the piano in our home until quite recently. Several years ago, one of my grandchildren was playing it vigorously and a hammer broke. When I opened the piano to look at it, I discovered that it had been repaired before. That must have been the one that I broke so many years ago.
8 We moved back to Hamilton in 1984 and it seemed to me that very little had changed downtown. Over the next ten years, there was a lot of rebuilding so that now it is completely different.
9 A Piper Cub was a small, single engine plane which was popular at the time. Every kid had the ambition that one day he would own one.
10 ‘Knickers’ or Knickerbockers were heavy pants that came just below the knee something like riding breeches. They were worn with knee-length socks and stood up to mud, sliding down roofs and a lot of other abuse.
11 We never really knew what a ‘stoten bottle’ was, and neither did Theresa. It was just an expression her mother used. Later, an Irish friend told me that it was probably a stouten bottle—one of the stone or porcelain bottles used to hold stout. In the old days, public houses made their own beer and saved these bottles to put it in. In every pub, you could see rows of these squat little bottles up on a shelf.
12 One of many games that you get to kiss a girl.
13 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.
14 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.
15 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!