Chapter Nine
The Summer of ’43
I started grade nine at Burlington High School in September. It was 1943, the war was dragging on slowly and the principal, Mr. Bateman, was overseas in the army. The vice-principal, Mr. William ‘Bill’ Kay was the acting principal. His son, William Blandford Kay had been a friend of mine for a long time. In fact, his birthday and mine were only one day apart. My mother and his mother had shared a room in the hospital when we were born and had been friends ever since. Blandford was his middle name, a bit pretentious but somehow it suited him. He told me that he had been called “Billy” as a young child and hated it. He didn’t like ‘Junior’ and ‘William was too formal for him.
The first few days in the fall my uncle drove me to school, but after that I rode my bike. I rode on the recently opened Queen Elizabeth Way to Freeman and then south on Brant Street to the high School. The pavement was narrow and the busy traffic was scary for someone on a bike. I soon discovered that I could cut through the rail yards around the station at Freeman to avoid traffic and save some time. But I had to cross several sets of open tracks and watch out for shunting trains.
Brant Street wasn’t much better. It was a narrow two lane concrete road without curbs and a drop-off from the edge of the pavement to the gravel shoulder. I quickly learned that you didn’t let your wheel drop off the pavement because it would throw you. I remember taking one bad fall and having the school nurse dig dirt and small stones out of my bloody knees and hands. It made me think of my father’s stories about riding his bike on gravel roads in the Queen’s Bush in the early days.
I remember moving around between rooms for various classes – something you don’t do in a one-room school. There were four classes in Grade 9, three in the regular stream and one ‘Commercial.’ I was in “9A” because we were placed alphabetically. Our home room teacher, Mrs. Tyrell, like Mrs. Gray, had come back after she was married because of the teacher shortage during the war. We took English and French, and algebra and geometry and science, now divided into physics and chemistry. We took British history from a new teacher who seemed very nervous and jumpy. One of the guys sat in the back and threw paper airplanes or made funny noises. One time the teacher got so mad she tried to hit him with a pointer and broke it on his shoulder. She was not back the next year. I felt sorry for her. I think she hated her job.
I remember cadet corps parades, and football in the fall, and finding out that my Indian friends of last year were no longer in our social group. They hung out somewhere else and I didn’t see them much. I was upset that I couldn’t have both my new friends and my old friends. It was subtle at first but as time went on, it became clearer. This was my first taste of racial discrimination and I remember that it caught me by surprise.
As a wartime measure, farm kids could stay home to help with the harvest and start fall classes in mid-October. In the spring, the same kids got off early to help with the planting. Lloyd Vivian was one of the farm boys. I remember him showed me his artificial leg. Several years before, he got his leg caught in a threshing machine while helping with the harvest.
I remember my first dance. I was too scared to ask a girl to dance and stood at the side with a few other grade niners. Georgina Barnes came over and asked me to dance. I was both embarrassed and relieved that I was on the dance floor. The next few dances were only slightly better. Later, my mother registered me for ballroom dancing in Hamilton, with the children of her friends. It was at the Royal Connaught Hotel, appropriately enough in the Ballroom, and I learned the Fox Trot, the Waltz, the Rumba and The Samba. But I still used the old two-step that Georgina had taught me. And I still felt nervous at the school dances.
I remember basketball games in the gymnasium and skiing with the Todds at Cedar Springs Golf Club. By this time, Mr. Todd was our Boy Scout leader and he would take us on nature hikes and out on his sail boat on the bay, as soon as we could swim well enough to satisfy him. In high school, there were more organized teams and I found that I really couldn’t compete with the rest of the guys in football, baseball, hockey and so-forth. So, I tended to like games that were less popular like soccer, or individual sports like skating, skiing, and sailing.
By the spring of ’44, the war was reaching its climax and things were looking better for the Allies. The big invasion of Europe, codename “Overlord” started in June and although the fighting was fierce, I was never in doubt that our side would win. My cousin Mary had joined the Nursing Sisters and was in England for much of the war. She married a Canadian army officer in England and he went over to France after the invasion. A couple of months later he was reported “missing in action, presumed killed.” I was old enough to fully appreciate this and I felt terrible for Mary.
The Summer of ’44
In July I was off to Camp Kitchikewana again, this time for a month. On the way up, I went to visit the McLenahans for a day or so before camp and Mary drove me over to the ferry dock the next day. I was already feeling a bit home-sick and I remember sneaking out to the magic seat when no-one was looking and wishing that my parents could come up after camp and drive me home.
I was in senior camp this year and it was a rough and ready crowd from Toronto and Windsor. I was rapidly growing up and was able to hold my own at swimming and canoeing. I remember our canoe trip being rained out on the second day. We were all soaked and cold, sitting under the overturned canoes. The camp finally sent a truck out to rescue us. I remember packing up to go home and finding that my favourite copy of the National Geographic had gone missing. I lost a lot of other stuff too. When the ferry arrived in Midland, there was Mary to meet me and my parents were there too. I began to believe in magic.
I learned some new words which I didn’t quite understand. It really upset my parents when I used the words “whore house” at the dinner table at home after I got home sometime later. I can remember my father suddenly rearing up at his end of the table and I immediately cowered in my chair. My mother said in a somewhat urgent voice, “Bill, I don’t think he knows what it means.” I didn’t speak up at the dinner table for a long time after that.
Somewhere in there I built a playhouse in one of the unused chicken runs. Theresa and Helen helped me and it had a door and windows and everything. I even got some left-over shingles from the house and shingled the roof. We also planted three vegetable gardens alongside it. I insisted on having a few corn plants in my plot but they didn’t produce much. I was upset and watered it and fertilized it and everything. Uncle Eric said that corn has to have a lot of corn plants around it to pollinate properly so I was content to have corn from his big patches.
I think it was about this time that my mother decided to call our place “Two Acres.” She had been trying to think of a name for some time. We got a sign made with a nice post to hang it on out near the road. I used to sit under the sign and name the cars as they went by. The rest of the summer was a bit of a blur – swimming at Hidden Valley pool, bike hikes with my Scouting friend Warren Ashcroft, playing with school friends and, oh yes, the rope railway. My friend Peter Kappele and I were responsible for that. During boring classes in school, I had designed it. We started building it in the spring but the summer holidays were a great time to finish it.
The Rope Railway
It was a small-scale version of the Spanish Aero Car over the Whirlpool Rapids on the Niagara River. It was to run from the back of the barn to near the chicken house. There were still a lot of hand hewn timbers left over from demolishing the back wing of the barn. Further, there was an opening on the upper level of the barn at just the right place. We used some of the great timbers to build a tower near the chicken house which must have been at least 12 feet tall. I measured the distance between the tower and the back of the barn. It was almost 90 feet. 30 yards sounded better so when I inveigled my father into buying some grass rope he was alarmed to discover that I needed 180 feet at 3½¢ a foot – a huge amount in those days. But I had it all figured out.
Peter and I strung two ropes across the gap and tightened it. We had a third rope to pull the car across. We then suspended the small car we had built using pulleys out of Uncle Eric’s block and tackle. The empty car ran across just fine. It was ready for the real test. I got in the car and Peter pushed me out from the barn opening. The ropes immediately stretched and I was propelled down the stretching ropes until the car ran into the ground with a juddering thump. I was thrown out on the ground. The ropes immediately rebounded, firing the car high in the air. The car jumped off the ropes in its trajectory and suddenly it was falling toward me. I never moved so fast in my life and it landed just a few feet away. Oh well, back to the drawing board.
The next step was to pre-stretch the ropes. We loaded a 100 lb. bag of chicken feed into the car on the ropes and let it sit about two feet off the ground in the middle for a whole day. We then tightened the ropes and tried it again. This time it worked, but in the middle, I was only about three feet off the ground and it was a hard pull to get back up to the tower or the second level of the barn. We tried sending Susie, the cocker spaniel across, but I guess Susie didn’t trust our engineering. Neither did Theresa who didn’t even want to look at our apparatus. And Uncle Eric was not amused because we had cut a piece out of the chicken house roof to attach a backstay for the tower which leaned alarmingly without it.
By this time, we were losing interest in the project but despite his earlier misgivings, my father was quite proud of it and took his friends out to see “…what my son built.” Mother was patient and mildly appreciative as always. Aunt Christine only went out once to look at it then returned to the house muttering: “That boy will kill himself someday.” A prophet in his own land!!
In grade 10, I got Osgood-Schlatter’s disease1 and had to wear a plaster splint on my leg for the fall term. This meant that I couldn’t go in the Cadet Corps or play sports. I had a spare period right after lunch and decided to take typing with the commercial kids. My parents had given me a portable typewriter and I was busy writing stories and letters and learning to touch-type was good. I remember those days at BHS on the great big heavy Underwoods with the large top frames that had to be thrown back at the end of each line. One thing about it, your fingers got very strong. For many years after that, I didn’t touch a typewriter but forty years later when I bought my first computer, all my Grade 10 typing quickly came back to me.
I took both French and German from Miss Eby. She was an institution at BHS; story goes that she had been there forever and would go on forever. She was a large woman with greying dark hair and grey tinted glasses which gave her a somewhat formidable appearance. She had a deep gravelly voice and would greet us each morning with: “Bonjour class!” In voices at least one octave higher than hers we would reply: “Bonjour, Ma’m’selle Eby. This became a ritual.
By the winter of ’45, our troops were in France, Belgium and Italy. The Italians had quit but the Germans were still fighting fiercely. I remember the “Battle of the Bulge.” In Belgium and Holland, the Germans were being pushed back relentlessly until they suddenly mounted a counter-attack and made a great bulge in the front line. This was a great worry to my father, but I still had confidence we would win. The end came in early May and there was great cheering and celebration in Burlington. But the war wasn’t over. We still had to defeat the Japanese in the Pacific.
The Summer of ’45
Dad had been talking about sending me to boarding school for some time, but now it was for real. In the spring he took me to Trinity College School in Port Hope and I met Mr. Ketchum, the Headmaster and a lot of other people. There were some qualifying exams and I found that I was going into Fourth Form which was the equivalent of Grade 11. I was not too keen on being away from home for a whole term. The longest I had ever been away was 4 weeks at camp. However, the school looked nice so I figured I could handle it.
My father was not too impressed with Camp Kitchikewana after my witless use of profanity at dinner that day last fall. So, he decided to send me to Camp Pioneer in Muskoka, run by the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship. He figured with that connection it should have a slightly higher class of boys. I met the camp group in Union Station in Toronto and we went on the train to Utterson which was the station for Port Sydney on Mary Lake. The camp flat-bed truck met us there and a bunch of us piled on the back with a canoe and assorted other junk. We wended our way into the camp which was on Clearwater Lake, a small lake south of Pt. Sydney.
It was a great camping experience in the woods, sleeping in big army tents set on wooden platforms. We were swimming and hiking and going on canoe trips – I was on a trip from Mary Lake right up the Mary River to Huntsville. I remember that I was stern paddle and didn’t swing the canoe fast enough when we came up to the Huntsville pier. Instead of laying it nicely alongside, we rammed the pier. But damage was minor and everything was OK. We camped on a rocky bluff in Lake Vernon that night. We chopped branches off juniper bushes for a makeshift mattress and slept fairly well.
I remember that summer mainly for a visit to our friends the Beatons. They had been living in Kirkland Lake but were now in Whitby. Bill Jr. was about my age and we had a really good time. I had the 12th of August circled on the calendar because that was when they were planning to visit us. One day Murray Peart noticed the circle and asked me what was happening then. I said glibly: “Oh that’s when the war will be over. Murray said: “You’re crazy. Those Japs will fight for another year.”
August arrived with the Japanese and the Americans fighting a vicious battle for every island and foxhole in the South Pacific. Some Canadians from the European front had agreed to go to the Pacific after VE Day but they were still in transit. We saw horrible scenes on the newsreels of soldiers using flame-throwers to burn the Japs out of caves. We also heard about the “Kamikazes,” the suicide pilots who flew their explosive-laden planes into Allied ships. Things looked bad. I still believed that we would win, but we were all tired of war. Then there was a test of a new super-atom-bomb in the New Mexico desert. The Atomic Age had arrived.
President Roosevelt had died in the spring, before VE Day. This was considered a great tragedy and my dad was not too impressed with Harry Truman, the Vice-President who immediately replaced him as President. But dad liked him better after a year or so. One day in August, we heard on the radio that one of these atomic bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima, flattening the city. A few days later, another one was dropped on Nagasaki. We then heard rumblings about the Japanese suing for peace. On August 12th, just before the Beatons arrived, there was a special news flash that Japan was surrendering. The terms of surrender were signed in Tokyo harbour on the 15th. The war was over just as my glib remark had predicted. Murray was not impressed.
Before I knew it, the summer was over and I was getting ready to go to boarding school. Mother was sewing name labels on all my clothes; dad took me in to Eaton’s to get a grey suit (I already had a blue one) and they dug a big steamer trunk out of the basement to hold all my clothes. It was the one that mother had taken to Europe in 1926 and had some pretty impressive foreign labels on it. This was for real.
Classes at TCS started a week after Labour Day, so I saw some of my friends already back at Burlington HS who wondered where I was. I told them I was off to Trinity College School and they said “Deadman is off with the high mucky-mucks.” My best friend said: “Boy John, you’ll be a snob in no time – won’t have time for us.” I said that I would see them all at Christmas.
Fall of ’45 – Off to Trinity College School
My dad said he would drive me to the school. The old Oldsmobile was on its last legs. The clutch release wasn’t working so it was hard to change gears. How did you change them? Brute force and rather noisily! Also, it was burning a quart of oil every hundred miles or so, and my father bought oil by the gallon at Canadian Tire and put it in himself – sometimes on the side of the road. And the wartime tires shed their tread at inopportune times. The windshield that I had cracked several years before was still not fixed.
As a physician, my dad had priority for the first new car which rolled off the production lines, recently converted from producing tanks and army trucks. The demand was so high that when he finally got the car, a Dodge, there were several bits missing, like the bumpers, which were to be provided later. I remember that my dad paid $1525 for it – a lot of money in those days. He sold the Oldsmobile privately and despite its problems, the buyer was pleased to pay $800 for it. Dad had got it for $1200 in 1939. Not a bad depreciation for 6 years and 120,000 miles. Dad did a lot of driving even during gas rationing in the war.
Finally, it was time to go to the school in Port Hope. My steamer trunk would not fit in the car so we sent it to Port Hope by rail express. A hundred miles, a flat tire and a quart of oil later we arrived at the school. I came to know that route through Port Hope very well – down the long hill of the main street, over the Ganaraska River, left turn onto Highway 28 and immediately right onto the street up the hill to the school.
Notes:
1 Osgood-Schlatter’s disease was common in adolescence. It is an inflammation of the joints, particularly the knee joints, and was aggravated by things like bicycle riding and running sports. The treatment was to immobilize the joint and then gradually increase movements.