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5 Beware Gentle Percy

The deer enclosure was Percy Hill’s pet. He was superintendent of the Galt Parks Board in the 1940s. The enclosure extended hundreds of feet into the hardwoods from the duck pond and allowed visitors to watch deer run in close to natural surroundings. The duck pond hosted a variety of tamed birds that shrieked, squawked, and honked everyone out of their beds within earshot at dawn each day. There were also platoons of multi-coloured rabbits that took leave to visit gardens for blocks around. Percy loved animals and nature.

Most Saturday mornings he sat in the Morris chair in my parents’ kitchen and discussed begonias and peat moss with my dad who had a little greenhouse leaning on the garage. Pop sold him geranium slippings.

Percy was tall, slim, soft-spoken, and gentle and gave much thought to the ways of the universe, but God help anyone who crossed him up. One morning he sat in the Morris chair with our cat purring in his lap and recounted with relish the fate of people who stole firewood.

He and the men who tended Victoria Park trimmed dead wood and burnt it in their own fireplaces. They stacked the wood at the end of the service lane behind the deer pens and took it home at their leisure. Every time they got a nice pile together, however, someone stole it. Percy, figuring the thieves came in the dead of night, rigged a trap for them. He drove four-inch spikes through a plank and laid it across the lane in front of the woodpile, spikes down during the day, but up at night. For weeks nothing happened. Then one morning Percy went in to find the wood stolen again. The spikes were up, but the wood was gone.

Later that morning he went for gas at Mil’s Service Station at the foot of Blenheim Road. The attendant at the pumps told Percy he had seen something that morning that he hadn’t seen in thirty years at the service station. A little pickup truck limped in with four flat tires. Yes, it was carrying a load of wood. Percy took the spiked plank away. The wood was never stolen again.