Читать книгу The Way of a Gardener - Des Kennedy - Страница 10
ОглавлениеWe could never have loved the earth so well
if we had had no childhood in it.
GEORGE ELIOT, The Mill on the Floss
IN 1954 MY FATHER LEFT my mother and us four boys in Woolton and sailed off to the faraway land of Canada. The plan was that he would find work and save every penny toward buying a house to which we would all move in a year or so. Not everyone approved of the scheme. One of the teachers at our school voiced what others were likely thinking: that this was reckless foolhardiness on his part, that he was bound to fail as other dreamers had failed before him, and that he’d be back in no time with his grand dreams crushed and his tail between his legs.
But at home we entertained no doubts. As my mother wrote to my dad during their long separation: “the boys still go [to Mass] most days. They are all keeping well and talking of Canada and I get tired of their questions. They do try to be as good as they can. I am sure you will be very glad to see them all again . . .We shall be glad to get word from you to cross, we’ll lose no time in getting out of this place.” All my hopes and yearnings were of leaving grimy old Merseyside for the wild excitement of what people still called the New World. The Canada I dreamed of moving to was a vast land of forested wilderness. Television helped stoke the fantasy. One of our favorite shows on the BBC at that time was called The Cabin in the Clearing, in which a pioneer couple and their brave daughter, Alice, were repeatedly menaced by wild animals and besieged in their isolated log cabin by murderous Shawnee Indians. I fantasized being with them in the wilderness, protecting pretty Alice from the perils that beset her. One evening, after much pleading, our mother allowed us kids to stay up past our normal bedtime to watch a TV special featuring “the singing rage Miss Patti Page.” Fetchingly dressed in a buckskin outfit, perfectly pert and blond and American, she seemed to me the most beautiful woman imaginable singing the most heartrending songs I’d ever heard. And she lived across the ocean, in the land where our father already was and we would soon be.
Finally, in early 1955, a letter arrived with the joyous news we’d awaited so long—our dad had bought a house! He enclosed several small black and white snapshots of what looked to us like an imposing wooden home on a considerable estate. As my mother had promised, we lost no time in disposing of our possessions and preparing to leave in the first week of May, even though this meant abandoning school before our terms were completed. The mid-fifties were the final days when transatlantic liners still were a cheaper alternative to airline travel, so we would take a boat to Canada. Berthed at the Liverpool docks, the Cunard Line ship seemed to me a truly magnificent ocean liner. My earlier fears over boarding the Mersey ferry were long gone, and as the great vessel was pulled away from the wharf and made its way out into the Irish Sea I was filled with a thrilling sense of adventure. As twilight descended, my brothers and I stood at the stern of the boat and watched the twinkling lights of Liverpool slowly fade and vanish into the darkness. We were leaving once and for all; the past was behind us and ahead lay unimagined possibilities.
Everything was changed on that voyage. There was no Mass to attend in the morning, or any school all day. We ate our meals in a plush dining room, served by an acerbic waiter. Not long into the voyage, our mother succumbed to seasickness that confined her to her bunk. We kids were free to roam, make pals with other kids, and get into whatever mischief offered itself, mostly by poking around areas of the ship we were not supposed to enter. Though our mum tried her best to maintain some discipline, we were experiencing a freedom we’d never known before, unhampered by any realization of how temporary a state of affairs this was. The latter part of the voyage involved much watching for icebergs and a collective anxiety that we not suffer the same fate as the Titanic.
Then the great excitement of first sighting land. We gathered at the railings and made out on the far horizon a low gray smudge. Cruising up the Saint Lawrence River offered a stunning validation of all my expectations. Forests and farms stretched away from either shore. Wooded hillsides rose beyond. Kids paddled out in canoes to wave greetings to us and ride the wake of our great ship’s passing. What a brilliant, wild, wide-open place we’d arrived at!
We disembarked at Montreal and took a train to Toronto. Again, I thrilled to mile after mile of woodlands, farms, lakes, and rivers. We pulled into Union Station in Toronto and wandered together into the waiting crowd. Suddenly a man burst forward and clasped us all in his arms. It was our dad, though he seemed almost a stranger, it had been so long since we’d seen him.
When we got to our new home it was in fact not a country estate, and certainly no cabin in a clearing, but a modest little two-story clapboard house on a city lot in the town of Weston on the outskirts of Toronto. But, wonder of wonders, there were trees growing on the lot, our very own trees—a row of scraggly evergreens out front and several big shade trees in the backyard. The whole neighborhood seemed dominated by enormous spreading trees. Although we were in a new country, with neither relatives nor friends, this appeared to me a far more green and pleasant land than the dreary treeless streets of Woolton Village we’d left behind. Paradoxically, our emigration seemed to me more coming home than exile. Of course, at nine years of age, admiring the few scrawny trees growing around our new home, I had no real idea of what might lie ahead of me. But I think I did have some nascent sense of having answered the call of trees, that the long journey we had just completed had taken me partway toward a destination I did not yet understand.
IT WAS MID-MAY of 1955 when our transplanted family finally got settled in Weston. The school year had little more than a month remaining, but Ger, Brendan, and I were enrolled straightaway at Saint John the Evangelist Catholic School, operated by an order of nuns called the Faithful Companions of Jesus. I think there was some initial confusion as to how our English standards fit with Canadian grades, but I ended up in the grade 4 class under the tutelage of a dour lay teacher named Mrs. Kavanagh. As far as the grade 4 class was concerned, I was the new kid, an immigrant who talked funny and had peculiar red hair. A “limey.” (My mother explained that calling us limeys only served to expose the ignorance of those using the term: the applicable pejorative for a Liverpudlian would be “Scouser,” from our distinctive dialect called “scouse.”) Almost straightaway, we had a little class field day of sorts and in the feature event, the less-than-a-hundred-yard dash across the playground, I finished in a dead heat for first with a startled Wally Somebody who was the most gifted athlete in the class. Few accomplishments could have more effectively established my credentials. In my eagerness to fit in, I quickly adopted whatever local slang I could, which may have won favor with my classmates but certainly didn’t with Mrs. Kavanagh. Twice I was held in after school and compelled to write on the blackboard fifty times, on one occasion “Geez is not a word” and on another “Ain’t is not a word.”
But I had not fallen from grace; far from it. In fact our churchgoing intensified. The school and adjacent church were about a mile from our house, a pleasant walk along tree-lined streets. My brothers and I would walk to Mass every morning before school, though hardly any other kids did this. We couldn’t receive Holy Communion, because we’d eaten breakfast before setting out, but on Saturdays we’d walk to Mass in the morning, when we could take Communion, then back home for breakfast, and return to church for confession in the afternoon. On Sundays my father would drive the family to Mass in the morning and some of us boys would walk back to church for Benediction on Sunday evening. There’d be lots of kids at Sunday Mass, since it was a mortal sin to miss it, but none at Benediction—they’d all be at home watching Walt Disney on TV while we’d kneel in the deserted church with a few old ladies groaning away at turgid hymns like “Tantum Ergo Sacramentum.”
We were genuine little saints, my brothers and I. One of our favorite pastimes was to play at saying Mass. We’d create a little makeshift altar in the house from whatever props we had at hand and dress ourselves as priest—a prized role that almost always fell to Ger, who was the primary instigator in the business—and altar boys, then go through the entire ritual, raising our make-believe Host, ringing the bells and all. Holy Mother Church remained at the core of our lives.
Soon we were released for summer vacation, which stretched for an eternity compared with the short English school holidays we’d known. That was the summer of Davy Crockett—the Disney version of America’s greatest frontiersman was everywhere, on television and in movie theaters. Three different versions of “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” played repeatedly on radio. Kids were wearing coonskin caps and moccasins. Naturally this fed right into my pre-existing frontier fetishes, and I soon had a pair of moccasins myself. Jim Bowie, Kit Carson, Daniel Boone—I couldn’t get enough of them. I devoured Western comic books and TV shows. I acquired a miniature ranch and used to spend hours arranging its fences and buildings and moving around the small figures of cowboys and Indians engaged in endless dispute.
The public schoolyard across from our house had a softball diamond, and frequently on the long, warm summer evenings a crowd would gather for a men’s fast-pitch game. These were fabulous events, the players men of immense strength and skill, the uniformed umpire as authoritative a figure as any priest or policeman, the crowds of wives and girlfriends raucous in their running commentaries. I’d experienced nothing like it before: the determination of a batter digging in, the lightning-fast pitch and smack of the ball into the catcher’s mitt, the time-honed chants of the players—“Hum, baby, hum!” “You got him, you got him!”— repeated like incantations. This was a game I wanted to play.
I WAS NOT aware at the time of how precarious our financial situation was. Something had gone wrong with the house purchase and, I only learned much later, we had almost lost the house and our investment in it. My father worked at two jobs. He’d leave home late in the evening to work the night shift as a maintenance man on the Toronto subway system known as the ttc . Returning home in the morning, he’d have breakfast and then go to a nearby nursery where he’d work in the greenhouses for another four or five hours, or if there was no nursery work, he’d pick up day-laboring jobs from the labor exchange. In the afternoon he’d work at our place. In very short order, to my dismay, the trees on our property that I’d prized so much upon arrival had been chopped down to make way for gardens, and within a year or two the front yard was a full English cottage garden while the yard out back was chockablock with fruits and vegetables. My dad would sleep for a few hours in the late afternoon and evening and then begin the work cycle all over again. At the t tc he’d take any special shifts available—on Christmas Day or New Year’s Eve—because of the extra pay involved. In all the years I was at home my parents never took a vacation anywhere.
My brothers and I learned from an early age how not to be noisy. Dear old Mum had a very limited tolerance for what she called “bedlam,” which would be anything much louder than the sound of snow falling. If I’d tried to raise four active boys within the confines of a small house I’m sure I’d have adopted a similar approach. Plus there was the wrath of a sleep-deprived dad to consider; if we kids were around the house and made any sound at all that awoke him from his slumbers, it was rather like facing a grouchy bear emerging from hibernation. We became adept at creeping and whispering, and came to think of noisy people as depraved.
For the first few years we were identifiably poor amid the modest affluence of our neighbors. In contrast to England, here almost everybody owned their own house; some even had a summer cottage up at Lake Simcoe or on Georgian Bay. Everyone owned a car. A few days before our first Christmas in Canada, there came a rapping on our front door. Two men, volunteers from the parish, had come to deliver a Christmas hamper. We kids were thrilled at all the unaccustomed treats stuffed into the bushel basket, but my parents were mortified. They told the Good Samaritans that we didn’t need or want the hamper, that there must be poor people in the parish who deserved it far more than we. There was a terrible awkwardness as we all stood in our little front room, the adults contending over disposition of the hamper, we kids not saying a word. I retain no memory of whether the hamper was finally refused or reluctantly accepted, delight in its treats tainted by the shame that was attached to them. The hamper proclaimed our poverty, that we were a charity case, and this was bitterly intolerable.
As soon as we were old enough, we boys began contributing to the cash flow. Ger and I started with a large paper route when I was about eleven, delivering the old Telegram and eventually switching to the rival Toronto Star. Spring through fall we’d haul our papers on a wagon and in winter on a sleigh. Like our fellow paperboys we took great pride in knowing how to bundle a paper tightly against itself so you could chuck it from sidewalk to front door without its opening up on impact. Within a year or two we each had our own route, and Ger soon graduated to being assistant on the truck that dropped off each delivery boy’s bundles.
The daily rounds of a paperboy were full of perks and perils— I was bitten by dogs and f lirted with by girls, and I gained fascinating glimpses into the homes and lives of my customers. I opened my own bank account and derived immense pleasure from its accumulating capital. My first paper route ran down what we called Main Street, the heart of old Weston and now called Weston Road. Here I got to deliver to a mortuary and to a shop that sold scandalous-looking ladies’ lingerie. I was equally intrigued by prosthetic devices in one of the shops I served, and treated kindly at the local police station where the cops would occasionally show me their guns.
Best of all, the route brought me into close proximity to the Humber River, which ran through a deep valley more or less parallel to Main Street. This was the kind of wild area toward which my inner Davy Crockett yearned. I spent many a summer afternoon, either alone or with school chums, poking around the willow-cloaked valley bottom and fishing for big suckers in the river’s pools. A century earlier the Humber had powered a sawmill and later a flour mill, both of which played a major role in the town’s development. But the mills were long gone and so was most everything else along the valley, because it had been one of the areas hardest hit by Hurricane Hazel, the deadliest hurricane in Canadian history, which struck in October of 1954. Almost a foot of rainfall within forty-eight hours had sent a wall of water roaring down the Humber that swept away everything in its path, including one whole block of homes in which thirty-two sleeping residents were killed within an hour. The floodplain was subsequently designated off limits for development, and the resultant ribbon of wilderness through the city fit my predilections perfectly.
SHORTLY AFTER EACH new school year began I would get swept up in World Series fever. This was the golden age of baseball, before expansion and multimillion-dollar contracts. I joined my schoolmates in thrilling to the exploits of Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays and Hammerin’ Hank Aaron. We became passionately attached to one team or another. To be sitting in a classroom while the Series games were being played mid-afternoon was pure torture, rendered even more torturous by a sympathetic teacher occasionally providing a scoring update. Within a year or two I’d uncharacteristically become one of the bad boys who’d sneak a miniature transistor radio into the classroom and furtively listen to the game through a cleverly concealed earpiece. And why not? There was nothing in the curriculum, scarcely anything in the universe, of greater consequence than that the Dodgers—the great Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Gil Hodges, Duke Snider, and the other Bums—took the 1955 Series over the Yanks in seven games. Or that the following year the excellence of Mantle, Yogi Berra, and Whitey Ford and Don Larsen’s perfect game powered the Yankees to the title in another thrilling seven-game series.
I began my own career playing first base on the class softball team. Dipping into the profits from my newspaper route, I purchased a first baseman’s mitt upon which I lavished obsessive attention. I repeatedly worked oil into its soft leather. I placed a ball inside the glove’s deep pocket and tied the glove tight around it overnight. I carried my glove wherever I could, repeatedly pounding my right fist into its pocket. Although there was no coach on hand, I worked diligently at my craft, fielding hot grounders and pop-ups, charging the bunt, stretching from the bag to shave a millisecond off a throw from the infield.
When the bitter Toronto winter set in, I was forced to become a sports spectator. Most of my peers were already adept at ice-skating, which I’d never tried because at that time it was virtually unknown in England. For the first winter or two I wobbled around on the neighborhood outdoor rink, but I realized that, no matter how hard I worked at it, I’d never skate as fast as Wally Somebody. I compensated by developing a fierce attachment to the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team. And what a team! George Armstrong, Frank Mahovlich, Tim Horton, and Johnny Bower. Punch Imlach was our mastermind. Throughout the dark winter months my spirit rose and fell with each victory or defeat. The Saturday-night Leafs game on TV with Foster Hewitt calling the game seemed, sacrilegiously, of far greater consequence than Sunday-morning Mass.
My dad maintained a peculiar enthusiasm for professional wrestling, delighting in the antics of gentlemanly Whipper Billy Watson, barrel-chested Yukon Eric, and the dastardly Miller brothers. He sought to encourage a similar enthusiasm in us kids, and we’d sometimes watch wrestling on TV with him, during the course of which he’d remind us that he could have gotten into professional wrestling himself if only he’d been a few inches taller. The only sporting event I can remember him taking me to was an evening of wrestling at Maple Leaf Gardens. In the feature match the Nazi-cloaked and eminently detestable Fritz Von Erich sought to apply his evil hold “the Claw” to the virtuous abdomen of Whipper Billy. In the same vein I recall a much-hyped grudge match involving the preening Gorgeous George, who, if he was defeated, would have his flowing blond tresses shaved from his head in the ring. Compared with the genuine heroics of the Leafs, the artificial nonsense of wrestling held only a fleeting appeal for me.
I look back fondly on those first several years in Weston, days of innocence and exploration, when the new world to which we’d journeyed was still an unfamiliar and intriguing place. I loved the family outings we’d sometimes take on summertime Sundays, to the conservation areas at Caledon Hills, Boyd Park, and Heart Lake, or—best of all—the long drive north to Midland where we’d visit the Jesuit Martyrs’ Shrine overlooking Georgian Bay and do some fishing in the Wye River. I loved the smell of summer heat, the singing of cicadas in the trees, obtaining prize conkers from the horse chestnuts that grew in front of our school, chumming around with the neighborhood kids, the fantastic icicles that hung from our eaves in winter. I fell ridiculously in love with my grade 5 teacher, a darling young woman who made no secret of her preference for Wally Somebody and his pal Harry Curtis, both of them handsome and wholesomely Canadian. Then she broke all our hearts by announcing one day that she was going to get married and change her name and not teach anymore. Shortly thereafter, another rude shock: at the conclusion of grade 5 my brothers and I and a few other kids at Saint John’s would be transferring to a brand-new Catholic school about to open in North York, an adjacent Toronto suburb. I had no way of knowing it at the time, but the days of innocence were already drawing to a close.
