Читать книгу The Way of a Gardener - Des Kennedy - Страница 11
ОглавлениеEducation is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember
from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught.
OSCAR WILDE, “The Critic as Artist”
THE PARISH OF SAINT BERNARD lay largely in the wilds of North York, but stretched just far enough across Jane Street and into Weston to include our block. To begin with, the parish had neither church nor school, just a small and rather squalid hall that served as the church, and this is where we attended Sunday Mass. The surrounding area included undeveloped fields that were being rapidly turned into residential subdivisions and shopping centers, primarily to accommodate an influx of Italian families. A spanking new and hopelessly sterile brick school was plopped down in the middle of a field alongside an enormous new church and rectory. The school was stocked with kids like ourselves who’d previously attended various other schools on the perimeter of the parish. We were mostly strangers to one another. What was brilliant for the first few weeks was that the schoolyard was a prairie of tall grasses within which various clandestine activities could be carried on. But pretty soon the grasses were trampled down and we had a schoolyard like any other.
Our principal was a diminutive but formidable nun named Sister Rosalie, from the same convent of Faithful Companions of Jesus as the nuns at Saint John’s, but most of the staff were lay teachers. The parish priest, a crusty old curmudgeon named Father Marshman, regularly prowled around the school and did his best to put the fear of God in everyone. But it was an uphill struggle. Perhaps it was the newness of the place, its rawness, the lack of any tradition, the eclectic mix of kids, but there seemed from the outset to be a sulking disrespect simmering just below the surface, a kind of incipient lawlessness that might break out at any minute. Some of the older boys smoked cigarettes and blasphemed extravagantly; a couple of girls were whispered of as known sluts. One lout used to entertain himself by seizing smaller boys by the nipple and squeezing hard enough to cause a bruise, telling them he’d given them “a purple titty.” Sister Rosalie, who brooked no insolence, had her hands full with this lot. A large leather strap hanging in her office warned of retribution for any misbehavior. Only once was I ever sent to the principal’s office for some infraction I no longer recall. When I entered her office and explained my transgression to her, she looked at me as though I’d disappointed her awfully. “Hold out your hand,” she said dispassionately, as she picked up the strap. I pulled up my sleeve and extended my right hand. She lashed my palm hard several times. I felt a fiery pain after each lash. “Now the other hand.” She lashed my left palm the same way. “All right, go back to your desk.” Although my hands were stinging as fiercely as if I’d stuck them into a hornet’s nest, the greater pain I felt was in having let the principal down. I knew poor Sister Rosalie held high hopes for me, and I had betrayed her expectations, shown myself no better than the worst louts of the class. But also, perversely, I experienced a moronic little swagger of satisfaction at my badness and at my courage under the lash of the murderous strap.
However, the infraction was an anomaly for, like my brothers, I maintained my piety even in the unencouraging environment of the new school. I excelled in class and took satisfaction in scoring top marks, winning spelling bees and the like. Singled out as both pious and bright, I was forced into a public-speaking role I didn’t really want, so that whenever a visiting dignitary addressed our class—a priest from the overseas missions, perhaps, or someone from the police warning us about the hazards of train tracks—it fell to me to rise and thank them for their presentation.
Fine literature singled me out as well. So far as I can remember, my first public poem was penned in the eighth grade. It concerned itself with a trout. My imaginative life had by then sashayed away from the Wild West, replacing cowboys with a fixation on trout fishing. I pored eagerly over old fishing magazines. I obtained a fiberglass rod with spinning reel and spent long hours perfecting the techniques of casting. My favorite event when the school visited the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair in Toronto was watching expert anglers cast plugs into circular targets floating at the far end of a long tank. My tackle box held a jumble of barbed hooks, leaders and lead shot, spinners and flashers, and, most absorbingly, flies. I studied the difference between wet and dry flies, stared longingly at displays of delicate flies in the neighborhood sporting goods store and practiced making my own flies, inexpertly gluing random clots of feathers onto hooks. No wily trout ever would, or did, attempt to eat one of these, though I cast them expectantly into the upper reaches of the Humber and Credit and whatever other streams I could. The thrill of an elusive trout flashing silver in a little brook excited a poetic impulse in me, as it had in Yeats before me. Sister Rosalie read my poem aloud to the grade 8 class. I had become a poet.
But I was still consumed with sports, devoting myself to track and field and fastball. By the time I was in grade 7, playing first base was no longer sufficient. Recognizing that the diametrically opposed ambitions of pitcher and hitter are at the heart of baseball, I set myself to become a pitcher. I worked on my pitching with fanatical single-mindedness and eventually was elevated to school pitcher, the player upon whose prowess the glory of the school largely rested in contests against other schools. Although I couldn’t conceptualize it at the time, I was intrigued by how aspects of psychology, intimidation, and momentum attend each pitch.
I’m uncertain whether I developed a fervid competitiveness through playing sports, and particularly pitching fastball, or whether I possessed the attitude all along and athletics merely gave it a publicly sanctioned platform. I do know that loving to win and hating to lose became an abiding mindset, later spilling over into political and environmental issues in which I became involved, my own little personalized reworking of the nineteenth-century maxim that “The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.”
BY THE LATE fifties, my old heartthrob Patti Page was yesterday’s darling and the schmaltz of the Four Lads and the Mills Brothers had similarly faded. We kids were swept up in the breakout mania of rock ’n’ roll and its pantheon of stars—Bill Haley, Little Richard, the Big Bopper, Fats Domino, Buddy Holly. Parents everywhere were outraged. I can remember my mother being not the least bit pleased when she overheard me listening on my little transistor radio to Brian Hyland’s “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini.” But even we kids were engaged in earnest debate over whether the “clean” songs of Pat Boone and Ricky Nelson weren’t preferable to the lewd wigglings of Elvis or the sinister leer of “the Killer,” Jerry Lee Lewis. A gang of disreputable greasers used to cruise our neighborhood in a big flip-top along the sides of which were painted leaping flames in tribute to Lewis’s scandalous “Great Balls of Fire.”
During these fraught times, walking to Saint Bernard’s school every day along Jane Street, I passed a little music store that had outside its front door a rack containing free handbills listing the Top 40 tunes for that week. The list was a matter of intense interest and considerable discussion among my classmates. Did the blatant teenage pathos of “Tell Laura I Love Her” justify its rating? Did Sheb Wooley’s “The Purple People Eater,” topping the charts in ’58, even deserve to be on the list, it was so spaz? I think the list was compiled by chu m Radio, Canada’s first Top 40 radio station, for whose disc jockeys we developed fierce attachments or dislikes. When the Canadian National Exhibition was on in the late summer, one of our great delights was to stand around an outdoor plaza watching the deejays spinning their discs in a glass booth.
More complicated by far were the sock hops occasionally attempted at school, dreary events at which many of the girls and very few of the boys were mad for dancing. Most of us boys plastered ourselves against the classroom walls and longed for the torment to end. Every once in a while there’d be a dance party at my friend Chuck Savoy’s house, where, despite the best efforts of Chubby Checker and Little Eva, I’d squirm against the twin terrors of dancing and the proximity of flirting girls. The music was in my head, not my body.
For many months a banjo sat on display in the front window of that little music store on Jane Street. Banjos contributed little, if anything, to the music we were all crazy for, and yet I was strongly drawn to this instrument. I looked at it longingly, imagined myself playing it. The price was some outrageous sum well beyond my paper route life savings, and anyway it was inconceivable that I would spend so much on what might prove to be a short-lived whim. I didn’t buy the banjo and eventually forgot about it. But over the years, every so often, I visualize that banjo again, wishing that I had bought it and mastered it, and wonder had I done so what curious avenues it might have led me down.
WANTING TO IMPRESS my friends and to be admired by pretty girls at school helped collapse the innocence of the early days and usher in a more complicated confusion of feelings. I had come to detest being poor, living in a poky house, and wearing cheap clothes. Going grocery shopping for my mum at the local a&p, where I’d often find bargains in the “reduced for quick sale” bin, no longer offered the excitement it once had. These frugalities didn’t seem clever anymore; they were niggardly and shameful. To have owned a car, any car, back in England would have made us gentry, but here our family car was an embarrassment. We started off with an old Ford panel van, my parents sitting up front and us kids perched on crates in the back. Our eventual elevation to the relative luxury of a secondhand 1955 Chevrolet four-door sedan was permanently undermined when my dad hand-painted its exterior by brush. To make matters worse, he began periodically removing the rear bench seat in order to haul home buckets of sewage he picked up at a city treatment plant. His compost heap may have benefited, but the lingering stench never left the car—or, I think, us after riding in the car—and my mother finally put an end to his ingenious scheme for free fertilizer. Parking outside church on Sunday morning amid the gleaming new coupes and panel wagons of the parish, he’d make a great show of locking the car’s doors, as though any self-respecting thief would lower himself to steal that crummy heap. I became embarrassed by my family and envied what looked like the cool, smooth sophistication of my classmates. Traitorously, I ignored the sacrifices my parents were making in order that we kids could have a better life and instead cringed at their idiosyncrasies of appearance and mannerism.
One occurrence typified that painful stage of distancing. Long after I’d outgrown my Wild West phase, I was given an unfortunate new set of clothes, claimed, I suspect, from Eaton’s Annex, a sinkhole at the downtown Eaton’s department store where merchandise returned by dissatisfied mail-order customers was disposed of at greatly reduced prices.
On this occasion the bargain in question was a matching pair of pants and shirt. The trousers were a vivid and thoroughly offensive green. They were several sizes too large for me (“You’ll grow into them” was a guiding principle for our wearables), and to make them fit I had to hitch the waistband up around my rib cage like Stan Laurel. The shirt—also far too large—hung down like a horse collar around my neck. It introduced a Western motif: it was a depressing gray from waist to armpits; then there was a clever bit of Gene Autry–style cowboy silver piping with Western curlicues, above which the shoulders and sleeves exploded with the same reptilian green as the trousers. Thus attired I looked, and felt, like Howdy Doody.
To complete my humiliation I was compelled by family obligation to wear this preposterous getup to Sunday Mass. Entering the church, removing my winter coat in the vestibule, walking up the center aisle past the families of my schoolmates, assuming our pew, I could feel a warm gush of prickly shame rising through my body and blushing crimson across my face. I was certain that my heartthrob of the moment was somewhere in the congregation, observing me, pathetic and ludicrous. How awful it seemed to me that morning, how awful it is to feel poor. Yes, poor little me. Oddly, an old photo of myself wearing that ridiculous outfit, and looking sufficiently pleased with both myself and it, now leads me to wonder whether I haven’t contrived a memory of emotional trauma about it for perverse revisionist reasons of my own.
MY FAITH NEVER wavered even as I entered the maelstrom of puberty, but now my prayers were frequently hijacked by the stirring of strange sensations in my body. Suddenly obsessed with the sweet mysteries of girls, but strictly forbidden to think “impure thoughts” about them, I took to praying for divine intervention toward arranging a successful love life. This attempt to cajole the divinities into giving me a hand represented a logical progression from all the times I’d fervently sought God’s assistance, or the Blessed Virgin’s intercession on my behalf, in getting top marks on a school exam or winning a race on field day. Ravished in my imagination by the charms of the Mouseketeer Annette Funicello, I prayed an entire novena—special prayers repeated in church on the afternoons of nine consecutive Fridays—to the Blessed Virgin Mary that she would contrive, however improbably, to have Annette and me meet, fall in love, and live happily ever after.
The novena apparently fell upon deaf ears, and shortly thereafter I lowered my sights from Annette to another lovely Italian girl named Mary, whose attainability was enhanced by the advantage of proximity: she lived in a large house on Jane Street, the very route we’d walk on our way to and from school. A year younger than me, with tawny skin and eyes that gazed from darkly wonderful depths, this exquisite creature moved like a dancer, with the ease of the truly beautiful. Far too shy to dare speak to her, I spoke instead to God about her. I sought His assistance in arranging things between Mary and myself. As with my Annette novena, this too proved an unsatisfactory courtship strategy, and I was left to encounter the beguiling creature in imagination alone.
The penalty one paid for sexual obsession, however sanctified it may have been behind transparent prayer, was exacted on Saturday afternoon in the darkened confines of the confessional. Never one to lie or steal, cheat or blaspheme, I began creating a smokescreen of imaginary sins behind which I could tuck in a quick mention of the “impure thoughts” that had been my only genuine transgression. “I disobeyed my parents three times,” I’d exaggerate, “and I lost my temper twice and”—(quieter, almost a whisper)—“I had impure thoughts five times and”—(louder again)—“I was jealous of my brother once.” There’d be an ominous pause from the other side of the screen. I’d see the darkened outline of the priest’s head hover closer.
“What kind of thoughts?” he’d ask, and I knew I was sunk.
I mean, what did he expect me to say? That when I saw lovely Mary walking home from school ahead of me, her pert little bum swaying like lyric poetry, her gorgeous long brown legs, her dark hair cascading down her back in maddening ringlets, that I wanted to take her by the hand to some charmed and private place where we’d kiss and fondle one another until, until, until. . . Oh, God!
Of course not. Instead I fibbed and obfuscated as best I could and the priest pried and prodded as best he could. A confession of impure thoughts invariably aroused the priest’s attention in a way that theft, dishonesty, or blasphemy seldom did. Perhaps even murder wouldn’t. This didn’t strike me as the least bit strange because I knew that the ejaculations that impure thoughts produced were mortal sins that, if left unconfessed, would doom me to Hell forever. I would never have imagined at the time that the priest might have been indulging his own prurient interest. Priests were holy men, the holiest and most admirable men we knew. Only years later, after the outrages of widespread priestly sexual predation were exposed, did the penny drop. Imagine living a life of lonely abstinence while having all these innocent young children whispering to you in the dark the most intimate details of their first confused experiences of sexual desire.
Released from the tortures of the confessional at last, you knelt to say your penance, then burst thankfully out of the church washed clean of all stain of sin and fired with a firm purpose never to sin again. But you did sin again. And again. Erotic dreams, infernal “nocturnal emissions,” and that most catastrophic of all iniquities: to take upon your tongue the Body of Christ while the vile wickedness of impure thoughts and actions was still blackening your soul—oh, here was an abomination, a mortal sin of such magnitude that you would be condemned forever to Hell were you to die with it still on your conscience.
The God of Eucharist and confessional, of redemption and damnation, existed entirely within the fundamental virtue of faith. The spiritual apprehension of divine truths not available to intellect alone. Credo—I believe. Faith was a precious gift, vastly superior to any earthly wisdom. From the outset, we were pressed repeatedly by parents, priests, and nuns to guard our faith against transgression, to be constantly vigilant against its loss. This was why girls were to be avoided, lest a fascination with what was called “the flesh” erode and corrupt the fundament of faith. To lose your faith was to lose everything, a catastrophe worse than death.
THE UNRULY IMPULSES of “the flesh” were frequently described in incendiary terms, “the flames of lust.” For me the hearthside flames of childhood had been comforting rather than ravenous, but I’d largely lost touch with fire after our great immigration to Canada. Our house in Weston had no fireplace, being centrally heated by an oil furnace in the basement. The only fire to be found—other than the pungent piles of leaves smoking throughout the neighborhood each autumn—was the fire of disaster. An old wooden church alongside the Saint John’s schoolyard burned to the ground under mysterious circumstances. Even more spectacularly, a whole lumberyard in town shot massive flames into the sky one night. Arson was again suspected. The occasional wail of a fire engine’s siren promised the excitement of fire as spectacle.
Though in the process of becoming engulfed by booming postwar Toronto, the town of Weston back in those days was still a relatively easy bike ride away from open countryside of fields, farms, and woodlands. Often in the summertime several pals and I would plan an all-day bike hike out to the Credit River country or up to the Caledon Hills. I loved these long meanderings through the countryside, until the final one on which I received my baptism in the terrifying fury of fire.
After a hard morning’s cycling, my pals and I had stopped to have our picnic lunch in a field through which a little brook meandered. Four boys sprawled languidly in golden grass, an idyllic summer scene. John, who was older than the rest of us by virtue of having failed a couple of grades but wise in our eyes with the wisdom of age, took out a box of wooden matches. He began striking matches and flipping them at each of us in turn. The instant it hit the dry grass, each match would ignite a small fire that one of us had to jump up and stamp out. We told John to quit it but he just laughed and flicked another burning match. Then another. After a bit I warned him that I wasn’t going to stamp out any more fires. He laughed again and threw another match, perhaps thinking that whatever power was in play here lay somewhere between himself and me, rather than in the flame. As mistaken myself, I refused to stamp out the fire it ignited, and so did the other guys.
Within moments the fire crept out in a malignant circle and we all jumped up and began stamping frantically at it. But too late. The circle swept outward through the parched grass and within moments was beyond our control. Suddenly all was shouting and panic and swirling smoke. I dashed across the field and up the hill to where some cabins stood. I hammered desperately on the door of one, then another, then another. Nobody answered. The cabins were all unoccupied. I looked back down the hill and saw that the circle of fire had grown enormously, engulfing much of the field. The guys were running around frantically, trying to rescue our bikes and get away. I ran back down to them and we shouted incoherently at one another as to whether we should go get help or make our escape before we got caught.
By now the ring of fire was dancing field-wide and menacing some nearby woods. Before we could decide what to do, truckloads of people came roaring up the country road and charged into the field wielding brooms and shovels. They quickly formed a long line at the fire’s advancing edge and methodically beat the flames out.
We had no hope of escaping the scene before being caught because our bike tires had melted in the fire, and we could hardly make a clean getaway on foot, pushing our disabled bikes along the road. A policeman appeared and asked us what had happened. John, as our elder, acted as spokesman and fibbed unconvincingly about how our little campfire had gotten away on us. The rest of us could have told the truth and sacrificed John to appease the authorities, but this would have been to break a solemn and unspoken code among grade 7 boys. The cop took our names and addresses—we hadn’t the jam to lie—and told us we’d have to appear in court in a few weeks’ time.
My God, that was a trail of tears we trod on the long journey home, pushing our pathetic bikes, sniping at one another over who was to blame for this calamity. Police, courts, fines, disgrace, the wrath of parents—unimaginable! Unbearable!
I told my mother the truth about what had happened and suffered no more than her chastisement that I’d be better off not associating with the fools I chose for friends. John’s mother—an enormous and intimidating woman who always reminded me of an ill-humored hippopotamus—gave me a far worse tongue-lashing. She brought out John’s precious Boston Bruins windbreaker, a gift from a cousin who played on the team. “Look at that!” she dangled the stupid jacket in front of my face. “Look at these burn holes. It’s ruined.” Only later did it occur to me that John, in total violation of the solemn and unspoken code sacred to grade 7 boys, might have told her that I was to blame for the fire. We were never contacted by the police and no more came of it, but even as a foolish lad I knew that far more than a field of grass had gone up in smoke that day. I had felt a first lick of the dragon’s tongue and had lost whatever it is that dragons devour.
AMONG THE WORST of my days at Saint Bernard’s school was the morning I brought our little brother Vincent for his first day at elementary school. Within a few minutes I was called from my classroom. The poor little guy was screaming and sobbing uncontrollably— he’d been suddenly plunged into a situation he’d found strange and terrifying. I walked him home and the school authorities advised my parents that his hearing was so badly impaired that he should be examined by an audiologist.
Tests determined that he had profound hearing loss in both ears. He was fitted with a hearing aid, a cumbersome device with a console hanging on his chest and twin wires leading up to large earplugs. From a world of silence, he felt himself involuntarily thrust into the world of sound, but it was a world he was condemned never to fully hear. “With the hearing aid,” he later recalled, “I was able to hear very loud sounds, such as a plane flying low overhead. However, I could not hear softer sounds such as the chirping of a bird, the buzzing of a bee, or someone whispering softly. I was oblivious to those types of sounds.” He was made to wear his hearing aid from the moment he woke up in the morning until he went to bed at night. But the technical limitations of the primitive analog hearing aids, which simply amplified all sounds indiscriminately, meant that he missed a lot of what was being said when having conversation with others. He had to lip-read when someone was talking. As he told me, “I required a good volume of voice to hear words properly; I required clarity of speech. My hearing aids didn’t have the ability to filter out background sounds such as a normal person’s ears would do in a noisy room.” Nor was any sound directional—it came from a box on his chest, not from any particular point in a room.
Vincent was enrolled in a public school with a special class for training hearing-impaired students to listen to words and to speak properly as well as to learn the same things hearing students would be learning in grade 1. But the class of about twenty students had eight grade levels in it, and the teacher concentrated on teaching the upper three grades of students to prepare them for integration into mainstream classes at high school. “The students in the lower grades were left pretty much to play around by themselves,” Vincent recalled. “Not much effort was put into teaching lip-reading, listening, talking, reading, and writing.”
Feeling marginalized and left out, he learned very little during those two years. In grade 3, he was moved to another public school with a much smaller class of about ten students with three grade levels. Here he learned more quickly. The following year he moved to yet another class with about ten students ranging from grades 4 to 6. For the first time, in grade 4, he was put in regular class part-time. However, he was lost in that class because of poor acoustics in the room and his inability to follow what was being said. “Self-consciousness that I was somehow different from the others started with my integration in the hearing class,” he told me. A year later more changes were made: He and a classmate who was also hearing-impaired were seated in the front of the class, close to the teachers, some of whom made a point of speaking slowly and clearly for their benefit. In grade 6 he spent half his time in regular classes but continued to have difficulty following what was said. He acquired a tape recorder into which he would speak, and then he’d listen to what he’d said. He used the tape recorder for a few years, trying to improve his pronunciation. He went on to attend regular classes full-time through grades 7 and 8, and, against all odds, he completed high school, then put himself through university.
Notwithstanding baby boomer nostalgia for the remembered simplicity and wholesomeness of the Leave It to Beaver era, this was a cruel time in which to be in any way different from the norm. Contempt and ridicule were heaped upon anyone whose language, skin color, or physical abilities differed however slightly from the one and only way everyone was supposed to be. Like other deaf people, Vincent was at times discounted as stupid by persons who had no idea what an agile mind and determined spirit he possessed.
ALL OF US kids were now attending school, my father continued working at a pace that would have exhausted most people, and my mother ran the household. She was responsible for all the cooking, cleaning, laundry, and shopping. Her meals remained steadfastly loyal to the tenets of British cuisine. Usually there’d be meat of some kind, perhaps sausages or bacon, chicken or an inexpensive cut of beef or pork. Potatoes almost always and at least one vegetable, typically boiled for far longer than necessary, then smeared with margarine and enlivened with salt. Rice was seldom if ever on the menu, nor was pasta. Herbs were kept on a very short leash, and exotica like yogurt or phyllo pastry remained beyond us. Amazingly, with so productive a vegetable garden, we never ate salad. By and large, the vegetables my father grew—enormous volumes of onions, cauliflower, cabbage, brussels sprouts, broccoli, carrots, parsnips, rutabagas, tomatoes, and peas—were those we’d eaten in England. Questionable Americanisms like squash and sweet corn took a very long time to work themselves into the garden and thence into the kitchen. Also true to British tradition, we never ran short of sweets, as mother baked bread pudding, ginger cake, fruit pies, and scones. She made wonderful Irish soda bread, long slices of which served as platforms for a thin skim of margarine and dollops of homemade fruit jam. Both my parents had a tremendous capacity for drinking tea and eating toast with jam.
The closest we ever came to dining out was on Friday evenings, when the Catholic injunction against eating meat on Friday justified getting takeout from Ron’s Fish & Chips. Located just a few blocks away on Jane Street in a small converted house, Ron’s was the ultimate in fast-food cuisine. There were no franchise burger or chicken or pizza joints around in those days, so Ron’s was where you went for takeout. Looking like the quintessential wiseguy with slicked-back black hair, wearing an apron of estimable vintage, Ron worked the vats in back, entirely free of concern about trans fats or cholesterol levels. Into the vats of simmering fat he plunged metal baskets of real fries cut from real potatoes and thick pieces of actual cod, oceans away from today’s patties of reconstituted fish parts and God knows what else pressed and frozen in some sweatshop in Guangzhou. Ron’s wife, whose name I never learned, wrapped each order in multiple sheets of newspaper, handed them over the counter, and took the money. I was hopelessly tongue-tied in my dealings with her; she seemed so like young Elizabeth Taylor with her mascara and vivid lipstick, her dark hair pinned up, and her tantalizingly bulging blouse unbuttoned to the point of revealing more than should have been revealed to innocents like myself. Occasionally fetching Friday dinner from Ron’s was perhaps my favorite chore.
My mother was not an enthusiastic cook. She may have been so earlier on and then grown tired of producing from scratch three meals a day for six people, every day, year after year. Her solution was not to eat out but to devise cunning shortcuts. On Fridays when fish and chips from Ron’s were not on order (damn!), pancakes were a meatless alternative. As a pancake flipper of not inconsiderable expertise myself, I can imagine how tedious it would become for anyone other than Aunt Jemima to be standing at a stove flipping sufficient pancakes to satisfy four ravenous boys. She decided that individual pancakes were an unnecessary complication and took to dumping the entire bowl of batter into a deep fry pan and cooking the whole works en masse. The resulting thick cake, served in stodgy blocks, was less than satisfactory, but we had been taught long before to be grateful for whatever food we were given and to never complain. Leaving even a morsel of uneaten food on the plate, however unpalatable, was not done.
Far more disheartening was her radical revamping of Christmas dinner. The nostalgia-inducing feast we’d so loved back in England was never quite the same in Canada, and my mother eventually decided that she had better things to do with her Christmas Day than spend the whole of it in the kitchen. Instead, she roasted the turkey the day before and for Christmas dinner served cold slices along with potato chips from a bag and cranberry sauce from a can. Only the Christmas cake and pudding survived in their former glory. I was horrified at the time, but in retrospect salute her independence of spirit, her refusal to continue being a perpetual domestic servant.
NOTWITHSTANDING MOTHER’S CULINARY shortcuts, in our familial value system the necessity of hard work was an absolute given. A life of abject misery in the parish poorhouse awaited those who did not put their shoulder to the wheel, their nose to the grindstone, and their heart into their work. We certainly didn’t identify this ethos as the Protestant work ethic, but we wholeheartedly embraced its Calvinistic trinity of hard work, independence, and scrupulous saving. As already mentioned, I launched my working career with delivering newspapers, but nudging toward my midteens meant a ratcheting-up of employment, so I started supplementing that income with summer yard work in the neighborhood. One of the least successful entries in my employment dossier occurred at this time, when I was hired to feed and water several dozen ferrets kept in cages by one of our outdoorsy neighbors. He raised these fearsome creatures for hunting rabbits and showed me the mark where one of them had bitten right through his thumbnail. Left in charge one time while he was away, I must have failed to properly secure the latch on one of the cages, because a number of ferrets broke loose and took to terrorizing the neighborhood. A plump little lady who lived directly behind us dissolved into hysterical shrieking after opening her front door and encountering a snarling ferret on her porch. After this episode I eliminated zookeeper as a possible career choice.
Less dramatically, I mowed lawns for a pittance, pushing ancient and often ill-maintained reel mowers through sometimes impossibly long grass for hours on end, blistering my tender hands in the process. Then old Father Marshman, who tended to view our family as a ready source of indentured servants, hired me on as part-time janitor for the parish church. At least my lawn mowing improved, as I cut the extensive church and school lawns with a roaring rotary power mower. But most of the church work I was required to do was either boring or disgusting. Every week I had to wash, wax, and buff the church floor, which seemed about the size of a football field. While other kids were out playing baseball or idling away their summers at lakeside cottages in Muskoka country or making good money caddying at golf courses, I’d spend hours on my hands and knees rubbing with steel wool at black marks indelibly imprinted on the church’s linoleum tile floor by cheap rubber pads on the kneelers. Cleaning ashtrays, toilets, and the kitchen of the parish hall after weddings or dances, revolting as it was, at least instilled in me an abiding empathy for people compelled to do such work for a living.
All of these formative experiences with “good, old-fashioned hard work” fell into the category of work as necessary evil, something one is compelled to do in order to survive. The money earned was the sole rationale for doing it. There was no question of job satisfaction, no delight in the nobility of honest labor, no sense of locking muscular arms in unity with the workers of the world. My father worked at jobs of not much better caliber all of his life, but I don’t believe it would have occurred to him to complain that the work was boring, repetitive, or unfulfilling. He considered himself fortunate to have a secure job that allowed him to support his family and buy a house. Expecting nothing more, he made the best of it, taking pleasure in his gardens rather than the job that made them possible. For him garden work seemed more a hobby, a form of relaxation. I can remember him being out in the summer garden for hours in blazing hot sunshine, wearing no shirt or hat and returning to the house with blisters all over his back. But he didn’t complain. I suspect he was happier in his garden than anywhere else. None of us kids took any interest in his gardens, nor did he encourage us to do so, likely because he loved the peace and quiet of working alone.
We did not socialize with, or indeed even know, any of his coworkers. He had nothing good to say about the union at the t tc , and apparently little sense of its having won for him the few privileges he enjoyed. I can remember him describing the popular socialist politician Tommy Douglas as “a dirty little Communist.”
From very early on, I knew this life was not for me, but escape from the dungeon of unrewarding work was not as readily imaginable to the children of the British working class as it perhaps was to many North Americans, at least white ones. My brothers and I did not grow up with an expectation of attending university. My mother liked to emphasize that for people in our situation the two time-tested avenues for “getting ahead” were the military and the Church. For a brief time I did become infatuated with militarism— I suppose it was a logical progression from my gun-totin’ cowboy phase—and began an avid study of warplanes and their armaments. I painstakingly glued together flimsy bits of balsa wood to create model fighters and bombers. The successful deployment of the first Soviet Sputnik during my grade 8 year ignited an interest in rocketry, and I took to making rockets propelled by metal cylinders packed with gunpowder extracted from fireworks. The air show at the Canadian National Exhibition came to rival the excitement of radio disc jockeys in their glass booths. Somehow it didn’t occur to me that my terror of heights might be a wee bit of an impediment to a career as a fighter pilot.
I REACHED A great watershed at the end of grade 8. The choice I faced was either to attend the nearby public high school—a daunting place rife with vice and immorality—or try to get accepted by one of the three exclusive Catholic boys’ high schools in the city. Paying the tuition fee was out of the question; my only hope was to win a scholarship. An immense anxiety gripped me as I journeyed alone by bus to these distant schools to sit for the scholarship exams. Then came nervous weeks of waiting, and finally the grand news—I’d won a scholarship to Michael Power High on the city’s west side. I’m convinced that the only reason I succeeded was that dear Sister Rosalie had secretly provided me beforehand with copies of the examination papers used in the previous few years, in which many of the same questions recurred year after year. Quite how she justified this chicanery I never thought to ask.
As it turned out, this was a favor I could well have done without, for my grade 9 year at Michael Power was one of the most miserable of my life. The school had been founded only two years earlier by the Basilian Fathers and was a long commute from home, involving three different city buses. None of my pals from elementary school went to Michael Power, and I largely lost touch with them. Apart from a few scholarship kids like me, the student body came from wealthy Catholic families, the sons of doctors and lawyers and bankers. While some were thoughtful and intelligent, a disproportionate number were vulgar and arrogant bullies. Older ones would physically intimidate us younger kids and they in turn would be physically intimidated by a couple of the brawny Basil-ians. Some years later the school was amalgamated with a nearby Catholic girls’ school, and today it boasts an active social justice program and a code of conduct that promotes “responsibility, respect, civility, and academic excellence in a safe learning and teaching environment.” But that was scarcely the tone during my brief stay. I hated the bullies and I hated the place and, of course, soon came to hate myself as well. No longer able to deliver newspapers after school, I kept on with the dismal janitorial work at our church, but as for the charms of capitalism, the bloom was definitely off the rose.
After a year of high school hell, it didn’t take much for me to convince myself that I had a vocation, called by God to the priesthood. I’d been more or less prepped for this all along. Our family’s deep piety, our almost fanatical attendance at daily Mass and other religious observances, our diligence in work, plus the fact that I usually secured top marks in class, all conspired toward repeated suggestions from various priests and nuns that I think seriously about becoming a priest. As a final inducement, my brother Ger had gone off to the seminary the year before, returning home for the summer holidays with tales of the marvelous time he was having there. Detesting my home, my school, and my work, I decided to answer God’s call.
