Читать книгу Bird's Eye View - Elinor Florence - Страница 7

After finishing high school at the top of my class, I made a humbling trip around town, report card in hand, looking for work as a secretary or sales clerk, even a waitress. But the depression had hit Saskatchewan hard and jobs were scarce.

I hadn’t even considered applying at the Times. It was one of those mysterious male preserves that had passed from old man MacTavish to his son Jock when he was mustered home from France. Neither of them had ever hired a woman.

So I spent the long summer days pondering my uncertain future while I picked potato bugs in our vegetable garden, and my evenings curled up on the blue mohair chesterfield with our house cat Pansy — we had numerous barn cats, but only one was allowed in the house — reading my beloved Victorian novels.

My luck changed one afternoon when I was fetching a parcel from the train station and overheard Pete Anderson, the one and only reporter for The Touchwood Times, calling down a black curse on MacTavish’s head as he booked a ticket for Toronto. Pete hadn’t lasted long; the newspaper cast off reporters as often as MacTavish lost his temper.

After hastily combing my hair in the station restroom, I hurried down the wide, windswept main street, past the Queen’s Hotel, Chinese restaurant, butcher shop, drugstore, hat shop, and Dutch bakery. I opened the door of the newspaper office as if I were entering a cave full of hibernating grizzlies.

The dimly lit front room was deserted. I was about to tiptoe out again when I heard a crash from the rear followed by a roar. “Bloody bleeding blasted balls!” I sidled around the front counter and down the narrow hallway to the back shop where the printing press stood.

MacTavish was crouched on his hands and knees, his bony backside sticking up in the air like a rock in a field, a circle worn on the seat of his pants by the snuff tin in his back pocket. He was surrounded by dozens of tiny nine-point lead letters that had fallen from an overturned type drawer.

“Well, don’t just stand there!” he bellowed over his shoulder. “Help me pick up these buggers!”

I lowered myself to the filthy wooden floor and began to gather the type while MacTavish clambered to his feet, wiping his hands on an ink-stained rag. He was a small man — even from my crouching position I could see that he was several inches shorter than me — but he cut an impressive figure. His head was covered with matted iron-grey hair and his piercing dark eyes glared at me from under the biggest, blackest eyebrows I had ever seen.

“What the blazes do you want?” he shouted. Later I learned that he always spoke at full volume, having been partly deafened by an exploding shell, but at the time I thought he was yelling at me.

“I’d like to apply for a job,” I said.

“Who’s your father?”

“Tom Jolliffe.”

“You’re the girl who’s supposed to be so bright? Well, looks can be deceiving!”

He gave a mirthless chuckle, but I wasn’t sure whether to laugh so I kept my eyes on the floor. He jammed the rag into his pocket. “As long as you’re here, make yourself useful! Run down to the grocery store and pick up this week’s advertisement! And bring me a can of snuff! Copenhagen Long Cut! Tell them to put it on my account.”

I started work that very minute. Sometimes I wondered why MacTavish hired me. He wouldn’t let me cover anything except women’s events, and there was little space in the paper anyway. Four pages were home print, written by clubs and sports teams and dropped through the slot in the front door. The other four pages came press-ready from an agency that supplied almost every weekly in Western Canada.

But I answered the telephone and worked the front counter, kept a pot of coffee perking, and ran errands all over town. MacTavish even taught me how to use his precious Kodak to photograph grip-and-grin cheque presentations, oddly shaped vegetables, and other subjects of intense local interest.

Each Wednesday, when the back shop was thick with the smell of melting lead and the sound of MacTavish’s curses rose above the thumping, clanking din of the press, I retreated to the little bathroom where I tacked a towel over the window and developed my negatives in the sink. I printed them in the enlarger and hung them up to dry with clothespins on a piece of string. Then I hurried down to the train station and sent them to a company in Winnipeg that made the necessary engravings, small rectangular plates of blueish-coloured zinc mounted on wooden blocks. With any luck, the engravings made it back in time for the next week’s issue. MacTavish laid the type and engravings onto plates, bolted the plates onto an antiquated mountain of scrap iron he called The Auld Dragon, and cranked out eight hundred copies of The Touchwood Times.

The first time MacTavish flew into a rage and fired me for ruining a roll of film, I rode my bicycle home weeping aloud to the fields and the skies. But the next morning I woke up and remembered everything to be done before the next edition. He can’t possibly handle it himself, I thought. I’ll just show up and see what happens.

I dressed and cycled to work an hour early. When MacTavish arrived, the coffee was burbling through the percolator and I was self-consciously marking up proofs on the front counter.

He banged the door, glared at me for a few seconds, and then stomped to his desk. “I like my coffee like I like my women: sweet as sugar!” he yelled. I brought him a cup meekly, although I was tempted to pour it over his head.

From then on, MacTavish continued to fire me at intervals. At first I would go home immediately and return the next morning, but once when I was in the midst of deciphering some illegible handwriting on a letter to the editor, I simply replied: “Yes, Mr. MacTavish,” and kept on typing.

He stood there uncertainly for a moment, then spat horribly into the brass shell casing he had carried home from France to use as a spittoon, and retreated behind his wall of newspapers.

I leaned over the handlebars and swung toward home. At the top of the east hill I stopped to catch my breath. The late afternoon sun poured its peculiar saffron light over the landscape and the ripening grain smelled like yeast. From a nearby fencepost I heard the meadowlark’s song: “I see, I see, I see your petticoat!”

The east hill was really no more than a long slope, but compared to the immense grassy plain to the south, this part of the world was considered hilly. If an outsider remarked on the flatness of the rolling fields around Touchwood, he was rebuked by the locals: “You go south, that’s where the flatlanders live! Down there you can see your dog running away for a week!”

The Touchwood Hills, as they were affectionately called, resembled nothing so much as an unmade bed, a random series of slanting planes and ridges before the prairie reluctantly gave way to the northern bush. At the foot of the east hill lay our homestead, three hundred and twenty acres of excellent topsoil located in the dead centre of Western Canada.

From here I could see my own home, with its red-shingled roof and triple dormers like half-shut eyes. It was set back a quarter-mile from the main road, surrounded by lilacs and caraganas, and backed by a row of weathered wooden granaries. My mother was taking the wash off the clothesline, our Border Collie, Laddy, beating her calves with his shaggy tail.

In the field beside the house, my father sat on the cultivator drawn by our team of horses, Bess and Bonnie. The summerfallow changed colour behind him as the weedy soil rolled over to reveal its ebony underbelly. White gulls fluttered around the plough like oversized butterflies.

My sixteen-year-old brother Jack stood in the dry slough bed nearby, pitching forkfuls of hay bigger than himself into the hayrack. Each time he swung his arms, a shower of golden stalks followed him like the tail of a comet.

Much as I loved the familiar scene, I secretly thought farming was a wretched business. I was tired of hearing about the glory years after the Great War, when every farmer drove a new truck and every farmer’s wife wore a fur coat. I had grown up during the long drought that followed, the dirty thirties bringing one crop failure after another.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Charlie Stewart waving from the tractor on his father’s field beside me. I raised my hand politely in return. My father had dropped a few hints about the eligibility of an only son with clear title to a half-section right across the road, but I dreaded the idea of farming — least of all with a big, good-natured beast of burden like Charlie. Instead, I cherished a secret dream of going to university.

I mounted my bicycle again, coasted down the hill, and turned onto the long driveway, lined by a double row of feathery blue spruce trees. I recalled the back-breaking trips Jack and I had made from the well, soaking the tiny saplings with pails of water while the drifting soil threatened to bury them alive.

“What a blessing my parents aren’t alive to see this,” Mother said.

As we sat at the table eating pork sausages and fried potatoes, we studied a map of Europe hanging on the blue plaster wall. Shiny steel pins from her sewing basket marked the line of invasion. The pinheads had already marched across Czechoslovakia and into Poland, leaving behind scattered holes like gunshots.

The large kitchen was the heart of our home. In winter the wood stove kept it warm, and in summer it was cooled by a breeze that flowed through the screened windows. A bouquet of late-blooming marigolds sat on the table in a green ceramic vase. Over the kitchen door hung the first needlework sampler I had sewn myself, at the age of ten. The crooked letters spelled: “Homes weeth ome.”

Dad sat at the head of the table where he could see his entire farm through the open window. A breath of air lifted the edge of the lace curtain, bringing with it the faint scent of smoke. Somewhere a farmer was burning off his stubble.

“Don’t worry, Anne. There’s still the English Channel between us and them.” It was a sign of my father’s ambivalence that he sometimes referred to the English as us, and sometimes as them.

“Did you ever see a German tank, Dad?” Jack asked, piling more sausages onto his plate. My brother was keen on weapons and his latest fascination was with the new Panzer.

“No, son, they came in at the end of the war and I’d already been shipped home. It must be quite something, like a mobile cannon with steel belts wrapped around the wheels. Apparently it can crawl over boulders, fences, anything.”

We were silent as we shared the horrifying vision of tanks rolling across the bright fields, driven by foreign savages indulging their lust for conquest, as the king said in a recent speech.

My mother reached for the milk and poured it into her cup first so the scalding tea wouldn’t crack the bone china. I loved to watch her eat, the way she buttered her bread one bite at a time: so gracious, so mannered, so … English.

I never called it home, at least not out loud, but I sometimes thought of England that way. I had once heard the term “ancestral pull,” the yearning to return to the birthplace of your forefathers. I knew it existed. I felt it in my bones.

My mother had grown up in an English seaside village, the only child of scholarly parents who encouraged her decision to become a nursing sister during the Great War. Both parents had died suddenly during the 1918 flu epidemic. The poor girl continued her work in the military hospital where she met my father, who was recovering from a vicious shrapnel wound, and later followed him to Touchwood.

I was pleased when people told me that I resembled my mother, because she was beautiful. We were almost the same height, although in the last year I had gained an inch on her. Both of us had a thick mass of wavy dark brown hair, hers with a few silver threads, and our eyes were the same shade of hazel.

I had even inherited my mother’s crooked face: the left eyebrow permanently cocked and the left side of her mouth quirked upwards, as if smiling at a private joke. MacTavish had once told me that I looked older and wiser than I deserved.

I glanced at my father gripping his coffee mug in his fist, his fingernails blackened with soil that no amount of scrubbing could remove, and asked myself again how he could be so indifferent to his own heritage.

His grandfather had come from the Orkney Islands to work for the Hudson’s Bay Company and married a Plains Cree. Dad had looked up some distant Scottish cousins while he was on leave during the first war, and had come away blessing his grandfather for having the good sense to leave that godforsaken place, with its rocky soil and sleeting winds.

“Just be thankful we live where we do,” he said for the hundredth time. We raised our eyes to the map again, as if in prayer. In 1939 the sun never set on the British Empire, and Canada was the biggest pink patch in the whole world.

Cambridge, England

October 20, 1939

Dear Anne,

Thank you for your recent letter and the photograph of the children. We were surprised to see how much they have grown. Rose is quite the young lady now.

Roger’s teaching position continues, although class sizes have dwindled since so many students have enlisted. It’s a mercy you aren’t in England. I have often felt sorry for you, so far away from civilization, but now I wish we had emigrated when we had the chance. Both my cook and housekeeper have joined up and we are in an awful muddle without them.

The tin of sweets you sent was most appreciated. We are simply longing for a taste of sugar. We don’t even have marmalade for our toast now that the oranges aren’t getting through from Spain.

Will you please send me some American cigarettes? And six pairs of silk stockings.

Your cousin, Pamela Spencer

“Dear old Pamela,” Mother said. “She always thought she was better than the rest of us, but when she landed an officer she became insufferable. After he started teaching at Cambridge, Pamela conveniently forgot she had any relatives. It must be a real comedown to clean her own house again. Well, I can’t afford silk stockings, but I’ll send her a carton of cigarettes.”

I thought my mother was being a little harsh. After all, Pamela led the life of a real English lady. No wonder she wasn’t used to scrubbing floors.