by A G Street
The advantages of returning home were obvious and overwhelming. Here I was a farm labourer, living a hard life with a complete absence of amusements and leisure, whereas at home I should have every comfort and a master’s position. The chief reasons for my not wanting to go home seem now to be puerile and silly, but at that time they were very real, and I wrote them to my father, who, I believe, did not understand them at all.
The gist of the thing was that I had discovered that I could get a living on my own without any help from my family. That folk in the neighbourhood accepted me as a useful citizen, not because I was Mr. Blanchard’s son of Partridge Farm, but simply because I was Jimmy Blanchard. This seemed wonderful to me at nineteen. It seems all the more wonderful to me now, as at forty I am obliged to confess that I have grave doubts as to my ability to get a living.
Another reason for wishing to stay was that I wanted to see the prairie, which I had broken, under crop. I do not think that my father appreciated this reason either, but it will be understandable to anyone who has done a similar thing. They, I know, will agree that to go away and not see the first crop would have been the act of a traitor. Besides, I had already agreed with George for another year at three hundred dollars, and as he was relying on that agreement, I could not let him down. This last reason was probably the only one of which my father approved.
I found out in later years that he had expected the return of the repentant prodigal, and was completely mystified by my refusal to accept the role. He journeyed to George’s home to interview his father, and in desperation inquired if I had become entangled with a girl.
‘Girls?’ said Mr. Hartley. ‘There aren’t many out there, and from George’s letters, your boy seems scared of them. Seems to prefer work. George says he’s all right, and doing very well.’
‘Then what is the attraction out there? They seem to spend most of their time doing labourers’ work.’
‘I don’t know. My boy’s just the same, though. Still, they’re well and happy, so we ought to be satisfied.’
And with that my father had to be content.
CHAPTER XII
Everyone who gives advice to young authors stresses the need for a strong love interest in most books or stories. I am sorry that I cannot oblige. George’s father was correct in his statement to my parents that there were very few girls in our part of Canada, and also that, up to date, I had shown no interest in them.
As a matter of fact there were four unmarried girls in our settlement; that is in a radius of six or seven miles. Two of these were engaged to be married, and as there were fifteen lusty unattached bachelors in the same district, the remaining two girls had no lack of attention. What chance had a green Englishman in his first year?
The usual practice was for bachelors living in shanties to go to supper on Sunday evenings with their married neighbours, and invariably, if these folk had an English girl living with them as companion help, the bachelor helped her to wash up the supper things. Once when a farmer’s wife had a fresh girl coming out from England, twelve bachelors arrived for supper on the Sunday evening after her arrival!
I must confess that female society, or rather the lack of it, started worrying me during my second winter. As I was now an experienced hand George spent longer and longer visits at his fiancée’s home, and the lonely evenings in the shanty became very irksome. The newness of everything had worn off. The pictures in the Tatler and the Daily Mirror seemed to annoy as much as interest. I began to wonder whether there was not something more to life than sitting in a hut in the midst of a waste of snow, and looking at them. My own company was not enough. I felt that I wanted to talk to somebody.
Then I became vaguely aware that Mary Macpherson at the Barloe store was possessed of some attractions. Presently these attractions seemed less vague, in fact quite definite. I discovered that I derived great pleasure from a few moments’ conversation with her, when I called at the store for letters and groceries. Working in the store she had a nodding acquaintance with all the boys in the district, and, if her father was busy at the other end of the building, she would flirt gaily with most of us.
I can remember making excuses to myself to go to Barloe as often as possible on the off chance of a word or two with Mary. For many evenings I debated with myself also as to whether I dare ring her up. The first time I tried it was disastrous, as her father answered the telephone, and I had to order some groceries, which we did not want, to be sent up by any neighbour who might be in town. I thought this very clever at the time, and repeated it on future occasions when the necessity arose, thinking that I had hoodwinked her father completely. Looking back on it now I think that he realized the real reason for those orders. But the many chats I had over the telephone with Mary that lonely winter gave me great pleasure, although I cannot now remember what we talked about. But to a lonely youth of twenty, who spent day after day and night after night in a one-roomed shanty with no other human being nearer than a mile, a girl’s voice, even though it was a nasal Canadian drawl, was a comforting and satisfying thing.
One day at the store I wanted some cups and saucers, and Mary said that I had better come upstairs to choose them. I followed her up to the loft above the store, which was filled with bales of goods. We knelt side by side to pick out the crockery from its straw wrappings. There seemed to be no need to hurry about this, I remember. Then I wondered if I dared kiss her. I would have to be quick about it, as old Mac would query too long an absence. The loft was dim. Her head was close to mine as we bent over the case. I can remember that her hair had a nice scent to it. Supposing screamed. Still— I kissed her.
It wasn’t a very successful effort. Certainly not one of the lingering sort as described in some books and depicted on the films, but rather an unsatisfactory peck. Mary giggled and rose to her feet. I followed her downstairs with the crockery, feeling a bit sheepish and also a bit of a Don Juan.
That was my sole escapade in this direction during my stay in Canada, for Mary got engaged to a man in Winnipeg the following summer, and got married shortly afterwards.
Now Mary was Canadian born, and at that date the English settlers and the Canadian-born ones did not mix easily. Whether this is still the case I do not know, but it was understandable at that time for the native-born man was then the most narrow-minded individual that it has been my fortune to meet. The English immigrant had, at least, some knowledge of a country other than Canada, whereas the other man, apart from an occasional trip to Winnipeg, had seen nothing other than his immediate neighbourhood, which he imagined was all the world. I should imagine that the War has altered this greatly.
Accordingly Mrs. Henderson spoke of Mary as ‘a gum-chewing little horror’. She chewed gum, it is true, as did most Canadian girls, but I will not have it that she was a horror. Gum-chewing in itself is not an obnoxious habit, although to find your partner at a dance chewing against your chest like a ruminant cow is a strange experience. Anyway, Mary made that winter much more pleasant for me, for which I shall be for ever grateful to her, and I write her down in my memory as a good sort.
That winter was easier for me in many ways; I could do my work with one hand, so to speak, and I had made many friends during the year. Other bachelors would drive over in the evenings to smoke and yarn, and sometimes Henderson would honour me with his company. He was very interested in our English farming after his visit to my home, and liked to hear all about it. I remember telling him one night that we rarely threshed out of the field, but stacked everything, and threshed it as we required the money. This sounds unbelievable to-day, but it was true enough in my boyhood, and it impressed Henderson greatly.
There was also our local dancing class, which functioned in the settlement schoolroom on Tuesday evenings. There I learnt to waltz, and also to perform many and weird dances, one of which, I remember, was called the Old Log Cabin. We had only a piano usually for music, but on the two occasions when we held a proper dance, an old farmer used to play the violin, rat
her indifferently in the early part of the evening, but better and better as the whisky warmed him.
The square dances necessitated the services of a ‘caller off’. This individual gave directions and a running commentary in a sing-song nasal voice. Bits of this I can still remember. ‘Lady round gent and gent don’t go. Lady round gent and gent al—so. Swing yer corner, lady. Gee old Bill So-and-so’s stepping high and wide like a colt. Hey! Allum and left.’
I am afraid that I was a poor performer, and I was never sure what ‘allum and left’ meant, but I think it must have been ‘hand in the left’ for the grand chain.
I was always a mystery to me why we never got pneumonia at those dances. The schoolroom was always hot and crowded, and we danced in fairly heavy winter clothes. Smoking was taboo inside the room, and we used to slip outside for a cigarette without putting on even a hat. Perhaps it would be forty degrees below zero outside, and in a few moments one’s hair would be frozen quite stiff and crackly, but this never seemed to have any ill effect.
Towards the end of the evening the bachelors of the company, who were to drive some particular damsel home, would fill the oven of the school stove with large stones. At the close of the festivities these were wrapped in blankets, and placed at the feet of their passengers. I suppose that this crude form of hot-water bottle made it just possible for young love to go the long way home in spite of the cold. Large family parties drove to these dances in a grain box on sleighs, but couples came in cutters.
The summer roads of Western Canada were just dirt tracks, and we got a much better road in many ways during the winter. For one thing the snow trail was smooth, and the sleighs ran along almost silently. Another feature was that the winter road was more direct. For instance, when we went to Beaver Lake in the summer the road wound round the north end of the lake, but in winter you could drive straight across the lake, some two miles, even with a load of grain, the snow-covered ice making a perfectly level trail.
The horses drawing sleighs walked in the track of the previous sleigh, and when only one horse was driven in a cutter—a vehicle like a large arm-chair mounted on steel runners—the shafts were attached to the near or left-hand side so that the horse trotted in the runner track.
Actually the horses could not possibly get along anywhere else than in the runner tracks. The intense cold made the snow of the consistency of castor sugar, and the slightest breeze caused it to blow about; it would not even stick together to form a snowball. Consequently, the track made by a sleigh and horses got blown in with loose snow soon after it was made. The next tracks suffered a like fate, and so on, the result being that in a few weeks the road was composed of two strips of hard packed snow, some two feet wide and two feet apart. These got higher and higher as time went on, and by Christmas, if a horse stepped off the trail, either outside or in between these two strips of packed snow, he would sink down sometimes to his belly in soft powdery snow.
Of course, the horses got to know this, and needed no driving on a good trail. This was a blessing, not only to the squires of dames, but also to the teamster, when he was hauling grain in a very cold snap. He would be able to hitch up the reins, and walk behind his load to keep warm. This was why the green Englishman on a large farm was always given the young horses, as they had to be driven for some time before they acquired a trail sense.
This may have been a harsh method of education, but it was usually quickly efficacious. The youngster sits up on his load to drive his team, and rapidly freezes. His hands, encased in wool-lined fingerless mittens, soon become devoid of all feeling as he grips the reins. His feet cease to belong to him. His nose is not, and his forehead becomes a dull ache. At the end of his journey his mittens are frozen into hard shells, and he is unable to bend his hands to unhook his team. But after a few days of this he is able to leave his team to their own devices and plod behind his load in comparative comfort.
In the early part of the winter all the grain was hauled ‘loose’, being shovelled into the grain box from the granary, and from the grain box into the elevator pit at the railway. Towards the end of the winter the grain was bagged into two-bushel bags, as when milder days came, the trails would not carry the weight and loads got upset. By this time the trails were very high in places where they had been continuously blown in; some of them would be three feet high, and when one side collapsed under the weight of the load, you had to heave your load off before you could get your sleigh back on to the trail. For this type of hauling we used a flat platform on the sleighs to facilitate loading and unloading. I have had to unload and reload three or four times in a five-mile journey, when hauling grain in late March. Presumably this is one reason for the grain being put into small sacks of only two bushels. Imagine one man struggling in the snow with our absurd sacks of four bushels!
I find it difficult to convey by writing the fact that the snow ruled our lives for five months in every winter without a break. From October to April it covered everything. We never saw the soil, the roads, or even the sidewalks or pavements in the towns. On a soft day in March you would see a small child being pushed along the side walk in a perambulator on runners.
Our shanty had a one-slope roof, and the door was in the middle of the high side. If you opened a tin of salmon, say, and wanted to dispose of the empty tin, you opened the door, and lobbed the tin backwards on to the roof, down which it would roll to the ground on the other side. When the snow melted in the spring, all your sins of this character, which had worn a snow-white mantle for so long, came to light, and there would be a hideous heap of the most horrible rubbish behind the shanty: empty tins, old socks, meat bones, prairie chicken carcasses, and all the discards of your winter’s life. This had to be cleared away before the summer sun got busy.
We got fat during the winter, as we did less work, and owing to the intense cold ate the more. I was over six feet in height, but in the summer I rarely weighed over eleven stone, while in the winter I always went up to over fourteen. The intense cold was, I think, the chief reason for nearly all the men being clean-shaven. If you had a moustache your breath froze on it, forming icicles, and at times ice also formed on your eyelashes. I have seen men so adorned come in from work, sit before the stove, and pull large pieces of ice from their moustaches before they sat down to dinner. It was not a pretty sight.
We smoked plug tobacco, and I have never found any tobacco to equal it since I left. To enjoy a pipe to the full, you must go to Western Canada. Occasionally, we would get a week of ‘sixty-below’ weather, which meant an entire absence of wind. After a good breakfast, with half a gallon of oatmeal porridge, say, as a starter, fill your pipe carefully, light it, pick up your axe, and step out into that white, cold, still world. That pipe is superb. Your puffs of smoke will ascend vertically to the heavens, the flavour is ambrosial, and the crunch, crunch of your moccasins on the snow is a pleasing accompaniment. Smoke carefully as you walk to your work, but keep it going, or otherwise your pipe stem will freeze up. When it is finished do not tap it out, but keep it in your mouth all the morning as you work. A pipe stem is a comforting helpful thing to bite on each time your axe bites deeply into the tree. And when you return to dinner you will find a rim of ice around your pipe stem, so lay it on the back of the stove to thaw out ready for you after your meal.
Snow in England means to most folk tobogganing, snowballing, and other pleasures, but I never saw winter sports of any kind in Canada. I suppose it was too cold. In short and rare doses snow may be an amusing thing, but when you live surrounded by it for five solid months you are something like the man who was sick of the palsy, for verily you are sick of it.
CHAPTER XIII
This record of my Canadian farming seems to be almost entirely about work. Of course, Canada is a country in which the white man does work, and works hard; there is no native population to do it for him as there is in some other colonies. In fact, in my time, the dwindling natives did no work, or precious little. They lived on Government reserves, a
nd were offered every inducement to farm, by such bribes as free seed corn and implements, but they did not exert themselves very much. During some periods of the year they were allowed off the reserve, and travelled about trapping musk rats and other fur-bearing animals.
But most of the white men in the district contrived to fit in a good deal of sport during the year. Wild duck were plentiful until freeze-up, when they went south to warmer climes. The prairie chicken, a species of grouse, and the bluff partridge stayed with us the whole year. At that date one could shoot almost anywhere. The best method was to drive in a buggy, and shoot over anyone’s farm, where you found chicken or duck. The partridge rarely flew, but would remain perched on a bush until you almost poked him off, and then he went like greased lightning.
In the winter the prairie chicken congregated round the straw piles of the threshing sites. We had a pile exactly ninety yards from the shanty door, and had got the range off to a nicety with a ·22 rifle. There were occasional jack rabbits, an animal like a large hare, and the bluffs were full of a smaller variety of rabbit. These last changed colour in the winter for protection from coyotes, being brown in summer, and changing to white when the snow came. One season, I remember, they made a mistake, and adopted their winter fashions too soon. We had an early fall of snow, which only lay for about ten days, during which time the bluff rabbits went white. Then we had a short Indian summer for a week or so, the snow melted, and every rabbit showed up distinctly against the brown background.
They were not very good eating, but we went out one afternoon that time, and shot about fifty, which we skinned and placed in an open box on the shanty roof out of the way of the coyotes, a perfect cold storage. We did the same with a lot of mallard duck another year. There was a large marsh about six miles to the south-west, and just before freeze-up the only patch of open water in the whole district was in the middle of this We must have timed it to a nicety, for on the night that six of us went down there, all the duck in the neighbourhood were coming to this water, and the next day they all went south. We sat around this water with our boots wrapped in straw bands for warmth, and shot hundreds of duck in the moonlight. I can remember our share of the bag was exactly fifty-seven, as we plucked them the next day, and put them on the roof. This was in October, and we ate fresh wild duck in March.