Born Naked: The Early Adventures of the Author of Never Cry Wolf

by Farley Mowat

  From this time forward, non-human animals increasingly engrossed my interest, both in daily life and in my reading. I had already read my way through the anthropomorphic confections represented by the Uncle Wiggly series, Beatrix Potter, Mother Goose, Aesop’s Fables, the Christopher Robin books, and The Wind in the Willows. Now I began seeking stronger meat. The Dr. Doolittle books held me for a time but I soon moved on to Kipling’s Just So Stories and, in the realms of my imagination, became another Mowgli. I also read everything about the Others written by Ernest Thompson Seton and Charles G.D. Roberts, whose animal characters were not always shaped in the human form but were sometimes allowed to be themselves.

  As an almost inevitable result of having parents who were book worms, and of being immersed in the library atmosphere, I was far in advance of my age as a reader. Nothing in print was forbidden to me. When I was seven, I worked my way through a big, lavishly illustrated volume of Gargantua and Pantagruel and, though I must admit I did not understand much of the text, I certainly appreciated the marginal drawings of grotesque human beings engaging in things dear to the imagery of small boys, especially the representations of Rabelaisian farting and pissing.

  My tastes ran the gamut from the Boys’ Own Annual to privately printed erotic novels given to my father by book salesmen. I was especially taken by one called Aphrodite whose limpid and stylish prose, and frank but subtly executed illustrations, made most modern pornography, even that which is classed as “art,” seem as crude and rude as graffiti in a public toilet.

  When it came to books and reading, Angus gave me as much latitude as I could wish for, but when my behaviour trespassed against the honour code he could become an Old Testament kind of parent. Left alone in the apartment one rainy Saturday afternoon, I entertained myself by making pellets out of tightly rolled wads of cotton wool which I shot at flies through my tin pea-shooter. Being nearly weightless, the pellets proved ineffective until I hit on the idea of soaking them with my mother’s perfume.

  Why perfume? I cannot say. Water would have done as well but perhaps I thought the stricken flies would die happier this way. In any event, when my parents returned home I was accused of fooling about with Helen’s toiletry. I denied the charge, which was idiotic because the scent of Attar of Roses hung around me like a cloud.

  Helen cried a little at the wastage of her treasured perfume and I had a little cry myself after getting seven whacks with my father’s razor strap on the palm of each hand. It didn’t really hurt that much, but since this was the first time I had been strapped, the shock was considerable.

  After the ordeal was over, Angus and I solemnly (if somewhat gingerly on my part) shook hands while he assured me the incident would now be forgotten. I understood that I had not been punished for taking the perfume so much as for having lied about taking it. Lying by others was a cardinal sin as far as Angus was concerned, although he was a skilled practitioner at the art himself, especially when he was engaged in concealing his affairs with other women from my mother.

  During the Belleville interlude I also dabbled in theft. Angus had a habit of leaving small change on top of his bureau. Since I had no fixed allowance I took to pocketing the odd penny. When I had amassed five cents, I would buy a special kind of candy bar sold at a little shop on the route to school. It wasn’t the candy I was after but the wrapping. This consisted of stiff, perforated cardboard designed to be converted into a little glider that would actually fly quite well. I acquired several of these bars but guilt tormented me and I was afraid either to eat the candy or to assemble the planes. I kept my hoard in a hole in the limestone retaining wall behind the library. Eventually the squirrels found them and that was that.

  My parents’ bedroom and possessions exercised an irresistible fascination for me. I pawed through all their belongings at one time or another and can vividly recall the cold chill when I found Angus’s .45 Colt service revolver under a pile of his underwear. I showed it to Geordie Sobie. Neither of us had the guts to touch this sinister-looking object but I nerved myself to steal one of the bullets. Possession of this shiny, brass cylinder with its ugly, snub nose of grey lead gave me considerable prestige at school for a few days—until an older boy took it from me.

  Although it may seem odd, that incident is one of the few distinct memories I retain of my years in public school. Could it have been that my teachers were such singularly colourless souls as to fail to make a mark? Or did I simply dislike the servitude of school so fervently that I was able to eliminate its echoes from my mind? Whatever, my early school days remain as insubstantial in memory as a miasma.

  STOUT FELLA CONTINUED to play a prominent part in my life. Because Belleville harbour was a filthy place, full of sewage and industrial refuse, Angus found a summer mooring for the little vessel at the mouth of Jones Creek, a few miles west of town. This became our summer home. When we were not off cruising, Angus commuted to work each day, leaving Helen to lie reading on deck in the sun, or belowdecks if it came on to rain, and me to wander about with the sons of a farm family who lived nearby.

  These people were not really farmers. They had a cow and some chickens and lived in an old farmhouse, which was so dilapidated they dared not make use of its upstairs rooms. The several sons, all under fourteen, never seemed to wash, dressed like characters from Huckleberry Finn, and were free souls. I found them irresistible—but then all my life I have had a special affinity for social outcasts. They swore with casual abandon; drank homebrew bootlegged by their parents; trapped, shot, and fished with complete disregard for the law, and were, in fact, a law unto themselves. I suspect that my enduring affection for anarchy owes much to the time I spent in their company.

  My friends did not all come from beyond the pale. After Geordie Sobie was finally forbidden to play with me because of the perceived threat to his morals, Alan Evans became my best friend. Alan and his widowed mother, Alice, a slim and faery lady much admired by Angus, lived with her father on a decrepit estate on the edge of town. It included a huge and rambling old house fast going to wrack and ruin, acres of overgrown lawns and gardens, and, best of all, an uninhabited gate-house.

  Alan’s grandfather was a mining engineer who had a dark and gloomy laboratory filled with equipment for metal assaying. This was a place apart—full of inscrutable machines, retorts, furnaces, piles of ore samples and drill cores, all in a state of mysterious confusion. To Alan and me it was the sorcerer’s workshop. Although it was forbidden territory, we used to sneak in and root around. Once we came upon a small slug of gold, gleaming dully in the bottom of a retort. Captain Kidd’s treasure could hardly have thrilled us more.

  In the early summer of 1929 the adult world was awash in hectic talk of fortunes being made on the stock markets. The get-rich-easy mood must have infected Alan and me for we too decided to make a lot of money, with which to finance exploring expeditions to the far corners of the earth. Our first enterprise was manufacturing raspberry cordial from a gone-to-wild raspberry plantation on the grounds. This was not a commercial success. We made gallons of the stuff but drank more of it than we sold.

  Our headquarters was the abandoned gate-house, full of wrecked furniture, dust, bats, spiders, and mice. One day inspiration came to me. We would trap the mice, skin them, and make a fortune selling mouse fur. The idea originated from my having read about moleskin smoking jackets. If moles—why not mice? We borrowed several mousetraps from the big house and eventually caught a mouse. But our attempts to skin it, using bits of broken glass for knives, resulted only in a small, bloody mess of fur and flesh, and two cut fingers.

  Next we decided to start a rabbit ranch. Pooling our scanty funds we managed to buy a pregnant doe, whom we named Buffy. This project involved Alan’s mother since we planned to keep our stock in a more-or-less abandoned greenhouse on the Evanses’ estate. Alice Evans appealed to Angus to head us off. He was then attending a library course in Toronto, from whence he sent me the f
ollowing:

  Since you’ve formed the habit

  Of keeping a rabbit,

  Please follow these orders,

  For rabbits as boarders

  Are no joke in the least for Sweet Alice.

  See Arthur and worry

  Him til he does hurry

  To build up a hutch

  For fair Buffy, as such

  Will be better by far for Sweet Alice.

  Take it out by the barn

  On the Ketcheson farm,

  Where you’ll have to buy it

  Some food for its diet,

  And relieve of her worry Sweet Alice.

  Now do not forget it,

  Or else you’ll regret it,

  Because it will die,

  And your mother and I

  Will be weeping, and so will Sweet Alice.

  In the end Buffy was eaten by a cat, so this scheme too came to a dead end.

  Alan then suggested we turn the gate-house into a hotel. We passed the word around that we would be happy to receive guests at two cents a head, with raspberry cordial thrown in. For a while there were no takers, but the word spread and one afternoon guests arrived. They were two teenage couples from the wrong side of town and they were not interested in our raspberry cordial. They were interested in the beds in the upstairs rooms, raddled with mildew and mouse nests as these were. Alan and I were turfed out of our own hostelry with the emphatic adjuration not to return or to tell anyone what was going on or “you’ll get your little asses kicked up to your ears!”

  IN THE FINANCIALLY euphoric spring of 1929, Angus had felt flush enough to do away with old, black Henry and buy a car more nearly befitting his rising status. He chose a pea-green Model A Ford roadster equipped with a folding canvas top and rumble seat. He named this jaunty vehicle Eardlie, in gratitude to the dealer, Eardlie Wilmott, who had given Angus a bargain on it out of admiration for my mother.

  Helen had always had many beaux and continued to attract men long after her marriage. Although I am certain she never succumbed to temptation, she enjoyed male admiration and was not above a little flirtation. This did not bother my father; in fact, he may have felt it gave him licence. With sporty little Eardlie to rip around in, he now became even more the dashing caballero and began exploiting his attractiveness to women to the full.

  Either his successes made him careless, or perhaps the stories he told my mother to cover his tracks simply became too outrageous for her to accept. Whatever. The day came when she charged him with being unfaithful to her.

  Both she and Angus thought I was out of the apartment, whereas I was reading in a corner of my room when the ruckus began. Since I had never known my parents to quarrel openly, I did not know what to make of the raised voices coming from the kitchen. Curious rather than alarmed, I padded into the hall, from whence I could see them.

  Angus was squatting in front of the open door of our ice-box, balancing on his toes as he reached into it for a bottle of beer. Helen was standing right behind him brandishing both fists in the air. As I watched, fascinated, she drew back her right foot and, for the first and last time in their life together, struck my father. She kicked him so hard in the rump that he tumbled into the ice-box, hitting his forehead with sufficient force to make it bleed—though only a little.

  Helen was appalled by what she had done. Her hands flew to her face, then she said, almost dreamily, “Oh, Angus. Oh, Angus,” and crumpled to the floor in a classic faint.

  According to everything I have since read about the effects of such incidents on children, I should have been horrified, terrified, or traumatized. The truth is that I was excited by this little drama which sent a delightful shiver down my spine. Had I been older I might have been tempted to applaud. But I knew it would be a mistake to reveal my presence, so I padded silently back to my room where I remained invisible while my mother and father patched up their quarrel.

  For weeks afterwards they were extremely kind to one another and to me. And Angus was much more careful in how he conducted his affairs. Thirty years were to elapse before Helen would find him out again.

  My parents became very active in Belleville’s “younger set” this year. Membership in the Bay of Quinte Yacht and Country Club was de rigueur for “gay young things” (homosexuals had not yet hijacked the word “gay”) and there they sailed and danced the summer days and nights away.

  Stout Fella was often moored to the club wharf on weekends so I saw and heard a good deal of what went on. I delighted in the music of the dance bands, the frivolity of young men in white ducks and young women in flapper dresses, and the general air of carnival. I even liked the smell of Martinis that used to hang like a mist in Stout Fella’s cramped little cabin. The adults around me were a merry lot, all unaware of the darkness that was about to overshadow the lives of many of them. They were happy and carefree, and so were we, their children. It was the last fling of the crazy twenties, and an idyllic time to be alive.

  4Prohibition had been introduced into Ontario during the war and reigned until 1927. It did not reign supreme. “Medicinal alcohol,” which could be obtained with a doctor’s prescription, eased the thirst of many. Others drank the alcohol-based nostrums dispensed by doctors.

  5When George was puzzled as to what course to take, she would complain that she was in a terrible quarry, and when confused she would find herself all of a zither.

  6Geddes, the eldest, once stripped brother Jack to the buff, painted him all over with blue house paint, then shut him up in the back of a horse-drawn hearse which was parked in the street waiting to receive a neighbour’s corpse. Jack lost some skin and hair when the paint was removed with turpentine. He was probably lucky not to have died from lead poisoning.

  5

  IN MAY OF 1930, A few days after my ninth birthday, Angus travelled to Windsor, Ontario, to be interviewed for the job of chief librarian. He made the journey with no great expectations. Canada was then reeling from the shock of the worst financial collapse in recorded history, which had shaken the industrialized world in the autumn of 1929. Following the Crash, the mood had become one of uncertainty, apprehension, and retrenchment. Those who had jobs thought themselves lucky and neither expected nor sought promotions. Angus expected the trip to Windsor to be a pointless if pleasant little jaunt for he didn’t believe he had a chance.

  Neither did my mother, until he called long distance (something rarely done in those days) to tell her he had been offered the job, and had accepted.

  Although Belleville styled itself a city, it was no more than a county town. Windsor was something else. When Eardlie drove into its outskirts late in August 1930, I found myself entering a different and intimidating world.

  Windsor called itself the Border City. Together with several satellite communities, it encrusted the eastern shore of the St. Clair River which marks the boundary between Canada and the United States. Just across the river lay the vast, smoky , sprawl of Detroit, Michigan, the Motor City, where nearly half the automobiles that were already dominating the lives of North Americans had been or were being built. A lot of Windsor men worked in the Detroit auto plants and chauvinists on the U. S. side of the river liked to refer to the two communities as the Twin Cities, implying (and even assuming) that Windsor was no more than a northern suburb of Detroit.

  This is not the way we felt about it. Our industrialist overlords and traitorous political collaborators had not yet succeeded in subverting our conviction that Canada was a nation in its own right. As far as my family was concerned, Detroit and the whole of the United States of America were alien ground and, no matter what similarities its inhabitants might have to us, they were foreigners.

  Even though I was only a child at the time, the experience of living on the borders of a foreign nation which so obviously believed in its Manifest Destiny as the eventual master of the con
tinent helped instil in me the fervent nationalism I still proudly maintain.

  Our new home was a ground-floor apartment in a brick four-plex on Victoria Avenue, only a fifteen-minute walk from downtown, and the public library where Angus now lorded it over a staff of six.

  I was enrolled at Victoria School, which was three times the size of the one I had attended in Belleville. Because I was a new boy and “a little squirt,” I became an instant target for a number of boys bigger and tougher if not meaner than myself. This was something I had not previously experienced but, since I was fleet of foot, I wasn’t often caught. Nevertheless the humiliation of being frequently on the run did not endear Victoria to me.

  Nor was this the only humiliation I endured. One of my few surviving memories of the place concerns a Home and School entertainment devised by a woman teacher who was insanely enamoured of the stage. Three other small boys and I were conscripted to perform an utterly idiotic, simpering version of a “folk dance” opposite four little girls. By the time the practice sessions ended, we boys on the one hand and the girls on the other had come to detest each other with a virulence extraordinary in ones so young. But this was nothing to the detestation I felt for our merciless taskmistress. By the time we actually performed our horrid little travesty, I hated that woman so much I believe I could have slipped a stiletto between her ribs, had I known what a stiletto was.