They Left Us Everything

by Plum Johnson

  Three blocks south from the main street sat an empty house: a rambling, unheated barn of a place surrounded by dirt paths and lilac hedges and overlooking a wild, pebbly beach that coughed up dead fish and driftwood. It had been used by out-of-towners as a seasonal cottage and had languished on the market after the war like a white elephant: a burdensome beauty, too costly to maintain. In a letter to his brother in England, Dad called it “a wreck.” His uncle in Rome wrote, My dear boy, do you mean to tell me that you have paid £5,000 for a house in … the colonies? Made of wood? Who wanted an unheated barn of a place on cinder blocks, facing stiff winds off the lake, with high ceilings, twenty-three rooms, and eighty-four drafty windows?

  Mum, that’s who. The fact that it lacked a furnace didn’t faze her: she was still unpacking mothballs and recovering from the heat. This house had two things that mattered to her most: cross-drafts and servants’ quarters. Maids—and especially cooks—had always been part of Mum’s household. Even as a young working girl in New York City, she’d been in the habit of sending her dirty laundry home to Virginia each week by train. Her mother’s maid, Lucy, would return it freshly ironed, along with a home-baked meal prepared by the family cook, Edmonia.

  The house suited Mum’s Southern disposition: its wide, white-columned verandah reminded her of her Gone with the Wind childhood: she claimed she could see New York across the lake from her bedroom window. The lake reminded Dad of rowing along the Thames in his student days and his war stint with the Royal Navy in the Indian Ocean.

  It took Mum and Dad almost a year to shore up the exterior. Dad added insulation, storm windows, and central heating, and threw a few more cinder blocks under the verandah to carry our weight. To the four thousand square feet of interior space, Mum added closets, tennis racks, and miles and miles of bookshelves. She slapped up some wallpaper in the dining room, but she didn’t bother renovating the kitchen—she didn’t expect to spend much time there. The house came with some big old turn-of-the-century furniture that the previous owners had abandoned.

  When Mum left behind our luxurious ex-pat lifestyle in Hong Kong and Singapore, she unwittingly left behind chauffeurs, houseboys, cooks, and gardeners. When Chris and Victor were born here in Oakville, Mum was shocked to discover that babies born in Canada didn’t automatically come with amahs. But although the staff was missing, this house in Oakville approximated the size and shape of the houses they’d left behind. It was expansive and commanding, just like their personalities, with strong bones, too, able to withstand the storms generated by their frustrations. It saved their marriage: Dad quipped that it had so many rooms they could go days without seeing each other.

  Of the twenty-three rooms, eight are bedrooms and many have two doors, each room leading into the next. There are rooms for everything: a mudroom, workroom, TV room, playroom, kitchen, pantry, trunk room, pool room, laundry room, dining room, living room, and an attic running the full length of the house. There are two staircases—one for the main part of the house with a solid oak banister and one in the back, off the pantry, for the maid.

  Masses of tall, four-foot windows open in on their hinges like doors, their panes rippling with hand-blown glass. Mum called them the shout-out kind, hearkening back to a friendlier time. The sightlines are extraordinary—the lake beckons from every window. Everywhere you turn, the sun streams in and the rooms are ablaze with light.

  Facing the lake, the wide, full-length verandah is skirted by lattice and climbing wisteria vines. Fresh breezes waft through the screens, carrying the mingled perfume of hydrangeas and lilacs. Beneath the verandah there’s an ancient floor of beach sand and shale where raccoons and squirrels take shelter from winter storms and where, in summer, the creative energy of the winds ebb and flow unobstructed.

  Mum loved the fact that Point O’ View had a limitless horizon. Big skies, like high ceilings and long horizons, allowed imaginations to soar, she told us, and looking up at the stars at night made you see how infinitesimal your problems really were. She hated to be boxed in by rules or structure of any kind.

  The house had ample space for Mum’s clutter and she filled it with their joint acquisitions: Dad’s inherited British antiques, her Colonial American ones, their Malay busts, Chinese portraits, carved cedar chests, and the low opium bed that served as our coffee table. She set up her manual typewriter at one end of the dining-room table and wrote copious letters to her friends and family, describing her new life in Canada. But her letters didn’t stay away for long; friends found them so fascinating that they mailed them back, certain she’d want to save them. Mum stuffed them into plastic bags and chucked them in the trunk room, feeding her own personal compost heap that seemed to grow faster and steamier than Dad’s in the garden.

  Dad’s bunker was the basement. This was where he escaped to putter: where he polished his shoes each morning on the long wooden bench; where he set up his pots of seedlings in a makeshift incubator under the windows; and where he kept his birdseed, gardening tools, and plant encyclopedias.

  Dad was handsome—some said a Cary grant look-alike, tall and distinguished in his bearing—reserved, mannerly, disciplined, and fastidious. He was a perfectionist, used the King’s English, and lived the way he had during the Great Depression, with minimal possessions—only the bare necessities, each one neatly stored in its place: labelled, filed, shipshape. After surviving war in the jungles of Malaya, Dad saw self-denial as a matter of pride, a badge of honour; he learned to excel at it, and over time it became a lifestyle choice: cut the fat, stay lean.

  Mum was beautifully buxom and vivacious—casual, irreverent, and full of common sense. After we finally acquired what Dad called “the idiot box,” Mum’s foxhole was the TV room, a cozy little room off the kitchen. This is where she listened to the nightly news from Walter Cronkite, read Time magazine, and drank gin out of her coffee mug. Mum was creative and artistic and lived in the world of ideas. She was gregarious, enthusiastic, spontaneous, and vitally curious about everything. But mess and clutter followed her like wake from a pleasure cruiser.

  Her jackets, sweaters, bathing suits, tennis rackets, and running shoes were jettisoned behind her as she gushed through the house. Letters, books, and newspaper clippings spilled out onto every surface, and when she needed more space, she simply moved to a different room and began her piles anew.

  Dad built dykes to stem the flood of Mum’s untidiness, but she invaded his neat space anyway. He posted signs: ANNE! PUT BACK! … ANNE! DO NOT OPEN! … ANNE! KEEP OUT! But she just laughed and ignored his pleas.

  Like Dad, Mum had been the youngest in a large wellto-do family, but where Dad had been orphaned and penniless in childhood and learned that life was harsh, Mum had been given everything and learned that life was fun. Her family adored her engaging personality; she was the baby who made everyone laugh. Her father owned a bank and her family owned multiple country homes to which all were invited during the long summer months. Securely surrounded by family and friends, she learned to be generous and inclusive: the world was her oyster.

  Mum wanted us to think the impossible, question authority, have open minds, and stretch our imaginations— to “go for it.” But Dad demanded that we stop daydreaming, obey authority, pay attention to duty, and create order out of chaos. His favourite expression was “You can’t make strong steel without a hot fire!” He believed that if we learned how to weather hurricanes in childhood, we’d be able to survive any small storm as adults; if we learned to do without, we’d never be in need. He thought he was doing us a favour—he wanted us to be as strong as steel.

  Mum and Dad were magnetized—we just weren’t sure at which end. From the time they first met during the war, they fought for supremacy over each other, using wit and words as ammunition, sometimes funny, often scathing, until they’d produced a little army of their own. In many ways, we children were the glue that held them together: we strained their resources to the point where divorce was no longer an economic option. Instead they
hunkered down to a lifetime of battle, full of tumult and the occasional truce, together a boiling cauldron that threatened to overflow but never did. The result for us was a rich, exotic stew of opposites—intense, confusing, and sometimes dangerous.

  Like most fathers, Dad took the family car to work in the mornings and Mum did her shopping on foot—in her tennis dress. The Oakville Club was perched over the harbour, offering tennis courts, sailing berths, and the annual cabaret, but the main social hub, it seemed, was our house. Mum reached out to everybody.

  I remember as a child thinking it perfectly normal that complete strangers joined us for meals. Sometimes, we were surprised to see they were even wearing our clothes. Mum would invite passersby in for tea. Dad would pick up hitchhikers and bring them home for dinner; if they’d been standing out in the rain, he’d give them a dry shirt. When the minister at church announced that a runaway teenager needed an adoptive home, Mum was the first to put up her hand. Suddenly, some sullen sixteen-year-old girl would be occupying our spare bedroom, stealing our things. Mum once tried to adopt a thirteen-year-old bike thief after she read in the paper that he’d been arrested for operating a gang. “Why would they put a child like this in jail?” she said. “If he can organize a gang of boys much older than himself, he’s obviously bright and loaded with potential. He just needs to be redirected!” She thought nothing of inviting whole families to live with us if they were temporarily homeless, and one single mother with two young sons, whom Mum had befriended in England during the war, moved in for almost a year.

  Our house overflowed with little boys—Mum seemed always to be pregnant with them—and she often had them on some kind of leash. At my grade two Christmas party, I remember other mothers being dropped off at the school wearing stylish tweed coats with little mink collars, and thin rubber boots buttoned over their pumps. But Mum believed in exercise, so she had walked, massively pregnant again, trudging through the deep snow wearing oversized galoshes and a mammoth white Borg coat that came down to her ankles. She looked like a polar bear. Around her middle she’d tied a long piece of yellow rope, and my two younger brothers clung to the ends like little farmers attached to a clothesline, trying not to lose sight of a barn in the blizzard. On her head Mum was wearing her brown leather World War II pilot’s helmet, earflaps down, chin strap dangling in the wind. She had dressed for what she considered was the main occasion— not the party, but the cold—and I was mortified. But Mum was practical and provocative. She challenged convention every chance she got. She didn’t give a damn.

  The days of our week had a prescribed rhythm, defined by chores and meals. In our family, Sundays were for church, roast beef, and country walks; Mondays for grocery shopping and shepherd’s pie; Tuesdays for clothes washing and chicken; Wednesdays for ironing and spaghetti; Thursdays for vacuuming and liver; Fridays for silver polishing and fish; and Saturdays for gardening, floor waxing, and dinner parties. There were no popular restaurants—parents created their own.

  When we weren’t in school, we children ran in packs with our unleashed dogs, into one house, out another, banging open screen doors, grazing in open kitchens, and briefly greeting other mothers who were in the middle of baking cookies or hanging their sheets out to dry. We wiped our hands on their aprons. Our parents didn’t see us from dawn to dusk. We had the run of the town. Before the advent of television, we entertained ourselves. In the spring, my brothers and their friends wore toy guns in holsters and leather chaps over their corduroys, stringing up stuffed animals with clothesline nooses and exploding dead fish with firecrackers. My friends and I dug clay from the banks of Lakeside Park to make pottery, and went down to the pier at night to watch the local Portuguese fishermen with their glowing lanterns scoop up nets of flapping smelt. In the winter when the creek froze over we learned to skate by pushing chairs over the surface; in our garden we built elaborate snow forts complete with connecting tunnels, flags, and arsenals of snowballs.

  But Saturday mornings were different. This is when neighbourhood children scattered and watched from afar, morbidly fascinated by our father—and grateful he wasn’t theirs. Dad had so many lessons to teach us that he could barely cram them all in. He never gave us a task without inspecting it afterwards. He checked the flatness of our sheets after we made our beds, our fingernails after we washed our hands, the shine of our shoes after we polished them, our toy cupboards after we cleared up. He was always making us memorize poems and copy out maps, and correcting what he called our “lazy English.”

  “Stop saying ‘Um’—think before you speak! … It’s not ‘yeah’—it’s ‘yes’! … It’s not ‘nope’—it’s ‘no’! … ‘Kids’ are baby goats—the word is ‘children’!”

  Saturdays were allowance days—when our chores expanded, but when we might also get paid. Dad kept a homemade ledger, called the “Wowance Book” by Victor, who was only two years old and unable yet to pronounce the word. Our allowances grew in penny increments, depending on our age; as the oldest, my allowance was a dime. After breakfast at the dining room table we’d stand to attention beside Dad’s chair. He’d bring out his ledger, interview each of us, peruse our weekly offences, and then tot up our fines. More often than not our fines would outstrip our wages and we’d owe Dad money, which we then had to work off with additional chores. If we were lucky we got a few pennies, which we had to sign for.

  After assigning us our duties, Dad would march outside and turn his attention to his beloved vegetable patch. Tucked in behind the back of the house was a large plot of land where Dad grew tomatoes, pumpkins, carrots, lettuce, and rhubarb. He also grew marigolds, nasturtiums, and hollyhocks. Everything was planted in neat rows, staked with thin bamboo poles and long lines of white string. On hot days Dad removed his shirt, knotted his white handkerchief at the four corners, dipped it in water from the outdoor tap, and placed it on his head like a hat. While the boys helped Dad outside, my job was to clean the kitchen. Dad’s detailed list was thumbtacked inside the door of the broom closet. It listed our chores and the time frame in which they were to be completed. Under “Plum” it read: “7:30–7:38 mop floor, 7:39–7:46 scrub sink, 7:47–7:52 clean counters …”

  Periodically, Dad came in to inspect. He’d examine the sink in minute detail until he found a dot of grease I’d overlooked.

  “You call this clean?” he’d shout. “Do it again! If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing well!”

  By the time Mum got out of bed and drifted downstairs in her housecoat and furry slippers, looking for coffee and an ashtray, she’d find me heaving with sobs.

  “Nothing I ever do is good enough!” I’d cry.

  Out in the driveway she could see Sandy standing erect, his arms up-stretched, holding a log over his head for five minutes—his punishment for not having cleaned the garage properly. When I think of it now, Dad’s memories of POW camps must have been only ten years in the past, but what was Mum thinking?

  One Saturday morning Dad came home with a man he introduced to us as “Popeye,” a homeless man he’d found sheltering at the police station. Popeye was old, arthritic, and unkempt, with matted hair, rotted teeth, stubbled chin, and torn clothing. He smelled bad and spoke Dutch—which Dad knew a little of, too, from his days in Java. (Dad loved languages, and also spoke a smattering of Portuguese, Spanish, and Malay.) He told us he was employing Popeye to help him weed. Since we were Dad’s regular labourers (the source of our pocket money), we viewed Popeye with a mixture of relief and skepticism. What did this mean?

  Dad carried a wicker chair and small table down to the bottom of the garden and placed them in the shade. Then he ordered me into the kitchen to prepare a tray of tea, complete with biscuits, jam, and our best silver cutlery. He sent Sandy to the mantelpiece to bring out a tin of Dad’s best pipe tobacco— and there Popeye sat, smoking his pipe, sipping his tea, paid by the hour until lunchtime. Dad supervised our work in the garden until it was time to drive Popeye back to the shelter. This went on every Saturday, for
years. Dad told us to be kind to Popeye “because that could be you one day.”

  On Sundays after lunch, while Mum wrote her letters, Dad took the five of us for hikes in the countryside. Dad had a particular way of walking. He took long strides with a bounce in each step, claiming that with this method even young children should be able to walk four miles in an hour. He showed us how to do it and clocked our speed with a stopwatch. While he strode ahead, swinging his walking stick like an army major, our Dalmatian, Scrappy, raced after him and we tried to keep up.

  During these walks, Dad taught us how to make water wheels. In his pocket he brought corks, bits of paper, toothpicks, and rubber bands, and he made elaborate contraptions that churned downstream in the Sixteen Mile Creek, rotating in the current like a Mississippi paddlewheel. He also taught us how to dig for worms, skewer them onto our hooks, and slosh around in the mud to catch crayfish in the watering hole.

  When it came time to drive back, we piled into the station wagon. The road home was straight south, three miles down to the lake. Dad tied Scrappy to the outside of the car, knotting his leash to the back door handle. Then he started the engine. We fell silent and watched nervously out the back window as Scrappy began running as fast as he could. As Dad accelerated we saw Scrappy’s black spots blur, his tongue lolling out of the side of his mouth, his leash taut against the handle, his body stretched like a greyhound. Robin and Sandy hung out the side window, gripping the ledges, their hair whipping straight back in the wind. In the front seat, Dad focused his view on the side mirror, checking Scrappy’s stamina, but I was focused on Dad. His dark side fascinated me. He had the same expression I saw when we sailed: pushing the limits of endurance, his jaw clenched and a hard glint in his eye. When we all landed safely at the back door, my heart was beating as fast as the dog’s. The rest of the day Scrappy lay in a heap on the verandah, Chris’s arms cuddled around him.