by Plum Johnson
We weren’t allowed to use the telephone—a luxury that Dad insisted was reserved for adults—unless it was an emergency, and even then he stood beside us with an egg timer, shouting, “Say what you have to say and ring off!” Luckily my best friend, Diana, lived across the garden, so she and I strung a clothesline between properties—between her bedroom window and mine—and reeled across notes to each other, stuffed into empty soup tins. In our free time we created a theatre in the basement, writing scripts and making props and auditioning neighbourhood children for our cast of characters. If we ran out of girls, we made wigs and conscripted my brothers. For dramatic scenes, we cut up onions to make ourselves cry. When I was ten the local library asked to mount one of our plays, and Mum was so excited she urged me to start writing a few plays like Shakespeare.
“If he could do it, why can’t you?” she said. “After all, you have the same twenty-six letters he had!” I heard Dad scoff behind his newspaper.
I hated to disappoint Mum, but nothing I wrote sounded like Shakespeare. I tried to imagine all his letters tossed out of my Parcheesi cup, scrambled like puzzle pieces onto the playground. What was his secret? It must have something to do with which letters he used … and how many of each. I spent months of frustration trying to count Shakespeare’s letters, to crack his code. Mum continued her enthusiastic support, but I discounted her praise. It was Dad’s I longed for because his was so hard to come by.
People were always saying “You’re so like your mother!” but I hated it when they said that. Dad hurled it at me like an insult, so I didn’t want to be like Mum. Besides, I inherited Dad’s shape—tall, lean, and flat—not Mum’s soft, cuddly, big-bosomed figure. It’s true that when I laughed my nose crinkled up, exposing crooked teeth exactly like hers, but I secretly hoped people might think I was more like Dad. I admired his reserve, his discipline, and his elegance—things Mum didn’t have.
Mum was the life of the party. Others were titillated by her individualism, but I hated being sucked into the centre of attention where she invariably stood. She was always pushing me forward, volunteering me for things as if I were an extension of her: “Plum would be happy to babysit/walk your child to school/ help at the church fair!” If I complained, she’d say, “You need to reach out to people! Everyone feels shy, but shyness is a form of selfishness.” Then she’d add, “I know you better than anyone! Remember, I’m the only one who’s known you All Your Life,” implying that she knew me better than I knew myself.
Sometimes I used to cry on Dad’s shoulder. “Oh, Dad, she criticizes everything I do … sometimes I think she just hates me!”
“You’re wrong,” he’d say gently. “She admires you … she loves you … she wishes she could be just like you.” But I didn’t believe him. Why would she want to be like me?
Dad never disciplined me—he left that up to Mum and her silver hairbrush—but he occasionally disciplined the boys with a long thin bamboo cane that he kept in his closet for this purpose. It was supposed to be holding up his tomato vines.
“You’ll get three of the best!” he’d shout. “And if you cry, you’ll get three more!”
For me, the worst of it was the calm before the storm. Dad would order the boys to go to his bedroom, take down their pants, bend over the four-poster, and wait for him. The cruelty of it seared my heart, yet I felt powerless to stop it. When I took a bath with my brothers afterwards, I could see the angry blue stripes and red welts on their little backsides as they climbed gingerly into the tub. I remember the night when I’d finally heard enough.
I was eleven years old, hiding behind the curtains in my bedroom. I had my hands to my ears trying to block out the screams of Sandy and Robin in the bedroom next door. Every swish of the cane as it whooshed through the air landed on the beat of Dad’s forceful words. “You—can’tmake—strongsteel—without—ahot—fire!” he bellowed, as if he were trying to convince himself. Then I heard him say, “This hurts me more than it does you!”
When Dad finally emerged from the bedroom, his shoulders were slumped and the cane dangled loosely in one hand. He looked exhausted. But I was waiting for him. I leapt at his chest, attacking him with my fists.
“You cruel, cruel man!” I shouted, surprising myself.
I fled down the stairs, out the verandah door, and down to the lake in the dark, throwing myself into the depths of the lilac bushes that towered over the path.
Dad had looked momentarily confused, startled by my outburst, and only then did I realize it wouldn’t have taken much to stop him. I understood in that moment that it wasn’t something he wanted to do … it was something he felt he had to do, some version of misguided discipline he’d experienced in his own childhood. He must have been beaten hard at boarding school.
I heard Dad calling for me but I didn’t answer. I wanted him to worry.
Upstairs, Mum was at the boys’ bedsides trying to soothe their tears—but we all knew that it was she who’d brought this on. When Dad arrived home from the office, it was Mum who told him of the boys’ transgressions; she of the comfortingkisses-after-the-fact knew exactly what punishment she was setting them up for. Why would she do this? Why didn’t she know better? I could never understand it. She seemed to have no trouble standing up to Dad on other occasions.
Some nights, after we were tucked in bed, Mum sneaked out to art class, and when she came home Dad would crumple up her drawings and throw them in the fireplace, raging that she should have stayed home and washed the dishes instead. I’d hear her slam a cupboard door and yell, “There’s plenty more where those came from!” Then I’d hear her pour herself a drink and shout, “And while you’re at it, you should thank me … because I’m going to be supplying paper for your fire for the rest of the winter!” I’d hear the metal ice cube tray clatter into the sink as she stormed out of the room.
Almost every other year I skipped a grade at elementary school, so that by the time I graduated to grade nine at the public high school, I was only twelve years old. Many of my classmates were sixteen—including Ernie, who worked after school as a gas jockey at the corner Esso station. Ernie had greasy, slicked-back hair and a comb sticking out of his back pocket. He always wore a leather bomber jacket, pointy shoes, and white socks.
At the end of grade nine Ernie cornered me at the back of art class. He pulled out his switchblade, and as he slowly cleaned his fingernails with the tip of his knife, he explained that he needed my final art project to hand in as his own. Naturally, I gave it to him. When Mum and Dad found out why I’d failed art, they packed me off to a boarding school in Toronto. I didn’t understand why I had to live away. Dad drove into Toronto every day—why couldn’t I come home every night with him? Mum said it was because it was time for me to “be around girls.” Dad said boarding school would “build my character.” I knew what that meant—courage in the face of adversity—but I figured Dad already gave us enough of that at home. I pleaded with him not to send me away, but he was unmoved.
“There are some things in life we all have to do, whether we like it or not!” he thundered. “You just have to learn to suck it in.” He took his big white hanky out of his pocket and handed it to me.
Dad’s rules were far stricter than those imposed by the school. When boarders went home on weekends, Dad insisted I stay in, like the girls from Venezuela and Abu Dhabi. When we lined up on Fridays to receive our allowance issued by the school bursar, Dad instructed them to give me only half, complaining that the recommended amount was far too generous. And he wouldn’t allow me to call home. Sometimes the matron took pity and offered her phone, but in those days Oakville was long distance and I had to reverse the charges. Collect calls were intercepted by the operator; I couldn’t communicate directly with Dad unless he agreed to accept, so the operator always had a longer conversation with him than I did.
“I have a collect call from your daughter, sir, will you accept the charges?”
“Why does my daughter wish to speak to me?”
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“Your father wants to know why you’re calling.”
“Tell him I’m sick! I’m in the infirmary! I want to speak to my mother!”
“Your daughter is sick, sir.”
“Nonsense! Tell her to pull herself together.”
“But she’s in the infirmary, sir.”
“She’s in good hands.”
“Sir? Could she speak to her mother?”
“No! I give her quite enough allowance and I will not accept collect calls.”
“But …”
“Over and out!”
Then I’d hear the operator say, “I’m so sorry, dear … I hope you feel better soon.”
On stormy days Dad took us sailing in his Snipe. It was a two-person racing dinghy, but he crammed all five of us into it. He stuffed me in the hull—“for ballast,” he said. We wore heavy orange life jackets made of kapok, which were so waterlogged they were like lead weights. They would have drowned us for sure, had we ever tipped.
Dad carried the wood centreboard down the street, five blocks to the harbour, and we lagged behind, lugging the heavy canvas bags stuffed with sails. After scrubbing the boat clean, we spent ages preparing the sails—sliding their tiny metal clips one by one into the narrow brass channels on both sides of the mast before finally hoisting them up and casting off.
Dad preferred sailing when seven-force gales churned the water as rough as the ocean. He shouted nautical orders at us (“Hard-a-lee!”) and then sat at the helm with his hand gripping the bucking tiller, forcing the bow into the wind, heeling the boat over, the mast almost parallel to the water. His face mirrored the tension of the sails: jaw set tight, facing the icy spray head-on, daring us to capsize. The boys in their bloated life jackets hunkered down for the ride, but I was stuffed inside, upside down, pressed against the wooden ribs, paralyzed with fear. Occasionally he’d pull me out to wave to Mum. She’d be on the verandah, anxiously peering through her binoculars.
At the end of the day we lowered the sails and all their tiny clips had to be slipped from the mast again. This was my job and I hated it.
One day, as I sat shivering on the dock, my cold hands wrestling with the wet sails and icy clips, I had what I thought was a brilliant idea. “Dad?” I said. “Why can’t the sails roll up and down into the boom automatically, like our movie screen does?” I’d often watched Dad pull up the screen when he set up the projector in the playroom. It was spring-loaded and would effortlessly wind out of its tube, and when he’d let go, it would roll quickly back in with a satisfying thu-thu-thunk.
He swiped at me as if I were a gnat. “Because life isn’t meant to be easy.”
“Easy” wasn’t in Dad’s vocabulary. He liked a challenge. Perhaps this is why Mum and Dad were able to keep their marriage vows, against all odds, until death. Dad once told me that divorce didn’t solve anything because you were just trading one set of problems for another. You had to look beyond them, he said.
When my own children were young and I was thinking of divorcing, Dad took me for a walk. He told me the story of when, as a child, he’d gone into the woods and torn down his brothers’ tree house in revenge because they wouldn’t let him play there.
“I always regretted it,” he told me, “because I tore down the one thing I loved.”
He left it up to me to decipher this parable, but when I decided to separate anyway, he came into the city to help me move out. I thought he disapproved, but in the kitchen, lifting boxes, I heard him mutter under his breath, “I wish I had your guts.”
Mum and Dad’s tumultuous battles reached one crescendo after another until eventually they simmered down. When they entered old age, their prolonged truce seemed to resemble companionship. When Dad got Alzheimer’s, it even resembled love. He began to pay compliments to Mum that she’d waited sixty years to hear—but we knew by then that he’d lost his mind.
By then, Oakville had matured into a sprawling, sophisticated commuter town with a population of over two hundred thousand people—one of the wealthiest in Canada.
Mum hated this change.
“People have more money than sense!” she’d say. “They tear down all these beautiful old houses, build monstrosities with five bathrooms, and then hightail it to Florida for the winter! Who wants to clean five bathrooms?”
Mainly she complained that, in the old part of town, all the children were gone. “It’s like a ghost town! Instead of sagebrush blowing down the streets, newspapers are all over the lawns—but nobody’s home. All the doors are locked. You walk down the street and you don’t see a single soul!” Young families, she pointed out, could no longer afford to live here; instead, they came as tourists.
On hot summer weekends, families who live in cookiecutter housing that was once farmland north of the highway drive down to the lakefront to picnic in front of our house. They peer wistfully over our hedge at a bygone era—at a house that looks frozen in time, the last unrenovated holdout. The verandah, wicker chairs, driftwood doorstops, white porcelain doorknobs, screen doors with hook-and-eye latches, and tall blown-glass windows have all remained much as they were when the house was built in 1902. You can find faux replicas at expensive home decor shops uptown, where everything new has been purposely distressed, but here at home every scratch has a bona fide provenance. When Dad finally kicked his dilapidated wooden wheelbarrow to the curb one garbage day, it appeared two weeks later at an antique shop on the main street with a $200 price tag strung on a pink satin ribbon dangling from its rusted iron wheel.
Tourists now refer to our house as the “Old Slave Driver’s House” because of what they think is a historic plaque outside the front door … but it’s a fake, hung there fifty years ago when we were teenagers determined to spite Dad. Our neighbours have a real one—WILLIAM BOND, MARINER, CIRCA 1874— but ours alleges that the owner was a SLAVE DRIVER, CIRCA 1953. It’s signed by THE OAKVILLE HYSTERICAL SOCIETY. In our minds, it was a cheeky chance to get back at Dad for perceived injustices—and to let the world know what we thought of his motto: “Spare the rod and you spoil the child.” When Dad went away on a business trip we bolted the sign to the outside of the house and giggled behind a tree at our gall.
When he saw it three weeks later, Dad was furious. He unpacked like a madman, ready to come hunting for us. He’d caned us many times for lesser offences. But before he could do so, Mum handed him his mail. Tearing apart the envelopes, he opened an official-looking letter written on Oakville Historical Society letterhead. It was from the chairman. They had held a meeting. Our sign, they said, made a mockery of their organization and they demanded Dad remove it—immediately!
This intensified Dad’s rage but redirected his anger. He stomped through the house shouting, “Who are they to tell me what to do? They have no authority—history be damned!” To our amazement, Dad refused to take the sign down. Not long afterwards, a letter to the editor of the local paper cemented Dad’s resolve. It said something like:
Dear Sirs, My wife and I recently visited your charming town and one of the highlights of our trip was coming across a sign on a house by the lake signed in fine print by the Oakville Hysterical Society. It gave us such a chuckle. Any town that has a sense of humour like this is one we plan to visit often.
The Oakville Beaver had put a black border around it and centred it on their op-ed page. Dad was so delighted he cut it out and framed it. Mum photocopied it and sent it to all her relatives in Virginia. Not every tourist, however, noticed the fine print. Mum and Dad never locked their doors, and one day Dad found a thank-you note propped up on the kitchen table: To whom it might concern, Thank you so much for letting us tour your lovely museum! We had no idea it was here.
Another time Mum answered the back doorbell to find an excited middle-aged professor from South Carolina standing there. “Excuse me,” he said, “but I couldn’t help reading your sign out front … I had no idea Canada still had slaves in 1953! Could you tell me a little more about it?”
“You’ll h
ave to ask the slaves …” Mum told him with a straight face, “and I’m sorry, but they’re out sailing.”
Dancing Till the End
I was with Mum on her last day in January, but I’d left in the evening before she went to bed. I retrace the minutes of that day in my mind, looking for clues I might have missed, but there were none. Well—maybe there was one: it was one of the few days she hadn’t asked to go to Sears. She hadn’t even dressed. She’d spent all that Sunday in her dressing gown, sitting in her bedroom, laughing and making phone calls.
The last call she placed was long distance—to Bodrhyddan Hall in Wales—to one of her oldest friends, the 9th Baron, Lord Langford. Geoffrey was born in 1912, four years before Mum, and was the last surviving member of the escape in the Sederhana Djohanis—the small boat in which my father and fifteen other British officers eluded the Japanese when Singapore fell in 1942.
Mum had been begging me for weeks to call Geoffrey for her, but I kept refusing. It felt like Mum was always either trying to direct my life or getting me to live hers, and I was desperate to draw the line. It was our perpetual dance.
“Please call Geoffrey for me,” she begged.
“You call Geoffrey.”
“I don’t have the energy!”
“Then wait till you do—he’s your friend, not mine!”
“I just want to know how he is,” she said quietly.
This time there was something about her tone—a sad vulnerability—that made me suddenly understand her differently. She didn’t lack the energy to pick up the phone—she had no problem calling me all the time—instead it sounded like she was feeling insecure, afraid she could no longer muster up her Life of the Party image and project it long distance, afraid she might disappoint Geoffrey. She wasn’t asking me to live her life; she was asking me to cover for her. I felt a surge of compassion and admiration: her spirit was indomitable.