by Alan Doyle
I’m not sure where you are right now, dear reader, as you are reading this book. But let me ask you this: Is there a place left in the free world where kids daily dodge a wild beast on their way to school? Imagine the parental and civic uproar if today in a typical Canadian town or city, a dog bit kids—every day, for nine years! I’m pretty sure Gabby, the Beast of Skinner’s Hill, was the last of his kind.
You’d think everything after that on the trek to school would have been easy. But it wasn’t. That was just the first trial. As they say in the mountain-climbing world, “The top of the mountain is only the halfway point.” Once we made it to the top of Skinner’s, we then had to descend the school side. We went from exhausting ourselves hiking up the treacherous icy slope to exerting every effort to keep from sliding down the other side. If you lost your footing on a particularly inclement day, you could slide out of control, hit the rounded snowbank at the school’s entrance and find yourself hurtling past the school, down the hill, across the road and into the river faster than you could drop an anchor. I’ve often thought that the makers of Olympic luge tracks should have visited Skinner’s Hill in Petty Harbour during one of those winters. They most certainly would have learned a thing or two about how the human body can speed along on ice. Whether those conditions could be replicated anywhere else in the world, we’ll never know.
After scaling Skinner’s Hill, crossing the dangerous terrain of Gabby the Beast and creeping down the other side of the mountain, we arrived at school, usually relatively unscathed. I’d say we were battered, bruised, bitten or frostbitten only about 30 percent of the time, which, given the circumstances, is pretty good.
The boys in our town were often called Petty Harbour Dogs. The history of this nickname dates back to the times when Petty Harbour folks used dogsleds to pull them and their cargo to and from St. John’s. Townies in the downtown core of St. John’s would hear the barking coming over the hills and announce, “Look out. Here come the Petty Harbour Dogs!” And eventually, men and boys from Petty Harbour became known as Petty Harbour Dogs, too.
Thinking back on this now, I believe the moniker was quite apt for us kids. We’d often sit in gangs on the bridge in Petty Harbour and eyeball the Townies and tourists who drove through on Sundays. And before school, it was the same thing. The second we stepped foot on school property, the boys and girls quickly separated. Bernie and I immediately went to the Dude Section of the yard, standing in a group right by the driveway, eyeballing every person and every car that turned into the dirt yard used as a makeshift parking lot. We must have looked like we were about to bark and defend our territory if they so much as stepped out of their vehicles. Standing around in our pack by the school gate, we’d reluctantly step aside only to let a teacher pass. I suppose we wanted the illusion that people got in only because we let them. We were cool like that, so cool that we needed to stay as far away from the school—and from the Girls’ Section—as possible, until the bell rang. Did it matter that the Dude Section was where the wind whipped right up the hill, freezing our faces and hands off? Did it matter that we weren’t always wearing hats or gloves? Of course not. We boys stood every morning on the most exposed part of the school property, wearing as few clothes as possible. The girls, much more sensibly than us lot, congregated in a little alcove close to the school and out of the cold wind.
Like a true pack, the boys in the Dude Section were all shapes and sizes, with pups as young as five to others in their teens. The quiet young ones were constantly studying the older ones, imprinting their words and actions into their young minds, whether they realized it or not.
Bern and I would sidle up to Wade and Donnie, two brothers who lived close to the school. Wade was a year or two older than the rest of us and hence was bigger and stronger, and Donnie was never far behind him. Both of them were tough as boots, as they had a few older brothers and cousins who kept them at the top of their game. Like in most of the families in Petty Harbour, Wade and Donnie carried a few strong physical traits from the previous generation. Wade was tall and good-looking with an olive complexion he shared with one of his older sisters. Donnie had the family freckles and red hair. In Petty Harbour, it was not difficult to pick out which family anyone was from. To this day, faces are handed down from generation to generation. I regularly visit Petty Harbour and can actually tell just by looking what family a young kid comes from. It is both odd and comforting to go there today and see a kid who’s the spitting image of Wade or Donnie and who’s riding his bike across the bridge just as we did a generation before. Same faces for generations.
Once the dogs assembled at the school gate, the banter often got going with a simple morning poke from Bernie.
“Alan, tell the truth, b’y. Did you comb your hair with a pork chop or what?”
“Yeah, Alan. Your head looks like a moose’s arse,” Wade might say.
Bernie would jump to my defence. He was allowed to mock me all he wanted, but no one else was. “Shut up, Wade. Your sister’s arse is as big as a moose’s and her butt cheeks probably hang down like two pork chops.”
“Maybe so, but I can tell you exactly what your sister’s arse looks like,” Wade would counter.
“Oooh.” All the boys loved when it got real dirty.
“Yeah. We’ve seen her arse so much we’re all sick of looking at it,” Donnie would chime in.
“You’re confused, Donnie, b’y. That’s Wade’s arse you gets to look at all the time.”
“Oooooh!” The boys loved it when the big b’ys wouldn’t let it go. You see, in Petty Harbour, whoever zings last wins. As long as you kept upping the verbal jabs, you were still in the game. The moment you got sookie or threatened to make it physical, you forfeited victory.
“Feeling all brave this morning, are you, Bern?” Wade would say to test the waters.
“Yes, b’y, Wade. There’s something about picturing your sister’s arse that gets me all riled up. Funny, ain’t it?”
While this verbal sparring went on, I and some of the others would be making bets about what would happen next.
“Bernie could take Wade in a fight if Wade’s coat was open and he got a quick shot in the guts,” my cousin Benny would say. He’d even act out the description to make sure we all got the meaning. Benny was thin as a rail with a head of hair as thick as a horse’s mane. He was quick footed, which made his shadow-boxing demonstrations most awesome to watch.
“To take down Wade, you gotta punch him in the neck and cut off his breathing,” Cousin Tommy would say. Tommy was Benny’s older brother. He was stocky, with a freckled face. He performed a little demonstration, punching the air to make his point clear to us. We mimicked the action and commented on the effectiveness of this technique. Clearly, Tommy had given a lot of thought to how to take down Wade.
“You’re both wrong,” he said. It was a tiny voice, high-pitched and reedy. We all looked down to see young Mikey had arrived. The youngest of the gang, at around seven years of age, he was full-on Nitzy Pumpkin, with blazing red hair and a face and body covered in freckles. “You gotta boot him in the nuts.”
“No booting in the nuts!” we’d all shout, but by this point Bernie and Wade were out of earshot and very involved in their banter.
Because he lived farther away, my friend Perry would arrive about fifteen minutes before school started and size up the scene in a few seconds. Never the loudest in the group but always the most observant, he remains to this day one of the funniest people I know. He walked and stood like an adult, even as a ten-year-old, but he had a perfect baby face that was always plastered with the same grin, like he knew something the rest of us did not.
“Alan, while the bulls are snorting at each other, you might want to pay particular attention to Miss Cindy’s blouse today.” Perry would then wink and touch his nose or perform some other gesture he got from a television character. “Miss Cindy passed me in her car as I was walking up the harbour, and even at top speed I got a fair look at her goods.” He�
�d wink and touch his nose in that “just between you and me” kind of way.
It was a longer walk to the school from the Long Run, so Bobby, Stephen and Paul, Jack Walsh’s sons, would arrive later than everyone else, and almost without fail, the entire conversation of the pack would shift to sports. All three brothers excelled at almost every sport. Between them, they had softball, bowling, darts and hockey championship trophies from Petty Harbour and beyond.
“Did you see the save Palmateer made last night for the Leafs? Best double-leg slide I ever saw.” Bobby would be uncontainably excited. “He went post to post, skates up in the air. Robbed Gainey of the puck. Thought he had a goal for sure! Almost as good as the home run from Reggie Jackson that just nipped over the glove of the outfielder. Deadly.”
Once these sports conversations got started, they quickly morphed from discussion to full-on theatrical performances. Bobby became a sportscaster, with more natural enthusiasm than anyone we’d ever seen on TV. When Bobby’s show started, Stephen and Paul took centre stage, the rest of us gathering to watch. As Bobby narrated, Stephen and Paul did a slow-motion play-by-play re-enactment of every last detail they’d seen on TV, doing so with perfect accuracy. It was our very own amateur Sports Desk show, live every morning. It was better than TSN.
Bobby would channel Bob Cole’s voice from Hockey Night in Canada. “Here goes the youngster Coffey, up the wing.” The boys would act this out, skating down the invisible ice.
“Other wing, Youppi.” (That was Paul’s nickname, like the Montreal Canadiens and Expos mascot, because he often wore big baggy jerseys.)
“Wake up, b’y.” Bobby would correct anyone who made the slightest error in the replay.
Back to Bob Cole. “Down the right side, around the defence. He can go, you know.” Bobby would transform any spectator into participant if he needed someone to assume a role. This time, he grabbed little Mikey. “And into the centre with a quick look between the legs.”
“Much like you’ll do with Miss Cindy’s attire today,” Perry would say as an aside just for me.
“But Coffey looks upstairs and blows it past the out-reached glove of the goalie. And he finishes with the goal!”
Bobby would run to stretch Stephen’s “glove hand” a little more so the re-enactment perfectly matched the angle and quickness of the actual save.
This broadcast would inevitably start debates about how Carbonneau was soft for the Habs, and Lanny McDonald and Börje Salming should retire from the Leafs. Every dog had his own opinion, and everyone would fight for airtime.
“I likes Wayne Gretzky,” Mikey would say, gathering up a ton of courage to speak.
“Who the f—k is Wayne Gretzky?” we’d all shout.
Eventually the bell would chime and we’d file into school and we’d be greeted by Mr. Kelly, our principal, with his exact-same-as-yesterday, exact-same-as-tomorrow greeting, “Good morning, children.” He was a tall, slender, Ichabod Crane kind of fellow who looked all the way down at you over his thin wire spectacles and long, sharp nose. And when I say long, I mean loooong.
“Mr. Kelly could smoke a cigarette in the shower,” Bernie used to say. I was eleven or twelve by the time I actually got the joke.
“Straight to your classrooms now, children.” I can still see Mr. Kelly standing in the doorway with one hand high on his chest, holding the two flaps of his blazer tight together while the other hand held his ever-present handkerchief, ready to catch anything that shot out of that almighty nose.
All of us kids would file into the school and hang our coats on the hooks in the hall, leaving our wet boots on the floor. Then we’d stream into our various classrooms. We had no PA system. Instead, Mr. Kelly would stand in the foyer area and ask all the teachers to keep their doors open. Then he’d raise his voice to what must have been a very uncomfortable volume and he’d yell out the announcements for that day. Any other person might have shouted like a referee at a sporting event or perhaps like a ringmaster at the circus, losing all formality. But Mr. Kelly was far too respectful and dignified for that kind of showmanship. He spoke exactly as he would if you were standing right next to him, not a word more or less, only about forty decibels louder:
“Today, children, there will be a mass to celebrate the Twenty-Sixth Day of the Holy Ascension of the Blessed Saint of Non-Rising Bread!” or something like that.
“Benny Stack, Perry Chafe, Peter Wells and Alan Doyle will serve mass and should go to confession fifteen minutes before the other students!
“Next Friday the Bookmobile will be back, so please have your library books ready to return!
“And finally, today is Day Three, so Mr. Pilgrim will be here this afternoon to take Grades 5 to 8 to play ball hockey. Weather permitting, this will take place up the road, but given that the weather rarely does permit, it’s more likely that ball hockey will take place in the basement of the church.
“Now, children, bow your heads and let us pray!”
And the low hum of a hundred or so students from kindergarten to Grade 8 would follow. “Our Father, who art in heaven …” When we reached the “Amen,” the classroom doors closed one by one and lessons began.
All classes were split grades except for kindergarten. I have no memory of the split-grade arrangement being an issue in Grades 1 and 2, or even in Grades 3 and 4. I suppose there was not such a delineated difference in curriculum for those levels. But as the grades got higher, sharing a class with kids doing a different curriculum became more and more difficult.
In Grade 5, for example, our teacher would teach Grade 5 math on one side of the room while the Grade 6s “read quietly” or did assigned work on the other side. When the teacher was finished, he or she would cross the floor at the front of the room and everything would switch. This meant there was always a group of idle kids in the room.
Imagine a dozen eleven-year-olds in a classroom. Now imagine asking them to stay intermittently quiet and work independently for about half an entire school day. When I was in the lower of the two grades in the room, it was conceivable for me and Perry and a few others to quietly eavesdrop on the lessons being taught to the upper grade. That would hold our attention for a few minutes at a time. But when we were in the older grade in the room and the teacher was teaching the lower grade, there was nothing at all to hold our attention. Naturally, we devised a whole array of quiet activities to engage in that were not quite related to the lessons we were supposed to be doing. But perhaps we learned a few things all on our own. Here are some highlights:
• Perfecting paper airplane shapes. I always found the classic shape could travel the farthest, while my cousin Benny made a smaller model that could not fly as far but was deadly accurate. He could fly it from the third row and have it land on the teacher’s desk while his back was turned. Brilliant. We learned so much about aerodynamics.
• Passing notes. These notes primarily consisted of creative insults about each other’s choice in hockey team. Me to Perry: Habs Rule. Perry to Me: Habs rule what? Or do you mean there is a Habs rule? We learned a bit about grammar.
• Whispering back and forth about the distinct possibility that Wanda may very well have grown breasts:
“Mr. Chafe,” I’d say to catch Perry’s attention. I’d cleverly taught myself to talk out the side of my mouth.
“Mr. Doyle.” Perry was even more discreet.
“I believe there may be some new action in Wanda’s upper underwear.”
“Do tell, Mr. Doyle.”
“If you lean forward about forty degrees and wait for the sun to bounce off the rocks, you’ll see what I mean.”
“Waiting for it … waiting for it. Yes sir. I can confirm a distinct outline through the white blouse.”
“A degree or two back and you might catch a direct look through the arm hole.”
“Yes, indeed. New gear, I see.”
We could carry on a conversation like this for quite some time, proving that we learned a lot about ventriloquism.
When, on the odd occasion, we actually concentrated on the school work assigned, I learned that I liked English and history and religion. And telling stories. I learned I did not enjoy math or science. I would not have put it in these words at the time, but I was never much for constants—you know, those things in math and sciences that never change … ever. Those things bugged me. Like water freezes at zero degrees, every time. A + B = C … every time. Boring.
But I recall the first time I really heard a poem and understood the function of that kind of language. It was E. J. Pratt’s poem “Erosion.” I found it very exciting that words arranged in a particular sequence and rhythm could make me feel a certain way. It made me start to think about songs. Was it possible that songs were really just sung poems? I learned that poetry can make predictable things a little more interesting.
My favourite class was gym, which was unfortunate because we did not have a gym. As Mr. Kelly mentioned in the announcements, once a week the phys. ed. teacher, Mr. Pilgrim, would come for a visit. He looked like a professional hockey player and honestly seemed to love coming to Petty Harbour to do sports with us kids. We had no gym or recreational facility of any kind, so we made do with what was around us. When the weather was fine, we’d go up on the hill and play softball or soccer. We’d go on hikes in the woods or walks around the harbour. Once a year, there’d be the National Fitness Program, where the older boys and girls would time their flexed arm hang or do other bizarre tests of strength. It didn’t matter to us what the activity was. It was not in the classroom, so it was all fun.