by Tom Wilson
A day or two later there was a knock at the door. Trixie jumped off the couch and ferociously attacked the inside door knob, and Bunny dried her hands on her apron, walked across the kitchen and opened the door. There were two men in uniform standing there with the snow falling all around them. Bunny yelled at me, “Hold the dog….Hold Trixie back, for Christ’s sake.” One of the men handed Bunny a box and graciously wished her and her family a merry Christmas. Bunny put the box on the kitchen table, and I ran in behind her excited to see what magical gift the two men in uniform had brought. She told me to get back, but I kneeled on a chair beside her, leaning over the kitchen table waiting to see what was inside. Bunny pulled back the cardboard flaps and revealed a card that said, “Seasons Greetings from your Salvation Army.” Deeper inside the box were cans and boxes of food.
I was confused. What kind of gift was this?
I reached in and pulled out a can of Green Giant Niblets Corn. Wow, I thought. That’s the same kind of canned corn I brought in for the Christmas hamper at school. I stared at it some more. Then I stared past it into the rest of the box and saw instant milk, cans of spaghetti sauce and beans.
What was going on here?
Why was this box of food brought to our door?
Until that night I’d had no idea what poor people looked like. I sat in the silence around our kitchen table and looked at Bunny and George and stared down at my plate. I knew who I was then. I was one of The Needy.
THE WAR AMPS POOL
Most of the social events Bunny and George dragged me to were held at assorted Legions, veterans clubs and the Canadian National Institute for the Blind. The War Amps on the mountain brow was the closest club to our rented house on East 36th Street. It’s where I would be taken to swim from time to time in the summer as a young boy, and at Christmas it’s where I’d go to get my presents from Santa.
Children of broken World War II veterans would gather for Remembrance Days, Easters, Christmas parties. These gatherings were a chance for the vets to drink and bitch and watch the Leafs and Ticat games together, and for the aging war brides to drink and complain and talk about what was happening on Coronation Street. As a young fella, I saw it as the best of times for all of them.
The War Amps club was an old house on the edge of the Hamilton escarpment at the end of East 34th Street, on land granted by the Queen to the boys who gave so much in the fight against “those nasty Germans.” It was a Garden of Eden for working-class war heroes, I suppose, a break in the action, a place to lay down the swords and join the family. The house was on a treed lawn bordered by a short stone wall. There was a parking lot, some picnic tables and a swimming pool.
Oh god…the swimming pool.
My first trip to the swimming pool was when I was six years old. Our family didn’t own a car, so Bunny and I walked down East 36th Street and over to the brow in the blistering afternoon heat. It was the sixties and everything I wore in the summer was polyester and came in Hot Wheels colours. Lime-green bathing suit, spectra-flame tank top, antifreeze sun hat. I looked like I had rolled right off the Mattel assembly line, a walking version of Big Daddy Roth’s Beatnik Bandit.
I remember Bunny giving me a little history lesson about the pool as we walked up the steps towards the smell of chlorine and cigarette smoke. “This is the pool that Harry Cockman’s crippled son committed suicide in by tying himself to his wheelchair and rolling his wheels towards the edge of the concrete bunker filled with water. He drowned and sank to the bottom until the grounds maintenance man found him the next morning. Poor wee fella.”
It’s also where blind veteran Dino Rocco stripped down and stumbled onto the diving board, then, running full speed off the board and into a dive, landed on the concrete at the bottom of the—yes—empty pool. Rocco broke his neck and died there. After surviving two years in a Japanese POW camp, tortured by his captors and nearly starved to death, Rocco met his end right there on the floor of the empty war-vets swimming pool. Needless to say, I was terrified as we approached my maiden swim at the pool. Bunny’s timing was always spot-on when it came to telling horror stories.
The most unthinkable stories she would save for supper time. She couldn’t help herself. Tales of train wrecks, body parts, mob hits, Hiroshima, Kennedy’s day in Dallas, priests and altar boys, white slavery, shotgun suicides—all got thrown out across my plate of meatloaf and boiled potatoes, the bloody condiment to otherwise boring meals.
I stood there in my lime-green bathing suit for a long, long time with the August sun beating down on me before I finally found the courage to jump in. As the cool water took hold of me, I could imagine poor Cockman’s wheelchair below me. I screamed underwater but no one heard me. I swam to the surface and saw Bunny poolside in a camp chair reading the Hamilton Spectator and smoking a Rothmans. I screamed again. She looked across the water at me for a moment and went back to the news.
Inside, the club was dark and dreary and filled with smoke and the smell of piss and beer and dried blood. Blind men and men missing arms or legs would gather to drink and often fight in the dimly lit room. Shuffleboard tables and pictures of Queen Elizabeth, Lester B. Pearson and King George hung on faded wallpaper. Nobody ever stopped to look at those pictures. Ever.
I was the youngest of the WWII kids, due to Bunny and George having become parents late in their lives. I was flung into a group of vets’ grandchildren, some orphans and assorted child amputees from around the region.
We’d be brought to the War Amps club to ring in the Christmas season in style. Santa was a guy named Jack Fairfax. He dressed in the well-worn Santa suit, strung the beard around his gin-blossomed cheeks and stuck a black glove on the stump of his left arm. He manoeuvred the gifts from a big bag with his one good arm and his only hand, while his assistant, Mrs. Fairfax, bellowed the names of the lucky children across the bar. Santa smoked Player’s and drank Molson Export stubbies.
What a mess. But the vets’ hearts were in the right place. They had come marching home from war a fraction of the men they were before they left. They continued to fight addictions and poverty and shitty jobs, and still every year they would pull together their version of a Christmas party for some kids with less than normal lives. Way to go, boys.
There was no money for a babysitter, so I accompanied Bunny and George to War Amps dinners at hotel ballrooms in Hamilton and Toronto. I would be dressed in bow tie and blazer and forced to sit through speeches and awards and beer and rye, and sometimes a band would play some old country classics or Vera Lynn tearjerker. “White Cliffs of Dover,” “When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain,” “Tennessee Waltz,” “Red River Valley,” etc., etc.
When I got a little older, around nine or ten years old, I was usually sat at a table with the annual “Timmy.” Timmy was a young person who, due to an unfortunate accident, had lost a limb, just like the big boys from WWII. He was put up on posters and dragged out to War Amps events and shopping centres and presented at schools as an example of what can happen if you fuck around and act like a careless daredevil.
The speakers and dignitaries at these dinners would sit at the head table at the front of the room. In front of that head table, exposed to the entire room, was a smaller one with just two chairs. As a spotlight shone down on him, Timmy would be paraded in and led to the little table.
“There he is folks—Timmy.” The wives applauded and the old men dragged their forks across their plates searching for a carrot or a pea, or sat back and poured whisky over their gums and banged their canes on the hardwood floor while Timmy limped by.
I would be brought over to Timmy’s table and introduced to him. The crowd would ooh and aah, and I would take my seat across from Timmy. We’d sit there in complete silence eating our roast beef and carrots and extra kid-helpings of dessert. We would both act like it was not happening. Like nothing was happening. Like the world had stopped and we were invisible.
Here are a few facts about the annual Timmy:
Fact:
/> • Timmy was an understandably miserable kid who had lost an arm or a leg doing some foolish shit like playing with blasting caps at a construction site or trying to hop on a moving train.
• Timmy was, nine times out of ten, a peewee hockey star before his accident, although I had no way of proving this annoying fact. And because I was such a lousy skater myself, I never acted impressed by this potential NHLer’s poor luck. In fact, I was a bit pissed off that this kid threw away a chance to stickhandle and shoot a puck with amazing ease just so he could impress some girls or some buddies or, even worse, pick up on a dare from his so-called friends.
• Every time, the train will take the leg.
• Every time, the blasting caps will take the arm.
• Every time, I prayed to God that no more kids would lose any more limbs, just so I didn’t have to sit and eat another meal in silence under a white spotlight in a ballroom full of tired old men and women eating roast beef.
I prayed that no more kids would have to be named Timmy and used as an example to show the world how unforgiving life can be to those whose luck runs out early. I prayed I would grow up fast and forget all this, but I guess my luck ran out.
TAILGUNNER WILSON
George Wilson was a farm boy, a lacrosse player, a wanderer, a banker, a prospector, an RCAF flight sergeant, a tail gunner, a blind man, a father and a mystery.
George fought the Germans from the suicide seat of a Lancaster bomber. It was the seat of no return. He had to have been a madman to take that job. Or maybe he had a death wish that he kept between himself and the blackness that surrounded him every night high above Europe. Whatever it was that made him sit down in the rear end of that giant RCAF Lancaster, he made sure none of us would ever know about it. It would stay locked up in George’s head with the morphine, the steel plate that covered the hole above his right temple, the English tarts he’d frequent in London and all his other wishes and secrets. (Bunny found a photo that George had carried home with him after the war. She’d pull it out and show it to me and tell me it was “your father’s girlfriend.”)
George Wilson was a war hero. And like most war heroes, he arrived home a broken man. In those days, there was no feel-good therapy or self-help books. He found himself a stool at the bar of the newly opened El Mocambo on Spadina Avenue in Toronto and dove into the bottle. He loved booze before the war, but lived for it when he came home, dumped on the streets of Toronto blind and crazy with a major head injury. He’d drink at the kitchen table, he’d drink in Legions and he’d drink in hotel rooms at War Amps conventions.
He’d knock ’em back with his blind war vet buddies and sometimes with a larger collection of warriors who were missing arms and legs, as well as one guy named Smitty, who was missing his nose. And after George had one too many, the surgical scars left by the hospital in France would cut loose and the left side of his face would lose its nerve, leaving George’s mouth to droop and his speech to slur. George looked and sounded like he had a stroke in these moments, and Bunny was always the first to notice.
She was quick to fly off her chair on the other side of the room and rush around looking for something for George to chew. A crust of bread would work, or other times it would be a piece of wood or a facecloth, a toothpick or a match cover. The movement of chewing would reactivate the muscles and bring him back to some kind of acceptable appearance while continuing on with his drunkenness.
George’s temper used to shock people because when he was sober he was soft spoken and timid as a church mouse. After the whisky and the beer hit the metal plate in his head, all hell would break loose. Blind George took on all comers. Bar stools would fly and jaws get cracked. He managed to do a fair amount of damage up and down Spadina Avenue, much to the surprise of bartenders, bouncers and onlookers who pretty well let him do whatever he wanted because he was a war hero and had lost so much fighting those soulless Germans. He won back our freedom, so he got free rein over every room he entered, which was a pretty good deal for him.
But Bunny suffered many long nights. There was no calming him down once he got home. He was a tiger in a cage. A tiger in a cage with a plate in its head and a cane to swing around. The walls of their little apartment on Huron Street had holes in the plaster from George trying to beat some light into his pitch-black world. His anguished cries were heard over the treetops and across the football field of Varsity Stadium and finally lost their power and crash-landed like George’s Lancaster bomber on the lawn of Queen’s Park.
Bunny and George moved to Hamilton in the fifties so George could settle into his job at a confectionery stand in a downtown post office. By the time I ended up running around his rented house on East 36th Street in Hamilton, he was a little older, a little tired and not so prone to the raging anger and violent outbursts that went along with having your eyesight robbed from you at the age of thirty.
The red-brick bungalow Bunny and George rented faced east, second from the northwest corner of Brucedale and East 36th Street. Our house, 162 East 36th Street, was the wreck of the block, all overgrown lawn and broken windows, and there was nobody in the house capable of fixing even the smallest problem, so whatever was broken would stay that way for eternity.
In those days, Hamilton’s East Mountain was in various stages of development. There were old farmhouses with the old people living in them still holding their own. There were wood-framed wartime houses, four-room cottages, usually with five or six kids stuffed in them, and then there were the piles of dirt and wood and bricks and beer bottles, where families in trailers lived, waiting for their houses to be built.
There were also some houses with perfect little lawns and gardens and fresh paint and washed cars and aprons and Trillium Awards displayed by the front doors. The folks in these houses needed to define themselves. They clung to middle-class attitudes to separate themselves from the armies of working-class, welfare and biker families that had settled in the neighbourhood from downtown and out of town and far away to come and work in the steel factories.
George did not have too much to say about the war or his enemy, the Germans. Bunny, on the other hand, had lots of anger and plenty to say about a nation of people who had set up camps to kill children and their innocent families, dropped bombs on England and taken her husband’s eyes away. Her book collection grew, with paperbacks of Treblinka, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and The Holocaust Kingdom. She would go into detail at dinnertime with excerpts of unthinkable, mindless violence and unexplainable evil that always ended with “those bloody Germans.”
I went to bed in fear and woke up in fear that the Germans would break through time and space and pull up in front of 162 East 36th Street with their tanks and lederhosen and flame throwers and try to take my eyes away from me. I had a list of the scariest monsters known to my preschool mind. In ascending order:
6. Lee Harvey Oswald
5. Alfred Hitchcock
4. Sharks
3. Perry Edward Smith and Richard Hickock, the two guys who kill the Clutter family in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood—At the age of four, I accidentally watched that movie when Bunny and George had fallen asleep.
2. Frankenstein’s monster
1. The Germans
One morning Bunny saw a moving van pull onto our street and a new family move into the Masons’ old house, six doors up. She inquired among the other housewives about who the new neighbours were and where they were from. That night at dinner the answer came back like an anti-aircraft missile tearing through our kitchen.
Germans…
Germans had moved onto our street. I expected my father to go to the basement and unpack machine guns and bayonets, and my mother, in her apron, to lay out a map of Hamilton’s East Mountain on the kitchen table for us to plan our attack. I thought tunnels would be dug and barbed wire strung around the perimeter of our house to ensure no Germans could sneak up and spy on us through our bedroom windows.
But none of this happened. Instead I lay awake in m
y mother’s bed every night, wide-eyed and terrified until CFRB’s Starlight Serenade faded over and out and I was carried away by the transistor radio in the kitchen, cradled to sleep and away from the Germans by host George Wilson (not my George Wilson) and Rimsky-Korsakov, Chopin, Puccini, Vaughan Williams and Sibelius.
Still, from a safe distance the Germans were watched day in, day out as they unpacked their cardboard boxes, teak furniture, appliances and winter tires. “The whole neighbourhood is talking,” said Bunny at the dinner table. It comforted me that we were not alone, that the Keiths, Montes, Tessaros, Baldassarios and all brave Canadians would be on guard for me.
Questions were raised about the Germans of East 36th Street. Had their family or their fellow villagers back home in the fatherland turned local Jews in to the Nazi authorities? Had they discovered any downed Allied paratroopers hiding in their barns? Had they killed them with pitchforks when they did? The parents were met with polite smiles, of course, but the young boy, Alfred, endured the brunt of our kitchen table suspicions. He was teased for the way he spoke, forbidden from playing street hockey with us, beaten up and, finally, stripped and tied to a telephone pole one night during a game of hide and seek.
The war was over but the battle raged on. The kids on East 36th Street had all seen the good guy vs bad guy, Germans vs Us movies like The Great Escape and Stalag 17 and every Tuesday tuned into Combat!, the weekly Hollywood account of World War II starring Vic Morrow. I ended up befriending Alfred, and even though I could not sway the mob’s opinion, I can at least say I gave him a chance to breathe a bit easier knowing he had one friend on the block.
—
Andy Strang was our neighbour. His alcohol-induced Jekyll and Hyde routine kept his family in constant fear. He threw his wife’s cooking out their kitchen window onto Brucedale Avenue and he pissed in her cedar chest at the end of their bed on a regular basis. Once, he put his son Archie’s head though the living room wall, an incident that became a domestic violence legend on our street, or at least next door in our house.