by Farley Mowat
We also had a stand of mounted tropical birds which had originally been protected by a glass bell jar. The jar had since been broken and the birds had become home to legions of moths and a myriad of skin-bone-feather-eating little beetles called dermestids. The display had, in fact, become a sort of mini-menagerie whose enterprising members quickly colonized the professor’s house.
Another prize possession was a decrepit stuffed black bear cub which had languished for too long in a damp basement. It stank with a peculiarly penetrating pungency.
It was our intention to hold a grand opening of the museum during the Christmas holidays. We planned to invite the mayor and other dignitaries. I had even written an announcement to be sent to the Star Phoenix, in which I extolled the uniqueness of our endeavour: “It is the most stupendous collection of natural and unnatural curiosities of all sexes ever gathered in Saskatoon.”
Disaster struck before we could go public. The moths and beetles precipitated things by invading the cupboard where Helen kept her raccoon coat and establishing a lively colony there. And a week of wet weather brought the bear to such a peak of pungency that my parents finally got wind of what was happening below decks. Angus made an investigation which was immediately followed by an ultimatum. We were given twenty-four hours to disperse the Saskatchewan National Animal Museum or it would end up in the rubbish bin behind our house.
I was not entirely devastated by the loss of my museum. The collecting phase had come to an end in any case, and my tribe was losing interest. Moreover, I was already preparing to engage my little band in another enterprise.
In December of 1934 a new magazine joined the ranks of Canadian periodicals. As is the Canadian way, it did so without fanfare. Nature Lore—The Official Organ of the Beaver Club of Amateur Naturalists came quietly upon the scene. The cover portrayed a bloated sea-gull about to bomb a very shaggy beaver. The club’s motto was inscribed below the beaver. Natura Omnia Vincit which, if my Latin is to be trusted, means Nature Conquers All.
The first issue contained: “Stories and Articles and Poems About Animals, Birds and Reptiles, Together with Various Illustrations and Anecdotes by Members of the Club. Price 5 or 10 cents the Copy.”
The variable asking price was, I submit, an act of genius. Those were Depression times so we dared not charge more than a nickel but, by giving the purchasers the option of paying ten cents in a good cause, we shamed most of them into doing just that.
It will come as no surprise to learn that Billy Mowat was the editor-in-chief. He wrote an impassioned editorial for the first issue, from which I quote:
“Birds and animals do not get heard enough in this country and are not treated well. The Beaver Club intends to do something about this. Every 5 cent bit contributed to this magazine will be spent on the betterment of the birds and animals of Saskatchewan…”
I also wrote most of the text, although I attributed many of the pieces to my loyal tribesfolk. It was the least I could do. They fanned out all over Saskatoon in fine weather and foul, hawking copies of the magazine to all and sundry.
The public’s reception astounded us. Within a week the entire first issue, amounting to fifty copies, had sold out. The three subsequent issues, with press runs of a hundred copies each, did almost as well, earning a grand total of $25.45, which was more than many people were then being paid for a week’s labour. This sum was almost pure profit because I had persuaded Angus to print Nature Lore on the library’s mimeograph machine (using library ink and paper) as a charitable contribution to a worthy cause.
I believe it was worthy. The articles may have been a little didactic: “Planestrius migratorius [the robin] is a prominent local insectivor”; or somewhat overblown: “The crow can talk extremely well and is as intelligent as most people.” Nevertheless, the effect was to at least engender some interest in and sympathy for wild creatures amongst people who had never previously given a thought to the possibility that they might have something in common with other animals.
As promised, we spent our money on good works. Each winter the discharge of hot water from the city’s coal-fired electric generating plant maintained an open pond in the otherwise frozen river. This provided a haven for ducks and geese which were unable to join in the great southbound migration because of sickness or, more usually, because they had been wounded by hunters. In previous years, most of these unfortunates starved to death long before spring came, but during the winter of 1934–35 the Beaver Club saw to it that they were well-supplied with grain and corn. In so doing we set a precedent which, I understand, is still being followed by some of the worthy citizens of Saskatoon.
11
JANUARY OF 1935 WAS WICKEDLY cold. For ten days the temperature fluctuated between 40° and 50° below zero, dropping to –52° one memorable morning—especially memorable because, when the thermometer fell that low, schools did not open and we had a holiday.
The dry cold of this second winter was even harder on my mother’s sinuses. She made no show of her troubles but, as Rachel remembered, “Sometimes your dad would ask me to stay with her in the evening until he returned from lectures at the university so she ‘won’t try to push a garden fork up her nose to ease the pain.’”
When she was not wrestling with the demons of her flesh, Helen volunteered her time to one of the several organizations trying to assist the destitute, of which there were many. Some neighbourhoods in Saskatoon could not then have been much better off than the poverty-stricken slums of nineteenth-century England. Although nothing was said about it in the press, every local doctor could attest to the fact that people were dying as a result of malnutrition, if not of outright starvation. Others actually froze to death. Although all children stayed home from school when the temperature dropped to –50°, not a few were forced to stay home most of the winter because they did not have clothing warm enough to withstand more than a hard frost.
Helen helped unpack and distribute bales of used clothing sent from relatively well-to-do Ontario. She also worked as a nursing assistant tending the children of the poor in the overcrowded municipal hospital. Not much about these activities was ever mentioned in my hearing but later, when I asked Helen about those days, she told me, “It was the most dreadful time. It seemed unbelievable that people could be so poor and suffer so in a world where others had everything they wanted and to spare. We Thomsons had been staunch Conservatives since the Flood, but that winter your father and I joined the CCF13 and I believe I might have become a communist if I had only known how to go about it.”
This summation from my gentle-natured mother reveals more about the brutality inflicted upon mostly working people during the Depression than a score of sociological reports could do.
Because almost everything going on around a child seems “normal” to him or her, I did not fully realize the extent of the suffering at the time. Nevertheless, the meaning of the phrase “the Dirty Thirties” was driven home to me on an occasion when I went with Rachel to visit a family from her own district.
These people, a Polish-born couple and two sons of about my age, had, like many others, lost their farm to bank foreclosure and had been forced to seek refuge in the city. They were existing in a gaunt shell of a frame house beyond the end of the streetcar line, and were penniless. We took them a small sack of flour, some sugar, four or five cans of beans, and a slab of bacon, all of which Rachel had bought with her own slender earnings.
I can vividly remember the repulsive smell of the one occupied room, all the space the family could hope to heat with the green poplar which was what they had to burn. It was a stench I would not encounter again until, in Newfoundland in the 1950s, I became interested in the island’s staple product, salt cod. I was to learn then that there are many grades of salt cod. The best make good eating—provided the cook knows how to treat the otherwise inedible grey slabs. The worst was called “maggoty fish.” It was not only maggoty but frequently rotten
. No Newfoundlander in his right mind would eat it; nevertheless, in the 1930s, tons of maggoty cod were bought by the federal government and shipped to Saskatchewan to be distributed to the needy. Most prairie dwellers did not have the slightest idea how to prepare it but, whatever they tried, only dire necessity could have brought them to eat the nauseous result.
Incidents like the visit to the Polish family insensibly increased my awareness of the fearful inequalities which exist between the haves and the have-nots in the human world. I often felt uncomfortable, if not a little guilty, about the well-nourished life I led, as compared to the stark existence being endured by many of my contemporaries. Something was desperately wrong in human affairs, but I did not know what the trouble was, or what might be done about it. Consequently I tried with some success to banish that awful awareness out of my conscious mind. It would return to haunt me throughout my adult life.
We better-off youngsters were not greatly inhibited by winter weather. Wrapped around with woollen clothing, wearing a fur-lined, aviator-style helmet, and equipped with a pair of Indian-made snowshoes, I followed my natural bent. On holidays and after school, I prowled the river bank and the prairie, always accompanied by Mutt and usually by some other member of the club.
On really stormy days, I occupied myself writing pieces for Nature Lore, or with my bird studies which were engrossing more and more of my attention. I was attempting to learn not only the identifying marks of every species of Canadian bird but their Latin names as well. I had filled our back yard with feeding stations (bountifully funded by the Beaver Club) and when these were blanketed by an invasion of showy, yellow and black evening grosbeaks, I attempted my first bird photographs using my mother’s Brownie box camera—which reduced their images to minute black dots upon a field of white.
Although birds increasingly preoccupied me, I found time for a new love. I had recently read a book about Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite. The success he had enjoyed from the simple discovery that, by combining notoriously unstable nitroglycerine with finely powdered clay, he could produce a stable and versatile explosive, made a great impression on me. The urge to emulate him grew strong. Perhaps I dreamed of some day endowing the Mowat Prize for Literature, or Peace. Perhaps I simply wanted to make big bangs. Whatever, I was sufficiently enthused to take a large part of my savings and buy a No. 7 Chemistry Set designed for the edification of “young scientists.”
It was a severe disappointment. Although it contained many little bottles and round wooden containers filled with chemicals, these all proved to be of the innocuous variety. No matter what combinations I tried, nothing much ever happened. I could test people’s spit for acidity (using litmus paper), or dye one of Rachel’s handkerchiefs red with logwood chips, but the set was not capable of producing even a stink bomb let alone an explosion. Nevertheless, it did provide me with a starting point from which I moved on to bigger things.
In late February Rachel sadly told us she would have to return to the family farm and take over the woman’s work there because her mother was very ill. The news upset me almost as much as if I had been faced with losing the sister or the brother I had never had. It was very distressing to my mother too. Her sinus troubles were still incapacitating her a great deal of the time so, quite apart from her fondness for Rachel, Helen had come to rely heavily upon her help.
Following Rachel’s departure my mother went into a decline. Her doctor diagnosed this as “an attack of nerves” and concluded she should go to Montreal where specialists might at least be able to alleviate her physical distress. In any event, she would escape from what remained of the prairie winter.
She was scheduled to leave by train at midnight on March 9. That evening a farewell party was held at our house. It was well-attended and, as was usual at Saskatoon parties, there was lots of liquor. Soon after dinner I absented myself to the back cellar where I had my chemistry “lab.” While revelry resounded through the floorboards overhead, I immersed myself in my most important and exciting experiment to date.
My chemistry set and its accompanying handbook having proved inadequate, I had turned to other sources of information and materials. A few hours well spent in the library’s reference section produced much information on the varieties and means of manufacture of high explosives. I discovered that many were quite easy to make and that the requisite ingredients were readily available. Ammonium nitrate, for example, could be had in quantity from any farm supply store, where it was sold as fertilizer. Potassium nitrate, powdered charcoal, and sulphur—the basic ingredients of gunpowder—could be bought cheaply at Pinder’s Drug Store. So could glycerine. Nitric acid was a little more difficult to obtain, but a neighbour who taught physics at high school brought me some from the school chemistry lab. In due course I intended to transform these latter two substances into nitroglycerine.
On the day of my mother’s departure, I was testing a formula of my own which I believed might produce something entirely new in the way of explosives. It did not seem impossible to me that Mr. Nobel might soon have to look to his laurels. What I did was mix potassium chlorate, potassium nitrate, and ammonium nitrate, then add a soupçon of fulminate of mercury. This last ingredient was obtained by shaking out the contents of a commercial detonator which had been supplied to me by the son of a railroad construction engineer.
The party upstairs was in full swing when the cellar windows blew out, the door at the head of the cellar stairs crashed open, dense and acrid smoke poured into the upstairs rooms, and there was an almighty BANG!
“It sounded,” Angus told me some years later, “as if somebody had dropped a trench mortar shell down the chimney. There was confusion amongst the guests and a lot of good liquor got spilled in the rush to get outside. Naturally I thought of you. I plunged down the cellar steps and met you headlong coming up. You looked as if you were made up to be a nigger minstrel. Face black as the ace of spades and eyes as big and round as if you had just seen a ghost. Maybe you had. Only it was more likely the grim reaper you glimpsed in passing.”
Having absorbed several martinis, my mother did not fully comprehend what all the fuss was about. She was rushed next door where she was given a sedative. What with one thing and another, she must have been fairly fuzzy by the time she was tenderly loaded into her sleeping compartment on the train. I wasn’t there but, according to my father, her parting words were directed to me.
“Tell the sweet little lamb,” she purportedly said, “he mustn’t play about with matches.”
Next morning my containers of chemicals, together with those test-tubes and bits of glass tubing which had escaped the blast, were reduced to splinters and powder by my father before being deposited in the garbage can.
Amazingly, the explosion did me no serious harm. I lost my eyelashes, eyebrows, and some of the hair from my head and, for a while, suffered from an irritation of the eyes. The damage to the house was also minor: several broken windows and a baseball-sized hole in the galvanized iron hot-water tank. Nevertheless, I now put chemistry behind me.
I took my farewell of Nobel’s science a few days after Helen’s departure. Very early on a Sunday morning I walked to the middle of the 25th Street Bridge and, just as the sun was rising, dropped an object over the balustrade. Then I put my fingers in my ears. There was only a disappointing “wump” as my piéce de rèsistance—a one-pound tobacco can filled with home-made gunpowder and fused with a cannon firecracker—blew a hole in a snowdrift on the river ice. The wild pigeons who lived under the bridge were only momentarily perturbed, and Saskatoon never knew it had been bombed by a passing spaceship.
ENTHUSIASM FOR THE Beaver Club waned sharply with the advent of warm weather. Most of the boys were infected with the spring craze for baseball and the girls with the spring craze for boys. Abandoned by most of its members, the club and Nature Lore quietly expired.
I was immune to the baseball virus and, since the testosterone co
ursing through my veins had not yet reached full flood, was more or less immune to girls as well. More or less. I sometimes had fantasies about Muriel Pinder, the dark-haired daughter of a druggist who had done exceedingly well for himself during the Prohibition years. Muriel lived in a rococo, strawberry-pink, stucco mansion a block away and was regarded by the boys of the neighbourhood as hot stuff. Alas, she did not regard me in the same way. I wrote her a poem once.
No bird that flies in summer skies,
No mouse that lurks in sacred church,
No fish that swims in river dim,
No snake that crawls on sunny walls
Can stir my heart the way you do
With raven hair and eyes so blue.
She returned this offering by next day’s post, with her critical evaluation written across it in purple ink.
“Ugh!” Muriel may not have had a taste for me but her literary taste was impeccable.
And, I must now admit, that poem was not even truthful. Birds, mice, fish, snakes, indeed any creatures that lived in the wild were of more interest to me than any girl.
That winter I had begun a correspondence with Frank Farley, my great uncle on my mother’s side. In 1882, at the age of twenty, Frank had left his family farm in Ontario and gone homesteading in the Golden West, as it was then being called. He broke several hundred acres of virgin prairie near Camrose, Alberta, and farmed them to such effect that, when he retired fifty years later, he was wealthy enough to indulge his lifelong interest in birds.
Frank was a self-made naturalist in the tradition which sanctioned and encouraged the collecting of natural history “specimens” with such avidity that rarities were literally pursued to extinction. Frank’s particular passion was for birds’ eggs. Over the years he had amassed an enormous egg collection and, by the 1930s, was accounted one of Canada’s outstanding ornithologists. He now became my mentor, if at some hundreds of miles removed.