by Hugh Hood
When we had prepared the ground we would send the truck for a load of concrete. This always meant an hour’s wait, either around ten-thirty or about two in the afternoon. It made a nice break. We would take things easy, cleaning off the shovels or sneaking a bit of leftover concrete to a homeowner to be used for a patio. The great thing was to melt inconspicuously into the landscape so as not to attract the attention of the ratepayer.
When the truck appeared, we either dumped the concrete into the road and shovelled it into wheelbarrows for delivery to Harris and Wally Butt, on their knees together at the edge of the new installation, or if we were only fixing scattered single bays, two of us would climb into the well of the truck and throw down shovelsful from on high. There was a certain amount of horseplay involved in this; more than once somebody down below caught a great lump of wet concrete in the pit of his stomach.
One morning in late June I was standing in the back of the truck about eleven o’clock, shovelling the stuff into a bay, sweating and feeling pretty loose, when Charlie Brown’s head appeared out of nowhere at the side of the truck. The edge of my shovel just missed him and an enormous gout of wet concrete went whizzing past his ear.
“Watch what you’re doing!” he said. That’s only a rough transcription of what he actually said. In fact he was speaking the dialect that Alastair MacCrimmon and I used to call “cityese,” an exotic English, rhythmic, heavily cadenced, comically obscene, with an unmistakable structure. If I were blindfolded in Rangoon and heard two men speaking “cityese,” I’d be able to spot them instantly; there’s something unique about the scansion.
Charlie got down off the truck and spoke to Harris.
“I need Hood in the Yard,” he said.
“Why don’t you take ‘Gummy’?” asked Harris protestingly. I felt proud.
“I want somebody who’s alive,” said Charlie disgustedly, motioning to me to join him in the truck. I looked at Harris inquiringly but he shook his head. He didn’t know what was up.
On the way back to the Yard Charlie told me about the watchmen. There had to be somebody in the office from around four in the afternoon until eight the next morning, as well as all day and all night on the weekend, which worked out to sixteen eight-hour shifts weekly.
Three old men approaching retirement split fifteen shifts amongst themselves, leaving an extra one to be filled in by one of the workmen. And each of these watchmen was entitled to three weeks’ holidays a year for a total of nine weeks to be filled in through the summer. Charlie had decided that my combination of supposititious book-learning and puny physique made me the ideal replacement.
“You can put in the next nine weeks on this job,” he said encouragingly. “That’ll take you down through August, and then I’ll find something else for you to do.” I was due to leave towards the end of September.
Now the thing was, I’d been getting used to the work on the gang and enjoying it. On the other hand, every man at the Yard would have given his eye-teeth to acquire this sinecure. I didn’t want to turn down what was obviously meant as a kindness, so I said nothing.
Charlie looked at me curiously. “What’s the matter? Don’t you want to do it?”
“Sure,” I said, “It’s fine, Charlie.” And it turned out to be an interesting job, each shift presenting novel problems. The four to twelve, and the daytime shifts on Saturday and Sunday, brought the most service calls. The twelve to eight was mainly a matter of arranging seat cushions from the swivel chairs on top of the desks, or on the floor, and trying to sleep. Once in a great while you might get a call in the middle of the night, usually from the Traffic Squad, to report that the barricades were down or the lights missing on a hole in the road. Then you had to call out an emergency truck from one of the Yards — there was only one truck available, each Yard providing a stand-by driver in turn — and direct the driver to the danger spot. The time of the call, the trouble, the location, the remedial action, and the precise time that the driver called back to say that the repair was in effect — all these things had to be noted down in a Daily Journal and initialled by the watchman. These books were sometimes produced as evidence in damage suits by City lawyers, and so had to be kept up carefully.
But most of the twelve to eight I spent sleeping, or talking to policemen who came in for a smoke and to warm themselves, or to nap for an hour or to hide from the Sergeant. These men patrolled one of the toughest parts of town and were as eager to stay out of trouble as the rest of us. They hated the corner of Bathurst and Queen, for example, because of the half-dozen enormous taverns located there, which meant that Friday and Saturday nights on that corner were real hellers. I’d often seen eight policemen standing in pairs on the corners of that intersection and wondered why. The answer, I was told, was that they just didn’t want to come alone.
Many of these fellows were English immigrants, bewildered by the Toronto attitude to the police. They were always complaining about times when they’d been losing a fight and hoping in vain that a citizen might give them a hand. I remember one Englishman in particular who was leaving the force and taking his family back to England because of this kind of thing. He felt alone and threatened in a country where incivility and disrespect for the law seemed accepted and regular.
None of these constables knew much law; none had a clear idea of his powers, and these were constantly exceeded in some circumstances and allowed to lapse in others. They hated and feared all lawyers, and were easily cowed by them. I know one drunken lawyer, a driver of spectacular incompetence, drunk or sober, who despite his erratic behaviour awheel, and despite the dozens of times he’s been stopped by traffic officers, has never been fined nor even summoned to court. He bounces aggressively out of his car, announces that he’s a lawyer, and the policeman, unsure of his ground, backs off.
On the other hand, when the officer feels that he has the upper hand he is perfectly ready to exceed the limits of his mandate, and is apt to be quite cynical about it. One young constable admitted to me that he always bulled the College Street crowds around, pushing people and threatening them with arrest to persuade them to move on, when there was no conceivable charge he could bring. Most of the people in the crowds, Jews and DP’s, had no notion of their rights and legal safeguards and were easily intimidated.
But most of the younger policemen were decent unassuming men, not too happy with their rates of pay and promotion, considering the nature of the work, but proud of what they were doing and even of the opinion that it was a dignified public service. I asked them about favouritism on the force and they all agreed that there was very little, and that a man would normally be judged on his merits. Their testimony carries some weight too, because they were all in junior positions and there was nothing in my questions to put them on their guard.
Another instructive aspect of the watchman’s job was our emergency sewer service. When there is a very heavy rain the Toronto sewers cause trouble; they are not equipped to carry off the excess water, being designed for normal conditions of flow. If there is an extremely heavy rain they back up, and the water begins to rise in cellars all over town, especially on low ground, in hollows and valleys and on the lower slopes of hills. And the only real cure for this abnormal state is the end of the storm.
Understandably enough, few householders are aware of this. When they observe the flood rising in the cellar, with its sometimes dismal and offensive accompaniment, they become alarmed, and the result is a flood of calls at the Yard, none of which distinguish between a genuinely blocked and defective sewer — with a tree root in it, say — and one which is in perfect shape but which is just too small for downpour conditions.
I remember afternoons, almost always on the weekend, when the phone rang as soon as I put it back in its cradle, for hours on end. I’d get panicky elderly ladies, people who raved in exotic foreign tongues, frightened children, Bohemians with basement apartments in which their folksong records fl
oated soggily round and round — every imaginable stripe of complaint. There was simply nothing to be done until the storm was over. I tried telling them so but it did no good and at length I learned simply to note the call, and imply, without actually making a commitment, that a service truck would be along. Of course no such service call was ever made unless there was a clear indication in the complaint of some genuine blockage or break. But I never told anybody that.
I channeled and re-routed calls of this and other kinds until the end of August, when the three elderly watchmen had all enjoyed leisurely vacations. By that time I was pretty much regarded as one of the office staff, and Charlie was visibly reluctant to send me back to Harris — it might create a dangerous precedent. The day after the last of the watchmen came back I ambled into the Yard wondering how he’d work it out. He had, you see, a kind of problem in status, or prestige, to resolve. But he was equal and rather more then equal to it.
It was the Tuesday after Labour Day. The Scotch guy (a man never known by any other name, always “the Scotch guy,” with a thick burr and a great genius for killing time) was sitting outside the tool-shed when I meandered in. He said nothing but grinned cheerily. When I went into the office Charlie handed me a small can of black paint, a small can of white, two brushes, a box of cleaning rags, and a set of stencils from zero through nine which could be fitted together to form any number up to 9999. He told us where to find a little ladder and the Scotch guy ran to get it. We threw the things in the back of Charlie’s pickup truck and he drove us to the foot of Jarvis Street, where we got out. I was still quite in the dark.
“I want you to re-paint the numbers on the lamp-posts,” he said. I’m not joking, that’s what he said. “When you get to Bloor Street, come into the Yard and I’ll give you a list of other streets.” He got into the truck and sped off along Queen’s Quay while we looked at each other scarcely able to credit our luck.
We painted our way up Jarvis Street at a snail’s pace — boy, did we take it slow! I’d go ahead and slap on a background of black paint. Then I’d walk back — we only had one ladder — and we’d work along, putting on the fresh numbers in a creamy off-white, a kind of eggshell or buff tint. We got up to Bloor Street on Friday afternoon, a matter of four days. When we appeared at the Yard Charlie glared at us in extreme vexation.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
It would not have been possible to go slower.
“We finished Jarvis Street,” I said apologetically.
“What, the west side too?”
“I’m afraid so.”
He began to root around in his desk and finally drew out a few dog-eared sheets of foolscap with a list of street names on them. He flourished it in the air and then handed it to the Scotch guy.
“Do these!” he said. He looked at us and began to smile and at last to laugh. “There’s fifteen hundred dollars in the Estimates to be spent on this job,” he growled. “Now get out and don’t let me see you around here for at least three weeks.”
So I finished out my first summer without any strain.
When I came back to the Yard the next year, I had only two more years’ work to do in the Graduate School. I had held a good fellowship which took care of most of my expenses, I’d had a highly remunerative job at the CN Express, where you could log seven or eight hours’ overtime if you had the nerve and could evade the foreman, so I wasn’t hurting for funds quite as much as before.
I went back because I liked it and I even persuaded a friend of mine, Alastair MacCrimmon, to apply for a similar job. He was then an intermittent student at the University and is now a film technician at CBC. Every night in the Chez Paree from eleven till two, he and I would sit around that summer exchanging our observations of life on the city. He was working at Number Six Yard and apparently things were managed there much as they were under Charlie. We used to amuse ourselves by playing a game which we called “Translate into Cityese.” Alastair would feed me a line in ordinary spoken English, or I would feed him one, and the idea was to render it with the peculiar diction, cadence and rhythm of the men on the gangs, getting the feeling as authentic as possible.
“Goodness me,” I might say, “we filled that hole in the road yesterday, and there it is again.” Alastair would translate this flawlessly.
“The men at the Hall have not sent up our cheques,” he would come back straight-faced, “and here it is nearly noon.” This would stand a lot of translation.
“Someone has stolen all the lights off the barricades,” or possibly, “Itchy-Koo has been drinking and cannot work.”
Or most enigmatic, even gnomic, of all: “The truck has stopped and will not go.”
It was Alastair who created the legend, on the city, of what Itchy-Koo said when he hit his foot with the sledge, crushing the metatarsal forever. He said: “That hurt!”
It was understood that I would get back my night-watchman’s job when the holiday time came; but I put in most of May and June on Mitch’s gang. When you remember poor old Harris’s anxiety-ridden behaviour, it was a revelation to see the difference in Mitch’s methods. He was very relaxed and so was his gang. Everybody had a good time; we were always close to a Beverage Room. And though it was the smallest of the three gangs, we could handle a moderate-sized job much faster than Harris, and nearly as professionally as Wall. The first thing we did that spring, as I remember, was a major installation of double sidewalk on Spadina Avenue just north of College outside the Tip Top Tailors branch store. We were right across from the Waverley Hotel and that branch of the Canadian Bank of Commerce of which my father had been manager fifteen years before.
In those days Dad used to do a lot of loan business in the district with furriers and garment-trade people during the season, and with independent sales agents, small jobbers and importers, smallwares and novelties salesmen with tiny agencies, and the like. One of these freelance salesmen, a man called Earl Darlington, came to Dad one day with a peculiar request for a short-term note. Earl could sell anything — he could charm the monkeys off the trees — but he never handled the same line two weeks in a row and so had no established line of credit. However Dad listened to the story, which was colourful and involved. He had a chance to buy the refrigerator in the Waverley for next to nothing because they meant to replace it. This was not what you and I think of as a refrigerator, but an enormous thing the size of an apartment living-room, with walls in which the cooling devices were intricately cemented. The whole room had to be removed, walls and all. It was like transporting a small house.
Darlington told Dad that he had a buyer for this monstrosity, the old Hunt’s Confectionery on Yonge Street, next to Loew’s Uptown. All he needed was the money to put a deposit on the refrigerator and to hire a truck with a flatbed trailer, and a gang of men, to move the thing. Dad listened to this beguiling tale and thought it over, talked to the manager of the Waverley, and in short concluded that it was a chance for Earl to make a dollar, so he let him have the money.
After surmounting fantastic obstacles they got the refrigerator out of the hotel in one piece and onto the trailer. They had the necessary permit from the police to move it, after business hours, and they hauled it up to a lane behind Stollery’s on the corner of Bloor and Yonge. In went the trailer and down the lane, but before they got to Hunt’s rear door the refrigerator got jammed between the walls of two buildings abutting on the lane. They couldn’t back up; they couldn’t go forward though they tried their damnedest. They were stuck fast. In desperation Darlington told the driver of the trailer and the gang of labourers to go home and get some sleep — he could see his quick profit being eaten up by overtime — and they’d try again next day. Then he went home himself, leaving about four tons of refrigerator immovable in the lane.
When they came back next morning the trailer was parked where they’d left it but the refrigerator was gone, vanished. Stolen, by God! And it was never traced.<
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Eventually Dad wrote off the loan.
Watching the men on the gang slide across the street and into the Waverley reminded me of this story and I told it to Mitch, who got a big chuckle out of it. He was then, I should say, about thirty-two or thirty-three, which seemed middle-age to me, though it doesn’t any more. Everybody liked Mitch, even Bill Tennyson who came out with us for a day once in a while, moody, difficult, but after a couple of hours’ joking with Mitch he would loosen up a bit and tell us about his latest scrap with his father-in-law, an ex-bantam-weight who liked to mix it with him now and then.
Then there was Frank Hughes, another nice fellow — Mitch had all the easy-going types out with him — a hockey player who had spent the previous winter in the Eastern League. He was going to the Detroit camp in the fall and was putting in the summer with us to stay in shape. I don’t know how much good the work on the gang did him as far as staying in shape went; but at least, like the rest of us, he got a good tan. Frank used to play fastball with Sherrin’s down at the beach and he was enjoying a very good year at the plate, which made him even easier to get along with. Like all ballplayers, he loved those base hits. He weighed around one-ninety and had one of the most powerful builds I’ve ever seen. He wasn’t broad-shouldered; he had low sloping shoulders and a cavernous chest and magnificent legs. He was a defenceman and though I never saw him play, they tell me he could really dig. I weighed around a hundred and forty, but the odd thing was, I had about an inch of reach on him. We used to spar around comically for the amusement of the gang and the passing girls who always had an eye on Frank — he was a very handsome man.