Secondly, the seven of us had just been released from a twelve-hour trip that, to say the least, had been eventful. We were like a herd of colts when first let out of the barn in the spring. Light-hearted, giddy, and reckless.
Thirdly, we were–and I have to admit this–a crazy bunch. There is, I’m afraid, no other way to describe us. We were wild, undisciplined, inquisitive, and audacious. I don’t know what made us that way. Perhaps it was the prairie wind beating constantly against our eardrums. Perhaps it was the prairie cold, or the prairie flatness, or the prairie mosquitoes that punctured our hides, or just the downwright craziness of the prairies themselves. Anyway, we were a crazy bunch.
Maybe it was the look of the house itself, sitting there on the corner, surrounded on two sides by a low concrete wall. On this, at intervals of about thirty feet, were mounted solid round concrete balls, each about the size of a basketball, each on a square, ornamental pedestal. They looked like a row of bare-faced busts and then, after one of us had painted faces on them, like a row of cartoon busts. The house had a big round tower thing in its front corner, surmounted by a sort of steeple.
When Dad turned the key in the front door and opened it, we rushed past him like a destroying wind. We found the front hall electric light switch and turned it on. “Hey, look!” we shouted. “Lights!” Then we switched them off and on a dozen times and proceeded to the other rooms to repeat the magic there.
Hub and I had to go wee wee, and when advised by Mother that we were to go upstairs instead of in the back yard we took the stairs two at a time to see if such a thing could be true. Sure enough it was. And then when we flushed the toilet and everything was flushed out we proceeded to investigate how big a load could be disposed of. For anyone who’s interested, the toilets of that day would handle half of the Prince Albert Herald. A whole newspaper plugged it and flooded the bathroom floor.
We also discovered that when you rolled marbles down the bathtub, and they swirled around on the porcelain before going down the drain, they made a marvellous sound. We had to abandon that game, however, due to a shortage of marbles.
There was a radiator in the hall, and when you tapped it with a hammer it gave off a different note for each section. I was doing this and making pretty good music, I thought, going from one end to the other. Unfortunately, I also hit the little metal tap at the end of the radiator and broke it off. Water shot out against the wall and I stuck my finger over it and yelled for Dad. It took him quite a while to whittle a little stick the right size to plug it. That stick plug stayed in the radiator all the time we lived in the Prince Albert house.
But the culmination of our adventures came at about nine-thirty, when Dad had just learned, by frantically phoning the freight sheds, and then the home of the station agent, that the reason our furniture hadn’t arrived yet was because the car carrying it had been side-tracked at Wakaw, and wouldn’t be along for a couple of days.
“Oh pshaw, what about Rosie?” he said. “She’ll starve.” (Actually Rosie survived the ordeal by chewing the upholstery off the parlour chairs. A remarkable cow.)
“We’ll just have to make the best of it,” Mother said. “I’ll borrow some cots and bed-sheets from the neighbours. Come on, Morley,” she added. “We’ll go calling.”
It was then that the lights went out. Every light in the house. A boy who had grown tired of turning lights on and off, was doing a further investigation of the intricacies of the electrical system. In those days, houses didn’t have wall-plugs as they do now–at least this house didn’t. Instead, there were wall-sockets into which a bulb or a plug could be screwed. On peering into one of these, he noticed a little screw. Now a screw calls for a screwdriver and he soon found one. But as soon as the metal of the screwdriver touched the live wire he got a terrific shock, yelled, and dropped the tool. At the same time, every single light in the house went. There was dead silence for a few seconds, then loud, anguished cries from the girls who were upstairs staking claims on their bedrooms. Nobody could see a thing, and in the strange house everybody was lost. It took Dad at least twenty-seven minutes to find the fuse, which was located deep in the cellar behind the furnace. I don’t know why, but in those days all fuse boxes were located behind the furnaces.
We finally got settled into the big house and went about the various businesses of our lives: Dad, to try to make a living for a family of nine in the face of a shattering drop in legal work, which was caused by the formation of a new judicial district to the north; Mother, to the task of keeping a big family clothed and fed and warm on less and less money; and the rest of us to just being kids.
One of our projects that year was to establish a dog team. The winters were long and cold in Prince Albert, and during the winter months there was still considerable trapping going on in the forests to the north. And occasionally, down on River Street where the fur-buyers’ shops were, we’d see a trapper come in with a team of dogs. This was too much; we had to have a dog team of our own.
To make the matter more urgent, we already knew a couple of kids who had dogs that pulled them on sleds. One boy, by the name of Jim Marvin, had lost a leg in some sort of accident before we knew him. He wore an artificial leg, but it was a clumsy thing, and we always liked to go swimming with him in the big slough because then he would remove the leg with his clothing and go hopping down the shore and into the water. We never tired of watching him do this.
Well, Jim had a little brown collie-type dog named Rusty, who was the greatest sled-puller I’ve ever known. Each morning in the winter Jim would hitch him to the sled, and down the snow-covered road Rusty would tear, barking gleefully. Then he would hang around the school, passing the time of day with the other dogs, until Jim needed to be pulled back home again.
So we had to have a dog team of our own. For a while we considered Patsy as a possible lead dog, but we couldn’t find a harness small enough for him; besides, he’d bite us every time we started to put any harness on him, and then would lie down and refuse to budge. So we began collecting stray dogs. There were a lot of them around, skinny, mangey, pitiful curs of all sizes who for some reason had left home and become wanderers.
We would entice these lean and hungry canines into the barn at the back of the lot where Old Rosie was kept, and lock them in the stall with her. Then we’d go to the butcher and beg some bones and meat scraps with which to feed them. “Once you feed a dog,” Hub explained, “he’ll stay with you forever.” But we never tested this theory by letting them out of the barn.
Finally, we had gathered together six of the weirdest-looking dogs imaginable. To say they were of mixed parent-age would be a gross understatement. We gave them names gleaned from a reading of Jack London and other writers of stories about heroic dogs, on the theory that if they had good names they’d try to be good dogs.
There was Buck, for instance, who Hub maintained “had St. Bernard in him”. He may have at that, but he also had some hound, some Pekinese, maybe a little bulldog and a million fleas. All he ever wanted to do was sit and scratch those fleas. There were Rex and King, Prince and White Fang and Kazan. There was even one we wanted to call “Barree, son of Kazan”, but it turned out to be somebody’s daughter. So we called her Queenie.
Somehow we managed to get harness for them all. Some of it was made of rope, some of rags, and some of it even had a bit of leather in it. One set that was fitted out for White Fang, a small, all-black cocker-spaniel (basically, he was cocker-spaniel) with the saddest eyes I’ve ever seen, was made of rags from somebody’s bright green dress. When we tied it on White Fang his big, sad brown eyes spoke of all the meanness and misery in the world.
Finally, we hitched the dogs to a sled, and then both Hub and I sat on it. The dogs also sat down in the snow and went about the business of scratching fleas, smelling each others’ rear ends, or licking their private parts. They had no intention of repaying our hand-outs of meat and bread-scraps with a little work. Where had we got that idea?
So we
stood up and threatened and threw frozen horse turds at them, and cajoled and tried to behave like dog-team drivers. “Mush, King! Mush, Queenie! Come on, Prince!” It sounded as though we had captured a royal family. But nothing worked. I honestly believe not one of those dogs had ever heard the word “mush” before.
Suddenly a miracle happened in the form of an old rattle-trap truck that came wheezing down Second Avenue. Practically nobody drove his car in the winter time then, preferring to put it up on blocks in a garage. If you did drive, you had to drain the water from the radiator every time the car was stopped for more than half an hour. But this individual was one of the daring pioneers of automobile travel. He’d fitted the wheels with chains so that they could grip the snowy road, he’d strapped an old buffalo robe over the hood, and he’d slid a piece of cardboard over the radiator. The result was pretty fearful-looking, and pretty noisy, too.
And it just so happened that at that moment Buck decided to live up to his name as a strong, fearless, relentless pursuer. Maybe he’d had experience with cars before. Maybe he mis-took the buffalo robe for his girl-friend. At any rate he issued a deep “Woof!” and took off after the rattling truck.
It wouldn’t have been so bad if he’d been the lead dog. But situated as he was–fourth in the team–his sudden acceleration tended to disrupt the order. In fact, it scattered them all over the place, and for a minute all we could see was legs and ears and bits of calico harness, accompanied by much yelping and barking. Then the whole team became operational, but unfortunately not according to the original plan. The dogs were hitched to pull in tandem rather than abreast. And they definitely weren’t supposed to race each other.
But race they did, determinedly and vociferously. As the slower dogs lagged behind, the others dragged them along until the harness ripped apart. The whole outfit disappeared into a large bush across the road. We never did see any of those dogs again. Here and there we found bits of harness clinging to a twig or bramble. But no sign at all did we ever find of dogs. They had absolutely no sense of gratitude. Hub summed it up by saying, “Once a bum, always a bum!”
But if we never did manage to get dogs to pull us, we did have a lot of fun coasting down the long Second Avenue hill and other hills in the town. One of these was called “Devil’s Dip”, and as a place to commit suicide it had few equals.
Prince Albert is built on the river bank, so that half the city is on the flat land above and half of it on the flat land down on the river level. Most of the avenues, Central Avenue, First and Second etc., are hills. Some of them long and gradual, others short and steep. As the winter wore on, their roads and sidewalks became hard-packed with snow which gradually turned to ice. The streets became one giant bob-sled run.
To take advantage of this situation, Hub invented a special bob-sled. It was none of your low, wide, sluggish contraptions, as sold by Eaton’s catalogue. No, this one was long and slim and speedy. To make it, Hub simply took a 2-by-8-inch plank about eight feet long. To one end he attached a narrow sled with steel runners, worn smooth. At the front he placed another sled, but this one was on a swivel so that it could be turned by means of a stick nailed across the front runners. Two-by-fours between sled and plank held it about a foot off the ground. This home-made bob-sled would accommodate half a dozen kids, and would go like the wind.
Hub appointed me as steerer, and he was pusher. That meant that I lay down at the front on my belly with my hands on the steering-stick. The other kids sat close together, each holding the feet of the one behind. At the end was Hub, who would run about fifty yards, pushing for all he was worth and then kneel on the back as the bob-sled sped on its way.
The Second Avenue hill was fully three blocks long, and I’m sure we gained speeds of over sixty miles an hour, and the momentum would carry us for another couple of blocks. It was a good slide.
There was, however, one small problem. At the bottom of the last block, just where the bob-sled would be travelling at maximum speed, there was a railway track. In fact, the main railway track. When our steel runners crossed the steel rails of the crossing sparks flew and we slowed down just a little. But worse than that, there was always the remote chance that a train and the bob-sled would reach that point on the rails at exactly the same instant.
The Braithwaite bob-sled became famous on Second Avenue hill. We could beat anything that showed up. Races were always in the dark, of course, because it was dark by the time school was out, and besides during the day time there were too many loads of coal or wood or groceries being hauled up the hill by struggling teams of horses with sharp cleats on their shoes. So, under the faint, eerie glow of street lamps, we whizzed down the hill, shouting and laughing and trying to cut the other bob-sled off and spill its riders in the snow.
Across the road from our house was a boys’ college run by the Anglican Church. It was a big brick building with a huge yard. What I remember best about it was that they had a big outdoor rink, and sometimes they would let us skate on it. But mostly we fought with these kids–them being Anglicans and us being Methodists–or engaged in some sort of competition with them.
One winter, having observed how much fun we were having on our bob-sled, they got busy and made one of their own. At first they were no match for us, but they gradually increased in speed and skill to the point where they issued a challenge. A race down Second Avenue from 20th Street, where the steepness really began, down to the bottom, to the first street past the tracks.
Hub was gleeful. “We’ll show those juicers who’s the fastest,” he gloated. “They may have a rink and a tennis court, but we’ve got the best sled.”
The night chosen for the race was clear and cold. There was no wind and the snow was so crisp it crackled when you walked on it. The frosty air made circular haloes around the tiny street lamps. The sky was full of stars, and the northern lights swayed like great coloured ghosts overhead. One of the teachers from the college came out to act as official starter and, since we had no adult of our own to represent us, we grudgingly, accepted his services. We had six kids and they had six. Their team was a little heavier than ours, which gave them something of an advantage. But we had experience and slightly slicker runners on our sled.
We got on our bob-sleds at the top of the hill. Each kid had his toque pulled down as low over his forehead as he could get it, and his face hidden behind a woollen scarf. Then, at the signal from the starter, the two pushers began their run and the race was on. Hub was a good pusher, so we gained a slight lead. Lying at the front of our sled, keeping her as straight as possible for every advantage, I could hear the rattle of the other bob’s steel runners on the icy snow slightly behind us. Our boys crouched low, each tucking his head against the back of the boy in front to cut down the wind resistance, and urged the sled forward with their bodies.
Faster and faster we went, the wind cutting like a knife. And then I heard it. A freight train on the tracks below. I could see the beam of the headlamp cutting through the frosty air. We were going to reach the crossing just about the same time as that train.
There was only one thing to do. Cramp the steering-sled hard to the right. For a horrible moment it slid sideways, then the steel runners caught and the bob-sled went over, with all of us tumbling on the road and sprawling along on the hard snow. We had just managed to sit up when we saw to our horror that the other bob wasn’t stopping. It was heading straight towards that slow-moving freight, and there was no help for it. Maybe the steerer had panicked and couldn’t move. As we sat there, petrified, the bob roared straight towards the centre of one of those freight cars. Then every one of those kids leaned back and flattened himself against the bob and underneath they went at the exact spot of maximum clearance half-way between the front and rear trucks of that car.
There wasn’t a sound from anyone for a long time. We just sat and stared. When the freight finally passed, there they were, the six of them standing holding on to the rope of their bob-sled, waiting to come across. Not one had
been touched.
Always after that I had a strong, strong suspicion that maybe there was some truth in the theory that the Anglicans were God’s special people, and forever in His care.
The best thing about Prince Albert, however, was the Strand Theatre on Central Avenue. It was a temple of delight, an arena of excitement, a steam bath of emotions, a great place to be on Saturday afternoon. Movies on Saturday afternoon cost a nickel for kids, and on Friday night they cost a dime. So, of course, we always wanted to go on Friday night. But there weren’t enough dimes to go around.
We’d line up at Dad’s chair after lunch on Saturday and he would dig deep into his pocket with his big hand and produce a handful of change. Then, with a long finger, he’d poke among the dimes and quarters and coppers, looking for nickels. (I remember that there was always a shiny lucky quarter in that big, lean hand. Dad had carried it in his pocket since he was a school-teacher in Ontario.) Then he’d dole out the nickels, and we’d be off.
For a long time Denny got in free, so Hub and I would take him with us. Dad, who paid little attention to these niceties, didn’t know about the free ticket and so he gave us a nickel for Denny, too. Which meant a whole raft of cent candy, licorice plugs, licorice whips, jaw-breakers and candy kisses to be munched during the performance.
We worked this racket until long after Denny was six. He was a skinny kid and small and the ticket-seller got used to letting him in free. But they changed ticket-sellers, and when we appeared the new one asked,
“How old is the little red-headed boy?”
“Oh, he’s just five,” Hub assured her.
But he hadn’t reckoned on Denny’s pride of accomplishment in having achieved his sixth birthday three months earlier. He elbowed his way to the front with fire shooting from his eyes and stated defiantly, “I’m not five. I’m six!” That was the end of our nickel’s worth of goodies during the show.
Never Sleep Three in a Bed Page 8