Then there is the question of older brothers and sisters. Since there were no multiple births in our family, everybody but Morley, the oldest, and Betty, the youngest, had siblings both older and younger than themselves. It’s hard to say which is worse. Older siblings are teasers while younger ones are teasees. I’ll begin with the teasers.
My older brothers were champion teasers. I was exactly the right number of years younger than them to be a safe target. I was too small to be able to retaliate physically or mentally, and big enough to make the game worthwhile. Somehow they managed to keep me in a bad temper most of the time, and on the constant verge of hysteria.
There was the occasion, for instance, when I spilled the milk. Since Old Rosie, bless her soul, gave more milk than even we could consume, Mother used to sell a couple of quarts daily to the Branions, who lived near the school. It was my job to deliver it in a large honey pail with a handle and lid. It was a chore I hated. There I was, toting that damned red honey pail, while the rest of the kids were carrying hockey sticks, or knocking each other on the head with dome crackers, or playing “chase” with marbles.
One winter day, when I was just about late for school and hurrying through the short-cut path, I slipped on an icy spot and fell. Both my hands went up in the air, the milk pail flew high, the lid came off, and the whole white, sticky mess came down on top of me. It was the last straw. Howling with anger and humiliation, I ran all the way back home and into the kitchen, where I told Mother the whole dismal story, my tears of rage increasing with the telling.
It was then that a big brother appeared on the scene. For some reason he hadn’t gone to high school that morning, and arrived in the kitchen just as I hit the high point of my story. I’ve got to admit it was the perfect opportunity, and he made the most of it. Smiling benignly upon me, he said, “Cheer up, old chap, there’s no use crying over spilt milk!”
Then he took off up the stairs with me after him–screaming and swearing and throwing everything I could lay my hands on. He barricaded himself in the bathroom, jeering back at me as I kicked the door, threatening every reprisal known to man. I knew, of course, that I would never carry out any of my threats. There’s an unwritten law in all big families that an older brother will run from a smaller one when the latter has become flaming mad. It’s much the same sort of thing as a great dane permitting itself to be chased off a poodle’s yard. A kind of property right. But just as it would be suicide for the poodle to pursue the dane any further than its own boundary or to attack it, so would it be folly of the worst kind for a smaller brother to actually try anything on a larger one.
As a kid I was a notorious mitt-loser. One reason for this was that I liked to read while I walked, and since I always seemed to be delivering newspapers, I had plenty of opportunity to do so. So, as I trudged down the streets with the bag of Prince Albert Heralds on my back, I’d be reading the latest wire news on something like the Dempsey-Firpo fight.
And here I must digress a bit, to talk about how fascinated Prince Albert kids were with world sporting events.
It is often assumed that because there were no radios or televisions in 1921, we didn’t know what was going on in the world. This is totally wrong. There was still the telegraph, which could bring us blow-by-blow, or pitch-by-pitch accounts of heavyweight championship fights or world series ball games.
It is the boxing that I remember best. Every kid in Prince Albert knew all about Jack Dempsey and hated his guts. This, of course, was all due to the great publicity campaign developed by his handlers. By making Dempsey the most hated fighter in history they assured a big gate for his fights against Sir Galahad-type challengers. They did everything possible to discredit the champ. His war record was doubtful. He was a killer, an inhuman monster in the ring. Why he even looked like a killer, with his three day growth of beard (he retained it to prevent bleeding, but we didn’t know that), his surly attitude with the press, and the unfair way that he bashed his opponents about.
Well, Dempsey signed to fight Georges Carpentier of France, and I’m sure no sporting event since the days of the Roman gladiators received more publicity. Every day the sports pages were full of it. Carpentier had everything that a Galahad should have. He was handsome, lithe, graceful, modest, clean-living, loving to his mother–and brothers, too, for all we knew. He was smaller than Dempsey, but fast. So fast–I can remember the exact quote–that he could “catch a wild hare”. And he was reputed to have a right-hand punch that could flatten a bull.
We all loved Georges and hated Jack. During the entire spring of 1921 we talked of little else. We staged impromptu boxing matches on the street in which the hero, Georges, always clobbered the rat, Jack. Nobody wanted to play the villain role, of course, and so we had to take turns. Many a kid was content to go home with a bloody nose or thick ear because once again the ogre had been bested.
We followed ail the press reports. By the night of the fight, on July 2, we knew that close to a hundred thousand fight fans, many of them women, would crowd into Boyles thirty-acre field in Jersey City, and pay well over a million and a half dollars to watch the “Manassa Mauler” finally get his come-uppance. There was no doubt that Carpentier would win. Why, didn’t he represent right and goodness and virtue, and didn’t those things always triumph in 1921?
On the night of the fight, half of Prince Albert filled the street in front of the Herald office. From an upstairs window a strong-voiced reporter, using a megaphone, relayed the blow-by-blow account to us as it came in over the wire. It was a festive occasion–men in straw hats, women in long dresses, kids in bare feet. The popcorn vendor, who usually sold his wares at Central Avenue Park during band concerts, had arrived with his cart and was doing a good business. Enthusiasm was so high that at least two fist-fights got going before the main bout, and there were three dog-fights. O. J. Parsons, a mean enough man to be the only Dempsey fan in town, bet Jim Sheldon, the livery stable operator, that Dempsey would win. But he was the only one to harbour such a treacherous thought.
The fight? Well, it’s history. Dempsey demolished Carpentier in four rounds, and smashed the poor chap up so badly that it was rumoured that he’d never fight again. Dempsey went on demolishing opponents until he ran into Gene Tunney much later, and was himself pretty badly smashed up. And because of that–such is the whimsy of fight fans–he became the most popular ex-heavyweight champion of all time!
Where was I? Oh yes, the story of the mitts. Well, as I walked around my paper route, reading the sports page, or the syndicated column of that funny writer, Stephen Leacock, or the adventures of Mutt and Jeff, I would tuck my mitts under my arm so that I could better turn the pages. This same motion also caused me to drop my mitts into the snow, and by the time I noticed they were gone it would be too late to find them. I’d never admit it when I got home, though, because of the roasting I’d get from my brothers.
Once, however, I forgot. I took my mitts to school, I put them on the window-sill, and when I went to get them they were gone. It was so annoying. I knew exactly where I’d put them, but they just weren’t there any more. Well, foolishly, I came home and repeated this story. The whole family took up the cry, of course, and soon “I took them to school and put them on the window-sill and when I went to get them they were gone” became a chant.
But all of this was nothing compared to sleeping three in a bed. Anyone who hasn’t had this experience has no right to say he knows anything at all about the vicissitudes of life. We managed all right in the summer, because then Morley was back in Nokomis working on a farm. But in winter he’d come home, and there just weren’t enough beds to go around. Five boys, two beds: simple arithmetic dictated that in one of those beds there had to be three bodies.
Denny or I, being the youngest of the boys, naturally found ourselves low man in the matter of three in a bed. And when you’re low in that situation, you are low indeed. All the mattresses in our house were old, and all of them sagged in the middle. This meant that the two b
odies on either side rolled towards the middle, and on top of whoever was lying there. There is no torture in the world to compare with the feeling of two heavy, sweaty, snoring bodies on top of you. It causes a desperate madness. You writhe, you squirm, but those two bulks simply cannot be shoved aside. You gasp for breath, you pant, you want to scream. When you do manage to sink into fitful sleep you dream that you are in the circus and the elephant has sat down on you. You awaken to find the reality is even worse.
Frantically, you calculate the time to be endured until you can escape. You know it’s only about two in the morning, and you can’t possibly get up until six. That’s four hours. But in the middle of the night every minute is like two hours in the daytime. So that figures out to four times sixty, which is two hundred and forty hours, and that, times two, is four hundred and eighty hours. So, for the equivalent of twenty days, you suffer, with no chance of reprieve. Because if you do manage to squirm from between those three hundred pounds of blubber, the two bodies immediately merge and there is no way of getting back. You can’t sleep on the outside because there are no covers there, and this is winter, you know, and attics are cold in winter.
No, it is a problem without solution. Yet another of those factors that contributes to the moulding of character. All my life I’ve had recurrent dreams of being crushed beneath tons of earth, or sinking in quicksand, or being trampled by herds of hippopotami. All my life I’ve had this awful claustrophobia, becoming terribly nervous when anyone stands close to me, or lies close to me. It’s blighted my existence, made a quivering neurotic of me, and ruined my sex life. I often wonder how I might have turned out if I’d had a bed of my own. A great wide expanse to spread out on as I pleased–to sprawl and turn and kick, without worrying about anyone. To be uncrushed, unsquashed, unsqueezed. I might have accomplished great things.
I can’t leave this chapter without a final word about Prince Albert. What a place it was for kids! Every kid should grow up in a place like Prince Albert. It had everything. Vacant lots. One of the great tragedies suffered by modern kids is they have no vacant lots. All they have is organized playgrounds, where parents or youth leaders or recreation directors supervise and plan their activities. But the vacant lot, especially one filled with bush, belonged to the kids. Why, a parent couldn’t even find his way through that labyrinth of paths! And there kids could do the things they liked to do–climb trees, crawl through brambles, make huts, smoke dried leaves, tell stories, experiment with the opposite sex, and nobody ever worried about what they were doing. They emerged from time to time to eat and sleep, or when a bare foot had been gashed on a sharp stone or a thorn. Outside of that, they were on their own.
Terms like “juvenile delinquent” and “child psychologist” hadn’t yet been invented. Kids were expected to do things they shouldn’t; that was part of being a kid. We badgered adults, and gave them as bad a time as we could. I remember one heart-felt declaration made by a harassed water-deliverer. In effect, what he said was, “Kids in Canada do more damage than the Germans did in the war!”
How about that?
We had figured out a way to open padlocks. You simply flattened one end of a nail, and then twisted it a bit. Inserted into the keyhole of a padlock and wiggled just right, it would open the lock. We did this with the lock on the box that enclosed the tap of the water pipe.
In Prince Albert–and indeed in many other western cities–the waterworks extended only as far as 23rd Street. All the houses beyond that had their water delivered to them by a big water-tank, drawn by a team of horses. The tank was filled at the water pipe.
Once we had unlocked the box we naturally turned the water on and let it run. It ran over the road and the sidewalk and into surrounding basements and made a fine mess generally. When the water-man came, we were on hand to get his reaction. We naturally disavowed any knowledge of who had perpetrated the dastardly deed, and promised to help him find the culprits. That’s when he made his deathless remark to us about the relative destructive powers of kids and the Germans.
The term “teen-ager” hadn’t been invented, either. And every transgression of kids didn’t become front page news, or the subject of a television special, as it does today. Matter of fact, we got no publicity at all.
Those days in Prince Albert were to be the last that the members of our family were all together. Morley became a farmer in Nokomis, Peter went into a bank, and was sent to a tiny town in the bush called Parkside. We saw them only now and then, and missed them sorely. For a big brother, no matter how much he may tease, is still a big brother after all. You can always find new friends, but your brothers and sisters are the only ones you’ll ever have.
10 Saskatoon—the Big Time
We moved to Saskatoon in the spring of 1924. I was in Grade Six, and had become editor of the room newspaper in our class. I remember a poem one of the kids handed in:
Maxwell Braithwaite is going away,
Going away from old P.A.
Going to a city of noise and din;
Won’t they smile when he walks in.
He’ll have to say please when he wants a dib,
Or he’s likely to get a poke on the jib.
The Wesley Church Trail Rangers group, in which I was still striving for my first badge, gave me a going-away present of a pen and pencil set. I remember it well, for it is the only going-away present I ever received in my life.
It was an important move for us. We left the big house and its stone wall, with the balls stuck on the top with pink plaster. Left the security of owning our house and embarked upon the unknown. I have never felt completely secure about anything since, for 1924 was the year that I came to realize that we were poor.
Actually we’d become poor some time before that, but I never realized it. When Dad had moved his family to Prince Albert, and gone into partnership with the city’s leading lawyer, he’d made a wise move. Prince Albert was a booming city and the judicial centre for the entire northern half of the province. So, Dad had bought the big house and settled down to be a prosperous lawyer, and we were all set to live the lives of sons and daughters of a prosperous lawyer.
Then the fickle forefinger of fate wrote and, having writ, moved on. For some perverse reason, the C.N.R. decided to extend its railway line to the town of Big River, eighty-six miles north-west of Prince Albert, and the Saskatchewan government, in its blithering stupidity, decided to establish a judicial district up there. This meant that a good half of the legal business was diverted from Prince Albert, and about half its lawyers became superfluous.
In spite of having eight kids to support, Dad might have survived even that blow, except that he had a couple of other things going against him. For one thing, he was a Conservative in a Liberal province. And Dad wasn’t one of your mild, pragmatic, easy-going men in the matter of politics. He was a zealot. He believed that Sir John A. Macdonald ranked only next to God in importance. He’d once shaken the great man’s hand at a picnic, and the first vote he ever cast in his life was for Sir John’s party in the election of 1891. Everything since that great Conservative victory had been anti-climactic.
Even worse, ever since Saskatchewan became a province in 1905 it had always had a Liberal government. No Conservative party had ever gained power there, but Dad, along with a few others, was determined that it by-gawd would. So he campaigned in the 1921 election and, of course, was on the losing side. This meant that all the little favours and goodies that a provincial government can pass out to lawyers never came Dad’s way. Not only did he not become a judge, he never even made King’s Counsel.
So there he was. Not enough legal business to sustain him, no provincial influence to help him, a family of eight to support, no backlog of savings, and he was fifty-six years old. In desperation, he decided to move to Saskatoon. I guess he borrowed the money for the move, I don’t know how else he could have got it. He had no influential friends in Saskatoon, no connections of any kind. He simply moved there and opened a law office, and
the family got poorer and poorer.
We weren’t even honest-poor. We were what my brother once called “sneaky poor”. That is, Mother never admitted we were poor. She managed to keep us living in a good house on a good street, even if she couldn’t pay the rent. When the landlord couldn’t be stalled any longer we of course had to move, and Mother, being a scrupulously honest Methodist, would try to pay off the rent on the house that we had left. Naturally the rent on the current house got behind, so then we had to move again. As a result, we lived in a half-dozen houses in as many years.
Such is the nature of poverty that it takes a child some time to realize it has actually happened to him. Always, he believes there is some sort of backlog, that when his mother says there isn’t money for a new coat she means that there is no immediate money in her purse, that she can’t afford it now. He doesn’t realize that there is no money, period. That when the rent comes due there is no cash to pay it, and landlords don’t wait for their money. They evict people. They are not friendly and kind. They become unfriendly and nasty. That when you haven’t money you are in a very, very bad category indeed. Being poor is hard to accept.
Well, we moved into the house at 760 Baird Street and, on the first day of May, Hub and Denny and I set off for Albert School. I remember the day well. It had snowed lightly in the night and we could see our footprints in the green grass of the boulevard along Clarence Avenue.
Never Sleep Three in a Bed Page 11