Boys facing girls, we pranced towards our partners, then backed away while shrilling a terminally stupid song, some verses of which are indelibly inscribed in memory: “Pray what is your intensir… intensir… intensir? Pray what is your intensir… with a ransom-tansom-tizza-matee?” whined the girls. To which we boys replied with ill-concealed loathing: “Our tension is to marry… to marry… to marry. Our tension is to marry… with a ransom-tan-som-tizza-matee.” For weeks afterwards, this line was iterated and reiterated by older kids in the school yard whenever any of us chorus boys appeared, and queries about how we were going to celebrate our wedding night rang in our ears like hellish carillons.
The only good thing about that event was that it brought Hughie Cowan and me together. He was one of my fellow performers, and our shared suffering made us friends.
Hughie’s parents were Scots immigrants. His father, a cabinet maker in the old country, had set himself up as a house builder in Windsor and had done fairly well during the post-war boom years. When the stock market collapse initiated the economic catastrophe which would eventually engulf the majority of working-class and even middle-class Canadians, Hughie’s father fell early victim. His little business failed and thereafter he could not find sufficient work as a carpenter or as anything else to earn more than the most meagre living.
The Cowan family was large and so suffered severely from the Great Depression, yet its members remained as open-hearted and open-handed as only people of adversity can be. I was always welcome in their crowded little house where Mrs. Cowan would urge me to eat more than my share of whatever food they had. Nor would I be allowed to go home empty-handed. If there was nothing better I would at least be given an apple to tide me on my way.
The Cowans owned a battered 1924 Dodge touring car and, when they could afford a few gallons of gas, they would drive out into the bountiful agricultural lands of Essex County to barter with the farmers for garden truck and fruit. I was sometimes invited to go along and I remember those foraging excursions as times of shared gaiety which belied the grimness of their underlying purpose.
Hughie and I spent much of our spare time exploring the river bank, factory dumps, and big patches of “waste” land which had been cleared and surveyed by speculators (“developers,” they now call themselves) during the boom years, but had since been abandoned and were now returning to wilderness. Rabbits, foxes, raccoons, and other wild creatures were recolonizing these regions although they had to share the space with unemployed and homeless men who had nowhere else to go. These destitute humans lived in what were beginning to be called hobo jungles, which Hughie and I often visited. We were always offered something to eat or drink, even if it was only a spoonful of beans or a mouthful of tea, and we were never offered any harm.
Once a jobless young man from Alberta entertained us by playing his accordion and singing songs about “life on the road,” which meant life riding the rods on the railroad. The songs dealt with a side of life far outside my experience. The refrain of one of them ran something like this:
Oh, the rails they is made of tempered steel,
And so’s the hearts of the Bosses,
But the rails ain’t never half so hard
As their hearts when they cuts their losses.
I didn’t understand this until Hughie’s father explained it to me.
“It means, laddie, that when things get tough the owners cut off the working stiffs, ye ken?”
It was an early but salutary lesson for me in the way the capitalist economy works.
Considering the limitations imposed on ten- or twelve-year-olds today, our parents accorded us an enormous degree of freedom. Nobody seemed overly concerned about where we might go or what we might be doing. Years later I asked my father whether he and Helen had worried about our tendencies to wander far afield.
“Certainly we worried. The way a mother cat does about a kitten that wanders off after a chipmunk. But we felt that keeping you in a nice safe cage would leave you with only the vaguest and perhaps the wrongest ideas of what life was really about. Chances have to be took even by the young.”
My reading had now taken me into James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, and other tales of the Red Men. Indian lore fascinated me but it was not until I fell under the spell of Ernest Thompson Seton’s Two Little Savages that I decided to become an Indian myself. I enlisted Hughie and we formed a tribe of two. We tried to emulate Jan, the hero of Two Little Savages, in learning and in practising Indian ways.
In the late spring of 1931 the Mowats had discovered Point Pelee, the most southerly point in Canada. Here, on the shore of Lake Erie, was a relatively untouched wilderness of forest, sandy beaches, dunes, and marshes. My family visited Pelee often thereafter, usually with Hughie in tow, and we two little savages were allowed to camp out in our own home-made wigwam to savour life au naturel. It is true that my parents camped within hailing distance but they made a point of keeping out of our sight and, as far as possible, out of our Indian lives. When we were in need of food (which was frequently) or of reassurance (as when a thunderstorm came roaring in off the lake), we went to them.
One July day the tribe went hunting. For an hour we slipped through the forest glades, soundless as shadows, in pursuit of the elusive moose. We found none because there were none on Point Pelee. Tired and hot, we eventually decided to have a swim but were outraged to find our favourite strip of sandy shore pre-empted by invading white men who had driven their covered wagon (a big Buick) along the hard-packed beach and were noisily setting up an encampment on our tribal land! To make matters worse, the licence plates on the covered wagon told us the invaders were Americans.
This was not to be tolerated. Wiggling through the dunes and taking cover behind tufts of tussock grass, we stalked the unsuspecting pale-faces. When we were within range, we let fly two blunt-headed arrows at their big tent.
This was not mere childish posturing. We were both practised bowmen and, moreover, our equipment had been designed and its construction overseen by Angus. An enraged howl from within the tent announced that we had made a point. We swiftly withdrew over the dunes into the woods and headed back to our lodge, well satisfied that we had struck a telling blow in defence of our native land.
That evening a pair of policemen appeared at my parents’ tent, enquiring about the presence of archers in the area. It appeared that a stray arrow had penetrated the tent of some tourists and had struck one of them in the ribs. No real harm had been done but the Americans had departed breathing fire and brimstone. Which, the policemen solemnly noted, was bad for the tourist business.
My parents kept their peace, so the police departed none the wiser. Then it was Hughie’s and my turn to be interrogated. I knew that a flat denial would only get me a licking for having told a falsehood, so I modified the lie and explained that we had shot at a squirrel in a tree top near the shore without knowing, until too late, that there were people on the beach. American people, I emphasized. It was probably this attention to detail which saved our hides. We escaped with a stern lecture but were forbidden the use of our weapons for the rest of that stay at Pelee.
NOT ALL OUR family excursions were local. My mother’s parents had a summer cottage near Danford Lake in the Gatineau Hills north-east of Ottawa, and Helen and I joined them there for a month during the summer of 1932.
I loved the place. The cottage was constructed of rough-cut white pine and was pungent with the scent of turpentine. It was not a city home transported into the country, as are so many “cottages” of today; it was a place not only in but of the wilderness.
Ceilings and roof were one, consisting of a layer of tarpaper over bare boards through which one could hear, unhampered, the drumming of the rain, the skirling of the wind during a storm, or the clatter of birds’ feet on the ridge-pole in a calm summer dawn.
There was no running water (therefore no obligatory b
aths for the likes of me). We carried our water up from the lake in buckets and it was not only fit to drink but tasted deliciously of balsam. There was no electricity but there was an ice-box, into whose maw we daily dumped a fifty-pound chunk.
The kitchen contained a cast-iron range which burned billets of hardwood and, for cooking during the heat of summer, there was a two-burner kerosene (coal-oil) stove. On the slopes overlooking the lake stood a marvellous outhouse through whose open door one could watch in comfort and seclusion the comings and goings of loons, ducks, and herons.
The mellow light of the well-named Aladdin lamps made the plank walls of the cottage glow golden at night, and enabled me to lie awake on my iron cot reading until all hours, engrossed in books about adventures in far places, Indian lore, or the lives of other animals.
On a sandy little beach below the cabin lay an old punt, square of bow and stern and heavy as lead, in which I could row wherever I chose amongst bays and coves still fringed by virgin forests. And there was not a single outboard engine or, indeed, any engine at all on the water with me.
There were no other children to play with but I did not miss their presence. I was by no means alone, or lonely, because of the plethora of other creatures including deer, beaver, squirrels, skunks, and a family of otters.
Once I spotted a young black bear snuffling along a beach and rowed quietly to within a few dozen yards of him before he saw me. We looked at each other for what seemed like ages. I was thinking about my dream bear at Bingen and I wondered how this one would look in a checked cap. The idea set me giggling. The bear cocked his head quizzically for a moment then lumbered off into the woods as if, perhaps, doubting my sanity.
There was more than enough to do. If I felt so inclined I could catch pike and bass and take them home as contributions to the dinner table. There were berries to be picked. There were little red-bellied snakes and wood frogs to be caught and secreted in tins and jars under my bed. At no great distance was a little backwoods farm whose house and barn were made of rough-hewn logs. The old couple who worked the place welcomed all comers. The farmer taught me how to use a Swede saw and an axe (well, it was only a hatchet), and told me wonderful stories of his earlier days as a logger, driving big timber down the Ottawa River.
That month at the cottage when I was eleven was no mere interlude in my life—it was a revelation. Thereafter the desire to become one with wilderness and its native inhabitants would grow ever stronger within me.
The Depression had little adverse effect upon the monied high rollers of Windsor (or anywhere else, for that matter). As chief librarian and therefore something of a cultural icon, Angus was favoured by the patronage of some of these, one of whom was the president of the Hiram Walker Distillery in nearby Walkerville. This man sometimes took us on elaborate party cruises in his luxurious yacht, which had a crew of seven, including a black bartender with whom I used to fish off the vessel’s gilded stern when we lay at anchor. The bartender also used to make brandy Alexanders for me—without the brandy.
Angus gloried in these cruises, although in his Bay of Quinte days he had despised power yachts, contemptuously calling them “stink pots.” Now, clad in white flannels, a blue blazer with gold buttons, and a jaunty yachting cap, he could easily have been mistaken for the film star Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., whom he not only resembled physically but whose swashbuckling, devil-may-care, life-of-the-party style he adopted as if it were his own.
Helen did not entirely share his pleasure in consorting with the rich.
“He would buy the fanciest yachting togs for himself but there never seemed to be money for me to dress so I could feel at ease amongst all those swells. Quite often I stayed home with you which, I am sure, didn’t cramp your father’s style at all.”
Clothes or no clothes, Helen did not choose to miss an extravaganza held at the ornate mansion of the distiller to celebrate Christmas, 1931. I was taken along although it was definitely not a children’s party. While the adults disported themselves downstairs, I was left alone in an enormous, chintz-filled sitting room on the second floor to entertain myself as best I could with a pile of silly games and a tray of cake and cookies.
The games soon palled so I explored the room in search of things to do. The house had been built at a time when electricity was available only to the rich and, instead of the more-or-less foolproof outlets in later-day use, had been fitted with brass wall receptacles into which one inserted a solid brass plug through a little trapdoor. Never having seen anything like this before, I tried the effect of pushing my finger through one of the trapdoors. The shock knocked me unconscious and half-way across the room, but did me no permanent damage except, perhaps, to introduce an element of caution into my future dealings with the leisured class.
My allowance during the Windsor years was five cents a week, and Hughie got none at all. Having seen how the rich lived, I concluded this situation wasn’t good enough and looked around for ways to supplement our incomes.
The public library was shaded by great sycamore trees, and when these fecund giants dropped their seeds the surrounding lawns and sidewalks were deeply littered with them. Hughie and I gathered a bushel of the seeds which we packaged in Windsor Public Library envelopes and hawked from house to house. Our sales pitch was that the seeds would produce statuesque sycamores a hundred feet in height… which they might well have done, given an equal number of years. Unfortunately Windsorites were not interested in ensuring a forested future, so our sales were minuscule. Even a letter of mine published in the Windsor Border City Star and containing this trenchant declaration: “Sicamores [sic] are the rarest and beautifulest trees I have ever seen in my life and should be spread,” failed to initiate a sycamore-seed-buying spree. We gave up on sycamores in favour of another venture.
People with cupboards full of unwanted magazines sometimes could not bring themselves to consign these to the garbage. Instead they donated them to the library with the result that the cellars were full of copies of the National Geographic magazine. Nobody seemed to want these so I asked Angus if I could have them. He was delighted to get rid of them, and Hughie and I spent the next two Saturdays hauling hundreds of Geographics in our Express wagons to the basement of my home. My plan was to set up a business supplying missing issues at five cents apiece to people who wanted to own a complete set.
It turned out there were all too few such; but Hughie and I at least increased our knowledge of the world from thumbing through our stock. We even learned a little about sex from avidly scanning pictures of bare-bosomed African and South Seas women.
The failure of these enterprises tended to sour me on a genre of books which was then considered essential to the proper rearing of young North American males—books like the Hardy Boys, the Tom Swift series, and especially the Horatio Alger books, whose dirt-poor but dogged young heroes made their ways to fame and fortune by devoutly pursuing their own selfish interests. Hereafter I devoted my attention to such nonconformist tales as Peck’s Bad Boy, Huckleberry Finn, and Penrod and Sam.
It was in the spirit of the latter that one summer Hughie and I organized a circus in my back yard. Hughie was the acrobat, and a good one too, although one afternoon he gave the audience more than their money’s worth by trying to do a handstand on top of our back fence. He crashed to the ground with such violence that the several little girls who made up our audience screamed their heads off.
I was the Master of Ceremonies, but also did my bit as an entertainer. Shrouding myself in a sheet upon which we had painted the outline of a skeleton, with a pillowcase painted to look like a skull pulled over my head, I played a ghost. I nearly became a real one when, blinded by my disguise, I ran full tilt into a concrete pillar, knocking myself out and leaving a permanent depression in my left temple.
We charged a one-cent admission fee and made a profit of fourteen cents, which we spent on two pomegranates (five cents each) and four one-cent, r
ound, black candies called nigger balls.
That was the last spring Hughie and I shared together. Faced with the humiliating prospect of having to “go on relief’ in order to feed his family, Hughie’s father chose the desperate alternative of becoming a homesteader in northern British Columbia. I remember how Hughie put it, echoing his father: “We’ll not become beggars. We’ll starve first.”
It was late June when they departed. Four children and three adults (one of Hughie’s uncles accompanied them) crowded with all their baggage into their ramshackle old touring car. Camping out along the way, it took them six weeks to reach their destination—a one-hundred-and-sixty-acre plot of primaeval forest. There, with axe and shovel, they began making a new life.
Hughie and I wrote to each other off and on until the 1950s when we finally lost touch. In the autumn of 1992, his sister Margaret appeared at a store in New Westminster, British Columbia, where I was autographing books, to tell me Hughie was alive and well and still living on part of the original family homestead. There I will visit him one day, God willing, and tell him how much I missed him when he left me behind in Windsor in the time of our childhood.
6
MY PARENTS HAD GIVEN AWAY our two cats before we moved to Windsor, but soon after we settled into our new home I found a scrawny stray kitten and brought it home. Angus named her Miss Carter after our landlady, whom he did not like. He used to stand on our front steps at night loudly calling our Miss Carter by name, adding: “Come home, you little tramp!”, while the other one, who lived only a few doors down the street, presumably endured acute embarrassment.
Other animals joined us. One was Limpopo, a Florida alligator brought to me by my Uncle Geddes, whose fiendish sense of humour as a youth had suffered no diminution with the years. When Limpopo arrived, he was a starving, six-inch weakling, but he grew apace on a diet of hard-boiled eggs, minnows, and tadpoles until, before we left Windsor, he was two feet long and could glutch down a six-inch sunfish in a couple of gulps.