red truck we could see a red band around our shack just under the roof. It looked as if the house was tied in red ribbon, like a parcel, but close to, we never noticed the red ribbon, which was odd.
There was no sort of village, just three or four other shacks and the men’s bunkhouse (forbidden territory to three little girls) and the cookhouse. Those buildings were just covered in tarpaper as well, and I remember hurrying past the forbidden bunkhouse as it loomed blackly and ominously in the early October dusk. The men were always so nice to us whenever we met them outside in daylight that it was a mystery how there would be dangers in the tall black house where they slept. Was it dangerous for them too? No. The feeling was that the men themselves were the danger, once inside their bunkhouse. Yet the cook, for instance, was really kind, and made a cake for my birthday with fancy icing, decorated with bluebirds and flowers.
The valley was encircled by high mountains where bears roamed. We were often warned about them but we never saw one. We did often see parky squirrels. Our little house had three rooms. The kitchen was so small that our mother could reach everything from sitting at her place at the table, yet it also had our parents’ bed, covered with our father’s arctic sleeping bag, tucked into a corner. There was a small living room, and one bedroom with three beds in a row for my sisters and me. The beds had tough grey blankets on them, like horse blankets. There was also a bathroom. Our father went up the mountain every morning in his work clothes, with his miner’s hat on (a hardhat with a light), deep into the mine. None of us ever got into the mine except Ruth, a little way, once. Our mother kept house in the shack, cooking on a wood stove, but she often came out with us exploring the lower reaches of the mountains and picking berries.
Those months in that place, as different from Forest Hill and our house there as can be imagined, were a time of peak childhood happiness. For years Carol and I used to say to each other, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if being back in Toronto was only a dream and we woke up still in Alaska?” Books and stories were very much part of that world too. I especially remember the Just So Stories from that time, and also a long tale our father would tell us in the evenings. It was called “The Empty House” and he made it up as he went along. I don’t remember a single detail, just the slight scariness of it and the fun of our father telling it in that cosy little place which, once the evenings drew in, was lit only by coal oil lamps.
Snow came in October while we were still there and we went for a ride in a sleigh pulled by Mrs. Seski’s terrifying husky dogs. It was almost dark when we had the sleigh ride, the days were so short, and that made it even more exciting and for once we weren’t frightened of the dogs as they raced ahead over the snow. Those dogs the rest of the time were chained up in front of her shack. We always gave them a wide berth. Seeing us they always pulled up their lips and bared their scary teeth and barked furiously. Their chains rattled as they jumped and strained against their collars. We had to pass them to get to the shack where Billy and his baby sister Helen lived — the only other children at the mine. Billy was six and was always in trouble for doing dangerous forbidden things and I admired him tremendously. Once he fell into a creek poisoned by run-off from the gold processing and we were sure he would die but he didn’t.
In Toronto our father read different books to us than our mother did: Jock of the Bushveld was a favourite of his because it was set in “his” Africa, and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. He must have read those several times as I feel as if I spent long stretches of my childhood immersed in one or the other, always in his voice. Books were my favourite Christmas presents; when I recall a particular Christmas, its atmosphere is that of whatever book I first read from the pile under the tree.
There was the year I got Wee Gillis and Carol got Ferdinand the Bull. It was a Toronto green Christmas, and the same one that Chuck got Tinker Toys. Or there was the wonderful year of the first Christmas in North Hatley when we skied every day and I got two new Arthur Ransomes: The Picts and the Martyrs and Great Northern. That most of the books I read were English meant that I viewed my own world as if through English eyes. Lake Massawippi and its surrounding hills doubled for the Lake District. Our little sailboat was Swallow in Swallows and Amazons. We did read, and over and over, all the L. M. Montgomery books but despite the PEI setting even those had an English flavour. Montgomery’s characters’ intense love of the natural world and her descriptions of it are Romantic as in the Romantic poets. I rarely encountered Canadian writing otherwise.
Reading was my joy but as I entered adolescence it also was in a significant way my undoing. Dauntless Nancy of the Amazons was replaced by one girl or woman after another who was fatally undone or at the very least tamed by love. I lived for hours every day within an English, Russian or French classic, not aware of an inner conflict between my desire for independence and a growing yearning for a man who would test me to the limit and beyond it. He must be dramatically, darkly, broodingly handsome, probably foreign — though the passion of a D. H. Lawrence working-class hero also might do, if I ever encountered such. What decidedly would not do would be a young man from either my Toronto or North Hatley neighbourhood.
I shake my head now at how an intelligent girl like me fell into such an obvious and silly trap. Why had I not been able to enjoy those other fictional worlds without losing my common sense? Part of it was the era. I already had the makings of a feminist in me, without even knowing the word, but nothing around me echoed it back let alone encouraged it. All the messages from movies, magazines, radio, early TV when I encountered it had a common theme, whether overt or somewhat disguised. I must live for love. I must find it and then all else would take care of itself and take care of me. That might have been at least a safe goal, were it not for all the novels that ensured that an ordinary man would not do. I required drama and intensity, scariness even.
I knew I was not the meek and compliant girl I was meant to be. I was tall and my walk was too forthright, my stride too long. When I’d boarded at King’s Hall for one awful year, I had to go to the gym before breakfast for “walking training” along with girls who had bad posture. I didn’t have bad posture but was made to know I must somehow tame my walk, take much smaller steps and put my toes down first. I could do this odd lady-like mincing briefly under the fierce eye of Miss Kaiser, but not otherwise. I was simply unable to hobble myself like that if I wanted to get somewhere. But my walk was the mere iceberg tip of my basic wrongness.
I was learning there had to be a muffling of my true self and a substitution of another or I would bore or alarm any man. And it went deeper than not being willing to wear a girdle, as Ruth did, or walk as a lady ought to. I had no small talk — I didn’t even know what it was. When the boys from the boys’ boarding school nearby came over for a dance I had nothing to say to them. I knew perfectly well that bringing up my thoughts about War and Peace would be out of the question. But on the spot, shuffling around the gym gripped by sweaty boy hands, I was unable to come up with anything else at all.
I had dream loves from my books, Mr. Rochester, Heathcliff, Prince Andrei and many more. Having seen Hamlet, I had Laurence Olivier. Brooding, passionate, often filled with pain and rage over some obscure past tragedy (which I would heal) and darkly handsome of course — such a man might have the kind of power to handle me. I would wait until I could find such a man in real life.
I didn’t see the dangerous nonsense of this, or, perhaps more likely, I didn’t see the implications. What might a man who considered himself to have power over powerful me do with his power? Or maybe I did sense the danger. It’s impossible to feel myself back into that girl’s mind. Not completely. Did I think I deserved punishment for my wrongness? Is that why I was allowing myself to be the victim of literature?
All along, beginning when I was fourteen, I did have my love for Hugh MacLennan, or Mr. MacLennan as I always called him, the writer who spent his summers in North Hatley and with whom I had long talks and a relationship
