Gzowski, the Colonel’s wife, was one of three children of Judge Edward Morgan, whose daughter, Hope, studied singing in Paris. In an article in Canadian Living, Peter claimed that his grandmother and her sister once toured France, and that for the rest of her life, Vera pronounced English words of French origin as if they had never migrated across the English Channel. Peter didn’t say whether Vera called her husband “le Colonel,” à la française.
In his memoirs and elsewhere, Peter liked to claim that his parents were married “in one of those run-away deals” in Jamestown, New York.17 In an interview on CBC’s Life & Times, Peter added another detail, that his parents were divorced “almost before I was born.” They lived together “barely long enough to produce me,” he claimed in his memoirs. They were divorced “not long after I was born,” he wrote in The Morningside Papers.18 The story of the unwanted child who had forced his parents into an unsuccessful marriage was a figment of Peter’s imagination. The marriage and birth were perfectly respectable. Margaret Young married Harold Gzowksi in May 1932 in Toronto, and their only son was born more than two years later.
Life insurance wasn’t a hot seller during the Depression, so for the remainder of the 1930s, Harold left Toronto to look for work.19 The Colonel and Vera Gzowski welcomed Margaret and young Peter to their house near Casa Loma.20 During summers, mother and son lived in Prince Edward County in eastern Ontario near Picton, where McGregor Young owned a cattle ranch.21 Years later one of Peter’s adoring Morningside fans, who had grown up in a general store close to Picton, told him that she remembered “a little blond baby whose first name was Peter and whose last name we couldn’t pronounce.” When he learned to walk, his mother dressed him in a sailor’s suit.
In 1937, Margaret was granted a bachelor of library science from the University of Toronto.22 The next year she and Peter moved in with her father at 112 Rosedale Heights Drive near St.Clair Avenue and Mount Pleasant Road. By that time, Margaret was employed at the book department at Eaton’s. Since government money for libraries, as for almost everything else, was in short supply, her choice of Eaton’s may have been forced upon her by the Depression. In 1939, Margaret was listed with the Young family at 481 Summerhill Avenue near Yonge Street, south of St. Clair Avenue. In one of these houses, Peter conducted an experiment. “I remember one night,” he wrote years later, “when I tried to see how close I could hold a candle to the curtains that billowed over my bed without setting them on fire.” When the curtains caught fire, he cried out for help. As his hysterical mother and grandmother Young doused the flames, his grandfather Young, who used to sing Peter to sleep with Stephen Foster melodies, burst into rounds of laughter.23
Harold Gzowski, Peter’s father, during the Great Depression at Larder Lake around Christmas, mid to late 1930s. The photo was apparently taken by John Taylor, who, in 1987, when he sent it to Peter, lived in Breslau, Ontario.
(Courtesy Trent University Archives, Gzowski fonds, 01-004, box 1, folder 1)
Perhaps because of Harold’s constant absence, his marriage with Margaret was terminated about 1938 when Peter was four.24 In the 1930s, there was only one cause of divorce: provable adultery. The aggrieved spouse needed witnesses or a confession.25 In Life & Times, Peter speculated that his mother always remained in love with his father even after she remarried, a story that may say more about the second than the first marriage. On the rare occasions when Margaret spoke to Peter about his father, she would tell Peter that he reminded her of Harold.26
Sometime in 1939, Margaret, and likely Peter, too, moved once again, this time to a house at 30 Edith Drive in the Eglinton Avenue and Avenue Road district of Toronto. In the Toronto City Directory for 1940, Margaret was listed as co-owner with Edward Feather, who, with a business partner, operated a sheet metal works at 198 Dupont Avenue near Spadina Avenue. Margaret, it seems, was searching for a surrogate father for her son, and also for a husband with enough income to provide a more secure living. Not once in his memoirs, books, or scores of articles did Peter mention Edward Feather.27 Meantime, Peter’s father enlisted to serve in the Second World War as a sergeant in the Royal Canadian Engineers. In London, on April 24, 1940, he married Brenda Raikes.28 Margaret’s relationship with Edward Feather didn’t last long. On Saturday, October 19, 1940, according to the Globe and Mail, “Mrs. Harold Gzowski” was married to R.W. Brown of Galt at the home of Margaret’s aunt, Lady Mann,29 a marriage that, according to Peter, was arranged so that his mother could be certain Peter would have a roof over his head and food on the table. Present at the large red-brick house at 161 St. George Street,30 a few blocks north of Bloor Street, were the bride’s parents, as well as the Colonel and Vera Gzowski, Reg’s two brothers and their wives, and, among others, members of the Kingsmill and Hancock families. After a honeymoon trip north, probably through Muskoka or the Ottawa Valley, Reg and Margaret Brown settled in Galt. Soon after his mother’s remarriage, Peter’s surname was changed to Brown, largely, he explained in his introduction to A Sense of Tradition, his book on Ridley College, “to avoid awkward questions.”
Like many other towns in southern and southwestern Ontario at the time, Galt, whose population was about eighteen thousand, was home to a wide variety of manufacturing, including textiles, shoes, furniture, metal works, and machine shops. Reg Brown was sales manager of the Narrow Fabrics, Weaving, and Dyeing Co., which produced labels for towels, bedsheets, and shirts made in other small factories.
The war made housing scarce, and it was probably for that reason that the Browns rented the upper duplex at 24 Park Avenue, an attractive buff brick Victorian house on a street of well-tended lawns, shrubs, and flower beds. Dickson Park was across Park Avenue from number 24. The town itself was named for the Scot, John Galt, a member of the Canada Land Company, who was also a novelist and friend of the poet Lord Byron. Several acres in size, Dickson Park slopes gently toward the Grand River, which runs through old Galt, now the centre of Cambridge. From the upper duplex at 24 Park Avenue, Peter enjoyed a splendid view of the centre of Galt with its soaring church spires, solid Romanesque banks, and a neoclassical Carnegie Library, along with square-shouldered stone and red-brick factories that helped to make Galt secure. Over to the left, across the river, is the ponderous Galt Collegiate Institute, also made of local fieldstone. Galt was built by Scots stonemasons who longed for the “old country” and re-created it in the rolling, fertile lowlands of southwestern Ontario. Today, beautifully preserved, the centre of Cambridge looks much as it did when Peter was young.
Even as a child Peter was a great observer. In an article called “A Perfect Place to Be a Boy,” written as part of an introduction to Images of Waterloo County (1996), Peter painted a picture of a young boy who enjoyed sitting in the second-floor bay window at number 24, fascinated by seasonal rituals in the park. Each September the Galt Fall Fair was staged there amid the brilliant fall finery of the surrounding trees. “A midway filled the baseball diamond and spilled over around the bandstand,” he recalled, while “sheds and barns that stood unused for the rest of the year sprang to life.” A menagerie of farm animals, from sheep to pigs, horses and cattle, filled the park. “In the autumn air,” he continued, “the honkytonk of the midway barkers and the squeals of terrified rapture from the whirling rides mingled with the cries of roosters and the lowing of cattle, and the smell of candy-floss and frying hamburgers, mixed with the sweet aroma of the barnyard.”
Halloween, Peter remembered, allowed for “soaping windows and ringing the door on the school principal’s house before running madly away,” as well as “standing on one side of the road while a friend stood on the other, and when a car came by pretending to pull on an imaginary rope.” At a time when not every household had indoor plumbing, even in prosperous towns like Galt, an annual ritual at Halloween was knocking over an outhouse or two.31
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