and finally for good in 1951, on my way to Oxford.
Looking back, I realize what an extraordinarily rich experience it was growing up in Toronto’s old east end in what was essentially a working-class neighbourhood before, during and after World War II. The public school, of institutional brick, with a cinder playing ground, was named after Sir Adam Beck, the original architect of the Ontario hydroelectricity system. It lay at midpoint on Lawlor between Kingston Road to the south and Gerrard Street to the north. On Kingston Road there were innumerable small shops, much like an English village, a cinema or “show”—which my sister and I were forbidden to enter—and a large United church. At one end of our normal range there was a tavern and at the other a Roman Catholic church where God alone knew what strange rites were performed! As children, we saw this church as a mysterious and possibly dangerous place. In the years since then I have had Roman Catholic adults tell me they were led to feel much the same way about non-Catholic churches in their childhood.
Few people we knew had a car before the war. When we finally got one in 1941, gasoline was rationed and so it didn’t really do us much good. Travel downtown normally took place by streetcar, the old kind where the seats were all made of wood and the conductor sat in a little station halfway down the car. There was a small stove beside him and in winter it paid to sit as close to its blazing warmth as possible.
The streets themselves were alive with every kind of horse-drawn vehicle imaginable: the milkman, the bread man and vendors of every type, including a bearded Jewish junk man who cried his rendition of “rags and bones” as he drove his nag and cart past the door. My mother enjoyed haggling with him over the worth of her surplus odds and ends. To our embarrassment, if we were anywhere nearby when one of the horses happened to relieve itself in a serious manner, we were instantly dispatched with a garbage can lid or other container to sweep up the manure for her precious rose bed. On many a hot summer day there would be a horse, still in harness, standing on our front lawn trying to reach the leaves of the maple tree. The wagon behind would lurch precariously until the driver got back from his delivery.
Since everybody had iceboxes instead of refrigerators, ice deliveries in the peak of summer were almost daily. The ice, hauled from Lake Simcoe in the winter and stored in deep sawdust in sheds until the hot season, was delivered by truck. All the kids from near and far would gather at the back as blocks were chipped out of the larger slabs and grab slivers of ice to suck on. You’d have thought it was something truly special and not just frozen water! Milkshakes at the corner parlour sold for five cents. The pie man, who rode a bicycle with a cart bearing the slogan Man shall not live by bread alone, also charged five cents for small pies. My favourite was pumpkin, although raisin came a close second.
Perhaps because the city limits were just five blocks away— Victoria Park Avenue marked the eastern boundary then—there were regular deliveries of fresh eggs, fruit and vegetables from the Mennonite farms to the northeast of the city, near the villages of Markham, Stouffville and Uxbridge. I vividly remember old trucks laden with crates of fresh strawberries appearing first, and then, later in the summer, the same farmers would be back with boxes of apples, fresh corn, honey, plums and pears. From the middle of August right through the fall the street was redolent with the smells of canning, of homemade jams and chili sauce, and the baking of pies.
Like most women of that day in our neighbourhood, except for a few involved in some war-related factory work, my mother didn’t go out to work but spent much of her time preserving fruit and baking. On the hottest days of summer, though, when my sister and I were quite young, she would often make a lunch and, crossing Kingston Road, walk with us down one of the sharply descending streets that led to Queen Street and on to the beach a block or so south. Lake Ontario seemed freezing cold even on days when the sand was so hot it burned your bare feet, and then too it was often questionable, as it still is today, how clean the water was. But we paddled in it and later swam in it without a care in the world.
The maze of lanes behind the houses in our neighbourhood became a sort of badlands for most of our games, from cowboys to Robin Hood, from King Arthur and his knights to daring explorers. As adventurers, we occasionally pinched a potato or two from home and roasted them in small fires behind the rows of sheds or garages. None of the war games had any deleterious effects, and I am grateful to have lived in a time when children were able to experience such freedom from the constant supervision of adults. Our parents rarely knew where we were. When I was fourteen I received a repeating .22 rifle that a friend and I would conceal by stuffing it down a pant leg. Then we’d walk stiff-legged to a small dump at the north end of Lawlor, where we would shoot rats. Today, that site is prime real estate.
There was once a time, not all that long ago, when almost everyone had a religious upbringing of one sort or another. Of course, there were differing levels of intensity or depth, but Canada was a predominantly, actively Christian country until well into the 1960s. Churches and Sunday schools were well attended. Church leaders still frequently made headlines for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with the sex abuse scandals of the ensuing era. Toronto newspapers regularly reported on Sunday sermons from major pulpits in the downtown core of the city.
Our family was not your average God-fearing household, however—not by any standard. My parents, having dedicated their hearts and lives to God, were very religious indeed. We went to church at least twice on Sunday, and that doesn’t include Sunday school, where my father was a keen, energetic superintendent for many years. Although he had left school around what is now grade nine or ten to join the Ulster Constabulary, he had a quick mind with an amazing memory, and he read serious works on theology and church history even while on vacation. He attended night school at Wycliffe Theological College some years later, well after I had been ordained, graduated with an S.Th. diploma and was made a deacon in the Anglican Church of Canada. His job was supposed to be “permanent deacon,” a position he could hold while continuing to work at his secular job, but about a year later, Bishop Frederick Wilkinson invited him to his Adelaide Street head office and told him he was needed for a rural parish near Peterborough. He consented, gave up his secular job, was ordained a priest at age fifty-four that spring in St. James’ Cathedral, and soon left for the three-point parish of Millbrook, Cavan and Baillieborough, about two hours’ drive northeast of Toronto. They soon had one of the finest Sunday schools in the region, and a band in which my mother played the bass drum.
While Sunday was anything but a day of rest as we were growing up, both my parents also attended Bible study groups, prayer meetings and assorted revivalist gatherings on weekdays whenever possible. My sister Elizabeth and I would walk several city blocks with my mother in all kinds of weather to St. Saviour’s Anglican Church at Main Street and Swanwick Avenue in Toronto’s east end to sit and fidget while a dozen or so women discussed a Bible passage and prayed. There was a fire hall on a nearby corner and I recall being much more interested in that than in what the Scripture Union, as the study text was called, had to impart. I joined the boys’ choir at about seven years of age. When there were special children’s crusades, aimed at getting as many as possible “to give their hearts to the Lord,” I regularly won prizes for bringing in the most recruits.
Looking back, one realizes that the hectic pace of our home life, saturated as it was with religiously based activities of every sort— from visiting English bishops (always of an evangelical bent) coming to dinner, to pressing uniforms and shining buttons for various organizations such as the Boys’ Brigade (a passion of my father’s) and, during World War II, the air cadets—was, as already hinted, anything but normal. However, to me and to Elizabeth it seemed totally normal at the time. What neither of us realized, of course, was just how ultra-conservative and narrow it all was. It was essentially a fundamentalist theology: the infallibility of the Bible, the literal virgin birth, an atoning death of Jesus Christ for the sins of the world. You were “saved by the blood of the lamb.” There was a great deal of guilt in the endless sermons to which we were subjected, and a lot of fear as well. I vividly remember having trouble sleeping after some visiting homespun preacher had waxed eloquent about Armageddon and the coming end of the world.
My
