with jam.
The closest we ever came to dining out was on Friday evenings, when the Catholic injunction against eating meat on Friday justified getting takeout from Ron’s Fish & Chips. Located just a few blocks away on Jane Street in a small converted house, Ron’s was the ultimate in fast-food cuisine. There were no franchise burger or chicken or pizza joints around in those days, so Ron’s was where you went for takeout. Looking like the quintessential wiseguy with slicked-back black hair, wearing an apron of estimable vintage, Ron worked the vats in back, entirely free of concern about trans fats or cholesterol levels. Into the vats of simmering fat he plunged metal baskets of real fries cut from real potatoes and thick pieces of actual cod, oceans away from today’s patties of reconstituted fish parts and God knows what else pressed and frozen in some sweatshop in Guangzhou. Ron’s wife, whose name I never learned, wrapped each order in multiple sheets of newspaper, handed them over the counter, and took the money. I was hopelessly tongue-tied in my dealings with her; she seemed so like young Elizabeth Taylor with her mascara and vivid lipstick, her dark hair pinned up, and her tantalizingly bulging blouse unbuttoned to the point of revealing more than should have been revealed to innocents like myself. Occasionally fetching Friday dinner from Ron’s was perhaps my favorite chore.
My mother was not an enthusiastic cook. She may have been so earlier on and then grown tired of producing from scratch three meals a day for six people, every day, year after year. Her solution was not to eat out but to devise cunning shortcuts. On Fridays when fish and chips from Ron’s were not on order (damn!), pancakes were a meatless alternative. As a pancake flipper of not inconsiderable expertise myself, I can imagine how tedious it would become for anyone other than Aunt Jemima to be standing at a stove flipping sufficient pancakes to satisfy four ravenous boys. She decided that individual pancakes were an unnecessary complication and took to dumping the entire bowl of batter into a deep fry pan and cooking the whole works en masse. The resulting thick cake, served in stodgy blocks, was less than satisfactory, but we had been taught long before to be grateful for whatever food we were given and to never complain. Leaving even a morsel of uneaten food on the plate, however unpalatable, was not done.
Far more disheartening was her radical revamping of Christmas dinner. The nostalgia-inducing feast we’d so loved back in England was never quite the same in Canada, and my mother eventually decided that she had better things to do with her Christmas Day than spend the whole of it in the kitchen. Instead, she roasted the turkey the day before and for Christmas dinner served cold slices along with potato chips from a bag and cranberry sauce from a can. Only the Christmas cake and pudding survived in their former glory. I was horrified at the time, but in retrospect salute her independence of spirit, her refusal to continue being a perpetual domestic servant.
NOTWITHSTANDING MOTHER’S CULINARY shortcuts, in our familial value system the necessity of hard work was an absolute given. A life of abject misery in the parish poorhouse awaited those who did not put their shoulder to the wheel, their nose to the grindstone, and their heart into their work. We certainly didn’t identify this ethos as the Protestant work ethic, but we wholeheartedly embraced its Calvinistic trinity of hard work, independence, and scrupulous saving. As already mentioned, I launched my working career with delivering newspapers, but nudging toward my midteens meant a ratcheting-up of employment, so I started supplementing that income with summer yard work in the neighborhood. One of the least successful entries in my employment dossier occurred at this time, when I was hired to feed and water several dozen ferrets kept in cages by one of our outdoorsy neighbors. He raised these fearsome creatures for hunting rabbits and showed me the mark where one of them had bitten right through his thumbnail. Left in charge one time while he was away, I must have failed to properly secure the latch on one of the cages, because a number of ferrets broke loose and took to terrorizing the neighborhood. A plump little lady who lived directly behind us dissolved into hysterical shrieking after opening her front door and encountering a snarling ferret on her porch. After this episode I eliminated zookeeper as a possible career choice.
Less dramatically, I mowed lawns for a pittance, pushing ancient and often ill-maintained reel mowers through sometimes impossibly long grass for hours on end, blistering my tender hands in the process. Then old Father Marshman, who tended to view our family as a ready source of indentured servants, hired me on as part-time janitor for the parish church. At least my lawn mowing improved, as I cut the extensive church and school lawns with a roaring rotary power mower. But most of the church work I was required to do was either boring or disgusting. Every week I had to wash, wax, and buff the church floor, which seemed about the size of a football field. While other kids were out playing baseball or idling away their summers at lakeside cottages in Muskoka country or making good money caddying at golf courses, I’d spend hours on my hands and knees rubbing with steel wool at black marks indelibly imprinted on the church’s linoleum tile floor by cheap rubber pads on the kneelers. Cleaning ashtrays, toilets, and the kitchen of the parish hall after weddings or dances, revolting as it was, at least instilled in me an abiding empathy for people compelled to do such work for a living.
All of these formative experiences with “good, old-fashioned hard work” fell into the category of work as necessary evil, something one is compelled to do in order to survive. The money earned was the sole rationale for doing it. There was no question of job satisfaction, no delight in the nobility of honest labor, no sense of locking muscular arms in unity with the workers of the world. My father worked at jobs of not much better caliber all of his life, but I don’t believe it would have occurred to him to complain that the work was boring, repetitive, or unfulfilling. He considered himself fortunate to have a secure job that allowed him to support his family and buy a house. Expecting nothing more, he made the best of it, taking pleasure in his gardens rather than the job that made them possible. For him garden work seemed more a hobby, a form of relaxation. I can remember him being out in the summer garden for hours in blazing hot sunshine, wearing no shirt or hat and returning to the house with blisters all over his back. But he didn’t complain. I suspect he was happier in his garden than anywhere else. None of us kids took any interest in his gardens, nor did he encourage us to do so, likely because he loved the peace and quiet of working alone.
We did not socialize with, or indeed even know, any of his coworkers. He had nothing good to say about the union at the t tc , and apparently little sense of its having won for him the few privileges he enjoyed. I can remember him describing the popular socialist politician Tommy Douglas as “a dirty little Communist.”
From very early on, I knew this life was not for me, but escape from the dungeon of unrewarding work was not as readily imaginable to the children of the British working class as it perhaps was to many North Americans, at least white ones. My brothers and I did not grow up with an expectation of attending university. My mother liked to emphasize that for people in our situation the two time-tested avenues for “getting ahead” were the military and the Church. For a brief time I did become infatuated with militarism— I suppose it was a logical progression from my gun-totin’ cowboy phase—and began an avid study of warplanes and their armaments. I painstakingly glued together flimsy bits of balsa wood to create model fighters and bombers. The successful deployment of the first Soviet Sputnik during my grade 8 year ignited an interest in rocketry, and I took to making rockets propelled by metal cylinders packed with gunpowder extracted from fireworks. The air show at the Canadian National Exhibition came to rival the excitement of radio disc jockeys in their glass booths. Somehow it didn’t occur to me that my terror of heights might be a wee bit of an impediment to a career as a fighter pilot.
I REACHED A great watershed at the end of grade 8. The choice I faced was either to attend the nearby public high school—a daunting place rife with vice and immorality—or try to get accepted by one of the three exclusive Catholic boys’ high schools in the city. Paying the tuition fee was out of the question; my only hope was to win a scholarship. An immense anxiety gripped me as I journeyed alone by bus to these distant schools to sit for the scholarship exams. Then came nervous weeks of waiting, and finally the grand news—I’d won a scholarship to Michael Power High on the city’s west side. I’m convinced that the only reason I succeeded was that dear
