what might lie ahead of me. But I think I did have some nascent sense of having answered the call of trees, that the long journey we had just completed had taken me partway toward a destination I did not yet understand.
IT WAS MID-MAY of 1955 when our transplanted family finally got settled in Weston. The school year had little more than a month remaining, but Ger, Brendan, and I were enrolled straightaway at Saint John the Evangelist Catholic School, operated by an order of nuns called the Faithful Companions of Jesus. I think there was some initial confusion as to how our English standards fit with Canadian grades, but I ended up in the grade 4 class under the tutelage of a dour lay teacher named Mrs. Kavanagh. As far as the grade 4 class was concerned, I was the new kid, an immigrant who talked funny and had peculiar red hair. A “limey.” (My mother explained that calling us limeys only served to expose the ignorance of those using the term: the applicable pejorative for a Liverpudlian would be “Scouser,” from our distinctive dialect called “scouse.”) Almost straightaway, we had a little class field day of sorts and in the feature event, the less-than-a-hundred-yard dash across the playground, I finished in a dead heat for first with a startled Wally Somebody who was the most gifted athlete in the class. Few accomplishments could have more effectively established my credentials. In my eagerness to fit in, I quickly adopted whatever local slang I could, which may have won favor with my classmates but certainly didn’t with Mrs. Kavanagh. Twice I was held in after school and compelled to write on the blackboard fifty times, on one occasion “Geez is not a word” and on another “Ain’t is not a word.”
But I had not fallen from grace; far from it. In fact our churchgoing intensified. The school and adjacent church were about a mile from our house, a pleasant walk along tree-lined streets. My brothers and I would walk to Mass every morning before school, though hardly any other kids did this. We couldn’t receive Holy Communion, because we’d eaten breakfast before setting out, but on Saturdays we’d walk to Mass in the morning, when we could take Communion, then back home for breakfast, and return to church for confession in the afternoon. On Sundays my father would drive the family to Mass in the morning and some of us boys would walk back to church for Benediction on Sunday evening. There’d be lots of kids at Sunday Mass, since it was a mortal sin to miss it, but none at Benediction—they’d all be at home watching Walt Disney on TV while we’d kneel in the deserted church with a few old ladies groaning away at turgid hymns like “Tantum Ergo Sacramentum.”
We were genuine little saints, my brothers and I. One of our favorite pastimes was to play at saying Mass. We’d create a little makeshift altar in the house from whatever props we had at hand and dress ourselves as priest—a prized role that almost always fell to Ger, who was the primary instigator in the business—and altar boys, then go through the entire ritual, raising our make-believe Host, ringing the bells and all. Holy Mother Church remained at the core of our lives.
Soon we were released for summer vacation, which stretched for an eternity compared with the short English school holidays we’d known. That was the summer of Davy Crockett—the Disney version of America’s greatest frontiersman was everywhere, on television and in movie theaters. Three different versions of “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” played repeatedly on radio. Kids were wearing coonskin caps and moccasins. Naturally this fed right into my pre-existing frontier fetishes, and I soon had a pair of moccasins myself. Jim Bowie, Kit Carson, Daniel Boone—I couldn’t get enough of them. I devoured Western comic books and TV shows. I acquired a miniature ranch and used to spend hours arranging its fences and buildings and moving around the small figures of cowboys and Indians engaged in endless dispute.
The public schoolyard across from our house had a softball diamond, and frequently on the long, warm summer evenings a crowd would gather for a men’s fast-pitch game. These were fabulous events, the players men of immense strength and skill, the uniformed umpire as authoritative a figure as any priest or policeman, the crowds of wives and girlfriends raucous in their running commentaries. I’d experienced nothing like it before: the determination of a batter digging in, the lightning-fast pitch and smack of the ball into the catcher’s mitt, the time-honed chants of the players—“Hum, baby, hum!” “You got him, you got him!”— repeated like incantations. This was a game I wanted to play.
I WAS NOT aware at the time of how precarious our financial situation was. Something had gone wrong with the house purchase and, I only learned much later, we had almost lost the house and our investment in it. My father worked at two jobs. He’d leave home late in the evening to work the night shift as a maintenance man on the Toronto subway system known as the ttc . Returning home in the morning, he’d have breakfast and then go to a nearby nursery where he’d work in the greenhouses for another four or five hours, or if there was no nursery work, he’d pick up day-laboring jobs from the labor exchange. In the afternoon he’d work at our place. In very short order, to my dismay, the trees on our property that I’d prized so much upon arrival had been chopped down to make way for gardens, and within a year or two the front yard was a full English cottage garden while the yard out back was chockablock with fruits and vegetables. My dad would sleep for a few hours in the late afternoon and evening and then begin the work cycle all over again. At the t tc he’d take any special shifts available—on Christmas Day or New Year’s Eve—because of the extra pay involved. In all the years I was at home my parents never took a vacation anywhere.
My brothers and I learned from an early age how not to be noisy. Dear old Mum had a very limited tolerance for what she called “bedlam,” which would be anything much louder than the sound of snow falling. If I’d tried to raise four active boys within the confines of a small house I’m sure I’d have adopted a similar approach. Plus there was the wrath of a sleep-deprived dad to consider; if we kids were around the house and made any sound at all that awoke him from his slumbers, it was rather like facing a grouchy bear emerging from hibernation. We became adept at creeping and whispering, and came to think of noisy people as depraved.
For the first few years we were identifiably poor amid the modest affluence of our neighbors. In contrast to England, here almost everybody owned their own house; some even had a summer cottage up at Lake Simcoe or on Georgian Bay. Everyone owned a car. A few days before our first Christmas in Canada, there came a rapping on our front door. Two men, volunteers from the parish, had come to deliver a Christmas hamper. We kids were thrilled at all the unaccustomed treats stuffed into the bushel basket, but my parents were mortified. They told the Good Samaritans that we didn’t need or want the hamper, that there must be poor people in the parish who deserved it far more than we. There was a terrible awkwardness as we all stood in our little front room, the adults contending over disposition of the hamper, we kids not saying a word. I retain no memory of whether the hamper was finally refused or reluctantly accepted, delight in its treats tainted by the shame that was attached to them. The hamper proclaimed our poverty, that we were a charity case, and this was bitterly intolerable.
As soon as we were old enough, we boys began contributing to the cash flow. Ger and I started with a large paper route when I was about eleven, delivering the old Telegram and eventually switching to the rival Toronto Star. Spring through fall we’d haul our papers on a wagon and in winter on a sleigh. Like our fellow paperboys we took great pride in knowing how to bundle a paper tightly against itself so you could chuck it from sidewalk to front door without its opening up on impact. Within a year or two we each had our own route, and Ger soon graduated to being assistant on the truck that dropped off each delivery boy’s bundles.
The daily rounds of a paperboy were full of perks and perils— I was bitten by dogs and f lirted with by girls, and I gained fascinating glimpses into the homes and lives of my customers. I opened my own bank account and derived immense pleasure from its accumulating capital. My first paper route ran down what we called Main Street, the heart of old Weston and now called Weston Road. Here I got to deliver to a mortuary and to a shop that sold scandalous-looking ladies’ lingerie. I was equally intrigued by prosthetic devices in one of the shops I served, and treated kindly at the local police station where the cops would occasionally show me their guns.
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