into close proximity to the Humber River, which ran through a deep valley more or less parallel to Main Street. This was the kind of wild area toward which my inner Davy Crockett yearned. I spent many a summer afternoon, either alone or with school chums, poking around the willow-cloaked valley bottom and fishing for big suckers in the river’s pools. A century earlier the Humber had powered a sawmill and later a flour mill, both of which played a major role in the town’s development. But the mills were long gone and so was most everything else along the valley, because it had been one of the areas hardest hit by Hurricane Hazel, the deadliest hurricane in Canadian history, which struck in October of 1954. Almost a foot of rainfall within forty-eight hours had sent a wall of water roaring down the Humber that swept away everything in its path, including one whole block of homes in which thirty-two sleeping residents were killed within an hour. The floodplain was subsequently designated off limits for development, and the resultant ribbon of wilderness through the city fit my predilections perfectly.
SHORTLY AFTER EACH new school year began I would get swept up in World Series fever. This was the golden age of baseball, before expansion and multimillion-dollar contracts. I joined my schoolmates in thrilling to the exploits of Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays and Hammerin’ Hank Aaron. We became passionately attached to one team or another. To be sitting in a classroom while the Series games were being played mid-afternoon was pure torture, rendered even more torturous by a sympathetic teacher occasionally providing a scoring update. Within a year or two I’d uncharacteristically become one of the bad boys who’d sneak a miniature transistor radio into the classroom and furtively listen to the game through a cleverly concealed earpiece. And why not? There was nothing in the curriculum, scarcely anything in the universe, of greater consequence than that the Dodgers—the great Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Gil Hodges, Duke Snider, and the other Bums—took the 1955 Series over the Yanks in seven games. Or that the following year the excellence of Mantle, Yogi Berra, and Whitey Ford and Don Larsen’s perfect game powered the Yankees to the title in another thrilling seven-game series.
I began my own career playing first base on the class softball team. Dipping into the profits from my newspaper route, I purchased a first baseman’s mitt upon which I lavished obsessive attention. I repeatedly worked oil into its soft leather. I placed a ball inside the glove’s deep pocket and tied the glove tight around it overnight. I carried my glove wherever I could, repeatedly pounding my right fist into its pocket. Although there was no coach on hand, I worked diligently at my craft, fielding hot grounders and pop-ups, charging the bunt, stretching from the bag to shave a millisecond off a throw from the infield.
When the bitter Toronto winter set in, I was forced to become a sports spectator. Most of my peers were already adept at ice-skating, which I’d never tried because at that time it was virtually unknown in England. For the first winter or two I wobbled around on the neighborhood outdoor rink, but I realized that, no matter how hard I worked at it, I’d never skate as fast as Wally Somebody. I compensated by developing a fierce attachment to the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team. And what a team! George Armstrong, Frank Mahovlich, Tim Horton, and Johnny Bower. Punch Imlach was our mastermind. Throughout the dark winter months my spirit rose and fell with each victory or defeat. The Saturday-night Leafs game on TV with Foster Hewitt calling the game seemed, sacrilegiously, of far greater consequence than Sunday-morning Mass.
My dad maintained a peculiar enthusiasm for professional wrestling, delighting in the antics of gentlemanly Whipper Billy Watson, barrel-chested Yukon Eric, and the dastardly Miller brothers. He sought to encourage a similar enthusiasm in us kids, and we’d sometimes watch wrestling on TV with him, during the course of which he’d remind us that he could have gotten into professional wrestling himself if only he’d been a few inches taller. The only sporting event I can remember him taking me to was an evening of wrestling at Maple Leaf Gardens. In the feature match the Nazi-cloaked and eminently detestable Fritz Von Erich sought to apply his evil hold “the Claw” to the virtuous abdomen of Whipper Billy. In the same vein I recall a much-hyped grudge match involving the preening Gorgeous George, who, if he was defeated, would have his flowing blond tresses shaved from his head in the ring. Compared with the genuine heroics of the Leafs, the artificial nonsense of wrestling held only a fleeting appeal for me.
I look back fondly on those first several years in Weston, days of innocence and exploration, when the new world to which we’d journeyed was still an unfamiliar and intriguing place. I loved the family outings we’d sometimes take on summertime Sundays, to the conservation areas at Caledon Hills, Boyd Park, and Heart Lake, or—best of all—the long drive north to Midland where we’d visit the Jesuit Martyrs’ Shrine overlooking Georgian Bay and do some fishing in the Wye River. I loved the smell of summer heat, the singing of cicadas in the trees, obtaining prize conkers from the horse chestnuts that grew in front of our school, chumming around with the neighborhood kids, the fantastic icicles that hung from our eaves in winter. I fell ridiculously in love with my grade 5 teacher, a darling young woman who made no secret of her preference for Wally Somebody and his pal Harry Curtis, both of them handsome and wholesomely Canadian. Then she broke all our hearts by announcing one day that she was going to get married and change her name and not teach anymore. Shortly thereafter, another rude shock: at the conclusion of grade 5 my brothers and I and a few other kids at Saint John’s would be transferring to a brand-new Catholic school about to open in North York, an adjacent Toronto suburb. I had no way of knowing it at the time, but the days of innocence were already drawing to a close.
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember
from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught.
OSCAR WILDE, “The Critic as Artist”
THE PARISH OF SAINT BERNARD lay largely in the wilds of North York, but stretched just far enough across Jane Street and into Weston to include our block. To begin with, the parish had neither church nor school, just a small and rather squalid hall that served as the church, and this is where we attended Sunday Mass. The surrounding area included undeveloped fields that were being rapidly turned into residential subdivisions and shopping centers, primarily to accommodate an influx of Italian families. A spanking new and hopelessly sterile brick school was plopped down in the middle of a field alongside an enormous new church and rectory. The school was stocked with kids like ourselves who’d previously attended various other schools on the perimeter of the parish. We were mostly strangers to one another. What was brilliant for the first few weeks was that the schoolyard was a prairie of tall grasses within which various clandestine activities could be carried on. But pretty soon the grasses were trampled down and we had a schoolyard like any other.
Our principal was a diminutive but formidable nun named Sister Rosalie, from the same convent of Faithful Companions of Jesus as the nuns at Saint John’s, but most of the staff were lay teachers. The parish priest, a crusty old curmudgeon named Father Marshman, regularly prowled around the school and did his best to put the fear of God in everyone. But it was an uphill struggle. Perhaps it was the newness of the place, its rawness, the lack of any tradition, the eclectic mix of kids, but there seemed from the outset to be a sulking disrespect simmering just below the surface, a kind of incipient lawlessness that might break out at any minute. Some of the older boys smoked cigarettes and blasphemed extravagantly; a couple of girls were whispered of as known sluts. One lout used to entertain himself by seizing smaller
