Father asked sarcastically.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes. I just might.” We looked at her in astonishment.
“Really, Rose, I don’t think one can equate the baking of bread and pies with the manufacture of army shells,” Father said, referring to her bakery business.
“No. Of course, I know that. I won’t manufacture them myself. I am considering going into partnership with an existing Brampton manufacturer.”
“Heavens. What on earth could be produced for the war in this town?” Father asked, incredulous. “We manufacture footwear here, but I understand the contract to supply boots has been awarded to a company in Montreal. We make furnaces.” In this he was referring to the Pease foundry managed by John Thompson, the father of my friend Jane. “I don’t think they’re going to need furnaces at the front.”
“Exactly,” Aunt Rose agreed. “But maybe one of those manufacturers would like to produce something required by Colonel Sam. If so, their factories are going to have to be converted. I have the capital to help them make the required changes.”
“Surely the government will pay for that, Rose,” Mother offered. “What would they need your money for?”
“That’s just it. The government will not pay for the conversion of the factories. To be awarded a contract, you must prove that you have the capacity to make the goods; only after that will the government consider awarding you a contract. I have looked into it.”
“What if you convert the factory—say, the Pease foundry into a factory that can make bullets, and after you do that, you are not awarded the government contract?” Father asked. “Or you get the contract and then the war ends before the contract is complete?” It was October. Barely three months into the war, it was no longer expected to be over by Christmas of that year. It was hoped it would be over long before Christmas of the next.
“That is a risk. A big risk. But that is the risk that business people across the country are taking. They are being compensated for that risk in charging higher than usual prices. If I invest in those enterprises, I will charge higher than usual interest rates.”
No one knew quite what to say to that.
* * *
It was knitting—the bringing together of strings of yarn to form a warm and useful piece of apparel or houseware—that nearly tore apart the relationship between me and my best friend, Jane. It started when we returned to school in September 1914. Jane I were then in senior third form, the beginning of our second year at Brampton Central School, our “middle” school, a large school to our minds. Covered in brick, it was an oddly shaped building, reflecting the numerous additions that had been made to the original two-storey, six-sided structure built in 1855. In 1868, two single-storey wings were added, flanking the original structure to the east and the west. With over five hundred registered pupils, it was not surprising that in 1914 another wing was being added.
The school was almost the same distance from my house as the Queen Street Primary School I attended for the first four years of my education. But the middle school was located north of my home, on Alexander Street, just off Main Street. I was able to walk to and from it twice a day far from the intersection of Queen and George Streets, far from the Kelly Iron Works Repair Shop that housed the father of the vile boy who had abducted the two young girls and far from its stoop and the twin brother of the vile boy, a man-boy of indeterminate age, who grunted and gesticulated at me—and only me—every time I passed his stoop. While Scary Scott’s treatment of me was not a secret—others had noticed it—only the two of us knew why he singled me out, a young girl with long, brown, curly hair like that of his deceased demonic mother. The two other people who knew were dead. One was the vile man in the jail who before turning his heart into a pincushion said his brother would become the vessel to continue their mother’s maniacal mission to abduct young girls with curly brown hair. The other was my friend Archie, who took the secret with him to his grave.
Though I no longer required the accompaniment of a friend as I walked to and from school, I was rarely without it. My neighbour and oldest friend, Frances, generally walked with me the first half of the way to our middle school. At the midway point, the corner of Main and Nelson, we were often met by our friend Jane, who would always assume a position on one side of me. Frances, who had walked by my side to that point, would continue on the other side of me, unless the sidewalk became too narrow, at which point Frances would fall in behind Jane and me. The reverse occurred as we walked home from school, Jane and I always in front until we arrived at Nelson and Main, Frances beside me if space allowed. The placement rules were unspoken but well understood. I was certain that Frances, who had been my devoted walking companion the prior four years, thought nothing of it.
Jane took up the knitting of scarves just before we returned to school. She considered the hobby a particularly delightful way to make a contribution to the war effort. She loved gathering different colours and textures of wool and organizing them in what she called “cheerful but masculine” stripes. So taken was she with the pursuit that she suggested at one point in early September that we organize a school knitting club.
“We can meet after class in one of the school rooms. We could knit together for an hour. Think how much we could contribute to the war effort,” she said. She was in no way deterred by my lack of enthusiasm for her suggestion.
“Aren’t there enough women knitting in the town?” I asked. “Maybe we could contribute to the war effort in another way? I heard that during the Boer War, women rolled and packed cigarettes for the fighting men. Maybe we could do that.”
She looked at me as though I was quite queer. “You’d rather work with smelly brown tobacco than pretty soft wool? And who would want the cigarettes? None of our boys smoke.”
That was true. But the older men did—men like my father and uncles. Some men smoked during the Boer War. Surely, some men would smoke during this war. While Jane was not enamoured with the suggestion, it was enough to end the conversation about the knitting club—at least for a time.
My hopes to entirely quash the notion were put asunder by the admission to our class at the beginning of October of a new student. When Elsa Strauss walked to the front of our class to introduce herself, I was immediately struck by the thickness that exuded from every feature. Her ankles, covered as they were in black stockings, bore no definable shape below her mid-calf grey A-line skirt. Her arms completely filled the sleeves of her cream-coloured, collared blouse. The wool vest she wore added thickness to her chest. But the thickest features by far were those on and around her face. Her eyes were big, with heavy lids; her nose was pudgy; her lips were full. The only features of her face that did not seem thick were her ears, which were merely big. Their extraordinary protrusion from her skull was noticeable but highly useful, I soon learned, as they worked in combination with the thickest feature of all: her long, dark blond hair. Elsa seemed to be in constant competition with her hair, pushing it as she spoke behind one ear and then the other, generally losing the fight to control it. I wondered that her hair was not tied back—perhaps its volume defied even that. The entire effect, though, was not unpleasant. Her features, so different from the slight figures held by Jane and me, were attractive in their own way on her tall, sturdy frame.
In a voice that initially quivered she told the forty students in our class that she was from Shelburne, north of Brampton, where her father had been a potato farmer. Their move to Brampton the day before had been precipitated by his appointment as the chief vegetable propagator at the Dale Estate. Her family was living in an apartment on the top floor of the old Haggert Iron Works building at Nelson and Main Street, above the Main Street facing Brampton Dairy. She had one brother, Wilfred, who had volunteered for the first contingent on the first day volunteers were accepted.
