Epilogue

The weekly 21-episode serial, The Wartime House in Shaughnessy Heights has been completed. Thanks for looking at my piece of creative non-fiction. Especially, thank you for the comments.

If you want to read it in sequence, here is the FIRST POST - and you can move through the weeks from that point.

The piece has had almost 2000 views during its lifetime here.

I promoted the serial exclusively through facebook, but there were a few referrals from other sources.

Most views were from Canada, followed by USA, China, Denmark, South Korea, Bulgaria, UK, Hong Kong, Russia and South Africa.

Viewing peaked in September. The episodes that got the most views were "Healing" followed by "Racism".

Again, thanks for participating in this experimental publication. Please stay to enjoy some of the short stories, poems, and slice-of-life columns that I will publish here from time to time.

Nancy-Ellen McLennan

Within

Within: The Silvery Dime

There are thousands of stories from the wartime house papering the back of my mind. The back of my mind is the place where the unexplainable exists and has been with me since I was old enough to realize I had a mind.

I became aware that I must carry the mystery with me quietly on one cold November day when I was about 11 years old. The first snow had blanketed the neighbourhood and it was such a clear day with a grey sky. The snow is so beautiful and bright. It generates optimism in me.

My brother had entered Sisler for grade seven so that meant my mom became a band volunteer. She had an armload of red band uniforms that needed to have all of the buttons replaced: the cuffs, the epaulettes, the tails, the pockets, and the double-breasted front. It was a big job and the pile of uniforms had taken up space on the chesterfield for the better part of a week. Dad was at work, and the Sisler High School Band needed the uniforms the next day, so she had no choice. She had to carry the uniforms all the way back to the school in her arms, snow or no snow. And it had been a busy day for her. She had done laundry and since it was a Saturday, we kids were coming and going and creating havoc underfoot.

It wasn’t until Dad got home from work at about four o’clock that I realized that Mom was in a panic and really upset. She was weeping quietly to herself and hugged my dad as soon as he came into the house. They sat at the corner of the kitchen table and talked quietly and my mom cried and my dad put his hand on her back.

“What’s wrong?” I had to ask.

She held out her left hand and I walked toward it. I didn’t see anything wrong.

“She lost the diamond from her engagement ring, Nancy,” said Dad softly.

I looked again and saw the claws poking into thin air and her freckled finger below where the stone should have been.

“Let’s go over it again,” he said. And this time I listened.

She blubbered though her chores and her tromp in the snow all the way across the tracks to Sisler and back. They talked about taking apart the plumbing and asking the band teacher to check the uniforms.

“It’s no use,” she said. “It’s gone.”

But I could see it. I knew where it was.

“I’ll get it!” I said. But they didn’t pay any attention.

I took a kitchen chair into the snowy backyard and put it on the clothesline stand. My dad had used his World War II ammunition box as a clothes peg holder and it was nailed to the outside wall of the back shed. I stood on the chair on my tiptoes, lifted the army green metal lid, and looked into the ammunition box. There it was. I picked it up and carried it into the kitchen and handed it to my mom.

They were happy again.

Many years later, my dad was in his dying days and my mom was caring for him in the wartime house. I lived about 500 kilometres away and visited as often as I could. During a winter visit, it was quiet. Dad was resting. I’d been there for a couple of days and finally I asked, “Why aren’t you wearing your wedding rings, Mom?”

She looked down, and then up at me. She gently shook her head.

“I lost them. Please don’t tell your dad.” They’d been missing for over two months.

But I could see them. I knew where they were.

I went to the back shed and pulled the heavy chest freezer away from the wall. There they were, on the floor behind the freezer. I picked them up and carried them to her and put them in her hand. She smiled and shed a silent tear as I told her where I had found them.

I eventually became the owner of those two rings and now I wear the diamond engagement ring. I don’t really like it except when it is under water and beside the thick sterling silver band I wear on the thumb of the same hand. Then, when it is under water, the dime shines as brightly as the silver. It glows to life and I can see inside the dime. It takes my memories and frees them from beneath my chest and from the back of my throat. The silver is pure and crystal clear, full of air and hope and explanations about what has painted my world and who I have become.

Forced Away

Forced away. 600 kilometres beyond the wartime house.

I have a shtick that I perform and have performed for a decade or more. Yes, it is true. I left Shaughnessy Heights. Perhaps I abandoned it. I did not simply move across town. I left that land, that city of bridges and impossible, unnumbered grid-patterned streets that would always be stuck in my memory as rhymes. Memorized, as my Dad had coached me to do:

Tinniswood Radford
Monreith Dalton
Robertson Kildaroch
Cairnesmore Minnigaffe
Seymore Sinclair.

Or the alphabetical names of street women:

Dagmar Ellen Frances Gertie
Harriet Isobel Juno Kate
Lydia Olivia Pearl.

I always wondered if the N was for Nancy, but it was probably Nelly.

I left that city of people moving toward and away from hubs of malls and parking lots to their fully detached, amply landscaped, totally fenced houses on streets in their separate neighbourhoods.

My parents defined their marriage by the Red River Flood of 1950. They got married on Thursday, April 6, before the Good Friday holiday. A month later, on May 8, the dykes gave way and bridges collapsed and Winnipeg saw 100,000 people evacuated and every able-bodied woman and man worked around the clock to shore up makeshift dykes with sand bags. And my Mom and Dad were on that front line. They had the photos to prove it.

My dad’s death, for me, is defined by the Flood of the Century. In 1997, on Easter Sunday, at the crack of dawn, with the comet Hail Bop adorning the dark blue sky outside the window of his room at Seven Oaks Hospital, he took his last breath. It was warm for the end of March, and it was water water everywhere. The staffers at Brookside Cemetery wondered whether they’d even be able to put him in the ground beside my brother. Everything was pretty soggy and we all knew about the limited drainage hassles of the Winnipeg gumbo, but we managed. No sooner had we buried him than the Wrath of Eric fell upon the flat lands and the early April snows began. They came and they came. The rivers rose and they rose.

I returned to my forest refuge, high above the Manitoba Escarpment and listened to the aftermath of the unprecedented spring blizzard. The dykes at Grand Forks had given way and that city went up in flames above the river, water spilling northward with nowhere to go but overland because the frozen white expanse of Lake Winnipeg could not yet budge. No amount of water could push aside ice of such mammoth proportions. The water would move instead upon the path of least resistance, overland.

One morning, I woke to the news that the town of Ste. Agathe had not held back the monster. Their dyke had failed and the people were fleeing.

“Fleeing?” I wondered. “Hmm, to where?”

The somber voice on the radio, in a serious 1960’s radio style, reported that the town of St. Norbert was accepting refugees from Ste. Agathe.

“Huh?” thought I. And then I found myself standing and yelling at the radio, “Go Up Hill! Go Up Hill!”

But no, these flatlanders ─ and I had been one of them ─ had no concept of uphill! Indeed, when the LaSalle burst its bank and the St. Norbert hosts themselves became refugees of the Flood of the Century, they too had to flee, and where did they go? Did they go uphill? No! They went to St. Vital! These educated people, these witnesses of floods of years gone by, these generational flatlanders were running downhill with the path of the gushing waters at their back. They could go west, above the escarpment, they could go east, beyond the eskers, but not even the City Fathers, not the engineers, nobody offered this advice.

They put all of their money on Duff’s Ditch. They only cared about their concrete zone. They showed no mercy for the lake-land folk to the north.

In my inescapable and honestly earned Shaughnessy Heights cynicism, fed by years and years of being told by the boys that I was a lowly scab, and by the girls that I was a freaking jock, and by the city folk that I was a useless hick, my shtick was born.

I decided to write a TV sit-com and call it “Tales from the Flat City: The City with No Perspective.” To get perspective in the flat city, you’d have to go up on the Arlington Bridge or up in the Richardson Building. It’s like living in a pac man game. There is never a view of the distance to the other side. In the flat city, they have neighbourhoods called River Heights and Silver Heights. But there ain’t no heights in Winnipeg! Their laughable pitiable useless plight. True, Winnipeg isn’t the only flat city on the planet. I’m told New Orleans is pretty flat, and Amsterdam, too, but I think they realize it there. And Barcelona is pretty flat, and even Chicago. But these are coastal and shoreline cities and the people there understand their landscape.

But Winnipeg flatlanders don’t get it. They call their land the Red River Valley. Hello! It is not a valley! It is a lake bottom. Plain and simply, it is a lake bottom. The confluence of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers is literally the navel of the province, the drain hole.

The farmer to the south of the flat city and the farmer to the west of the flat city, and the inter-lake farmer, relentlessly struggling with the gumbo clay, the flatness, and the uncooperative drainage, tamed the mighty John Deere caterpillar to do their bidding. Ditches and ditches and more ditches were dug so that the water would flow off my land and onto yours until, when the Flood of the Century reared its ugly head, the Red River and Assiniboine River watersheds came within metres of becoming one vast body of water, spilling back into Winnipeg from the west! Spilling through St. James and possibly all the way to Shaughnessy Heights! The Brunkhild Dyke, just west of Winnipeg and south of the Trans Canada Highway was the last hold-out. The man-made drainage patterns had left a mere sliver of land between the LaSalle and the Assiniboine.

I can still see Diana Swain standing on the dyke telling the wrong story. It was all a story of hope and work and miracles, when it should have been a story of misperception, stupidity, and exploitation. I wish it would have spilled over. I wish there was a way to wake the flatlanders up.

Settlers who moved across eastern Manitoba through the Winnipeg flats came from landscapes with mixed terrain. They preferred it and they settled above the escarpment because of that. They settled where the farmland drained and the forests flourished, where they could find a vantage point to see overland for a great distances.

In the North End, in Shaughnessy Heights, I could not understand the perspective that was missing from my life. My two yearly visits to Granny and Grandpa’s was not enough to grant me that, but we would hoot and holler at every landmark valley along Highway 16 or 45 and we’d climb hills and roll down them, just for fun every time we went.

I don’t know why my dad opted for the flat land. But it couldn’t hold me. My mom was a great lover of her flat city. She’d stand at the party and defend it with all her ninety-eight pound might, “Winnipeg born and Winnipeg bred, and when I die, I’ll be Winnipeg dead.”

Maybe that’s what kept Dad in Shaughnessy Heights. While all of Mom’s friends from Eaton’s were moving to the heights from Elmwood to EK and from the West End to St. James or from Fort Rouge to St. Vital, Mom silently waited for the opportunity to get out of Shaughnessy Heights. But they never left the wartime house. I made plenty of visits to the old neighbourhood, long after I had gone up land.

I watched the back lane evolve from a wide-open zone to a corridor of two-car garages. I watched the saplings grow to become fully valid trees with birds and everything! I saw house after solid wartime house with big extensions built onto the back on those nice sixty-foot lots. I watched the old dirt road, Keewatin, become a mighty commercial thoroughfare, a four-lane, with new neighbourhoods well beyond, all the way to Park Royal.

The Boys

Boys and Girls:

The Boys. Drifting in schools, a safe distance from the wartime house.

Eventually, every kid raised in a wartime house with more than four people in it learned to smoke and drink. You hit the age when clandestine activities become the norm because you are coming of age. Being the middle child in the middle of the baby boom, I was lost. I was too young to be cool and too old to be cute. One time I managed to find myself in a field of people partying, drinking, smoking dope far past deGrave’s, down a dirt track out in someone’s farm field. The underage booze of choice there was Villaberry Cup. It came in a potbellied bottle with a jug-band style handle and a very long neck with a screw cap. It was a lovely coral colour and has long been off the market. They called them fortified wines. They were cheap and potent. I didn’t have any, or maybe I did. Everyone was listening to “Whole Lotta Love” and Gasoline Alley on eight-tracks, and we piled into the cars to head to the Lincoln. The drinking age had just been lowered to eighteen, so many high school kids could fake IDs and hang in there for the angel dust and joints and Standard Lager, but not me. Not yet. I still looked fourteen, but at least I was on the fringe. Some of my classmates who had big tits could get into the Lincoln. I would hang around on the fringes of these cool teenagers.

I was usually fortified with something. Maybe with some beer that we’d had up the street at Marlene’s. Her mom was never home. And we’d hop into and out of cars, and go over to Dunlop, then back to the Lincoln, hunting for a party. I still didn’t have a boyfriend, but they all knew me because I had a brother, a cool brother, who could fight, and party, and play football, and have girlfriends. All of my girlfriends wanted to be around him and his gang, so I got to be on the edge of the cool gang, unless he saw me and punched me and told me to fuck off.

But this time he was too drunk. He didn’t give a shit. Man, what a night. Everyone was wild. Maybe this would be my chance to find a boyfriend! Drunk kids are mean and irrational. I must have said something about wanting a boyfriend. The next think I knew I was in the back seat of someone’s car and there was a guy leaning on me, trying to kiss me. He smelled like puke. My heart was pounding. Wow! Someone wants to neck with me! Wow, this is it! But the puke was horrible. And there was so much else going on.

Wait, what is that? People? Lights? Yes. I’m still in the parking lot at the Lincoln. Is that my brother?

He was laughing. People were putting their faces against the car window and looking in. And my God. The stench. What am I doing here?

“Go Irwin Go!!! Go Irwin Go!!”

That was his name. Irwin. I didn’t know him, but they did. And who else is out there. Oh! Linda! Susan! My friends are watching too. He couldn’t even talk. He tried to put his tongue on my face and lean on me, but he was too drunk. His eyes were not even open. I got out of the car. I walked home. Nothing was ever said. My brother was too self-absorbed to care about my humiliation.

I grew to respect Irwin. He was a Rosser kid, a real farmer. He was older, an early phase boomer, and I think he really did like me, but neither of us recovered from the humiliation in time to become friends. We met a few other times, but to my recollection, never spoke. He was a shy guy, too shy for necking in the parking lot of the Lincoln.

“You need schoolin’
Baby I’m not foolin’.”

And I did. I was a tomboy and everyone else had boyfriends. I was just not pretty or I was too smart. I had a handsome brother and all of the girls really liked him. But I was not allowed there, with them, so I had to wander into other fields.

It had become embarrassing. Everyone had had a boyfriend or two by then. It was all they ever talked about. But how did they do it?

I could feel the surge of love beneath my ribs. There was no denying it. I’d drop my head on the pillow every night dreaming of Patrick or John or Raymond, anyone who had paid the least bit of attention to me. I was baffled. Not a single solitary boy had indicated in any way that he was interested in me. I guess I’d have to be more assertive.

I heard there was kissing at the New Year’s Eve parties and everyone had boyfriends, but I’d go anyway. This one was way across McPhillips. It was past Mountain and well beyond the rules and routines of Shaughnessy Heights. I had to walk, but it would be worth it. I would find someone to neck with, if it was the last thing I ever did.

I would get drunk enough, or someone else would. Yes, I’m proud to say, I found success and necked with Truss on the couch right through midnight, to Led Zeppelin, right in front of everyone. Of course, I fell in love with him. He went to a different school though, so I never got to see him after that. I think he was younger than me. But in my mind, we were destined for each other, and the pattern was established. I would find another boyfriend, now that I knew how to neck.

Anna was a good teacher. She wasn’t pretty either, but somehow she had lots of boyfriends and everyone laughed about it. Even the cool guys used to talk to her. She was really loud and crazy, just like me, and she knew where the parties were and always went, and she always found someone to neck with.

Pretty soon, I realized that most of my friends had been fucking the guys, not just necking with them. Especially Anna. Everyone liked fucking her. I was so jealous. How did they do it? How did they find boyfriends to fuck them? It was very embarrassing for me. I had to be the only virgin left who drank and smoked and hitch-hiked. What a loser.

I wondered if I would have to start telling lies and pretending that I’d been fucked in order to get my friends off my back. Most of the girls who were hanging out with my brother and his friends were two grades behind me and they were getting fucked and taken to parties and driven around in cars. I had to talk fast and keep my ears open to figure out what was going on, and usually I ended up hitchhiking to the parties, and showing up like an old shoe, just to be included.

I never had trouble getting rides, but I never got picked up at the parties. It was like I had rabies or something. I would party with the boys and laugh and be clever and crazy, and end up hitchhiking back to Shaughnessy Heights alone.

I had some friends who lived across the tracks by this time and even further up McPhillips in the nice bungalows and slab houses, on the expensive streets, almost in Garden City. They were a gang of Major Work girls, a grade behind me and they were paired up. Judy and Marlene. Debbie and Lorraine. And then there was me. Unpaired and alone, as usual, but kindly, they included me. They were pretty good at getting boyfriends. And they knew Anna from elementary school, from before they were in Major Work.

Their parents were more protective than any of the ones in Shaughnessy Heights. They always had family plans on the weekends in the summer. They had cottages to go to or their boyfriends did. My weekends were just the same once summer arrived. I was on my own and headed off to Grand Beach to party there. There were no plans. It was just a matter of sticking out the thumb and heading north. On one of those weekends, I decided I would get fucked, once and for all.

I was sick of being a virgin and embarrassed about it. I had my period, so I knew I wouldn’t get pregnant. I was on the prowl. Through Grand Marais and Grand Beach, party after party, beer after beer, joint after joint, I’d wander with one idea in mind.

Eventually, I found a guy, a nice looking drunk guy. He got me in the bedroom of the cabin we were partying in and started to go for it. I yanked out my tampon and shoved it between the wall and the bed and he fucked me. The sun was already coming up by then and people were sleeping all over the place, so I just left the party after that. I felt pretty proud of myself.

I was walking past the place that sold the deep-fried mushrooms and saw Anna there and was so excited to tell her my good news. I remember the look on her face. I’d expected her to whoop up and say, “Way to go!” but she didn’t. She just smiled and kinda softly nodded. I tried to fall in love with him. I can’t even remember his name. Foster? No. It started with F. A few weeks later Judy and Marlene and Debbie and Lorraine, who all knew him, invited him to a party in the city and made sure I was there so we could fuck again, but it didn’t work out. That was nice of them.

The Girls

Boys and Girls:
The Girls. Fifty metres west or in the backyard of the wartime house.

I’m not a lesbian, I guess. I’ve never worried about that. When you are a kid, it’s safer to be with the girls than with the boys. You are part of the clan, especially with the big girls. One summer I was at Winnipeg Beach, or Ponema maybe, and there was a bunch of families staying in one cottage, one of those that had the wind blowing underneath. The water pump was down along a soft grassy path at the corner and we’d run there, barefoot all the way, in our pajamas. The outhouse was, yes, disgusting. And the outhouse was a dangerous place, too, because the boys would grab you and force you and lock you inside. The big girls were there to protect me.

When we all piled into the cottage at night, after dark, and my sister was in the crib, I was declared to be a big girl now and went into the big bed. I awoke sometime in the middle of the night. I was on top of the stomach of a big girl and the big girl’s friend, my face in their breasts, and I had no clothes on and they were laughing. I totally didn’t get it. They were my heroes. My protectors. I must have started crying because the next thing I knew my mom was in and dragging me out of the big bed. It was never mentioned.

As I grew, the girls back in the neighbourhood played lots and lots of doctor. It started to get exciting when their tits started to bulge, even though mine never did. We’d be under the shed or up in the bedroom closets of the wartime houses, or out in a makeshift fort in the fields, and eventually, in the back seats of derelict cars along the back lane. It involved mainly showing and touching. There was never any kissing. It was a show-off experience, not really a lesbian thing. Once I reached puberty, it ended and was never mentioned again. Not by any of the girls.

I did eventually find some lesbian friends. I didn’t know they were lesbians, though, until much later. I thought that laughing about tits and hugging in tears was all quite normal for jock girlfriends. There were no lesbians in those days. There were old maids and tomboys. I qualified as a tomboy because I had no boyfriend. My brother had convinced me that I was an ugly scab. In grade eight, when I finally started to grow, I became a jock because boys weren’t an option for me. I hung out with other jock girlfriends. Some of them had boyfriends, but there were lots of us who didn’t.

My first drinking experience took place with a gang of my sports friends. I was in basketball, volleyball, track, fastball, tetherball, all of it. This was my world. My high school was located just outside the edge of my neighourhood and I was living it all. We somehow aquired a six pack of Standard Lager and went to Barb’s house, way out of Shaughnessy Heights, past Redwood in one of those really old houses that were scrunched together, before you hit Mountain. After we had drunk some beer, Barb went ballistic and started going on that there was no God and that men were weasels. And the other girls were all with her and I was trying to convince her that God was good, but I simply lost the battle. I puked and somehow got home. The next day I realized that they were lesbians, lezzies, they were called back then. It didn’t matter to me. I was very upset about her loss of belief in God and not at all upset about their gayness. After that I easily recognized my gay friends. But it was never mentioned. There was no phobia about it.

Several years later when I was back in Shaughnessy Heights visiting my folks, showing off my first born, I found out that Sharon, my summer camp friend from the West End, was living just a half block away in one of the slab homes. This was the friend, who was so interested in testing which girl’s breast could hold a pencil or a hair roller or a soup can beneath it. Needless to say, mine held nothing. There was no droop whatsoever. What an athlete Sharon had been, right up to the university level, until she buggered up her pinky in a motorcycle accident. They fused it in the tea-cup position. I guess you can’t make set-shots with a fused pinky.

I wandered up to the house where she was staying, knocked, and entered right into the front room. There were no front hallways in slab homes. I sat on the chesterfield and they called from the back hall to say they’d be right there. Out came two young heavy-breasted women, my age, wearing only t-shirts and panties, and they were very giddy. They had come right out of the closet and into my face.

“You are married?” Sharon asked. “Why?” I admitted I wasn’t sure why, just that it seemed like time. They made me feel the fool for my choices.


I found Sharon one more time after that. We met for a drink in Osborne Village. She was a computer programmer. Today I can’t find her anywhere. Not on Facebook. Not on Google. I do miss her. My favourite memory of Sharon involved an incident that happened back in our wartime house. My parents had left us alone for the weekend, so it was time for the party. Sharon came over in the midst of it and my brother’s friend, Bob, drunk out of his mind, tried to seduce her at the bottom of the stairs. In a wartime house, the stairs go up on a corner making the bottom almost like a chaise longue. She was just around the corner hugging the banister and sitting on step five, and he was sprawled at her feet, mumbling lovely enticements to her. She was loving it.

“He’s sucking my toe! He’s sucking my toe!” She reminded me of the toe-sucking moment when I visited her and her girlfriend that day. It meant a lot to her.

VLA

The VLA design of the wartime house.

In Shaughnessy Heights we played outside. Even if the weather was miserable. The wartime houses had no such thing as a “rumpus room” like the bungalows or the peacetime houses had.

The wartime house is made of cedar and fir, so it will be there for a long long time. That should have been a basis for pride, but for sixty years the wartime house has been shrouded in a cloak of shame. The shame was not because of the materials. Its parts were harvested in the late forties. It was good and honest work that took the timber from forest and to train. Many seeds of hope and much optimism moved with the lumber down from the mountains and across the dry rolling prairies. But when it arrived in Winnipeg and rested on the pallets of the vast rail yards beneath the Arlington Bridge, all sense of pride and hope that had surrounded the house vanished.

The house became part of a circus of assembly. As its parts came together, its scope shrank and its destiny to sit as a clone of other houses on Manitoba Avenue was approaching. It would begin to absorb humanity’s aura, but because of its natural oils, it would not head back to the earth any time soon, unless by stroke of fire, perish the thought.

This house was dropped from one flat car to another and another and moved from the pallet to the ground on the edge of Shaughnessy Heights. It had been in Winnipeg over the winter and was adapted to the winds and the absence of the forest noises. The clanking and banging of boxcars, the stench of diesel and Black Cat tobacco, the running engines, and the slamming truck doors became its new atmosphere. It was dropped off the tracks and taken by truck across the muddy clay, west, about 300 metres where its assembly began.

Parts were measured. The men put it together and spoke about the wartime house.

“I wouldn’t live in one of these cracker boxes.”

“Mostly charity cases are moving in down here.”

“Can’t even get a house on their own.”

This was a VLA neighbourhood. By law, the Veterans Land Act, every soldier, unless he was too rich, was entitled to return from war to a home of his own. Everyone in Shaughnessy Heights knew this about each other, and there was some shame in that. Nobody talked about it.

Then the wartime house started to go up. It sat on a pony wall, only a measly pony wall. A circumference of cement about two feet high supported the house instead of a properly poured basement. Some of the people who were really ashamed about the pony wall got conveyer belts and sent kids crawling underneath onto the clay to send the dirt out into the backyard, scoop by scoop, until they had a hole that they could call a basement. They gained prestige by having another room in their house. But I never had a chance to go down into any of those basements.

There was, however, an attic in every house, but most people called it a cubby hole. It had a short, kid-size door with a large, adult-size doorknob. The door gave this part of the house some status because none of the bedroom closets had doors, just a shelf and a pole for coat hangers. The cubby hole was the short part under the slant of the roof upstairs. It was as long as the house was wide, and the place where the suitcase full of Christmas decorations was stored. Of course, we played in there amid the pink insulation and the cloth-covered electrical wiring.

Each wartime house had a back shed that had no inside walls. It would have been good for muddy boots if people used the back door. Our shed got fixed up a bit and they tried to keep it warm in there, even though it had no pony wall underneath. It was always pretty cold, except in the summer, because it was on the south side of the house. Eventually, the hot water tank, the freezer, the automatic washer, and the dryer got sent out there and our parents found ways to keep it as warm as the rest of the house.

The front hall was just a wall that separated the kitchen from the front door. Our first wall phone was in the front hall, so we could lie under coats to talk on the phone, if we needed privacy. Some houses had no front hall and you walked through the front door right into the kitchen. The front hall was a place to throw your coat and other stuff, like school books.

The space under the stairs also had a door of its own, with the same painted doorknob as the cubby hole. Originally, the wringer washer was kept in there. It was a great hiding place. Later, after the oil furnace broke and they sealed off the chimney in case of a fire, they put a natural gas furnace under the house and you had to go through a trap door that was under the stairs to get at it. What a fiasco when the meter reader came. It was so embarrassing. Most people put their furnace in the back shed, but not us.

The parents’ bedroom was beside the door to the closet under the stairs. Most parents couldn’t wait for their kids to move away so they could knock down the wall between their bedroom and the front room to make an L-shaped bigger room. My parents did that and got a dining room suite. It all happened after we moved away. They even pounded through the outside wall of their bedroom and added a TV room south of that! They should have done it when we lived there, but that would just have given us more space to mess up.

The top of the stairs was a dead end with a door on each side. One door led to, the girls’ room that I shared it with my younger sister, and the other to the room for my older brother. These rooms had those slanted ceilings and crazy corners so you could either fit a big bed and a dresser into them, or two small beds and a dresser. In one of the bedrooms there was a floor vent that opened to the kitchen. My brother’s room had the vent, while ours had the cubby hole.

We played outside. There simply was no extra room to play in the wartime house. There were only the two bedrooms upstairs for the kids and most houses had more than two kids in the family, so everyone was sharing, and nobody was allowed in, especially not with their friends.

In our house, we were coached in bed-making. It would happen on a Saturday afternoon every year during spring-cleaning while the music from Broadway shows rang forth on the hi-fi.

“Whoa hoe the Wells Fargo wagon is a-comin’ down the street oh please let it be for me.”

“The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plane.”

“There ain’t nothin’ like a dame, nothin’ in the world.”

It must have been raining outside on those Saturdays, otherwise we would never have been in the house on a Saturday afternoon. We were shown how it was done in a hospital or maybe in the army. We were given clean sheets that smelled sweet. We would place our little pajama dolls on our beds, mine pink, hers purple. It was a very special time. And again, the following spring, our beds would get made. Between bouts of spring cleaning, our room was a free-for all. It was designed for rumpus. We had the small door that led to our cave along the slant of the house and we would never worry about the itchy stuff while we built our hidden forts in there. We had a dresser, but usually it had no clothes in it. We’d sit in the drawers, playing ship, and over she’d go, spilling the whole thing on the floor. A laundry basket? I don’t think so. Not that I remember. We played school up there, and business girls. And probably doctor.

From my perspective, everyone’s house was like this although I didn’t see the inside of very many of the other houses on the street. These were big families in small homes and there was no such thing as décor. There were no “light fixtures,” no wall-paper, no bathtub surrounds. What for? The matching melmac belonged in St. James and the doily-covered china cabinets belonged in Elmwood. Here, all we needed was ordinary stuff. An aluminum pot full of pea soup and a fist full of crackers would sustain us so we could run the lanes and the sidewalks, and cut through the yards. In the back doors and out the front we’d go. Slam! Calling and hollering. Laughing and crying. By and large, ignoring the grown-ups.

There were no fitful nervous mothers in Shaughnessy Heights. Well, maybe one. She never came outside and we’d chew grass to make our teeth green and sneer at her in through the back bedroom window. I think she was French, so maybe she worried about her kids. But the rest of us would get home at dark or when we were hungry and there was always something on the go. Mom was always busy. Canning. Rolling smokes. Gardening. Cooking. Laundering with the wringer squeezing into the kitchen sink. Ironing in front of the TV. Shake shake that 7-Up bottle of water with the thumb, letting just the right amount out to dampen the clothes. Roll them up. Roll the socks. Maybe do some dishes, if the washing machine wasn’t in front of the sink. Save the housework until Saturday, if it rains. And the dads were at work, somewhere. Labatt’s, Esso, Dominion Bridge, Kleysens, CPR, Motorcoach. They would come home and sometimes they would have a beer. Round and round it went. The dads grunted at each other. There wasn’t much fun to be had. After all, every single dad in Shaughnessy Heights had been in the war.

Even though every one of our dads was a veteran, they didn’t talk to each other about the war. Each of them knew their war was much worse than the other guy’s war. It would become a pissing contest over who had the worst experience. There was no such thing as sunscreen or gor-tex for protection from the elements and there was no such thing as Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. The dads had nothing to talk about.

The Steps

The Steps. North-facing, one metre outside the wartime house.

We were a front-door family. One of the most important memories from my life in Shaughnessy Heights happened on the front steps. In Shaughnessy Heights nobody said, “the porch.” It was always “the Steps.” Just like nobody ever said “sofa” or “couch”, it was “the chesterfield.” We had our own lingo.

The Steps was the place where we would gather. Anyone’s steps would do. The steps were made of two-by-fours. Nothing was pressure-treated in those days. There was no indoor-outdoor carpet and no rubber runners. Some steps were painted. There was really just one step to a landing which was a bit wider than the door, and then you were in. Some people had railings on the sides, but not everyone. Eventually, people started replacing the Steps with more upscale decorative and practical improvements. Wrought iron railing came much later. First, some people got poured cement steps and some got the Barkman steps with the little concrete pimples all over. Our house was a holdout. Our steps were replaced with wood, at least once, before the concrete steps came.

It is on the wooden steps, facing north, in the hot summer shade of the wartime house that many of my most pensive memories lay. I would stare at the cracked frontis-stone of poured cement that butted up to the step. Its diagonal crack had grass growing through it in the middle of July. I knew every pebble that was locked into the mix. I spent hours pouting and staring at that hunk of cement, lusting after the good fortune of the family across the street. I was trying to look sad and forlorn, aching with every theatrical muscle of my body and pushing forth my need with every paranormal sensory perceptual gift I was granted to get them to invite me with them. From that step, I’d watch them load a Coleman cooler, blankets, kids, toys, anything a good family would need for an afternoon at the beach. Stonewall Beach.

Take me! Invite me!

The waves of my thoughts would waft across the street as I tried to make eye contact and plead for an invitation to the beach party.

Pity me! You know I’m fun! Let me come too!

The girls, my so-called friends, would pass a smug glance my way, smiling, no, laughing happily, very unlike usual sisterly behaviour, as they piled into the car and drove west to the gravel at Keewatin and then off, north of the city, to the man-made pond at Stonewall. It would have been about 90 degrees in the shade that day. The resentment seethed out of me from those wooden steps after they pulled away and my pitiful theatrics dissolved into a bitter, hard-done-by attitude. I became snarly. I usually imagined myself as a conciliatory girl. A helpful girl. But on those steps, more than once, my less gracious sides were staged.

Later, when I was older, and paying my own way in life, I would return to Shaughnessy Heights to see my parents, and there would still be reversions to the former patterns of family angst. Frequently, situations would arise and my personal turmoil would spill back into that house and out again onto the Steps. There, where as a preteen playing fruits, I had chosen gooseberries and listened triumphantly to apples oranges peaches pears plums bananas as my neighborhood friends would try to guess my fruit so I could jump off the Steps and race them around the house, I sat again, with my mother. For some reason, I was in a fury, and for some other reason, she was sitting beside me in an infuriating calm. She wanted to get me through my fury, but it was not to be. I was fighting mad. Beyond snarly. I was so angry, I pulled my glasses off my face and wrang them into mangled snapping plastic trash, then threw them onto the same piece of concrete that had fed my sullenness many years before. The steps were the stage for poignant moments as well as drama. It was not a private stage being only a scant ten paces from the sidewalk, and the bus stop, for that matter. We had no front fence. What happened on the Steps was community theatre for neighbours and passers by. Except for that one time.

I had been commuting to Fort Garry Campus for a year by the time that hot summer was born. I was starting to realize that Shaughnessy Heights was indeed a cove, an urban cove, a mixed-up urban cove that was hard to describe to others. I’d never bother to explain it. I’d just say, “The North End,” when I told people where I lived, and their eyes would roll back and they’d imagine some mythical place they’d never been and abruptly change the subject.

I had a year of university under my belt and after first year had ended I landed the dream summer job; I became a Park Lady for the City of Winnipeg Parks and Recreation Department. I navigated the city on my ten-speed, from Shaughnessy Heights, jumping crumbling pavement along Selkirk to McPhillips, down Logan to my nest of youngsters at Roosevelt Park on Elgin and Isabel in the city’s core. We had a handsome Pool Man, Harry, another North Ender who was also unfazed by the reputation that preceded this little inner city playground. I received my first eye witness experience with solvent sniffing that summer, and I also met hundreds of kids who were game to sing and dance and cut and paste and roar with laughter over and over again. One day we were given a chance to leave the concrete wading pool for an overnight trip and take a school bus to Birds Hill Park, wherever that was, and go camping and swimming and, man alive, we would do it!

All Park Ladies wore these outfits, homemade of indestructible polyester fabric that was handed to every Park Lady, courtesy of the City of Winnipeg, on their first day of training. We had to buy the pattern and had five days to make our Park Lady outfit. Most people hired a seamstress, but I made my own. Green shorts under a sleeveless goldish-orange shift. No hat. I had about twenty kids in my charge for the beach trip and somehow kept track of them. They filled pop cans and plastic bags with hundreds, maybe thousands of frogs, babies, not long since tadpoles, and threw them into the biffies where people, kids and grownups, entering from the blazing sun and blinded in the contrast of the dark building, stepped on them barefoot, not realizing what they were, and exited in screams and even nausea. I experienced my first official “sexual abuse” instance where one kid’s penis got zipped into his fly when a few of the other boys, probably playing doctor, were interrupted. The boss of our field trip probably had to file an official report. The poor kid had to go to Emergency to get unstuck, and I stayed camping with the rest of them. And we swam again the next day. It was 93 in the shade. We bussed back to the city to drop the kids off at Roosevelt Park, and I rode my ten-speed back into Shaughnessy Heights. I was a mess. My skin clashed with my Park Lady outfit. This was in the days before sunscreen was invented. My freckles were popping and the skin between them was redder than a raspberry. The part of my hair on my scalp was red. The tops of my ears and the tops of my feet were already blistered. It wasn’t my first sunburn but it was serious. I must have slept.

I must have dreamed. I woke. I felt really rough. Fever. Logic would have told me to have a cool bath, but once you pass puberty, your parents stop looking after you in Shaughnessy Heights, and you are not quite sure how to look after yourself. I was still wearing my Park Lady outfit and had been sleeping on the chesterfield in the front room. It would have been too hot upstairs. I was delirious. Again. This was not my first encounter with delirium. It was my second.

The first time I was delirious I had the flu and was about thirteen. I had been asleep and I suddenly woke on the same chesterfield and started raving. My brother and sister thought it was hilarious. I was the circus act of the day. My dad had just gotten home from work. He still smelled of fuel oil, and he was the first to realize that I was speaking from another realm. Maybe what he’d witnessed during the war twigged his awareness. He came over to me.

“Throw me in the garbage!” I was yelling. “Just throw me in the garbage!” The garbage was at the end of the hall near the kitchen, and that is where I wanted to be. From the inside, from the perspective of the delirious teenage girl, I could see myself. My head had become a shiny featureless ball atop a spindly neck. No eyes. No nose. No mouth and absolutely no hair. With this identity, I had no worth. I was determined to be shed from this place.

My dad lifted me from the chesterfield and I became a plank. I was stiff as a board, willing him to shove me head first into the garbage can. He carried me past it, though, and into their bedroom. He’d figured it out. He laid me on the bed and picked up my mom’s hand mirror from their dresser. He put it in front of my eyes, and as soon as I saw myself, I snapped out of it.

The second time, though, I was on my own, too old to expect parental support, and it was in the middle of the night. I lay there in the wartime house that hot July night and opened my eyes to see an illuminated, upside down capital T hovering in front of me, and it offered me a choice. I could stay how I was, very miserable, aching from head to toe, very very sick, or I could become the inverted T. That was a comfortable and peaceful option, and very tempting. I stood up and immediately felt better. The summer sun was rising. The heat wave would continue, but the early morning was pleasant and cool. I went outside through the unlocked wooden screen door and the spring pulled it shut behind me with a familiar bang. I entered the fresh morning air and sat on the Steps. The sun was just coming up over the wartime houses across the street. It was a brilliant yellow light and the dew made everything so clear and perfect. I rested a moment then stood again and went back in.

Odd, I thought, that Bijou, our yappy poodle hadn’t greeted me. Odd, I thought, that I could see myself lying on the chesterfield. I walked to my parents’ room, five paces away, and looked at them sleeping, the dog at their feet. I returned to the chesterfield and lay down and went back to sleep.

The front steps constituted the threshold of my life in Shaughnessy Heights. I crossed them to enter the world and to return to the home. It was the peephole, the magic tunnel of my life. I still can feel that flat urban summer sunrise of delirium. I can feel the comfort of the Steps in silence. I can smell them.

Parent Invisiblity

Parent invisibility, within the walls of the wartime house.

Recently I found myself sitting at a sewing machine. The home computer has robbed me of my private friendship with the sewing machine, and as I sat again in front of that clunky old friend, my mind drifted back to my first one.

The jet black Singer treadle sewing machine with the lovely gold-painted crest came into our house during the early years, before boys and junior high. It had been my granny’s. I’d spent days in her dining room sorting her buttons by the hour. Piling her crazy quilt squares. Granny sewed mostly by hand, as far as I can remember, and at some point this Singer treadle with an oak cabinet – two drawers on the left and two on the right – ended up at the wartime house. We would ride the treadle, sitting on the cast iron footplate underneath the cabinet. We usually had to spin the big wheel underneath, catching our fingers and small fists as we worked to get it spinning. The top wheel never worked because the belt between the top wheel and bottom wheel was always broken. When it came time to sew, the belt would be jerried with safety pins or coat-hanger wire punctured through the leather belt. Eventually it would eat through and the belt would get shorter and shorter, and have more and more pieces holding it together to complete the pull.

As I worked to mend my lingerie on my electric machine and listened to the hum and lock and watched inexplicably inconsistent tension and missed stitches, I realized why I have become an expert on the PC. It was the sewing machine that taught me patience.

I used to listen to my dad vibrate and whine and shake and snap at us when he was under the hood of a car that was refusing to do what he wanted it to do. He didn’t swear much, but this was worse. His wrath would percolate slowly, growing in intensity until we would hear this high pitch vibrato from deep in his throat, and we’d look at one another and duck.

With a sewing machine, that kind of childish behaviour gets you absolutely nowhere. Thread breaks. Needles break. Mistaken seams get sewn and must be ripped. Tension can suddenly become impossible to adjust. Change the thread. Change the needle. The bobbin thread can break, and break, and break again. Dust the bobbin case. Add a few drops of oil. Lift the presser foot. Lower the presser foot. Loosen the feed dog. Dust the feed dog. Stitches get missed. Loosen the pressure foot. Such adjustments were possible with the treadle. Once the electric machine replaced the treadle, you had backstitches, zigzags, buttonholers, and far more sensitive adjustments that could increase the permutations and combinations for solving a nagging problem of thread breakage. It took more than patience; it took persistence and a view to the eventual goal.

And sew I did. My first Home Ec teacher happened to have been my mom’s Home Ec teacher too. Miss Krett was the reason my Mom quit school, but she taught me how to clip the seam allowance of a shoulder seam and how to never put pins in your mouth. I had already learned how to tie off a seam because my Granny had taught me that. Pull the thread through. Tie one knot, right over left, then tie the other, left over right. Then snip the end. There was no reverse on the school electric machines, and there was no reverse on my treadle at home. I already knew how to stitch by hand.

In the focused intensity of the sewing machine, I discovered a new self, the bookish me. I was not really a patient girl, but if there was a destination to reach I became determined to find my way there, not letting any little piece of equipment block my path. For hours, perhaps days, I would stitch stitch stitch.

One day, during a renovation project in the back shed – I think we’d finally gotten a new hot water tank – Dad decided that the sewing machine was too big. It took up too much room. He handily sawed off the two oak four-inch lips that extended over each side of the cabinet. He made it fit. Then he painted it white. There was no value in it. There was no such thing as antiques. It was still a sewing machine and one of my few refuges. It moved with me, away from the wartime house, away from Shaughnessy Heights, above the escarpment, and eventually, after I got my electric sewing machine I sent it to my sister. It is dead to me now. I do not wonder if it still joins fabric for a girl.

In grade seven Home Ec, I first found out how big the North End was. It turned out that St. John’s High School (or Isaac Newton Jr. High) either had no Home Ec classroom or too few chairs in the one they had. Thus, the girls from St. John’s came to our school. They were girls from a part of the North End that I’d never really considered: past Arlington! Existence beyond McPhillips had entered my consciousness by this time, because my older brother had some friends from over there, but these girls were so different! So stylish! So brave! Make-up! Short, very short skirts. They were loud talkers and had such confidence.

I saw them as the years progressed, the same girls, on the basketball court. They always had their noses in the air. Our part of the North End was definitely in a class of its own.

Racism

Racism. In our own backyards and within the walls of the wartime house.

While racism existed through the North End and into Shaughnessy Heights, I didn’t recognize it for what it was. In those days, the grown-ups would spew out snot in laughing fits over jokes about Bohunks and Indians. Our attitudes were tainted early in life. We had absolutely no understanding of the horrors that had been created by the colonial racial attitudes. We were innocent victims, being fed unhealthy attitudes and grievous scripts, false stories about people of other races, people who weren’t WASPS like us. We would eventually be called to duty, to raise our own kids without these horrible racist assumptions. Families are still struggling to break the cycle of ignorance that has divided our communities.

In grade five, Shaughnessy Park School tripled in size. Kids from the Rural Municipality of Rosser and other kids from the Burrows Keewatin Housing Development had moved into our corner of the world. They had infiltrated through the edges of our little grid of concrete streets and wartime houses. The Rosser kids were farmers and property owners living off the grid. They came to school by bus. The kids from the Development were from families who had qualified for subsidized housing, poor folk. There were single-parent families, immigrant families, and both rural and urban Native families from far and wide. Instantly, the dynamic of the school changed. Some of the Rosser kids didn’t have running water and had farm chores so they would get teased. They smelled different. They were heartlessly teased. The kids from the Development were a mixed bag. Their houses were new and these kids seemed older and braver and smarter than any of us who had been born into the neighbourhood. Rivalries started and our parents became afraid. There were some tough kids around now, kids tougher than us. But it did not take long for the integration, and soon the new gangs of friends blossomed and the trouble we made tripled. It wasn’t the fault of the kids from the Development, but many parents scorned and complained about the new kids, about how the neighbourhood had gone down hill, about how the new families were nothing but trouble. Imagine that, North Enders full of disdain for other North Enders!

But then we lived in a privileged corner of the North End. We knew that the dirtiest poor people lived on Jarvis. That was the street where nobody went and nobody wanted to live. It was past the tracks and past McPhillips, so it was well beyond our borders and we were safe from the likes of that sort of folk, until now. This was exactly the kind of family that had moved into our neighbourhood. Our parents scorned them because of where they’d been. It was a collection of myths, but everyone concurred, so it became truth.

None of our parents found friends among the grown-ups in the Development. Though the neighbourhood expansion was all doom and gloom from the grown-up’s perspective, it was great for me. I was no longer the only hyperactive kid in class.

In grade two my report card read, “Nancy would do much better if she would quit playing with pencils and singing aloud to herself in class.” This did not bode well for my future career as an elementary school student. I got my first whomping from Miss Calder in grade three. Her tactic was humiliation. She made me wear a baby bottle around my neck and drink out of it when I was bad. I was crushed. I was not a smart alec. I was just a chatty little girl with a quick wit and an interest in pretty much everything. My mom intervened, so I didn’t have to wear the bottle again. Then came grade four. I spent lots of time in the hall. I asked all of the wrong questions and interrupted at all of the worst times. I couldn’t sit still. One day, Miss Vickers grabbed my bangs and bounced my head against the pink painted cinder brick of the hallway, outside Room 10, at the end of the long hall. I can’t remember what she was saying to me, but I can still see her orange lipstick and the white crap in the corners of her mouth and the stretchy saliva going up and down inside her mouth as she yelled something into my face.

Then came grade five, and the lovely Miss Vickers with the Betty Boop hair cut and the bright blue Austin Cooper was promoted to grade five with us. The Rosser kids and the Development kids started moving in and our class doubled in size. By the end of the year, there were more than forty of us in that grade five class at Shaughnessy Park. And Miss Vickers had taken to strapping me instead of slamming my head against the wall.

The kids from the Development and from Rosser doubled the population of Shaughnessy Park School. I had been an impossible student for the teachers in the 12-room school, and now it had 30 classrooms. I had been bounced around and humiliated, but by grade five, with all of the other kids pouring in from different parts of the city or province, from somewhere, we never knew where, they would have to deal with me, once and for all.

Give her the strap. Just give her the strap. Never mind that I weighed sixty-five pounds and was three and a half feet tall. I was a never-ending hassle for the grade five teacher and was creating a bad atmosphere in this class of 42 kids. Just give her the strap. And that they did. Time and time again. It started in grade five and followed me over to junior high at Sisler and continued until grade nine. I’m not sure why it stopped. Maybe it was the straight A’s that had been following me all the way through. In hindsight, there was something dreadfully incongruous about it. I remember my face and neck and ears being red with heat as tears poured down my face. I was embarrassed that the teacher might know it hurt. Shrugs.

Our small enclave called Shaughnessy Heights had spawned street-smart kids with the gift of gab, but we were not very worldly beyond our four streets. The kids in the Development had lessons to share from their lives, so far. They had brand new houses complete with basements and an upstairs without slanted ceilings. They had brand new cupboards with fresh white paint. We should have been coveting their good fortune, but underneath the excitement of having hundreds of new houses in our neighbourhood was a quiet hum of dissent.

We were used to nothing being said. Our dads didn’t talk about the war. They went to the Army Navy or the Legion, but we didn’t know about the war. All of the kids on the street knew that our dads played pool or went drinking and we also knew that they didn’t do it together. My dad went to the Army Navy. Shelley’s dad went to the Weston Legion. Legion 141 was the sports Legion. We didn’t know why our dads weren’t friends with each other.

Neighbours weren’t friends. There was a difference for grown-ups.

“You can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your neighbours,” my mom would say. I knew this was another nugget of wisdom from my Irish Nana.

The social division between the Development and our part of the neighbourhood started somewhere. Maybe in the school. Maybe in the homes. I think it began with the grown-ups. We would hear them talking to each other and their innocent racism would just spill off their lips into our open ears. They were the poor kids. They were the bad kids. Stay away from there. Even the teachers seemed to have that idea. But we were all just kids. And I was already a bad kid in the school, so where did I belong? I was smart-assed and smart on the tests. By grade six, Mr. Biblow had his hands full.

As the only male teacher in the school, he got the problem kids. He knew I was a problem, just as my brother had been before me. A big-mouthed jokester, but I was still the smallest kid in my grade and the loudest too. And along came Donald Roy. He was just as loud and funny as me, but he was two years older and eighteen inches taller. He became my new best friend ─ in school, at least. Together we tore Mr. Biblow’s class apart. It made me cool. Every day he was strapping either Donald or me. I didn’t give a shit. Yes, I got A’s and B’s and Donald got D’s and E’s, but together we were a perfect team. I was proud to be chirping and laughing with Donald from across the room, disrupting. I had to sit right in front of Mr. Biblow’s desk and Donald had to sit at the back. He was the tallest and I was the smallest. I never knew where Donald lived. On Chudley, I think. In the Development. Outside of school I never saw him.

The next year I went to grade seven at Sisler in a class with kids from way beyond the boundaries of Shaughnessy Heights, kids from King Edward, and Faraday, and Robertson schools. Smart kids. Kids who’d already taken typing, for Christ’s sake. Kids who for years had been told they were smart and special by the teachers. Kids who didn’t live beside the Development and had never heard of Shaughnessy Heights. They had put me into a special class. They called it Major Work. There, I had no notoriety. I became isolated, bra-less in a school of grade twelve kids. I had been stripped of my cool banter and plunked into a sea of show-offs and smarty-pants, smarter than me, anyway. And there was no sign of Donald Roy. Lightly fondly disappear. Just go.

They couldn’t have failed him in grade six; he was already fourteen. He must have been somewhere in thise shiny tiled halls of Sisler High School. Maybe they made short work of him. I noticed his younger brother, Van. He fit in better. He had friends. But I never saw Donald during all of those years. He saw me a few times, but I must have looked through him. Our tight connection built on wit and an intellectual war with Mr. Biblow had vanished and so had our chemistry.

I grew through that school, across the tracks, on the other side of the Northwood wading pool. There were only seven Shaughnessy Park kids in my Major Work class: Rod and Ken, Gary and Michael, Evelyn and Pat and me. So I had no locker partner and was embarrassed about that too. Our grade seven class was in the furthest corner of the school, surrounded by grade twelves. I was in a sea of phase one baby boomers and never spoke to any of them because they couldn’t see me. It took time for me to find my way among these strangers. I ducked the big kids. I cried at home and started to accept my new role in the class as the unknown kid with average grades. Eventually my wit percolated forth within the class and I started to take my strappings from our math and science teacher, Mr. McCullough. He would strap me in his secret back room where he prepared his science labs and supposedly drank his mickey. I chatted in class and took my expulsions to the gym while gradually, my grades started to improve.

I grasped for the fringe of the pretty girls and the popular boys, wanting to be seen near them, aching to fit in. Like most insecure adolescents, all I could see was how different I was. I couldn’t find a way to fit and I had been hitting this wall of insecurity since grade two when I felt the first sting of the big girl from Magnus Avenue, the bully, Donna Wozney. It was recess and the new addition had not yet been built on Shaughnessy Park School, so we could play on the swings and teeter totter which were still close to the school. I was standing by the red painted baby swings, that had chains to keep you from falling out, but I wouldn’t go on them, not during school hours. I think Donna was in grade five. She came over and offered me a rubber chocolate candy while I was playing, and I was thrilled. She watched with glee as I bit into it then laughed really loudly and pointed her finger at me. I think it was a fake laugh or a sinister laugh. She laughed because I had fallen for her cruel joke and I was crushed, not because I was embarrassed about the rubber candy, but because I thought she really was being nice to me when she made the offer.

In our house, the worst offence that we could commit was to hurt someone’s feelings. When I would come running in the front door, letting the spring door slam behind me, howling and talking at the same time, my mom would seem to listen. In hind-sight, I wonder if she did. She would eventually turn to me and say, “Aw, did somebody hurt your feelings? Come ‘ere.” And maybe she’d give me a hug, or maybe not, and she’d just let me explain and cry and shake and weep. And then she’d tell me I was just too sensitive. I got that a lot.

Sometimes I got lucky in my efforts to be one of the crowd and would get to ride in cars and drink. I eventually finished Sisler. I graduated with honours. I took some drugs and painted my weekends with lights and fast-moving opportunities. There was no plan, I just found out what excitement beckoned on a day-to-day basis. Parties and concerts and socials and bars were the main attractions. I usually ran with a pack of the pretty girls so that meant we wouldn’t get turned away at the door. They let me come along because I was the fast talker. I had a job to do and I was pretty good at it.

On one of the trips from Shaughnessy Heights, I found myself in a car traveling south along Main Street, probably to a social in Fort Rouge or a bar in St. Boniface. I didn’t like bennies and didn’t do acid very often, but I liked to smoke pot and hash, and it was pretty strong stuff, usually boasting red hairs or white stripes. We usually had our trendy liquor, maybe Southern Comfort or Molson Old Stock. Despite our imbibing, however, our focus remained on the next party, the place where the best boy was. Or the place where the next bag of pot was. Or the place where we knew we could sneak in.

It had been raining. It still was raining. The neon lights and the streetlights and the head lights and the police car lights were reflected in the wet sidewalk. We had to stop. We had drugs with us. We had to “get the fuck in the car!” Why were we out of the car? Why had we stopped?

“Stop! Someone is hurt!”

The car was stopped and I jumped out. There was a bus in front of me and people were standing around looking at a man lying on the ground hollering.

“He ran over my foot! He pushed me off the bus!”

I went over. Yes. It was Donald Roy. He saw me and I saw him. We read each other’s minds. He saw himself and I saw myself. There we were, the two loudest people in the crowd, again. This time I saw my separation from him. The separation I could not see when I was in grade six. Back then he knew it, but I didn’t. I was just a little girl, but he had already lived much much more than I had. Since then he had, too.

Despite the drugs and despite the liquor, I entered a zone of absolute clarity in that Main Street fiasco.

“Wait!” I screamed. But maybe I only screamed in my head. “Somebody call an ambulance!”

“Get the fuck in the car! Let’s get outta here!”

The world turned to slow motion. I must have had a bag of weed in my purse and probably open liquor in the car.

“Here come the cops! We gotta go! Get in the fuckin’ car!”Maybe someone told me that Donald Roy left this world prematurely. He saw the world with a clarity that is only now seeping into my mind. His memory rests between my shoulders and whispers in my ear. He tells me about my neighborhood and the people that we were. He tells me that we were pitiful in many ways and narrow in scope. But he liked me and I liked him back.

Transportation

Transportation. Out of Shaughnessy Heights and back to the wartime house.

Hitch-hiking was the most logical mode of transportation for teenaged North End girls. That was the summer that I started to head to Grand Beach every weekend. Every weekend. In those days, it seemed like quite a trek, but now when I realize it is barely more than an hour north of the Perimeter, I smile at my lack of worldliness.

By that time I had reached first-year university. Riding in a car pool to the Fort Garry campus from the North End in time for 8:30 classes was no small feat. Missing my ride home would mean an hour-long bus ride or a thirty-minute hitch.

In first-year university, my car pool started right in front of our wartime house. It was with a neighbourhood chum in my own grade, Bruce, who lived only two doors down. I went to U of M with the Commerce guys: Bernie, Gaylord, and Bruce. Bruce drove like a maniac south up snow-laden Route 90, passing two-ton delivery trucks in the far right lane, speeding over the tracks at Taylor, and passing on the curve toward McGillivray. There was no faster way to get there than in Bruce’s red Belair. But I wasn’t in Commerce, so my schedule never matched for the ride back to the North End. I learned to ply my trade as a hitch-hiker. I had the gift of the gab from many years of chatting it up and down the back lanes of Shaughnessy Heights. Everything in life was interesting. There was always lots to talk about and interesting questions to ask. The risks of hitching were simply urban myths. None of us knew anyone who’d been mugged or raped or stabbed. The most I was ever offered was a cool $100 on the corner of Notre Dame and McPhillips. I just hopped out and put out a fresh thumb. I was almost home.

The Bannister

The bannister. The core of the wartime house

The banister in a wartime house is not made of fancy oak spindles. It is just wallboard. We used to slide down it, but it was about only about two feet long, so once you were on it, you were pretty much at the bottom. Usually we’d just sit there and hang out, like we were on a hobby horse. But having a solid banister had its advantages. It was a great place to sit and eavesdrop on the grown-ups.

I think my mom was so embarrassed about explaining the “facts of life” to me that she did it while on the phone, knowing that I was sitting on the stairs listening.

“Hello? Yes, this is Betty McLennan calling regarding my prescription for birth control pills? Yes. I need to get my prescription if that’s okay. Yes. I can get it up at Shaughnessy Drugs. The pharmacist there knows me. Yes. I really appreciate this. Thanks a lot. Bye.”

Oh my god. I was in shock. My mother is pregnant and is taking a pill to kill the baby. How could she? I was shaking as I sat there. I turned and crawled up the stairs into my room and fell onto my bed. I wept into my pillow.

I pondered the idea of begging her not to go ahead with it. I did not know how I could broach the subject with her, and nothing was ever said.

Another time, I woke in the night and found myself sitting on the stairs listening to my parents fighting. My dad was wearing his blue ESSO shirt and my mom had just gotten home. It was very late. He had packed the suitcase and was leaving, for good. That time I had to intervene. The tears were pouring down my cheeks. My sister and my brother were still sleeping, but I was there in the middle, begging from the bottom of my broken heart for my dad to stay with the family.

I had not considered why he would possibly leave. I knew Mom was home late and had been out with some curlers or old friends or something, but that wasn’t important. Nothing could be so bad that my dad would leave us.

He didn’t leave.