The Good Old Days

The Good Old Days – Or Were They?

My father died on a bitterly cold day in December 1934. He was fifty-one. I was born eight days later. I was the tenth child and there was no income. Mother was forty-five and almost deaf. She did not speak English and was illiterate. It was the middle of the Great Depression. The Depression lasted longer on the Saskatchewan prairies than it did in the cities because along with the Depression, there were years of drought and the historic dust storms.

My mother managed our home as well as she could but outside the house, her social life was practically non-existent. She could not cope with her deafness and was somewhat paranoid about being in public. She thought people were talking about her. I have never had a conversation with either of my parents. We learned to communicate with our mother with hand gestures and actions. She was very good at reading lips or perhaps expressions.

We lived in a four-room house. The outside was wooden boards and the inside was paneling. There was no insulation in the walls or ceiling. The windows were single-pane glass and the winter wind rattled the doors and windows. I remember we used to draw in the frost on the window glass. Sometimes it was an inch thick. The summer heat was intolerable.

We had a black iron stove in the kitchen where my mother did all the cooking and baking. There was no respite for her during the hot summer or the cold winter. The cooking stove also served to heat the house. In the living room there was a pot-bellied stove with the stove pipe exiting through the wall. The fires never stayed alight throughout the night unless someone got up to stoke and add some coals. It was a miracle the old wooden structure did not burn down.

We used oil lamps for light and an outside toilet. At night we used a chamber pot. In winter the chamber pot would freeze indoors and had to be warmed in the kitchen in order for it to be emptied the next day.

There was a deep well that supplied us with fresh, cold water and a cooling system. During the summer we kept butter and milk in a bucket tied to a rope and a pulley lowered the bucket down to the water’s edge. In the winter when the water in the well froze, we repeatedly dropped the bucket onto the surface until we broke a hole in the ice to get to the water. When it was too cold outside we kept milk and butter in the dirt cellar where it would not freeze.

The oldest of my siblings was twenty when I was born. By the time I reached the age of remembering, they had all left home except two brothers and a sister. Occasionally the older ones would come home for a visit but they remained strangers to me throughout my life. In fact I only saw my oldest sister once. That was when I went home to celebrate my mother’s one hundredth birthday. It was normal for me not knowing my siblings. It was also normal for me to grow up without a father. It wasn’t until I was much older that I realized what was missing in my ideas of marriage and parenting. My life experience was my reality and my teacher, without the input of normal parental guidance.

I was a small, sickly child. Now I know what caused my illnesses but at the time the allergies that I was prone to were not known. I suffered from food, chemical, skin and respiratory allergies and still do. There were no doctors within a twenty-five mile radius of our town, so all cures were home cures. All diagnoses were self-diagnosed.

We were poor beyond poor and often did not have food on the table. In the summer we had a large garden but by the end of winter our cellar was often bare. Mother pickled, canned, preserved and stocked what she could but it never seemed to be enough. By spring the carrots, potatoes and other root vegetables were soft and wilted. I am sure the nutrition left in them was minimal.

We ate what we had and much of what we ate I was allergic to. I remember having Mom’s good homemade bread and lard for supper and enjoying it. Butter was fifteen cents a pound so we could rarely afford it if our cow was not producing milk in order for Mom to make butter. Breakfast was usually oatmeal porridge and sometimes we were blessed with a bag of puffed wheat. That was always a great treat.

We usually had a cow for milk, some chickens for fresh eggs and occasional meat on the table, and later we had a few goats for milk and cheese.

I was an odd child, spending much time alone. I don’t remember having any friends. When I learned to read, I spent all my time reading anything I could get my hands on. We got a weekly paper after Mom’s income improved. The federal government started a welfare program called Relief. I don’t know how much my mother received but I remember our life improved substantially.

When the Second World War started three of my brothers joined the service. They sent home a portion of their salary, which further increased Mother’s income. When I was nine-years-old my brother in the army was killed in Italy. It was just a month before the war ended in 1944. I recall going to school with tears running down my cheeks. It seemed that everyone in school lost someone during the war.

The school I attended until the age of thirteen was a two-room building with a dirt basement. When the weather was too cold to play outside we were sent into the basement for recess. I had a terrible fear of the huge coal-eating furnace. I had never seen anything so frightening.

Because I was so sickly, I was never chosen to play team sports and I spent a great deal of time standing in the corner of the school yard, watching the others play. I recall there were about thirty children in the school, who ranged from kindergarten to grade eight.

There were two teachers, one for each room, and the number of children they taught varied with the child’s progress. English was my second language. Until I started school I spoke only a dialect of German. My parents were Mennonites who were shunned by the church. Being shunned was a very grave punishment. I am not sure why they were punished but they had apparently committed a grave sin and the church had condemned them to a fiery hell.

There was a small church next to our property that my sister and I attended regularly. I don’t know what happened when people died during the winter as my father did. The ground was too frozen to dig a grave and there was no refrigeration. It may remain a mystery to me. I once attended a burial in the church yard. I looked into the grave and saw a woman’s body lying in a hole in the ground. There was no embalming, casket or cover over her body. I watched as they threw dirt over her. The sight haunted me for years.

As children we thought our community was a safe place to play and we roamed freely wherever we wanted. Perhaps it was not as safe as we thought or maybe we were simply unaware of dangers.

One evening at dusk I was coming home from a neighbour’s house. I hurried because I was afraid of the dark. As I came through an opening in the hedge at the back of our property, I saw what appeared to be a very large dog in our garden. It growled at me and I made a bee line for the house. Our garden was very large and the "dog" moved slowly across the expansive space. I had no trouble reaching the house safely. At the time I did not think it could have been anything but a dog although there were no large dogs in our town.

It was only later I was told that it was a man on his hands and knees who was waiting for me to return home. Luckily for me, I took a different opening in the hedge from the one where he was waiting. I learned later that he was a Peeping Tom, as we called them then. I often wondered why Mother tacked the blinds to the window frames.

Many people were moving from the prairies to the west coast because of the continuing drought and the Depression. After the war ended my mother began making plans to move to British Columbia too. My two brothers were home from Europe and had found jobs in the lumber industry. They built a small home for us and when I was thirteen, we boarded the train and ventured west. The train ride was very exciting for the first day but when we reached the Rockies I was terrified. At times the drop was thousands of feet straight down with the raging Frazer River below us. Hell’s Gate is aptly named. I have crossed the mountains dozens of times since then and they still frighten me.

It was April when we moved and I had two months remaining in grade six. On my last day at school my teacher, Mrs. Highbine, whom I hated, offered me a letter saying that I should apply to enter grade eight when I got to B.C. I was an above-average student and the school system in Saskatchewan was about a year ahead of British Columbia. However, I was stubborn and headstrong and this "dumb" teacher was not going to tell me what to do, so I refused to take her letter.

As I mentioned, my mother was not socially aware, consequently, when I got to B.C. I took the next four months off and simply did not attend school. In September I had to first of all find a school and then register myself. Without the letter from my previous teacher, the new school had no option but to place me in grade six again as I asked. After all, in my mind I had not really passed the grade.

My older brother and sister were in high school which was about eight miles away. I was totally on my own in this new environment. I was forced to be independent at a very early age. I made many mistakes. This one cost me two years.

About the time we moved to B.C., I began to write poetry. My poetry was published in the weekly church bulletin and one poem was accepted by Redbook magazine. They paid me the princely sum of two dollars. At that time I had no idea what an accomplishment that was.

In June of grade eleven our high school burned down. A new modern school was built and ready for our graduation a year later. On the basis of my poetry I was named Literary Editor of the yearbook, which we called The Phoenix. It was 1954 and I was nineteen-and-a-half-years-old.

There were no jobs in our small town. College was out of the question because of lack of money. The day after my graduation, my sister and I packed our small cardboard suitcases and walked to the highway. We stuck our thumbs out and hitchhiked our way back over the mountains to Lethbridge, Alberta..

My sister was immediately accepted with Bell Telephone and I joined the Air Force. My aptitude tests showed promise for secretarial work.

Was I ready for my future behind a desk? I had never used a telephone in my life. Why would we need a telephone when my mother was deaf?


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