I was born the month and the year, November, 1929, that the Great Depression descended upon the land, a grey miasma that saw wealthy financiers in New York throwing themselves out of the windows of tall buildings because they could not face the shame of ruin. It started the years of breadlines , and soup kitchens and men travelling the country in search of food, going from door to door asking for food in return for work.
Some present I was to my parents, conceived in the high times and born into these!
My family lived comfortably, in a three-storey, red brick house in Rosedale in Toronto. My Dad was a successful advertising account executive with Cockfield Brown, my mother received an allowance from her father in Ottawa, so was relatively independent. He gave them their first house on Douglas Drive. She had her own car. I had one brother, Joe who was eight years older, and a sister Pat, who was four years older than I.
What I remember of those years was a sudden tension when there was a knock at the back door. The kitchen door was closed firmly against me but I knew that mother and the cook were preparing a hand-out for one of the wandering men who came regularly to our house. The other memory was of being told never, ever to go into the wooded ravine across from our house. There were men living there.
Of course, we went, Pat and I, venturing, with our hearts in our mouths, into the ravine, hiding behind trees, and peering around them into the depths. A little further, a little further. When we saw movement, we fled in the great fear that one of these unkempt, bearded men would chase us. Just once. That was enough. Our lives were a separate reality. Those men seemed to come from some different, far-away place. It was all men. I wondered where the women were.
Our lives continued as they always had, highlighted by the usual celebrations: extravagant, magical, Christmas=s, Easter feasts with big chocolate eggs, birthday parties where we ate patties filled with creamed chicken and peas and birthday cake (the birthday person got the last piece) and ice cream.
On Christmas morning we were not allowed to move out of our beds until we heard the clinking of milkman=s cart. Before that, by ourselves, we had opened up the Christmas stockings that rustled at the foot of our beds and found a big orange at the bottom. We did not get oranges at other times. We had breakfast and then lined up with the smallest first, it was (me-I) until Sue came along, at the door of the library to be ushered into this room where a huge Christmas three blazed with lights and decorations We were directed to our piles of gifts and I always checked first to find books.
I remember the parties Mum and Dad had, mostly hearing Dad singing in his lovely voice with someone playing the piano. The rugs in the blue living room were rolled up and people danced. I remember the card parties with their closest friends, Do and Henry Gooderham and Min and .... Leishman. Mum wore one of her beautiful long dresses. She had a soft, black one with sequins that glittered on it that I liked best.
The house seemed vast to a small person: the long front hall leading to a fireplace with benches on either end where the fire was never lit, and no one sat. On either side were the blue living room and the red living room, named for the colours of their rugs. We children were rarely in either. The red room I thought of as Dad=s. It held the piano, his drinks cabinet and a round cross-legged table with a brass top holding the hear-no-evil, see-no evil monkey on it. I was in the blue living room only on the odd Sunday where I scanned the funny papers spread out of the floor and my parents listened to the radio news. And it was here we heard the King giving his Christmas message to the people. He hardly stuttered at all.
Behind the blue room was the dining room, panelled in walnut, with a cut glass door handle that sent a rainbow of colours shooting across the room when the sun shone. Doors led from this room to the large porch and the long garden beyond. I spent hours playing on top of the swinging chesterfield on the porch, hanging upside down and trying tricks. A gardener took care of the flower beds where Dad cut a flower for his buttonhole on summer mornings. Mum showed me the fairy rings at the back of the garden where I used to go to sit under the bushes and imagined the fairies dancing around me.
One year, when I was very little, a huge Arctic owl sat in a tree near my carriage. My mother was afraid it would hurt me and had the gardener take it away. I have always felt an affinity with owls.
The huge kitchen was beside the dining room. We children ate our meals there except for Sunday when we all had Sunday dinner together, roast beef with beans or chicken with peas, and ice cream for dessert. I was not allowed to go into the kitchen any other times, except when I was taken. Dad once showed me the frig where he kept his cheese in a can. I had to hold my nose. It smelled horrible. He showed me one cheese with blue things in it and told me they were alive to help the cheese ripen. Ugh! Who would eat that! AYour mother makes me keep it in this can,@ he said. I think he thought I would be interested. I was, at first, until he opened the top.
