Chudley to Buller

Three doors west and 12 east, within a hundred metres of the wartime house.

I was a middle child, trying to serve as a moderator in a rambunctious family in a rambunctious neighbourhood.

“Your bladder’s near your eyes!” my Nana would say.

“Don’t be so sensitive!” my Mom would coax me out of my turmoil over this or that. Destiny was not at my side.

I believed in a perfect world. Also because I was born in the middle of the baby boom, half of the boomers were older than me and half were younger. I was too young to be a hippie. I was always on the fringe. Most kids my age squeezed into the older groups, but not me. I looked three years younger than I was. I was always begging to fit in. It was exhausting.

Across the street, in a wartime house, the mirror image of ours, lived a family of thirteen. Yes. Thirteen. There were really old teenagers whom you hardly ever saw and there were kids in diapers, too. I never really thought about how they all fit into that house, but they did. They held the position of being the dirty family on the block, and they made the rest of us look good. I don’t know if they were dirty, but we thought they were. Belittling still is human nature. At the other end of the block there was another big family with mostly grown-up teenagers, but one girl was younger than me. They had nine. And up a block, there was a house with ten kids in it. There was only one house on our block with two kids and their yard, of course, was the nicest. Logically, I realized that the fewer kids a family had, the richer they were, and the nicer their house. The kids in families with only two kids, however, were shy and didn’t know how to hang out. They didn’t get into hide and go seek. They couldn’t stay out to play. They actually did homework. They wore sweaters and clean white socks. They might as well have lived across the river. They just didn’t belong, so they soon moved away, except for the soft-spoken Hogues, who did stay in Shaughnessy Heights.

Magical childhood is a fantasy. Neighbourhoods are full of envy and cruelty. Kids run home in tears if they can’t get tough. Other kids get tough for inexplicable reasons and hone their cruel behaviours in twos and threes.

In Shaughnessy Heights, the further east you went, the older the parents were. And the older the teenagers were. In my block, there were lots of us around the same age.

The back sheds of the wartime houses had no foundation. They were just sitting on wooden blocks, so we could crawl under, and we did. Why? Well, to play doctor, of course! It was perfect. You had to be lying down because there was not enough room to even sit. It was private. It was out of the rain or the heat. Actually, it was a very healing atmosphere for would-be body probers. We used bobby pins, and I guess we took turns. I never understood why I was always playing doctor with the older kids and playing school with the younger ones. The babysitter’s upstairs closet was another popular location for playing doctor. Those must have been the winter episodes. Perhaps that is how I ended up under the next-door neighbour’s clothesline stand, circled by a bevy of boys. The next-door neighbours had three boys, and there was my brother, and the two from across the street and the four from across the lane. And I was actually invited to play with them! I couldn’t believe they had invited me! They got me to crawl under and sent the youngest neighbour boy in to crawl on top of me. Of course, I get it now, but then I was totally clueless. I was probably four and very small for my age. They gave him instructions to put his thing into me. I couldn’t imagine where he was supposed to put it. The laughter got loud and raucous. There was pushing. It all became very intense and I started to become agitated. This game was no longer fun for me and I needed to get out of there.

And among the sheds and lanes and shadows of the neighbourhood there were plenty of attempts to exploit the child. On a hot summer afternoon on our way back from the Northwood wading pool, just after we crossed the tracks back into Shaughnessy Heights’ block of peacetime houses, we passed the house where the guy would stand bare naked in the window. It was like he was waiting for us. I must have seen it, at least once, because I have a memory of burgundy drapes pulled to the side and these big legs with a funny pile of flesh at the top. It’s possible too, that I didn’t see it. But I knew about it, and somehow our moms found out and someone put an end to it. I knew it was bad.

But as an Aquarian child, I was oblivious to a lot of the normal sexual socialization that the girls and boys around me giggled about. I didn’t wear a bra until grade nine.

Four years earlier, in grade five, they handed out “The Book” and showed us a film strip in a slide projector with a diagram of a uterus and fallopian tubes that looked to me like snakes escaping from a Grecian urn. There was no penis slide. I guess that was on the boys’ filmstrip.

I had no hint of breasts. I was still wearing size six-X and had no hint of body hair past the nape of my neck. But my best friend Beverley did. By grade six, she had a C-cup and a string of boyfriends. I was invited to their camper trailer at Falcon Beach in the summer and got to watch her neck on the park bench for hours on end. There was not a tickle of sexual awareness in me. I was definitely her decoy. That winter, I went over to her house to play every day after school, and her grade eight boyfriend Bob came, too. They would clamp faces on the chesterfield in the basement and stay like that until it was time for me to leave. I’d just play alone, reading books that I didn’t have at home. Playing pin-the-tail-on-the donkey, by myself. Not a tickle in me. I was completely uninformed. But her mom must have thought her girl was safe, if I was with her. Bev had two kids before I finished high school.

And Shelley’s big sister already had a kid! Now that was a real eye opener for me. I’d never been around a baby and hadn’t put any thought into how they came to be part of Shaughnessy Heights.

Every wartime house came fully equipped with a spring-loaded mail slot on the inside door. The mailman would shove the mail through the slot where it would get walked on with wet and muddy shoes before anyone thought to pick it up. More often than not, the mail slot would be used as a megaphone. “Can Shelley come out to play?” we’d holler through the slot. Or we’d lock out our brothers and sisters and they’d scream and yell and threaten us through that mail slot.

At that stage, I was about eleven years old and there were actually two new babies at Shelley’s house. Her mom also had one, so there were lots of shitty diapers around. There were three of us running together through the neighbourhood that fall. The third musketeer, Susan, lived on Magnus. To get to her house, I ran across the street, through Shelley’s yard, across the lane, through another yard and across Magnus, to her place. Her backyard went right out into the fields, until The Development was built. So back and forth we’d run. Keeping in touch. Hanging out. Walking fences. Jumping fences. That’s probably when we started smoking. But we were always home by dark.

On this day, we rounded the corner to the front of Shelley’s house with some urgent and specific intention and found the door locked. Bang! Bang! Bang! Shelley hammered on the door, knowing her older sister was in there with her boyfriend. She opened the mail slot to yell and instead took a peek. Then, inexplicably, she started crying! I looked and saw some guy’s bare ass, some guy up on his knees supporting himself with his arms on the edge of the chesterfield in the front room. I didn’t get it, but I could see from Shelley’s reaction that this was bad news. Not a tickle felt I. Shelley’s sister married the guy, and Shelley herself had her first kid right after grade 12. I was completely oblivious to this mating ritual.

There was absolutely no explanation coming from home. No internet education. No TV beyond Father Knows Best scandals. Not a whisper. Sex Ed hadn’t really been invented yet. My first period came on a Christmas Eve. Lucky me. We were on our way out the door for our annual visit to see mom’s friend Ada and her girls. They had no dad. This was well before the invention of adhesive maxi pads or tampons of any shape, and as my luck continued, the stores were closed that night and our house was completely padless. I was a real gusher, so there was no pretending that it this wasn’t happening. Mom came into the bathroom with a sanitary belt. I still blush when I say the words. It was a tangled mess of elastic with metal triangular hooks hanging from loops that were threaded through some other metal buckles of some sort. It was a complicated contraption and had brownish stains on the ends of the elastic that held the hooks.

“Here. Just use this.”

“Huh?”

I had absolutely no clue. The only thing I recognized was the smell. There had been a girl in grade six who came from a farm. She always smelled that way. She got teased for it, too, but really, it was disgusting.

Mom handed me a strip of a torn-up sheet. She rolled it up so that it was about eighteen inches long and six inches wide.

“Watch.” She was in a hurry. We had to get going. After Ada’s we had to go to Helen’s and then get back here in time for the cousins to come to our place. It was Christmas Eve and we had traditions.

She somehow whipped one end of this rag through this triangular hook and handed me the contraption, now complete with a rag hanging on it.

“Put this on. That’ll do.” That was the extent of my sex ed. I still didn’t have it figured out, so I spent the entire Christmas Eve sitting in fear that whatever I had shoved into my underpants would fall out on the floor. I was given no instructions about what to do with the rags after they were soaked. It was all just a matter of figuring it out as I went along.

Hands in the Bathroom

Hands in the Bathroom. Southeast corner with the cloudy window, within.

If I close my eyes to relive the most tender moment of my life, I sink back into the bathroom at that wartime house. My dad had been a farm boy, and my mom a city girl. Dad was worldly in his way and she in hers. Dad had been to Europe. There, he got a taste for better cheeses and better breads and for hot running water.

Our bathtub was a cast iron claw tub. Our toilet was much like the one I have today. The hot water tank was a tacky thing, tall and skinny by today’s standards. It was all lumpy with copper pipes and plates and covered with ragged ugly, possibly toxic insulation material that was haphazardly sheathed in a piece of flannel, full of rips. Between this monster and our toilet was a wall sink, hung at about the height of my clavicles. I could reach the taps; I was tall enough. But it was always best when Dad was there.

I don’t think I would ever have washed my hands except when having a romp in the bathtub or an accidental soaking while playing some kitchen chemistry game with whatever ingredients the cupboards offered. I don’t remember the common TV family commands Go wash up! or Brush your teeth! No, what I heard was my Nana telling my Mom to “Relax. We’re all gonna eat a peck of dirt before we die.” It never dawned on me to wash up before eating. It never did become a habit with me. Even if we were covered with some mysterious dark-coloured goo, or the dirt under our fingernails was brown, we were oblivious. We were hungry.

In the mornings, before school, or if I was a particularly terrible mess from a day of hard outdoor play, my dad would sweep me up and carry me to our heavy yellowish sink. I would stand on his feet and put the palms of my hands onto the cold porcelain of the sink bottom. He would put in the plug and turn on the cold, with a trickle, and then the hot. Then he would put his hands on top of mine and I would feel my left hand getting warmer and warmer. He’d turn off the cold tap, and my left hand would get warmer and warmer, almost hot, but never uncomfortable. He would whistle through his teeth during this little ritual, some Scottish tune like Road to The Isles, and the water would fill up the sink, past my wrists, and half-way up my arms. Then he’d pick up the soap and put it between my hands, and with my hands in his, he’d start to wash. The suds would spill through and I’d feel the slippery stuff in the middle and his big hands against mine. I could have stood like that for hours. Then, from nowhere, the corner of a towel would get dipped into the sink and his right hand would come against my face, with the warm, no, the hot wet cloth between. Just as my hands had felt comforted, this too was soothing and gentle.

Years later, my kids would hate getting their faces wiped. I guess I must have been rough. When I close my eyes today, I can still feel the bottom of my feet standing on my Dad’s feet, the strength of his legs keeping me tight against the sink. I had the faith that he would deliver hot steamy water, but not too hot. Just hot enough to bear. This was a supernatural connection I had with my Dad. He knew the power of the steam and taught it to me. I do not know where he learned it, but I’ve seen glimpses and heard snippets that the days of WWII did not only include battle but also private and sensual times in ancient architecture, including full bodied wines, and perhaps with women he knew before he met my mom. He never spoke about those times, but somehow I knew, especially from the European foods he enjoyed, that he had a hidden world that he shared in his own indirect ways. Maybe he was sharing a bit of that with me when he helped me enjoy the suds and the hot running water. To this day, I still love steam and despise the sauna.

Healing

Healing. Within the walls of the wartime house.

We were the healthiest kids on the block, and we knew it. We were told that we were and we believed it. If we hurt ourselves, from a bump on the head or stubbed toe or a fall down some stairs, our instructions were clear. Rub it. The purple and yellow bruises that covered our knees and shins, our elbows and foreheads were not a worry and were seldom mentioned. Scrapes and cuts seldom got a band-aid. There were no band-aids in our house. As soon as some arrived in the medicine chest we would use them for sticking things together, for manufacturing something much more important. But the medicine chest always had a small bottle with a red rubber stopper that had a glass rod projecting from it. We knew how to get the little bottle and dab and smear the red liquid onto our injury. We didn’t need help. It was like playing doctor. We were a mercurochrome family. We went for the red stuff. The yellow stuff that some of the other kids had, we later learned, was iodine. Apparently it hurt, but the mercurochrome didn’t. If we had a cut or a scrape, we’d self-administer the mercurochrome right on top of the grit and blood, and would head back out to play and wait for the scab. Fresh air was the best thing for an open cut.

But inevitably the scab would get picked. What kid can resist picking a scab? Between hard nosed play and inevitably dirty fingernails, it would start to get green with pus, and when it did we had a routine: Mom would boil water, put it in the biggest cooking bowl she had, and bring it to us in the front room of our house. Why this ritual would always happen on the chesterfield, in the front room, I wasn’t sure. The water was scalding hot. If the cut was on your head, you had to use a cloth, but otherwise you had to dip the cut right into the steaming water. Even if it was for one zillionth of a second, for the first dip, you still had to do it.

“Dip!” That was the command. In and out. Usually the other kids were watching and howling while the injured party was screaming “I can’t!” for the first 25 micro-millisecond dips. On we would go. And gradually, the dips lengthened in duration to a half second, a second, and suddenly we felt tough and the taunters would shut up. Then the abhorrent chore of dipping turned into a tantalizing test of one’s pain threshold. Who could handle the hottest water? When would I feel that great pleasure of soaking in the hottest water possible?

Perhaps it was the cold Manitoba winters that gave me such a love for hot water. I secretly loved this ritual. Not so much that I would purposefully injure myself, but enough that I never balked when the boiling water treatment was the recommended remedy. Really, it was a cooking of the flesh. When the water became only warm, which of course felt cool to me after my show of endurance, Mom would come in for her inspection. Because there were no band-aids in the house, if we passed the inspection we would be sent outside to dry it up again. She would urge us to keep it clean. If she thought it was really bad, that there still might be some evil foreign substance inside the infected spot, she would use her last resort.

This treatment was perhaps one of the more wholesome uses of two spoons. It was Nana who delivered my first soap and sugar poultice, and I still use it for nagging slivers, ingrown toenails, and nasty burns. Mom would scrape a sliver of soft hand soap onto the spoon from the underside of a bar of soap. Usually, the bar had been sitting on the bottom of the bathtub, surrounded with a fringe of cloudy water. (I don’t think we owned a soap dish). Then she would head back into the kitchen for the sugar bowl. Of course, I was underfoot, following every bit of this episode. I was the patient. I was special! She’d take three pinches of sugar from the bowl and put it onto the same spoon as the soap and then crush the soap and sugar together with the back of the second spoon. After that, she’d set it down for a second and rip a hunk of a sheet, just the right size, and then scrape the poultice onto the sheet. The poultice was usually about the size of a dime, or a quarter, depending on how big the target spot was. She told me that the soap would keep it clean and that the bad germs would be so tempted by the sugar that they would swim up to the poultice and then die in the soap. She would put the poultice on top of the softly cooked open wound and tie the sheet around. It always worked best if it was done at bedtime so that there would be a chance it would be kept on for a while. If I kept it on, it always worked. Sometimes when we would unwrap the poultice, sure enough, it would be slimy and pinkish yellow and I was sure that indeed the bad stuff had left the depths of my flesh and I was fine. There would be no scary red lines shooting up my leg or up my arm screaming, “Blood poisoning!! Blood poisoning!” We never had blood poisoning in our house. We were the healthiest family in the neighbourhood.

Eaton's Downtown

Eaton’s downtown. Transit vortex: bus stop 15 metres from the wartime house.

There was one other place, besides Shaughnessy Heights, where I could run freely in Winnipeg. My dad worked rotating shifts, including most weekends, and my mom’s part time job at Eaton’s was also on the weekends. She worked in the Cash Office up on the 9th floor and in the Information Booth at the foot of the escalators on the main floor every Friday evening from four until nine-thirty, and on Saturday all day. To deal with the problem of a lack of a babysitter on Saturdays, Mom would leave three soft, taupe-coloured cardboard bus tickets on the kitchen table with a note telling us to meet her for lunch at work.

I don’t know how I was so blessed to grow up in a house where we didn’t have any chores. All of my friends had mountains of chores to do on Saturdays, especially the Ukrainian kids. But not us. Our house was a place to live. To really be who we were. If our parents tried to assign us chores, it eventually ended up in a battle royale, among the kids mostly, until we were told to get outside. Winter or summer. Get outside. It wasn’t a strategy on our part, it was just how our house functioned. Nobody in our family made their bed. Nobody closed a dresser drawer. Nobody put laundry in any basket that I ever saw. The stairs were piled with stuff, destined for our upstairs world, stuff that never got carried up. We climbed over piles of clean and dirty laundry and sometimes would plow through it to find something we needed.

On Saturday mornings, without being taught or told how, we got up and dressed, any which way, and hopped the bus. Sometimes, there would be a battle over that and we would take separate busses. We were little kids, maybe six or seven years old, with a little sister in tow. But none of us ever got sick of our trips to Eaton’s. We knew every corner of that place: the elevators and escalators, the annexes and the bathrooms, the stairwells and the lunch counters, the grocery department and the books.

The bus trip involved a transfer at the Selkirk and McPhillips turn-around. There was a warm-up shack there where we could wait for the bus to take us up Selkirk to Main, down Main to Graham, and along Graham to Donald where we’d hop off and run into the Donald Street annex and begin our game of hide and seek. We never had any money, but we were never bored. When we showed up too early at Mom’s station, she would give us a quarter for chips and gravy at the third floor lunch counter. We usually ate with her in the staff lunchroom on the second floor, but sometimes we’d eat on the fifth floor in the Valley Room. We were not allowed in the Grill Room, either because it was too fancy or because there were so many old people in there and we might knock one over. It was probably too expensive. After Mom got off work, we’d head past the cosmetics to the candy counter on the main floor and get licorice allsorts (I liked the beaded ones best) and head out the Hargrave annex to catch the bus home. This part of the trip was hell in the winter.

In sub-zero temperatures, the bus shack on the southwest corner of Graham and Hargrave was a horrible torture chamber with stinky steamy putrid breath sticking to the small windows along the tops of the side walls and escaping through the cracks in the ill-fitting door. Mom worked the pre-Christmas rush, and the days were short in December, so it was dark whenever we’d go to catch the bus home in winter. We’d walk up to the shack and push the door open. Inside there was a bench along the east wall and people would squeeze back to let us in. As soon as we were in, Mom would light up and contribute to the soup that was breath and cigarette smoke. That bus shack had a smell like no other place I’ve known. The salt from people’s shoes made the black, bumpy rubber floor sloppy and gritty. I stood between the legs of grown-ups and could not see out the windows. Everything was a shadow from the single incandescent light bulb. Folks’ navy blue Eaton’s bags got soggy on the floor. Men in big coats and hats smoked. Women in fur coats and red lipstick smoked. Kids tugged and pushed each other hoping for a chance to stand on the bench to wipe the window for a peek outside. Someone would say, “Here it comes!” and everyone would shuffle. Sometimes it was ours. Sometimes it wasn’t. I think those Elmwood kids got on the East Kildonan McKay bus. I never talked to those kids. They had more busses than we did. We’d run out to check and call Mom out if it was ours, the Selkirk bus. We would ride the trolley to the end of the line where we’d run into our clean and spacious bus shack at McPhillips and wait to transfer to our own bus, the Selkirk Keewatin, to drop us off across the street from home, our wartime house.