The Innocent. Lynne Golding

concluded that if her house—the one directly across the road from the jail—was the last place to which a felon would escape, our house, just two doors east, was surely the third last place. In fact, I began to feel sorry for those in houses on the perimeter of the town, for surely their homes stood the greatest risk of such an intrusion.

      Of course, my Aunt Rose also knew that most of the inmates of the local jail were not people of whom one needed to be particularly frightened. Few within it would actually desire to escape the relative warmth of its walls or the three square meals it provided (if you could call oatmeal for breakfast, soup and bread for lunch, and cornmeal for supper three square meals). Though the jail was regularly declared ill equipped to act as a place for the infirm or destitute, and though, as a result of the efforts of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, a house of refuge for the destitute had been built, the jail continued to house such misfortunates. Indeed, on a cold winter night many a poor God-fearing man would steal a loaf of bread or some other small trifle simply to have the privilege of being locked up in the jail until dawn restored the sun’s warm rays.

      When I was a child, there were at all times at least five people in the jail that you would be pleased to have to your home for Sunday dinner. They were the jail’s superintendent, his wife, and their three children, all of whom lived in an apartment within its thick stone walls. The superintendent was actually known as a governor—a strange title, I always thought, for one with a principality of twelve thousand square feet and a population of between thirty and sixty souls. But as that was his official title, that was how he was always known.

      Commensurate with the small size of his regime, the governor, it seemed, was not particularly well paid. Bob Parker, the governor I first remember, made many good-natured petitions to the more influential of the local ratepayers for an annual salary more befitting his position. His appeals were met with equally good-natured rejections. Governor Parker took the response in stride, but he never relinquished this quest. Since he could not persuade adult Bramptonians of the real perils from which his office protected them, he sought instead to convince their teenage children. Accordingly, once or twice a year, when the mood struck him and the teenagers were available, he would provide them with stirring accounts of some the jail’s most perfidious inhabitants. The teenagers were delighted to be the vessels of this aspect of his campaign and dutifully relayed the told tales to their tax-paying parents. My parents’ only criteria regarding the retelling by Ina and Jim was that it be done in my absence. Father declared my ears far too young to hear such accounts.

      So it was that one day in late August 1909, less than a month before I began school, my friend Archie McKechnie and I came upon a gaggle of teenagers including my brother Jim and sister Ina, swarming the governor in front of the jail.

      “You know what they’re doing, don’t you?” I asked Archie. “The governor is going to tell them a scary story about one of the jail’s inmates.”

      “I know,” said Archie. “Let’s listen.”

      “Oh! I can’t,” I protested. “Father says that I am too young to hear such stories.”

      We were silent for a few minutes, but Archie, a year and a half older than me, the son of one of the town’s leading lawyers and destined, his parents said, to follow in his father’s footsteps, was always thinking of loopholes. He also had the advantage of knowing well the man about whom he would be directing his advantage. Before moving into our house when I was a toddler, the McKechnies were our neighbours. Our two families were well acquainted.

      “Did your father ever tell you that you could not play around the jail?” Archie asked.

      “No. He’s never said that.”

      “Has your Father ever forbidden you from sitting on the steps of the jail and taking in the sun?”

      “No,” I replied, quite confidently. “He likes it when I take in the sun.”

      “Has he ever said you cannot sit in the sun and play ball while other people are having a conversation somewhere else?”

      “No, he’s never done that either.”

      “Wouldn’t it be fair to say, then,” he concluded, “that you are allowed to sit on the jail steps, take in the sun, and roll a ball back and forth between us while other people are having a conversation under the tree on the jail’s front lawn?”

      It was not the best deductive reasoning, but it was sufficient for a curious six-year-old. We scurried onto the big, concrete steps at the front of the jail where, hidden from the view of the governor and teenagers by the high concrete risers, we silently rolled a ball back and forth as the governor, surrounded by a dozen teenagers, told his scary tale.