Another, more haunting crib memory: I am lying watching the window and the long white curtains that hang either side of it moving a little in the breeze. But somehow floating in the air between the curtains and me are horrible chains of diamond shapes. The diamonds are somehow both black and gold, dazzlingly bright and they are moving convulsively, collapsing and straightening. It is terrifying and I hate it but am powerless to stop it. Even closing my eyes doesn’t stop it. I had no words to tell anyone of this at the time but every once in a long while over the years I would remember those diamonds and shudder. I think I was middle-aged before I realized it had been a very early migraine.
Sometimes I told my stories to Carol or to my mother; often I didn’t. I had two imaginary friends, Jennie Wren and Dootsy Bootsy, whom I can’t remember beyond the fact that they existed, or existed for me. I had even forgotten Dootsy’s name but Carol remembered. Mother read to us and sang to us every day and the words from the books and from the songs wove themselves into the stories I told myself. I learned how words and images could express joy and happiness and fun, as well as adventure and danger, and how many different flavours those emotions had and how they were associated with colours and seasons. Mother sang spring songs — “The Birdies’ Ball,” “A Frog He Would A-Wooing Go” — and winter ones — all the carols and “The North Wind Doth Blow.” I learned what grief was from “Now the Day Is Over,” a song with suffering and loss in every lugubrious word and note. It was torture to listen to it and yet we begged her to sing it.
We had many books in our house. Every night Mother would sit on my twin bed or Carol’s, turnabout for fairness, and read to us: the Beatrix Potters, The Wind in the Willows, all of A. A. Milne, fairy tales from a fat red book whose title I forget, Australian children’s books sent by Ruth’s godmother who had moved to Australia, some American books, Tom Sawyer and a book called The Blue Fly Caravan that I’ve never encountered since. There were the strange and wonderful At the Back of the North Wind and The Princess and Curdie. I can’t remember those in any detail, just their mysterious otherworldly atmosphere that we loved. There was darkness at the windows and the lamplight was yellow and we lay so cosily in our twin maple wood beds, with our beautiful mother reading, her dark hair smoothed back in that lovely roll women wore then, her fingers turning the pages.
Later she would go downstairs and we would fall asleep listening to her playing the piano, Beethoven sonatas or Chopin. We were so safe. And across the world other children, children I would later know as adults, crept into cellars to hide from bombs, or were dragged from burning buildings.
In 1940 our family spent five or six months, from May until sometime in October, living in a tiny, tarpaper shack at the Lucky Shot gold mine in Alaska. When we drove down into the valley in our red truck we could see a red band around our shack just under the roof. It looked as if the house was tied in red ribbon, like a parcel, but close to, we never noticed the red ribbon, which was odd.
There was no sort of village, just three or four other shacks and the men’s bunkhouse (forbidden territory to three little girls) and the cookhouse. Those buildings were just covered in tarpaper as well, and I remember hurrying past the forbidden bunkhouse as it loomed blackly and ominously in the early October dusk. The men were always so nice to us whenever we met them outside in daylight that it was a mystery how there would be dangers in the tall black house where they slept. Was it dangerous for them too? No. The feeling was that the men themselves were the danger, once inside their bunkhouse. Yet the cook, for instance, was really kind, and made a cake for my birthday with fancy icing, decorated with bluebirds and flowers.
The valley was encircled by high mountains where bears roamed. We were often warned about them but we never saw one. We did often see parky squirrels. Our little house had three rooms. The kitchen was so small that our mother could reach everything from sitting at her place at the table, yet it also had our parents’ bed, covered with our father’s arctic sleeping bag, tucked into a corner. There was a small living room, and one bedroom with three beds in a row for my sisters and me. The beds had tough grey blankets on them, like horse blankets. There was also a bathroom. Our father went up the mountain every morning in his work clothes, with his miner’s hat on (a hardhat with a light), deep into the mine. None of us ever got into the mine except Ruth, a little way, once. Our mother kept house in the shack, cooking on a wood stove, but she often came out with us exploring the lower reaches of the mountains and picking berries.
Those months in that place, as different from Forest Hill and our house there as can be imagined, were a time of peak childhood happiness. For years Carol and I used to say to each other, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if being back in Toronto was only a dream and we woke up still in Alaska?” Books and stories were very much part of that world too. I especially remember the Just So Stories from that time, and also a long tale our father would tell us in the evenings. It was called “The Empty House” and he made it up as he went along. I don’t remember a single detail, just the slight scariness of it and the fun of our father telling it in that cosy little place which, once the evenings drew in, was lit only by coal oil lamps.
Snow came in October while we were still there and we went for a ride in a sleigh pulled by Mrs. Seski’s terrifying husky dogs. It was almost dark when we had the sleigh ride, the days were so short, and that made it even more exciting and for once we weren’t frightened of the dogs as they raced ahead over the snow. Those dogs the rest of the time were chained up in front of her shack. We always gave them a wide berth. Seeing us they always pulled up their lips and bared their scary teeth and barked furiously. Their chains rattled as they jumped and strained against their collars. We had to pass them to get to the shack where Billy and his baby sister Helen lived — the only other children at the mine. Billy was six and was always in trouble for doing dangerous forbidden things and I admired him tremendously. Once he fell into a creek poisoned by run-off from the gold processing and we were sure he would die but he didn’t.
In Toronto our father read different books to us than our mother did: Jock of the Bushveld was a favourite of his because it was set in “his” Africa, and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. He must have read those several times as I feel as if I spent long stretches of my childhood immersed in one or the other, always in his voice. Books were my favourite Christmas presents; when I recall a particular Christmas, its atmosphere is that of whatever book I first read from the pile under the tree.
There was the year I got Wee Gillis and Carol got Ferdinand the Bull. It was a Toronto green Christmas, and the same one that Chuck got Tinker Toys. Or there was the wonderful year of the first Christmas in North Hatley when we skied every day and I got two new Arthur Ransomes: The Picts and the Martyrs and Great Northern. That most of the books I read were English meant that I viewed my own world as if through English eyes. Lake Massawippi and its surrounding hills doubled for the Lake District. Our little sailboat was Swallow in Swallows and Amazons. We did read, and over and over, all the L. M. Montgomery books but despite the PEI setting even those had an English flavour. Montgomery’s characters’ intense love of the natural world and her descriptions of it are Romantic as in the Romantic poets. I rarely encountered Canadian writing otherwise.
Reading was my joy but as I entered adolescence it also was in a significant way my undoing. Dauntless Nancy of the Amazons was replaced by one girl or woman after another who was fatally undone or at the very least tamed by love. I lived for hours every day within an English, Russian or French classic, not aware of an inner conflict between my desire for independence and a growing yearning for a man who would test me to the limit and