Reports from other hills, Concession Street and St. Andrews were favourites, arrived by runner. The mess there it seemed was always worse than on our hill. Fire trucks were colliding with police cars and ambulances.
One snowy afternoon there actually was a fire at the top of Central School Hill, and the firemen couldn’t get up through the jam. The fire was just over the fence from the schoolyard, on Bruce Street, in a little shed where a man with bulging eyes, a sort of hermit, fixed radios. The firemen didn’t have wireless communication in their trucks so there was a lot of shouting back and forth as to who was to do what and go where. Boys ran up and down the hill hollering contradictory rumours. There was an explosion. People were jumping out of windows.
At last Grenfell Davenport, running like a deer, ended the confusion. The fire was out, he hollered. He and a pack of boys had put it out with snowballs.
10 A Child’s Christmas on Havill Street
When Grandma and Grandpa Spring were still with us, we had Christmas dinner at their house on Havill Street in Galt. Before dinner we exchanged gifts in the parlour. Only one person at a time was allowed to open a gift and everyone would say “Ooh!” and “Ah!” as if they were at a fireworks display. After dinner the adults retired to the kitchen, leaving the children to play with their new toys or eavesdrop through the closed kitchen door. My mother and all my aunts had the gift of hysterical laughter, and when we heard that through the door we knew our uncles were telling jokes.
That done there was a hush while Aunt Sisley Alsop told stories of mystery and imagination. She was a spiritualist preacher in California and came every Christmas with a bag of messages from the dead. Gasps came through the door. Next came squeals when she read palms. It wasn’t what you would call an orthodox Christmas.
While my aunts did the dinner dishes and recounted difficult births, and before the poker game started, the uncles and larger nephews charged out to the street in a cloud of cigar smoke for a snowball fight. Strange now to recall Uncle John, the decrepit old man I sat watching hockey games with years later, running down Havill Street to snowball the fedora off Uncle Ted.
Every other Christmas, instead of playing poker after dinner and the snowball fight, the adults would indulge in a few games of bingo. This was in lieu of prayer and carol singing, which gives you some idea of where we stood on the social scale.
Uncle Fred Linder, in spite of stammering worse than anyone I have ever heard, insisted on calling the bingo. It was a challenge that everyone conceded. Anyway, he owned all the bingo paraphernalia (cards, a revolving cage that released the numbered Ping-Pong balls, et cetera). One year he forgot to bring the bingo equipment, and my father drove him home to pick it up in our 1929 Chevrolet.
On the return trip Uncle Fred, possibly because of my father’s flatulence, chose to ride outside on the running board. My father cornered onto Havill Street too fast for Uncle Fred to hang on, and he flew off and torpedoed through the slush headfirst into the snow banked along the curb. They slogged into the house, howling with laughter. Uncle Fred’s fedora was caked with slush and squished down around his ears. We all howled at the sight of him.
When Uncle Fred recounted what had happened, our mouths dropped and we fell silent. Not because of his near-death experience, but because he had stopped stammering. For half an hour he talked just like us. My mother, who believed that Uncle Fred stammered because he ran a machine gun during World War I, told my sister, Shirley, and me that this was our father’s first miracle.
Sadly, it didn’t last. The stammering, worse if anything, returned as soon as Uncle Fred began to call the bingo. My mother said this was the Lord’s way of telling us we were desecrating his birthday.
After Grandma and Grandpa Spring died, Christmas moved to Auntie Bea’s house just around the corner on Concession Street. Auntie Bea married late in life and met her husband at a bingo. She never won at bingo, my mother said, but the man she met became another Uncle Bill.
Theirs was a stillborn marriage. Auntie Bea remained a spinster and Uncle Bill, sexually frustrated, continually tested their love by threatening to die. It was his good fortune to develop a minor heart condition that required popping a nitroglycerine pill before and after every exertion when Auntie Bea was around. “I’m taking out the garbage, darling,” he would holler as he popped a nitro into his mouth with a flourish. “If I’m not back in five minutes, you’ll know that I’ve dropped.” Sometimes in a pique she would dare him to go ahead and drop and he would say, “You’d like that, wouldn’t you, sweetheart? Well, I might just be around for years.”
They tormented each other through Thanksgiving dinner, and we all braced ourselves for the crash, possibly headfirst into the potato salad. But at Christmas they always managed a truce, like the one on the Western Front in France in 1914.
Ours wasn’t a drinking family except for two uncles, one great-uncle, and three cousins, so Christmas never got out of control. Auntie Bea, however, after one sip of wine, would do a little dance by herself until she got dizzy and fell onto the sofa.
A Salvation Army major lived next door, and Auntie Bea took great pains to hide from him the fact that any alcohol entered her house. One year, a couple of days before Christmas, she was nursing a large bottle of wine from the bus stop when she came upon the major shovelling the snow off her front walk. She hid the bottle under her coat and stopped to thank him. They talked of charity and sobriety for several minutes before she lost her grip and the bottle smashed at his feet. She told my mother she couldn’t think of a single thing to say while the major helped her pick up the broken glass. My mother said she should have told him her husband had made her buy it, but Auntie Bea lacked the guile.
Over Christmas and New Year’s the Galt Canadian Pacific Railway station is now the bleakest place in town. Even the freight trains take a holiday. The depot sits dark and silent. What a contrast to the days of passenger trains and steam engines in the 1940s and 1950s when the station was the liveliest place in town.
Hundreds of people went there just to watch passengers coming and going, especially on weekends. Orville Rumble, who wore sunglasses day and night, summer and winter, went there to scout new ladies coming to town. Fish in wooden crates arrived, too, from Port Dover, and Lake Erie and Northern electric cars made it up to the station on a spur line. On holiday weekends sightseers parked their cars on Rose Street and walked to the station. Taxis crowded the parking space close to the platform. Galt Cab, Fraser’s Taxi, De Luxe Cab, and Preston Taxi flocked to the station at train time like gulls to a fish boat.
Holiday trains came in two sections fifteen minutes apart. The first section, made up of old wooden coaches, carried college students. There was a lot of singing on board, and on occasion someone would blow a bugle out the door. The second section, comprised of steel coaches, carried the establishment: businessmen wearing mohair coats, ladies sporting fur hats, magnates in club cars full of cigar smoke, and sometimes in the last two coaches, the Toronto Maple Leafs or Detroit Red Wings hockey teams.
On a Saturday night in winter, back when the late-edition Toronto Star arrived by train, paperboys and girls ran circles around cars as they heaved snowballs. The station had a general waiting room and a separate ladies’ waiting room, presumably a sanctuary for spinsters and nuns and other custodians of virginity. The beer parlours downtown were similarly divided.
“Here she comes!” someone would shout at the first sign of the headlight rising in the east, and everyone in the waiting rooms would rise as if for a hymn, lift their luggage, and jam through the doors to the platform. The awesome