One of Peter’s last articles at Ridley was entitled “Some Hints on Memory,” an amusing, self-deprecating short essay that provided tips on how to remember things. Licence numbers were memorable if broken into meaningful pairs of numbers, giving an age, a year, and so on. To remember laundry day, Peter tied a handkerchief around his wrist on Sunday evening. The following Thursday, when it began to smell, it was laundry time. “I have noticed,” he wrote, “that some boys around the School have tried to accomplish the same thing with a shirt or a pair of socks but I find the handkerchief less offensive.” His final tip was to set important dates and events to rhyming couplets. His first verse was about the upcoming Mother’s Day: “Though she may be far away / Please remember Mother’s Day,” lines both poignant and cheeky. The second verse was advice on how to avoid getting caught smoking: “Prefects check at half past ten / Then they go to sleep again. / Remember they are in a rut: / Eleven o’clock’s the time to butt.” And his third verse was how to get back into one’s room after curfew. He bragged that even his roommate, whose name he couldn’t recall, complimented him on his memory. He was so proud of this article that, more than thirty-five years later, he included it in A Sense of Tradition.
That he had become more self-confident and slightly cocky during his last year at Ridley shows in his writing style and ironic attitude. The March 1952 photograph of the first basketball team reveals a young man who is no longer the confused boy who cowered at Dean’s House two years earlier. At seventeen he seems more relaxed, the scars of acne no longer an overwhelming problem. His upper body muscles are developing, and he is becoming quite the handsome, self-aware lad.
Peter’s accounts of a trip to a bar on the American side of Niagara Falls also revealed a cocksure nature. In Ontario the legal drinking age was twenty-one; however, it was eighteen on the American side of the border. One version of the story appeared in an article written by Peter in 1970 for Saturday Night. After chartering a bus to Niagara Falls, Ontario, several of the boys from Ridley walked over the international bridge, spent time in a bar, and got drunk. Others only pretended to be drunk, for they didn’t want to be teased for not drinking. Two or three honest, sober boys were ostracized. In retrospect Peter admired their honesty but carefully avoided explaining his own role in the incident. The reader might be tempted to guess that he was one of the young men who merely faked inebriation. There are, naturally, many variations of the drinking story.11
There was one episode, however, for which there is only one version, because Peter never wrote about it. One dark evening, probably in his last year at Ridley, Peter was returning to the college. He was desperate for another smoke. He had a cigarette but no match. In the dim light of a street lamp, he came upon another solitary walker. “Gotta light?” he asked the man. The man reached into his pocket, pulled out a penny match packet, and proceeded to light a match. Mere inches apart, their faces glowed in the amber light of the match. As Peter sucked at the end of the cigarette, the man quietly asked “Wanna fuck?” Peter dropped the cigarette and ran. He reached the college dorm, tore up to his room, and was so agitated that he couldn’t speak. “What’s the matter, Peter?” asked John Girvin. It took Peter several minutes to calm down enough to recount the episode. Girvin never forgot that night. Peter, apparently, did, for in Canadian Living in March 1998, he wrote a loving article about Girvin called “Chums by Chance,” in which there is no mention of the proposition on the bridge. Instead, Peter recalled only that each night he and Girvin “would lie awake in our room and talk of girls, dreams and home.”
Strangely enough, in the first Morningside Papers, published in 1985, Peter and his editors decided to include a short chapter called “The Closet,” which consists of two letters, both of them on the subject of gay men. Coincidentally, St. Catharines and a boarding school play roles in each letter, which were sent to Peter after two people, strangers to each other, had heard a Morningside interview with novelist Howard Engel, on the subject of a gay man in St. Catharines who had committed suicide when he discovered his name on a police list of men who had enjoyed sex in a public toilet. Of course, it is improbable, after more than thirty years, that the man in St. Catharines who committed suicide was the same man Peter had met on the bridge about 1952. The first letter in “The Closet” was from a married man, the father of two children. To all appearances, he told Peter, he was happy. He did have, however, a dark side. “I want anonymous sexual encounters,” the man confessed. “They must be anonymous because I just cannot afford them being anything else.” From Duncan, British Columbia, came a second letter that told of a gay teacher in an unnamed boarding school who was forced to resign. Peter made no comment.
Peter graduated from Ridley in June 1952 with honours. He was awarded the Kelly Matthews Memorial Prize for mathematics, physics, and chemistry; received the Julian Street12 Prize for prose; and cadet platoon number four, of which he was the sergeant,13 won second prize. Peter also won the William H. Merritt Prize for public speaking, a prize that caused a bit of controversy. Each year the winner repeated the speech to the Rotary Club of St. Catharines. His topic was a comparison of American culture to human waste. American culture, he contended, developed at the same time as outdoor facilities moved inside and as toilet paper replaced stiff, glossy pages from shopping catalogues.14 As human waste grew more sanitized, American popular culture grew more insipid, proof being the movies of Shirley Temple and the Andy Hardy films of Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney.
In the end, Ridley authorities did allow their best public speaker to address the Rotarians, whose reaction went unrecorded. Peter was also awarded two university scholarships. In a photograph of Upper School prize winners, Peter looks proud as he poses in shirt, jacket, and tie, in the back row, with other prize winners, including John Girvin, on Peter’s left, as well as Jim Chaplin, R.K. “Shiggy” Banks, Andre Dorfman, and other bright young adults ready to face the world and to make their contributions to it.
Peter remembered his years at Ridley with great affection. “I belonged. I was a part of something in a way I have seldom been since,” he wrote in the Toronto Star on November 28, 1978. Even though he claimed that his year as editor of The Varsity, 1956–57, and his months as city editor of Moose Jaw’s Times-Herald, were also his happiest, there is no doubt that the high standards and strict discipline of the private school left a lasting impression, as well as many topics for books and articles. To be at his creative best, Peter always required imposed discipline.
A teenage Peter with sign this structure in disrepair. persons using it do so entirely at their own risk, perhaps on a construction site?
(Trent University Archives, Gzowski fonds 92-015/1/34/Photographer: Michael Gillan)
In September 1952, Peter entered the University of Toronto. By that time, the young adult, less self-conscious, was beginning to cope with the scars of acne. What he couldn’t handle was the lack of Ridley discipline. Years later he told a reporter that he wasted time playing crap games with taxi drivers. He drank at the King Cole Room in the Park Plaza Hotel and attended parties at his frat house, Zeta Psi, at 118 St. George Street, just north of Harbord Street on land now occupied by the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library and the university’s archives. One autumn weekend the University of Western Ontario football team was playing at Varsity Stadium in Toronto. John Girvin, a member of the Western team, visited Peter, who took him over to his frat house and showed him his initiation scar. Zeta Psi had welcomed Peter in typical fashion by imprinting its insignia into his arm with a branding iron.15 Since he was under oath to keep the practice