During any distant war, life on the home front goes on almost normally. Such was the case, apparently, in Galt during the Second World War. People played ball games in the park, and during the annual Galt Fall Fair, young people, but surely not Peter, hopped the fence surrounding the park in order to avoid the admission charge. Lois, one of Peter’s Morningside listeners, recalled the gangly boy she used to glimpse through the boards of the back fence as she rode her bike down the lane, past the large bush of yellow roses that pushed through the fence at 24 Park Avenue.36 Jeanette, another schoolmate, remembered Peter’s beautiful blond hair and flawless olive complexion. Photographs verify that he was an attractive young lad. In most, Peter appears content, though in one he seems a bit overawed by his tall, well-dressed mother. As he peers up admiringly at her, as if waiting for some sign of recognition, she ignores him. With a slight and knowing smile on her round, attractive face, she is more interested in the camera and perhaps in the person taking her picture.
Photographs of Peter’s stepfather and Peter together either were not taken or have not survived. Uncle Reg, his nieces recall, could be difficult. He was a man of silences. Ed Mannion, whose family lived near the Browns, recalled Reg as rather brusque and difficult. Although Peter and Reg were never close, Peter admitted that Reg did, on occasion, slip over to the ice rink to watch his stepson play hockey, and perhaps to remind him that it was suppertime. In fact, on one occasion Peter called his stepfather “a very nice, decent man.” It was Reg who drove Peter, at about age twelve, to the family doctor when he was hit on the forehead by a stray puck, which, Peter claimed, had left a scar that “still creases my forehead, and which I still finger proudly when I stare in the mirror and think of the mornings in the winter sun.” It may have been Reg who encouraged Peter to hunt. In “The Pleasure of Guns,” an essay read on This Country in the Morning, Peter related an incident that happened when he was thirteen. “I shot a groundhog once,” Peter told his listeners, “and then I went and picked it up, and that was enough for me.”37
Peter was on good terms with his step-cousins who lived nearby. One night, when he slept over at their house, he shared a bedroom with Shirley Brown. She was ten and he was six. The future broadcaster talked and talked well into the wee hours of the morning. Unknown to Shirley at the time, Peter had a childhood crush on her. An only child, Peter seems to have longed for conversation. From an early age, he loved to communicate. “When you’re the only pea in the pod,” observes journalist and memoirist Russell Baker, “your parents are likely to get you confused with the Hope Diamond. And that encourages you to talk too much.”38 In his memoirs, published in 1988, Peter paints a sunny picture of the town. However, in 1982, during the first season of Morningside, he inadvertently revealed that there had been shadows. In an interview with Alice Munro, the fiction writer talked about Poppy Cullender, a character in her short story “The Stone in the Field.” Poppy was thought odd because he was single, and because he collected antiques. Poppy and the narrator’s mother were partners in an antiques business. Peter asked Munro to read from the story.
“There were farmhouses,” Munro read, “where Poppy was not a welcome sight.” Children teased him, and not a few women locked the door as he approached, his eyes rolling “in an uncontrollably lewd or silly way.” He usually called out “in a soft lisp and stutter, ‘Ith anybody h-home?’” In 1969, years before the government of Pierre Trudeau decriminalized homosexuality in Canada, Poppy went to jail for making harmless overtures to two baseball players on the train to Stratford.
At the end of the reading Peter suddenly blurted out that there was a Poppy Cullender in Galt. Immediately, he began to distance himself from that odd, unnamed man of his childhood. “He wasn’t close to me,” Peter insisted. “I didn’t know him.” Just to make sure that there was no parallel with Munro’s story, he added, “He wasn’t friends with my mother.”39 It was an oddly defensive statement, especially for a man who painted himself as sympathetic to underdogs. Nowhere in his memoirs or elsewhere does this Poppy-type man appear, except in The Morningside Years, published in 1997, which includes the transcript of the interview with Munro.
Each summer Reg and Margaret Brown drove Reg’s Oldsmobile coupe40 to the Gzowski compound on Lake Simcoe near Sutton, Ontario. Peter’s grandfather had purchased the lakeshore property from the Sibbald family around 1920. Reg and Margaret sometimes stopped for a visit and occasionally stayed overnight. Their purpose was to leave young Peter for the summer under the watchful eye of his grandparents. Peter always remembered the Colonel with affection. He was the only respected male authority in his young life. During part of one summer, so Peter once claimed, he attended Camp Nagiwa, a camp for boys on Ontario’s Severn River41 where, perhaps, he imagined himself participating in campfire singsongs, long hikes, and canoeing. If indeed he had ever attended a summer camp, it wasn’t Nagiwa, which wasn’t founded until 1954. 42
In Galt, Margaret was able to put her library degree to good use. At the public library she became the children’s librarian. Years later several of Peter’s listeners wrote to him about the librarian they adored. Not only did she read to them, but she also allowed them to stamp return dates on borrowed books and to re-shelve returned books.
“Mother felt out of place in the Presbyterian stone town of Galt with its knitting mills and metal works,” Peter once noted. Her tastes were different from those of the average resident. She read Dorothy Parker, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and W.B. Yeats, and she spoke French. She also enjoyed jazz. And she took a fancy to mixed-doubles badminton. Margaret joined the local club, whose members played in the auditorium of the Galt City Hall on Main Street, a couple of blocks uphill from the Carnegie Library. There is a photograph, taken not long before her death, of Margaret posing with fellow members of the club. While the others look relaxed and happy, Margaret appears uncomfortable as she stands beside her badminton partner. Years later one of the players mailed Peter a copy of the photograph clipped from the local Galt newspaper. Peter kept the clipping on his desk at the main CBC building on Jarvis Street. One day, in May 1992, he showed it to Marco Adria, who was interviewing him. As he examined this photograph, Peter speculated, “Mother would not have been happy in the badminton club.”
Inside her “confining” marriage, Peter noted, his mother “chafed and strained.”43 On an episode of Life & Times filmed in 1997, Peter remarked that Margaret was “very funny, very quick and ... very naughty.” Very naughty? What did he mean? That was the closest he ever came to acknowledging what appears to have been an open secret in Galt in the 1940s. One of the other people in the photograph of the badminton club offered a slightly different interpretation. “I admired her for her appearance and poise,” she recalled, “but not for her behaviour.” It seems that Margaret and her badminton partner were “more than friends.”
Alice Munro knows that in small towns there is rarely, if ever, a quiet affair. In her book Open Secrets, there is a story called “Carried Away,” which features a small-town librarian who favours a dark red blouse and has lips to match. “You could not say with any assurance that she had a bad reputation,” notes the narrator. “But it was not quite a spotless reputation, either.” Like Peter’s mother, Louisa the librarian once worked in the book department at Eaton’s. Louisa was rumoured to have had affairs with travelling salesmen.44
During the interview with Marco Adria in 1992, Peter seemed artfully ignorant of the extramarital relationship. However, on school playgrounds children are prone to gossiping and teasing. The children who mocked Poppy Cullender in that other Munro story were typical of children everywhere. Peter’s use of the code word naughty on Life & Times suggests that he did know about his mother’s alleged affair. That his stepfather probably knew about it may explain why some people found him difficult.
In 1946, when Jack Young, Margaret’s cousin, was studying at