One morning my mother sent me to buy milk. Hershy and Jackie Keenan, another neighbour, trudged along with me. What was in my mother’s mind sending a four-year-old to buy milk in a glass bottle? One of the boys who insisted on carrying it dropped it just as we got to our front door. Milk and glass splattered over the walkway. When I rushed in to tell my mother, the two boys denied they had anything to do with it. I was shocked my two friends would lie. My parents had told me lying was a sin. It was even more shocking that anyone would do so when it cast someone else in a guilty light.
The perfidy of friends didn’t end there. A few days later, one of the boys and I were coming through the back alley after buying some candy. The boy stopped, pulled down his pants, squatted, and did a huge bowel movement on the pavement. I was fascinated, because the only ones I’d ever seen till now were always floating in toilet water. When we got home, I rushed in to tell my mother about the remarkable pavement presence of “Number Two.” She in turn told the boy’s mother. All four of us hurried back to the scene of the crime. The evidence was still there, in its pristine, sculpted state. The culprit started to cry and denied it was his. Worse still, he said it was mine!
“No, it’s not, it’s not.” I cried to my mother, as once again I was betrayed by a friend’s lies.
Mother was very quiet the rest of the day. When I went to bed that night, I realized she wasn’t sure whether to believe me. I felt utterly powerless because there was no way to prove to her that I was telling the truth.
In their own way, by their own lights, they tried to care for you tried to teach you to care for objects of their caring.
— Adrienne Rich, “Meditations for a Savage Child,” from Diving into the Wreck
I wasn’t a total angel. My first conscious act of disobedience occurred when I was four. On the weekends my father would take me sledding down the gentle slopes beside Balmy Beach Canoe Club. Some other children would go down the hill sitting backwards on their sleighs.
“Daddy, I want to go that way down the hill.”
“No, Lorraine. You’ll hurt yourself if you do.”
Ignoring his warning, I went down — backwards. It was an uneventful ride. No bumps or collisions. Yet as I trudged up to the top of the hill, I felt blood running out of my nose. Where had the nosebleed come from? Is that what happened when you disobeyed? The mysterious power of parental prohibition was indelibly impressed on my mind.
Balmy Beach Canoe Club as it looked in the 1930s. Beacher and Canada Sports Hall of Fame athlete and sports writer Ted Reeve stands in back row, second from left.
Those outings with my father were special because he was away all week. Life normally had a regular routine, although one night in July 1936 that routine was altered. Small changes have a huge impact on childish minds. My parents took me down to the hill above the Balmy Beach Canoe Club and said we were going to sleep outside that night. This, to me, was a grand adventure. Their reasons were practical and necessary however. The temperature had soared to 105 degrees Fahrenheit (almost 41 degrees Celsius). It was the worst heat wave in Canadian history. My mother was pregnant with my sister Suzanne and my father knew we had to get out of our hot basement apartment. So we slept out under the stars surrounded by scores of other Beachers. With no air conditioning available then, 542 Ontarians eventually died. Our proximity to the waters of Lake Ontario saved us.
The baby carriage was always placed outside our basement apartment window. That way, if the baby cried, my parents could hear it.
One of Dad’s letters from 1941 when he was still on the road. He’d get only a small commission on the $110 dollar order!
Most of my time was spent with my mother. Thursday was a special day in my week. Mom and I would sit at the kitchen table in our basement apartment. There’d be an accumulation of letters my dad had sent her that week. She’d read each one aloud in sequence. When she’d finished, I’d join her in the ending I knew by heart. “I miss you and the baby. As ever, your adoring Neil” followed by eleven big Xs. That “as ever, your adoring Neil” was the final phrase in every letter he sent all the sixteen years he was travelling. I knew my mother treasured these letters because she kept them for the rest of her life. Whenever the inevitable strains of marriage would temporarily overtake her and my dad, she’d read one or two of them, reliving the flush of their early love.
These letters kept me close to my dad even though Mom was the constant physical presence. Dad was “on the road” Monday to Friday, a travelling salesman perfecting his pitch as he worked solely on commission for Sutherland Press, his employer in St. Thomas, Ontario. He’d stop at every small business in his territory and convince the owners, under the guise of buying gas, a sandwich, a packet of Sweet Caporal cigarettes, or getting a haircut, to look at his samples.
“What do you think about this as a goodwill gesture for your customers?” he’d ask, as he opened his sample case, displaying anything on which an ad could fit — small screwdrivers, sewing kits, rulers, emery boards, key rings, pens, and pencils. The crown of his collection of goodies, however, was the common man’s art collection — calendars produced by Sutherland Press depicting fishing (“all the phases of the moon shown for best catching times” ) and hunting, dogs, cats, and monkeys, scenic vistas of mountain temples, cowboys on the range, ethereal nude nymphs rising innocently from a secluded pool to bask in the sun’s rays. He’d explain to my mother, “I always show them more than one line, so they have to make a choice. Otherwise if I have only one thing to offer, they can easily say no.”
Life on the road in the Depression years was competitive and he had to fight for survival for his small family. “Do you remember, Maw, when Lorraine was a baby, I’d shoot craps in the hotel at nights so you’d have money to buy orange juice for her?” he’d reminisce in later years. That tame love of gambling was disguised in the letters as “having a card game in the hotel in Peterborough” with fellow travelling salesmen like “Tiny” Mercer, Bill Mickelthwaite, and Chubby O’Toole, all peddling their particular “lines” in the same territory.
After we’d read through all three letters, the last of which had arrived only that morning, we’d open the Laura Secord candy box, where mother kept her photos. It was my job to lift off the lid bearing an embossed medallion of a stern woman in a starched bonnet. As I handed my mom each picture, I’d ask, “Who’s this, Mommy?” No matter how often she told me I’d ask each time, loving the predictability of her answers.
There’d be photos of my father in an argyle sweater, posing nonchalantly against a spiffy car, his arm around Mom in her very chic fur-collared coat (no doubt one she’d modelled for her former employer, the Spadina clothing manufacturer). Beside them stood two other couples, arms joined around one another’s waists, each person with one foot raised in the air, doing a kick-step.
“Oh, Lorraine, you know who that is. That’s Auntie Flo and Uncle Frank. And that’s Auntie Phil. Can’t you tell from her beautiful teeth? And that’s her boyfriend she went around with for years — Dimmie Woodie. Boy, how those two could Charleston!”
My first impressions of what it would be like to be grown up came from those photos. You had someone you loved with his arm around you, and you posed as if you were part