Tests determined that he had profound hearing loss in both ears. He was fitted with a hearing aid, a cumbersome device with a console hanging on his chest and twin wires leading up to large earplugs. From a world of silence, he felt himself involuntarily thrust into the world of sound, but it was a world he was condemned never to fully hear. “With the hearing aid,” he later recalled, “I was able to hear very loud sounds, such as a plane flying low overhead. However, I could not hear softer sounds such as the chirping of a bird, the buzzing of a bee, or someone whispering softly. I was oblivious to those types of sounds.” He was made to wear his hearing aid from the moment he woke up in the morning until he went to bed at night. But the technical limitations of the primitive analog hearing aids, which simply amplified all sounds indiscriminately, meant that he missed a lot of what was being said when having conversation with others. He had to lip-read when someone was talking. As he told me, “I required a good volume of voice to hear words properly; I required clarity of speech. My hearing aids didn’t have the ability to filter out background sounds such as a normal person’s ears would do in a noisy room.” Nor was any sound directional—it came from a box on his chest, not from any particular point in a room.
Vincent was enrolled in a public school with a special class for training hearing-impaired students to listen to words and to speak properly as well as to learn the same things hearing students would be learning in grade 1. But the class of about twenty students had eight grade levels in it, and the teacher concentrated on teaching the upper three grades of students to prepare them for integration into mainstream classes at high school. “The students in the lower grades were left pretty much to play around by themselves,” Vincent recalled. “Not much effort was put into teaching lip-reading, listening, talking, reading, and writing.”
Feeling marginalized and left out, he learned very little during those two years. In grade 3, he was moved to another public school with a much smaller class of about ten students with three grade levels. Here he learned more quickly. The following year he moved to yet another class with about ten students ranging from grades 4 to 6. For the first time, in grade 4, he was put in regular class part-time. However, he was lost in that class because of poor acoustics in the room and his inability to follow what was being said. “Self-consciousness that I was somehow different from the others started with my integration in the hearing class,” he told me. A year later more changes were made: He and a classmate who was also hearing-impaired were seated in the front of the class, close to the teachers, some of whom made a point of speaking slowly and clearly for their benefit. In grade 6 he spent half his time in regular classes but continued to have difficulty following what was said. He acquired a tape recorder into which he would speak, and then he’d listen to what he’d said. He used the tape recorder for a few years, trying to improve his pronunciation. He went on to attend regular classes full-time through grades 7 and 8, and, against all odds, he completed high school, then put himself through university.
Notwithstanding baby boomer nostalgia for the remembered simplicity and wholesomeness of the Leave It to Beaver era, this was a cruel time in which to be in any way different from the norm. Contempt and ridicule were heaped upon anyone whose language, skin color, or physical abilities differed however slightly from the one and only way everyone was supposed to be. Like other deaf people, Vincent was at times discounted as stupid by persons who had no idea what an agile mind and determined spirit he possessed.
ALL OF US kids were now attending school, my father continued working at a pace that would have exhausted most people, and my mother ran the household. She was responsible for all the cooking, cleaning, laundry, and shopping. Her meals remained steadfastly loyal to the tenets of British cuisine. Usually there’d be meat of some kind, perhaps sausages or bacon, chicken or an inexpensive cut of beef or pork. Potatoes almost always and at least one vegetable, typically boiled for far longer than necessary, then smeared with margarine and enlivened with salt. Rice was seldom if ever on the menu, nor was pasta. Herbs were kept on a very short leash, and exotica like yogurt or phyllo pastry remained beyond us. Amazingly, with so productive a vegetable garden, we never ate salad. By and large, the vegetables my father grew—enormous volumes of onions, cauliflower, cabbage, brussels sprouts, broccoli, carrots, parsnips, rutabagas, tomatoes, and peas—were those we’d eaten in England. Questionable Americanisms like squash and sweet corn took a very long time to work themselves into the garden and thence into the kitchen. Also true to British tradition, we never ran short of sweets, as mother baked bread pudding, ginger cake, fruit pies, and scones. She made wonderful Irish soda bread, long slices of which served as platforms for a thin skim of margarine and dollops of homemade fruit jam. Both my parents had a tremendous capacity for drinking tea and eating toast with jam.
The closest we ever came to dining out was on Friday evenings, when the Catholic injunction against eating meat on Friday justified getting takeout from Ron’s Fish & Chips. Located just a few blocks away on Jane Street in a small converted house, Ron’s was the ultimate in fast-food cuisine. There were no franchise burger or chicken or pizza joints around in those days, so Ron’s was where you went for takeout. Looking like the quintessential wiseguy with slicked-back black hair, wearing an apron of estimable vintage, Ron worked the vats in back, entirely free of concern about trans fats or cholesterol levels. Into the vats of simmering fat he plunged metal baskets of real fries cut from real potatoes and thick pieces of actual cod, oceans away from today’s patties of reconstituted fish parts and God knows what else pressed and frozen in some sweatshop in Guangzhou. Ron’s wife, whose name I never learned, wrapped each order in multiple sheets of newspaper, handed them over the counter, and took the money. I was hopelessly tongue-tied in my dealings with her; she seemed so like young Elizabeth Taylor with her mascara and vivid lipstick, her dark hair pinned up, and her tantalizingly bulging blouse unbuttoned to the point of revealing more than should have been revealed to innocents like myself. Occasionally fetching Friday dinner from Ron’s was perhaps my favorite chore.
My mother was not an enthusiastic cook. She may have been so earlier on and then grown tired of producing from scratch three meals a day for six people, every day, year after year. Her solution was not to eat out but to devise cunning shortcuts. On Fridays when fish and chips from Ron’s were not on order (damn!), pancakes were a meatless alternative. As a pancake flipper of not inconsiderable expertise myself, I can imagine how tedious it would become for anyone other than Aunt Jemima to be standing at a stove flipping sufficient pancakes to satisfy four ravenous boys. She decided that individual pancakes were an unnecessary complication and took to dumping the entire bowl of batter into a deep fry pan and cooking the whole works en masse. The resulting thick cake, served in stodgy blocks, was less than satisfactory, but we had been taught long before to be grateful for whatever food we were given and to never complain. Leaving even a morsel of uneaten food on the plate, however unpalatable, was not done.
Far more disheartening was her radical revamping of Christmas dinner. The nostalgia-inducing feast we’d so loved back in England was never quite the same in Canada, and my mother eventually decided that she had better things to do with her Christmas Day than spend the whole of it in the kitchen. Instead, she roasted the turkey the day before and for Christmas dinner served cold slices along with potato chips from a bag and cranberry sauce from a can. Only the Christmas cake and pudding survived in their former glory. I was horrified at the time, but in retrospect salute her independence of spirit, her refusal to continue being a perpetual domestic servant.
NOTWITHSTANDING MOTHER’S CULINARY shortcuts, in our familial value system the necessity of hard work was an absolute given. A life of abject misery in the parish poorhouse awaited those who did not put their shoulder to the wheel, their nose to the grindstone, and their heart into their work. We certainly didn’t identify this ethos as the Protestant work ethic, but we wholeheartedly embraced its Calvinistic trinity of hard work, independence, and scrupulous saving. As already mentioned, I launched my working career with delivering newspapers, but nudging toward my midteens meant a ratcheting-up of employment, so I started supplementing that income with summer yard work in the neighborhood. One of the least successful entries in my employment dossier occurred at this time, when I was hired to feed and water several dozen ferrets kept in cages by one of our outdoorsy neighbors. He raised these fearsome creatures for hunting rabbits