Almost immediately upon arrival, Young felt tension in the household. Margaret arranged a bridge game. She invited a male friend to join them. The friend mistook Jack for Mac, Margaret’s brother. “I remembered Reg’s indignation at such a thought,” Jack told Peter in 1996. Jack and Margaret were partners, and they won all evening. The next day before he boarded the return train to London, Jack and Margaret had a walk in a nearby park. “I still remember the English tweed suit she wore,” Young told Peter, “and her ‘sensible’ walking shoes. It was a beautiful, crisp, fall day.” Margaret talked about her son and described him as “an extremely bright boy bordering on genius.” She was certain that Peter would be a success.
In addition to books and bridge, Margaret also indulged in alcohol, cigarettes, and fine clothing, the accoutrements of the liberated woman of the 1940s. Because nylon stockings were made scarce by the war, Margaret took to staining her long legs “a silken brown,” and her young son, sitting on one of the twin beds in his parents’ bedroom, sometimes watched her as she carefully painted a faux seam on each leg “from her heel to the back of her knees.”47 For one of her photographic portraits, she wore a beautiful fur stole draped around her elegant shoulders. She enjoyed trips to Toronto where she dined at the fashionable Arcadian Court at Simpson’s department store, high above the intersection of Queen and Yonge Streets.
Fascinated by drama, Margaret became active in the Galt Little Theatre. For Love from a Stranger, a murder-mystery produced for the 1946–47 season, she was assistant director.48 In another production Peter played the role of his mother’s son. Margaret also performed in Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit,49 a play about love the second time around.
The boy and his mother were always close. In those days, the biannual arrival of Eaton’s catalogue was always a time of excitement at farms and in small towns across Canada. The catalogues were full of colour photographs of toys and clothing and household wares that stimulated the imagination, especially during the Second World War when many goods were rationed. Peter always retained happy memories of snuggling up against his mother as they examined the catalogue page by page.50
During one Christmas holiday, Peter folded gift boxes at Brown’s Jewellery Store on Main Street. Owned by the father of his good friend, Tom Brown,51 the store was located just up the street from the Carnegie Library. The money he earned bought a Christmas gift for his mother, perhaps something from the elegant jewellery shop decorated with two large, attractive urns imported from Japan by earlier generations of Browns. The boy was mad about hockey. One winter his mother dressed him in a scratchy white turtleneck with dark blue cuffs and waistband, which had once belonged to her brother. The sweater kept her son warm during bone-chilling mornings when he insisted on “slipping down the hill to the hockey rink before decent people were up.”52
“I can feel that turtleneck now, rough and itchy under my ears,” he told Morningside listeners one day when he was introducing novelist Roch Carrier, well-known for his story about ordering a Montreal Canadiens sweater from Monsieur Eaton, who, instead, mailed the boy a Toronto Maple Leafs sweater.
Peter was so busy playing hockey in the park that he failed to catch a glimpse of the sixteen-year-old Gordie Howe, who was in Galt during the 1944–45 season as a member of the junior farm team of the Detroit Red Wings. At least that’s what Peter claimed in an article in 1965.53 Fifteen years later he told fans of the Edmonton Oilers that, as a boy, he had indeed seen Howe in uniform, and he repeated that version of the story in The Game of Our Lives. He also bragged that, when he was about eight, Harry Lumley threw him over his shoulder into the local swimming pool. Eight years older than Peter, the young goaltender played for the farm team of the Red Wings, and therefore, like Howe, he may very well have been practising in Galt during the summer of 1942. In The Game of Our Lives, Peter’s imagination embroidered the Lumley story. Lumley was joined by fellow hockey player Marty Pavelich, and Peter was thrown into Willow Lake along with a whole gang of his friends.54
Radio, the only broadcast medium then available in Canada, was a means of escape for Peter. It also helped to develop his imagination and taught him to listen. “Writers have to cultivate the habit early in life of listening to people other than themselves,” claims Russell Baker.55 In his memoirs, Peter mentioned Abbott and Costello, Jack Benny, and other American radio entertainers, as well as CBC personalities such as the Happy Gang, Mart Kenney, and Lorne Greene. He also enjoyed radio drama. As she ironed on Monday evenings, Margaret listened to Lux Radio Theater, produced by Cecil B. DeMille, and Peter was there with her. He also began to pay attention to dramas produced by CBC Radio.56
Until 1952, when Canadian television first aired, most Canadians had only heard hockey games, unless they were lucky enough to obtain tickets to games at Maple Leaf Gardens, the Forum in Montreal, or Detroit’s Olympia. Listening to hockey games on radio was an excellent way to develop the imagination. As the play-by-play was described by Foster Hewitt, the listener had to picture the players moving out of their own zone to stickhandle and pass into the opposition’s zone.57 Like most boys his age, Peter supplemented his imagination by collecting photographs of National Hockey League players, courtesy of Beehive Golden Corn Syrup, whose labels, when mailed to company headquarters, brought an autographed photograph of a favourite player. Peter also filled scrapbooks with articles about hockey and photographs of players clipped from Galt’s Daily Reporter, which he delivered six days a week. He may also have clipped articles and photos from the London Free Press and Liberty magazine, both of which he delivered for a short time. At about age eleven he heard Syl Apps, a native of Galt, speak at the annual hockey banquet in Galt.
During the 1945–46 season, Peter first witnessed an NHL game. Gregor Young, his favourite uncle, was a returned soldier who found work in the advertising department of Imperial Oil, sponsor of the hockey broadcasts. The company gave Young two tickets. Uncle and nephew were ushered up to the Gondola, the large broadcast booth floating high above the ice of Maple Leaf Gardens. Peter was thrilled to sit close to Foster Hewitt, whom he could see through soundproof glass. Peter and his uncle were handed earphones that allowed them to listen to Hewitt as his voice went across Canada and Newfoundland. The excitement at being in the Gardens, and so close to Hewitt, as well as the unaccustomed height above the ice, made Peter nauseous. “I tore my earphones off in a moment of frenzy,” he recounted in his memoirs, “and banged them on the shelf. The impact echoed through Foster’s microphone and out to hockey fans in Canada and Newfoundland and on the ships at sea.” In reality, of course, Peter’s earphones did no such thing. Otherwise Hewitt and listeners from Vancouver to St. John’s would also have picked up every word of conversation between Peter and his uncle. Ten years later Peter varied the story by claiming that he had assisted Hewitt that evening.58
Even as a child, Peter was passionate about golf, and Margaret and Reg encouraged him “to swing a sawed-off club at some old balls on the front lawn.” When Peter was about ten, the Colonel also gave his grandson tips on golf. “Pr-r-retend there-r-re’s a big spike r-r-running r-r-right up your ar-r-rse and out thr-r-rough your-r-r head, laddie,” the Colonel would tell Peter. In his sports column in Saturday Night twenty years later, Peter explained that his grandfather trilled his r’s because his ancestors were Polish.59 Under his grandfather’s tutelage, Peter soon learned to break eighty. “That summer,” he noted in an article in Saturday Night in 1966, “I entered myself in the qualifying round for my age group in the Ontario Junior Tournament.” On the day of the tournament, he rose early in order to practise. “Around mid-morning,” Peter recalled, “the other young players from my hometown came to drive me to the Cheddoke course in Hamilton.” Peter even brought his own caddy, the only player to do so.
In June 1947, Peter graduated from Dickson Public School. That summer of his thirteenth birthday he worked at the Waterloo Golf and Country