Born Naked (13 page)

 

 

 

12

 

 

HELEN'S TRIP EAST REINFORCED HER
desire to return permanently to familiar places and familiar faces. She did not nag Angus about this—nagging was not her way—but he was aware of how she felt and secretly shared her yearning for the home of their younger years. A Bay of Quinte Bullfrog born and bred, he was starting to feel as if he were being transformed into a Desert Horned Toad.

Despite (or because of) the dust and drought, his imagination seethed with visions of white-winged ships and rolling oceans, which resulted in the Saskatoon Public Library acquiring one of the outstanding collections of maritime books in all of Canada. He, too, was homesick.

Not being privy to my parents' inner feelings which, I must admit, did not greatly interest me in any case, I was taken by surprise when, in mid-summer, Angus announced it was time for us to pay a visit to the past. I had no suspicion that it was also in his mind to see what opportunities might now exist for him as a librarian in eastern Canada.

The prospect of travelling east did not thrill me. I was reluctant to leave my Eden at the country club, but at least I had the satisfaction of seeing most of the fledglings whose lives I had been overseeing depart from their nests before we also departed.

Leaving the caravan behind (itself now an empty nest), we climbed into Eardlie and on July 27 set out for the east. We reached my grandparents' cottage in the Gatineau Hills early in August and Helen and I settled in while Angus set off to “sniff out the lay of the land.”

The cottage and its environs, which I had found so enthralling when I was eleven, no longer excited me. While my mother revelled in long days spent in trivial, pursuits (swimming, afternoon teas, and bridge games), I grew increasingly restive, longing to be back in sun-scorched and drought-stricken Saskatchewan. In the space of two years, I had become a prairie boy and, although this second visit to the Gatineaus was hardly an ordeal (there were boats to row, lakes in which to swim, and birds, if only
eastern
ones, to watch), it seemed no more than an interlude in my life.

One pleasant memory was of a ten-day visit by my cousin Helen Fair Thomson from Calgary. My uncle Jack's daughter, she was a devil-may-care little blonde a couple of years my junior who was happy to help me enliven things a little.

Grandmother Georgina Thomson, the doyenne of the establishment, made a ritual of drinking a small glass of sherry every evening before going to bed. “Just a
tiny
sip,” she would say apologetically, “to help me sleep, you know.” This it certainly seemed to do for her snores reverberated through the flimsy walls of the cottage to such effect that, early on, I had shifted
my
bed to the boathouse. But the “tiny sip” turned out to be mere camouflage.

One day Helen Fair, prowling about where she hadn't ought, discovered that our revered grandmother kept a private stash consisting of two gallon jugs of cheap sherry secreted under her bed.

We told no one. Instead, we helped ourselves to Georgie's sleeping medicine, decanting our tithe into a pint milk bottle, after which we filled the sherry jug up to the proper level with naturally brown swamp water. We kept our bottle hidden in the ice-house and on hot days would sip at the sweet and heady wine while lounging in our bathing suits in the damp, cool sawdust.

Apparently Georgina did not sleep any the less soundly for drinking watered booze. According to my cousin, Grandmother's snoring continued unabated.

Late in August Angus returned to us, disheartened. He had found no suitable opening in library work and, in fact, there were precious few in any other activity, either, since the Depression was continuing to deepen. Nothing of this was discussed in my presence but, as what I viewed as exile from the west drew to its end, my mother became unaccountably downcast and Angus uncharacteristically gloomy.

Mutt and I and Angus left the Gatineau in the later part of August, Helen having elected to remain amongst her own kind a while longer, eventually to return to Saskatoon by train.

We three males drove to Oakville to spend some time with my paternal grandparents and my aunt Jean and her son Larry while Angus reconnoitred the library situation in nearby Toronto.

Since I had last seen them, my grandmother Mary had become an irascible invalid and my grandfather Gill had withdrawn so far into his private world as to be almost unreachable. I sought relief from this gloomy situation by writing a poem in which my antipathy for the urban east, and my love of the west, came through, loud and clear.

 

You come from the city, the fester spot

Where man and nature have drifted apart,

Where limbs decay and bodies rot

In the smoke and the grime and the smell.

 

You've left the noise of man and machine

For the land and the sky where the air blows clean,

Where the loudest sound is the eagle's scream,

And the coyotes' lonely wail.

 

There's times you wish that you'd never left,

You think of your friends and you feel bereft.

So you swing your axe with a hand grown deft

And forget as the city grins.

 

When the meadowlark sings you sit enthralled.

You are there when the river ice cracks and growls.

You hear as the wolf chorus barks and howls.

You are one with the voice of the Plains.

 

I hardly need remark that I had been reading a lot of Robert Service.

Observing how restless I was, Angus one day asked if I would like to go into Toronto with him and visit the Royal Ontario Museum. This was equivalent to being invited to visit a major temple of the gods. I was ecstatic.

Next morning Angus dropped me off in front of the vast museum building, promising to pick me up in three hours' time. With considerable trepidation, I climbed the long flight of entrance stairs and asked a guard where the birds were kept. I followed his directions through echoing halls filled with such fascinating objects as Egyptian mummies and ancient Graecian weapons, until I reached the galleries housing the zoological displays. One of these halls was walled with glass cases of stuffed birds, all of them looking deader than death itself.

The bird gallery seemed totally empty of life until a fair-haired young man came striding briskly along. Seeing me contemplating a case of rigid warblers, he stopped and introduced himself as Jim Baillie, an assistant curator.

“You're interested in birds, eh?” he asked.

I nodded vigorously then told him I was from Saskatoon, whereupon he invited me to come with him behind the scenes into a huge room stinking so powerfully of mothballs it almost took my breath away. It was crammed with floor-to-ceiling metal cabinets in which, Jim told me, more than a hundred thousand “study skins” of Canadian birds were stored. He opened the hermetically sealed doors of a cabinet and slid out one of its many drawers to show me row upon row of stuffed avian cadavers laid out stiffly on their backs.

Every species of Canadian bird was to be found in this room, if not in life, at least in a form that could be closely examined and even handled. I was confronted by such a plethora of riches that I could hardly contain myself. Amused by my enthusiasm, Baillie turned me loose to explore the cabinets on my own.

For the next two and a half hours, I wandered in a dream, unaware of anyone else, including the director of the
ROM
who, on August 22, 1935, wrote in his journal:

“Today I met a fourteen-year-old boy, Farley Mowat, at the museum. He was searching the museum cabinets for birds he did not know or had not seen in Saskatchewan. Red-headed and freckled, he ought to make a name for himself in natural history. He is a grand-nephew of Frank Farley of Camrose, Alberta.”

On September 11 Angus, Mutt, and I finally headed for Saskatchewan. Having delayed well beyond his predetermined return date in the vain hope that something acceptable would turn up in Toronto, my father was now in such a tearing hurry that we arrived in Saskatoon three and a half days later. I think he drove most of each night while Mutt and I slept. All I recall of that mad dash is that Angus bought several dozen chocolate eclairs and the three of us subsisted on these for most of the journey. It was some time before I was again able to look a chocolate eclair in the face.

This sort of thing was characteristic of Angus. He believed that, if one was going to indulge oneself, one should do it in a big way. Soon after we got home he decided to indulge our mutual craving for fried onions. He bought a thirty-pound bag and five pounds of fat bacon, and we had fried bacon and onions for dinner every night for a week. Apart from making us both bilious, this diet induced flatulence of such potency that I was a virtual pariah during my first few days as a high-school student at Nutana Collegiate Institute. I could only thank my lucky stars that I had had the foresight to change my name to William. As it was, I had to bear with “Stinky” for some months.

Because some of the teachers at Nutana were interested in the same things I was, I now began to take an interest in school. Frank Wilson, called Monkey Wilson because of his gnarled little face, taught biology and taught it well. He was also a neophyte wildlife photographer with a passable knowledge of birds. Jelly Belly (I can't recall his proper name) taught mathematics but clearly was not enamoured of his subject and was tolerant of those of us who loathed it. On the other hand, he loved Indian lore and was an expert on the Plains tribes. He could sometimes be sidetracked from geometry into telling us tales about the Blackfeet and others such. Then there was Miss Edwards, my English teacher, who not only refrained from forcing us to memorize poetry we couldn't stomach, but allowed us to write essays on topics of our own choosing. She was most encouraging of my own literary bent—besides which she was young, nubile, and not averse to flirting a little, even with the likes of me.

This was something of considerable moment for, at long last, my male juices were beginning to flow. “I think the little bugger's balls are finally coming down,” was how my father described the change in me to Don Chisholm who, it may be remembered, was a close family friend and my mother's most devoted admirer. I overheard the comment and was not amused. My testicles had been down for a long time; it was just that they had not received any call to action.

I had (as noted) discovered masturbation as early as 1933 but since it hadn't pleasured me much then I had lost interest in it. Now my interest was vividly revived, something which did not escape Angus's attention and which doubtless inspired his comment to Don Chisholm. However, he sensibly did not forbid it. Nor did he refer to it in the bleak, guilt-inducing sexual terminology of the times as “self-abuse.” In fact, so far as I can recall, he only once referred to it at all. One morning over breakfast (still oatmeal porridge and honey), he looked me squarely in the eye and without any preamble said, “In the army, we used to call it pulling the pud. Everybody did it. Nothing wrong with it either. Nothing wrong with
you
playing with
yourself,
Bunje, so long as you don't get caught by a minister, or any of the other old women whose idea of pleasure is attending a good hanging. So carry on until you can try something better.”

I was speechless with embarrassment and, after this outburst, I think he was too. We said not another word to each other until we met again for dinner that evening. Then: “Your mother won't be home until the end of the month,” he told me, “so I've gone ahead and hired a girl to look after us before we get knee-deep in dirty dishes and soiled socks. Her name's Louise.”

To this day I don't know whether Angus hired Louise because he thought I was in need, or because he was in need, or genuinely as someone to clean the house and wash and cook. Maybe all three.

Louise was a knock-out. Nineteen years old, she was, in my father's eyes, the epitome of western femininity: “a buxom, big-boned prairie woman.” She had a luscious, husky voice, gleaming black hair and eyes, and couldn't have cooked anything more elaborate than a pancake had you paid her double wages. She couldn't actually do anything much in a housewifely way except make and consume vast quantities of chocolate fudge and, of course, do the washing.

Alas, she did not long remain with us. My mother arrived home early in October and a week later Louise departed. I never knew the rights of her dismissal but many years later Helen responded to an inquiry of mine with these enigmatic words: “It wasn't so much what Louise
couldn't
do. It was what she could.”

I was sorry to see her go for I had become fond of her and for a long time thereafter she was central to many of my more satisfying dreams. Yet I always had the sneaking suspicion that I was somehow in competition with my father for her. If so, I never had a chance.

Well, there would be other maids—though not for some time to come. After Louise's departure, my mother announced with unusual firmness that we were better off without a maid at all and that henceforward she would do the housework even if, she could not resist adding, “it quite wears me out.”

I lost out on two accounts. Louise was gone from my life. And I found myself spending a lot of time washing dishes, peeling potatoes, sweeping, and even dusting, while Helen was confined to bed or to the living-room couch because of her “poor face.” Since I knew my mother actually was suffering I did not much resent having to do housework, but I
did
resent having to assume another of a maid's duties.

Helen and Angus had planned a large cocktail party for mid-December. I was told I would be expected to distribute the hors-d'oeuvres and drinks. Not so bad, except that
I was to be accoutred in a maid's uniform and expected to pass myself off as a genuine female servitor.