Back by popular demand

Christmas on the Ocean Limited

(This piece was written and published a number of years ago. When the late Peter Gzowski was hosting Morningside on CBC Radio, he asked listeners to send him something about Christmas for his Christmas Eve program. I sent this and he read it to end his program that day. Years later, I read it myself on Christmas Eve, on the CBC Radio Mainstreet program that covered the Maritimes. I have been asked to share this story again so here it is. It's my own personal Christmas tradition! I hope you enjoy it and I wish you all the best of the Christmas season.

Here's the story.

One winter day in Halifax

One of the "life stories" that has made the most difference to my life didn't happen as I was growing up. It was many years later, on a winter's day in downtown Halifax, that the events took place that would leave my life changed forever.

This story has been published before so this could be considered a later edition.

This is how the story starts:

---

On January 9, 1989, I walked home for lunch in downtown Halifax. It was unusual for me to go home for lunch. I was a magazine editor and there were always lots of people (writers!) who wanted to have lunch with me. I sometimes wonder what life would have been like if I had eaten out that day.

I unlocked the front door, went in and tossed my coat on the couch. I was immediately struck by the fact that I was not greeted by three cats. They had their own door/tunnel leading from the first floor bathroom window out to the deck but none of them liked the cold — and it was a cold day.

I went into the dining room and saw the doors to the china cabinet were standing open and my mother’s silver flatwear had been placed in my own suitcase, which was open on the floor.

While I stood trying to register what this meant, I heard someone coming down the stairs. I knew immediately that there was a burglar in the house. I stood still — there was nowhere I could go. I had always heard that people who did break-and-enters didn’t want to confront anyone and I imagined that he would rush down the stairs and straight out the front door, happy to be out of there.

But he came around the corner to where I was standing and he had a knife in his hand. He laid the knife against the side of my face and said, “Don’t try anything and you won’t get hurt.”

---

The story is written in five parts and here they are, all linked up for your reading convenience.

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

On the beaches, on the wharves, in the gravel pit. . .

From the time I moved to Chatham at the age of five until my early teens, I lived in a house that was part of a group called the "hydro houses" – although the power supply at the nearby plant didn't come from water. I guess they should have been called the "NB Power" houses – my father worked at the plant – but for the sake of simplicity, I'll stick with the hydro houses.

There were six houses, three on either side of a small street. There were three styles of house and each one faced its mirror image. They were at the very edge of Chatham, on the road to Loggieville. That road is very built up with subdivisions now but then, our houses and the neighbours right behind were just about the last houses before you got to Forrest Corner which you reached just before Loggieville.

The "Welcome to Chatham" sign was in our backyard. As little kids, we thought it was fun – magical, almost – to jump back and forth on either side of the sign and do "now-we're-in-town, now-we're-not."

The neighbours behind us, on the other side of the "Welcome to Chatham" sign, were the Sprays. The elder Mr. Spray, who seemed very old to me at the time but probably wasn't, had gone to fight in the Boer War. His son, Charlie, was a carpenter and cabinet-maker. Sometimes, we were allowed to go over to Charlie's workshop and watch him while he worked. The smell of new wood, freshly cut, can still take me back to that workshop.

At the end of our side of the little street was a stand of quite large evergreens which we called "the woods." It was a lovely place to play – there was lots of walking room as the lowest branches were way higher than we were. One of the fathers had put up a swing and there was a little wooden building – left from the construction of our houses – that we called "the playhouse."

At the end of the other side of the street was a field, a field that stretched all the way to the Shore Road which ran alongside our beloved Miramichi River.

At the top of the field, we had laid out bases and stomped down enough of the grass that it served as our ballfield. We – the kids from the hydro houses – played ball with the MacFarlanes and the Thorburns from the Hollow and with other kids who often showed up from the Hill or from further uptown.

There was a path which led from our houses across the field, around the ballfield, over to a lane – more like a wagon track – that ran alongside Howard MacIntosh's field. It was used a couple of times a year, probably during haying although I wasn't keeping track. Our fathers used the path and the lane when they walked to work at the NB Power plant.

Near the bottom of the field, approaching the Shore Road, was a gravel pit. We spent many happy hours in the gravel pit – it seemed very big to me, and maybe it was. There was an "island" in the middle of the gravelly wasteland, an upward protuberance that was topped with grass and, I was told, was the last place the bulldozer/digger stood before the gravel pit was abandoned by heavy equipment. We used to scramble to the top of the island which wasn't easy as the central part had eroded away and it involved hanging almost upside down while trying to make it over the top.

On the days we were going swimming, we would pass right by the gravel pit and head down the Shore Road. We were usually on bicycles. The nearest beach was McIntyre's. It wasn't a great beach but it was the nearest and that was its appeal. Further along was The Grove, a nicer beach but frequented by older teenagers and we were often made to feel unwelcome there. (Our impression was that there were shenanigans going on.)

The last beach downriver along the Shore Road was Terrill's Point and we usually didn't go there on bikes but one of the fathers would often drive us down after work.

The real treat for an after-work swim though – or for a Saturday or Sunday afternoon – was a trip down past Loggieville to Manderson's Beach. Manderson's was sandy – it was tidal so it could also be sea-weedy – and it had a canteen for hot dogs and ice cream and other treats. There were a few cottages just to the left after driving down the dirt road and I always envied the people who were there all the time, living at the beach.

(This is not Manderson's but it's just a bit down-river and it looks similar.)

I loved swimming in the Miramichi – it couldn't have been very clean because there were polluting industries upriver, not to mention no sewage treatment – and I never liked swimming in fresh-water lakes. I found lake water cold.

I think the Miramichi would be much cleaner today.

I had another swim in the Miramichi one day that was more inadvertent than my swims at Manderson's.

I was hanging out with other kids at the cement plant wharf. The cement plant was on the extreme opposite end of Chatham from where I lived – at the edge of town on the road to Newcastle. There were ships there occasionally.

I don't remember a lot of the details about this particular day or even who all was there. There were a few kids – we had biked there – and we were all probably around 12 or 13. We were sitting around, talking about this and that. At some point, we got up – were we making plans to leave? – and one of the boys picked me up and, without warning, threw me into the river.

I could swim but I was taken terribly by surprise and I still remember the frightening sensation of sinking, deeper and deeper. I struggled to change direction and finally broke the surface, gasping and sputtering. I wasn't having an easy time of it. I was fully dressed, remember.

Just then, a boy named Billy MacLean (whom I didn't really know) jumped in beside me. He put his arms around me and "swam me" a few metres downstream until I could touch bottom and walk to shore. I have no further memory of what happened next. I guess I got on my bike and went home.

A few years later, Billy MacLean sustained a serious head injury when he ran headfirst into the boards during a hockey game. I was told that his personality was dramatically changed by the accident.

'Is this the party to whom I am speaking?' *

My son is 17. As with most of his contemporaries, his phone appears to be permanently attached to his body. He holds text conversations, often with up to five or six people simultaneously while keeping an eye on the NBA draft, reporting bits and pieces of news items that pop up, updating Facebook, following Twitter, playing a game, watching YouTube. He lives a lot of his life inside that phone.

(I have written about the world and the language of text, right here, if you're interested.)

I don't usually play the "when-I-was-your-age" game. I try to avoid anything that resembles old-fogey-ism. I did tell him about the telephone though.

In the house where I grew up, when you came in the front door, you were in the hall. If you bore right, you would go upstairs – the stairs were open to the hall but separated from the downstairs by a wall. If you went straight ahead, you were in the heart of the house, with the living room to the left and the kitchen straight ahead.

The door from the hall and the door into the kitchen both opened into the living room area (it wasn't really separate from the living room; it was an outcropping of the living room) and were pinned back against the wall by a small piece of furniture called a "telephone bench" – or, I've since learned, also called a "gossip bench."

Ours was green, vinyl-covered, with two shelves on one side and a seat that raised to allow for storage underneath.

This is one:

And here's another:

Neither one of these is really like ours but if you combine certain elements from each, it would be sort of like ours.

Inside the storage seat were old catalogues and magazines and, for some reason, this toy:

I have no idea why I remember this, or why those things were kept there. I have no memory of anyone ever playing with them although I can still remember exactly how it felt to squeeze them and see the ping pong ball fly out. And yes, you were supposed to catch it.

Finally, this is what the telephone looked like – with the exception of the coiled cord:

Our number was 456-12 – expressed as four five six ring twelve. When it was for us, it rang one long, two short. All our phone conversations – intimate ones with boyfriends, secretive ones with girlfriends – were held just steps away from where family members were reading the paper, listening to the radio, chatting among themselves. Sometimes, if I felt I really needed the privacy, I would haul the little gossip bench out, squeeze myself behind one of the doors and try to have a jacket or something to build a little tent over my head. The vacuum cleaner was behind there too.

When we had this kind of phone, it was a party line. It didn't seem any kind of inconvenience as it had always been this way and we became used to sharing the line with neighbours. It was another level of learning to speak somewhat guardedly – maybe leading to a reticence which is not so obvious in subsequent generations!

"Listening in" was not routine at our house but we knew houses where it was. We knew one woman who kept an oven mitt beside her phone to cover the receiver when she wanted to listen in to a conversation on her party line.

Do you remember this?

When one of my friends got one – the Princess Phone – for her bedroom, we were all a little jealous. I never did get a Princess Phone. (Later on, the teen generation that was after me but before cell-phones, often had not only a phone in their bedrooms but their own phone line. They were listed in the phone book under the family name as, "teenager's phone.")

Today, our landline supports our primary cordless phone downstairs, as well as a hands-free phone (with head-set) and a fax phone. There are phones in two of the bedrooms upstairs.

Among the three of us, we have an iPhone, a Blackberry and a simple little Samsung with a sliding full keyboard (mine). I got my phone after I was struck by how few public pay phones are left in the world. (My cell phone number begins 456 – the same four five six as the first phone I remember.)

I don't intend this to be nostalgic although telephones are occasionally more ubiquitous than I would wish. I still know people who don't carry phones everywhere they go and they survive. I often get annoyed at people who have loud phone conversations in public places. And I could happily get along without the endless telemarketing even though I have gone to the trouble of getting on the no-call lists. They don't work as well as I'd like.

The telephone has been used a great source of humour, however. From Shelley Berman to Bob Newhart to the great Lily Tomlin. . .

* Here's Ernestine, telephone operator, chatting with the incomparable Cher.

Sure, I wish I'd practiced more . . .

I took music lessons – piano – for several years, beginning when I was quite young, probably seven or eight years old.

My music lessons were given in St. Andrew's Hall which was attached to the United Church at the back and which fronted on Henderson St. in Chatham. You can see a bit of it on the far right in this picture:

Just inside the door were the minister's office and the choir room where the gowns were kept and where members of the choir gathered before each service.

The hall itself was used as a meeting place for youth groups and as a gym – non-regulation size – and kids played basketball, volleyball and badminton there.

On the right-hand side of the hall was an open stairway that led up to a balcony/mezzanine. I remember that whole area – which was in two sections – being used as a storage area for extra chairs and boxes of books.

Through another door at the back of this balcony was a long narrow room with two pianos. This is where the half-hour once-a-week music lessons happened.

In looking back, I can't imagine children today being sent up those stairs into a closed room to spend half an hour alone with the music teacher.

Each of the music teachers – besides doing the private lessons – was organist and choir director at the United Church and also taught music at Chatham Grammar School.

My teachers were, in this order: Pauline Whitman, Jack Armstrong, Vera Zwicker and Professor Moir (who was the younger brother of the legendary Irene Moir, award-winning choir director and voice teacher at St. Michael's Academy.) I think I may be missing a teacher, a less serious, more frivolous young woman who didn't meet with the approval of the ladies of the United Church choir. Or maybe I'm imagining her.

I liked the teachers. Miss Whitman was sweet and appealing. She was very much respected as a musician and the choir ladies loved her. It was hard to take Mr. Armstrong as seriously because he was relaxed and laid-back and didn't seem to take himself very seriously. I'm pretty sure he was also an accomplished musician.

Miss Zwicker was eccentric. She was not comfortable in her own skin and although I don't think anyone ever doubted her musical abilities, she was not as much appreciated as teacher/director because it was hard to feel comfortable with her.

Professor Moir, as far as I know, was taken seriously by everyone, himself included. I remember him as kind of a fussy fellow, almost a caricature of a music teacher. I may be wrong though. I was pretty young.

There was one more teacher. One year – I'm not sure why – I was sent up to St. Michael's Academy, then a Catholic school.

The door nearest to downtown led me into a front hall that passed the auditorium on the left and offices on the right. Straight ahead was another door that led into a long corridor with windows looking into the auditorium on one side and a series of small music rooms – furnished with pianos and other instruments – on the other side.

It was in one of those small rooms where I met Sister Dionne, hands properly out of sight, tucked into the wide sleeves of the full habit of the school's founders, the Religious Hospitallers of St. Joseph. Looking a little like this:

I was a little afraid of Sister Dionne although she was very kind to me. She was a very accomplished musician – she played the piano for me a couple of times – and she could be five feet away with her back to me and "hear" that I was using the wrong fingering for my pieces. If she was near me and my fingering was wrong, she cracked her slender little hard-wood pointer across my knuckles which, I have to say, hurt like hell.

She held my face in her hands and called me her Rose of Sharon. I expect she prayed for me to become Catholic but that was still many years in the future.

I have fairly neutral memories about my music lessons. They didn't make me particularly happy – or unhappy. Like most children, I didn't enjoy practicing and I thought there was entirely too much emphasis placed on scales. I liked some of the work that was more like school-work. I remember a project which involved cutting out information and pictures and putting together little bound booklets on several of the great composers – the story of their lives and families, and how their lives in music developed: Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and others. It was a very enjoyable project.

I didn't enjoy the little pieces I had to play over and over. I envied those people who could play "by ear" and I entertained fantasies of playing sing-able songs and being the life of the party. I loved the Mammoth Book and I played some of the songs from it.

I remember playing Aura Lee -- which I was delighted to discover was the same tune as the Elvis Presley hit, Love Me Tender – Silver Threads Among the Gold, Beautiful Dreamer, Down by the Old Mill Stream, When You and I Were Young, Maggie.

I loved music from olden times. I still do.

The focus of all those music lessons was preparing for the annual Miramichi Music Festival. It went on for several days with events held at different schools in both Chatham and Newcastle. Some years, depending on how my birthday related to the festival's dates, I played in more than one age category. For example, when I was nine, I played in both the 10-and-under and the 12-and-under. Most years, I played one or two solo numbers and a duet. I usually played duets with Betty Cameron and at least once, I played with Dawn Williston.

The pianists and vocalists always knew one thing: if we were in the same age category as Doreen Bryenton from Newcastle, we were pretty much aiming for second place, having conceded top spot to her. She was an excellent musician; fortunately, she was a little older than I so I wasn't always up against her in competition. I think maybe I did come out ahead of her one year although I can't remember the details now.

One thing I do remember is that if our competition was in Newcastle, we would be taken there early in the day and have to sit through several other categories, listening to innumerable singers, all singing the same song, of course. To this day, I can hear Who is Sylvia? being sung in my head in many different voices. This one is Dame Janet Baker and I must say, it's lovely.

If you won your category, you got to perform at the Final Concert. One year, when Betty and I won the duet category, the concert was recorded by the local radio station and someone there made each performance into a 78 rpm vinyl record. Yes, I still have it.

While I was growing up, our family had a big upright piano. When we moved to a smaller house, my mother got rid of it and bought a much smaller one – what she always called an "apartment-sized piano." It has one less octave than a regular piano – four keys missing on either end of the keyboard.

The little piano is mine now and many years later, I was living in Ottawa and had a piano tuner come in to take care of it. He was a taciturn fellow but he played it nicely when he was finished – it sounded lovely – and I said, "It's a nice little piano, isn't it?"

"This is not a piano," he muttered. "This is a spinnet."

Well, fancy that. A spinnet.

You learn something new every day.

Early reader

When I was very small, probably around three, my mother went back to teaching. We lived in Newcastle Creek, in the Grand Lake area of New Brunswick and she taught in a small school in Rothwell, between Newcastle Creek and Minto. There was no daycare in those days and she probably didn't want to leave me with someone else anyway – so she took me to school with her.

We travelled to the school on a smelly old bus. I think it's understandable that my memories might be vague – I was pretty young, after all – but there are times I get a whiff of almost sickening fumes, maybe in a garage or a body shop, and I can imagine my mother and me back in that rickety old bus.

Our bus ride took us through the heart of the strip mining landscape that was the Avon Coal Company. Strip mining is not pretty. This isn't the Avon but it's a pretty good illustration of what strip mining looks like:

The school probably had three rooms – grades one, two and three. Mum taught grade two. I don't really remember the children in the class except for one girl named Star. How are you going to forget a girl named Star? She's memorable because of her name but also because she took care of me. My mother couldn't always deal with my needs so it was Star who supervised me at recess and lunch-time and who took me to the bathroom when necessary.

I think that must have been a challenge, particularly in the winter, because this school had an outdoor toilet, down at the back of the schoolyard. I don't remember how it all happened but I'm assuming that I must have been dressed in a snow-suit and boots and mittens. All that would have to be put on in the cloakroom, taken off after the walk through the snow to the outdoor facility, put back on for the walk back to the school, taken off for the rest of the classroom day.

For Star's sake, I hope this didn't happen too many times a day.

In what I have since come to think of as a very privileged placement, I was seated at a small desk at the front of the class, right beside the big teacher's desk. I don't know for sure what I did all day – I suppose I drew pictures and coloured and looked at books. I do know that at one point, my mother had to tell me firmly that I must not answer any more questions that she put to the class. I must be very quiet and let the grade two students answer.

Toward the end of that year, she noticed me one day holding a book, moving my eyes across the page, turning the page at appropriate times. She thought it was very cute, how I was pretending to read. When I asked for her help with a certain word, she obliged and then asked me if knew the other words. I assured her that I did and proceeded to read the page to her, stopping only on certain words that I couldn't quite figure out.

I was not yet four but from that point on, I read everything I could get my hands on.

At that age, my favourite books were The Bobbsey Twins series. This is the edition I remember best:

By the time I started grade one at the White School in Chatham, I had read many of the books in the series. The grade one teacher (and school principal), Mrs. Dorothy Gilliss, recognized early that my reading skills were quite advanced and she tested me and found I was reading at a grade six level.

Many years later, she told me she had been convinced I was reading at a higher level than grade six but that was as high as her books went. Mrs. Gilliss gave me a little assignment of going up front and reading to the class every Friday afternoon, which I enjoyed. She also put me into grade two in the mornings, grade one in the afternoons and after my first year at the White School, I went into grade three.

Now remember, I, in effect, started school at the age of three. And I'm telling this story not to preen about how smart I am. I believe that all kids are smart. I was talking to a friend from Belgium and I asked her when her two small children would go to school. Where she lives, children may go to school at two; they must go at three. That seems just about right to me.

I'm still surprised at the hostility this view is met with.

I'm a long-time admirer of the late Dr. Fraser Mustard, the pioneer in early childhood education. I tried to find a nice concise summary of his life's work but I didn't find anything suitable. If you Google Dr. Mustard, you'll find innumerable articles and studies that support his theories on early childhood. Meanwhile, there's a lot of information about the value of early childhood development right here.

My formal education begins

I went to the White School on Wellington St. in Chatham, N.B. for the first three years of my formal education.

Chatham was a tough little town and the White School was a tough school. I don't mean that in the academic sense. I mean some of the tough kids in town went there.

My memories of my days there look like old snapshots in black and white, some in brown, some in various shades of grey. Except for myself, of course. I see myself in colour – a tiny girl, a prim and proper little creature with my white blouses and red sweaters and pleated skirts and the long ringlets that my mother wound around her index finger with a hairbrush every morning. I was no match for my school-mates and I had little understanding of who they were and where they came from.

The kids at the White School crossed socio-economic lines. Some of them came from what I suppose, were called "poor" families. There was one boy who used to stand near me and watch while I ate my apple at recess and ask me if I'd save him the "cord." When I'd give him what was left of the apple, he'd eat the whole thing, including the seeds and stem. This horrified me mostly because I wouldn't even put my mouth near where someone else had bitten or chewed. I wouldn't take a drink of pop out of someone else's bottle. I began to save more and more of the apple until eventually, I was only eating one or two bites before I handed it over.

Chatham was a distinctly divided town – Catholic and Protestant, the huge majority being Catholic. Most of the kids I remember – not all but most – came from big raucous Irish Catholic families. (There were also big Acadian Catholic families, openly looked down on as "the French." The dynamic around them, both within and outside their families, was very different from the Irish.) In retrospect, I think growing up in those big families – some of them – was probably a joyous experience. But it was the very opposite of our family. We weren't a big family, or Catholic – and we most certainly weren't raucous. I didn't know how to react and I had no defense when, almost every day, I was chased around the school-yard being yelled at: "Catholic Catholic ring the bell! Dirty Protestant, go to hell!"

There were two boys – I could name them but I'm not going to – who would lie in wait for me every day after school, just past Hill St., about half-way to St. Andrew's St. I don't remember either one of them ever attacking me on his own. It was always the two of them together. They claimed to "like" me and they held me down in the ditch and kissed me all over my face. I really hated it and I dreaded that walk home after school.

The worst thing that happened to me at the White School was on the day I went from the grade one classroom to the basement. (The "basement" was the euphemism for bathroom/washroom/toilet in that school. The request to the teacher was, "May I go to the basement?") I remember the school as very big although that's probably an example of that phenomenon where things from one's childhood always seem much bigger in life's rear-view mirror than they really were. In memory though, it seemed a long long walk down a dark stairway to get to what must have been a communal toilet as there were already boys there when I got there.

They were big boys – grade six, I suppose – and they were smoking. I went into the stall and they began to talk loudly. They first said they were going to go into the stalls on either side of me and climb up and look down and watch what I was doing. Then they decided they could get a closer look if they came right into my stall and they announced that they were going to come under the door. They were laughing and coming close to the door so I could see their feet.

I was paralyzed with fear. I had no idea what to do and the truth is, I have no idea what I did. I must have escaped somehow because here I am. I never went to the washroom in that school again. I never told anyone what happened, not even a couple of years later when I had an embarrassing accident because I was too afraid to go to the "basement."

I have never recovered from this incident. I approach life with a certain wariness. I'm not adventurous and I'm consciously careful not to get myself into a situation where I'm trapped. I don't embrace new experiences for these very fearful reasons. It's not the unknown I fear as much as it is getting caught with my back to the wall.

Looking back now, I can't imagine why I was sent to the White School. I think of my parents – particularly my mother – as being protective, overly-protective even. What would make them – her – think that this was the elementary school for me?

The stories

The stories I'm telling here are about me. They are, therefore, mostly of interest to me — and to my family and perhaps to my friends.

On the other hand, if I tell them well enough, maybe they'll be of universal interest and even if you've stumbled upon them by accident, you'll say, "What a good story!" and you'll come back and read some more. Even if you don't say, "What a good story!" I'm pretty sure, at some point, you'll say, "That happened to me too." Or maybe you'll say, "I once had a friend/teacher/neighbour like that."

I hope if you do, you'll come back and check out the stories now and then.

I'm not a natural blogger. I'm an editor and writer and so even telling my life stories, I'm not comfortable dashing it off. I want to choose the right words, make sure my facts are accurate, try hard for clarity. I will try to be interesting if not exactly chatty.

I will continue to publish from my archives over here. I've been on a self-appointed sabbatical but I'm going to get back to work and I look forward to seeing you, both here and there.