Born Naked (6 page)

That month at the cottage when I was eleven was no mere interlude in my life—it was a revelation. Thereafter the desire to become one with wilderness and its native inhabitants would grow ever stronger within me.

The Depression had little adverse effect upon the monied high rollers of Windsor (or anywhere else, for that matter). As chief librarian and therefore something of a cultural icon, Angus was favoured by the patronage of some of these, one of whom was the president of the Hiram Walker Distillery in nearby Walkerville. This man sometimes took us on elaborate party cruises in his luxurious yacht, which had a crew of seven, including a black bartender with whom I used to fish off the vessel's gilded stern when we lay at anchor. The bartender also used to make brandy Alexanders for me—without the brandy.

Angus gloried in these cruises, although in his Bay of Quinte days he had despised power yachts, contemptuously calling them “stink pots.” Now, clad in white flannels, a blue blazer with gold buttons, and a jaunty yachting cap, he could easily have been mistaken for the film star Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., whom he not only resembled physically but whose swashbuckling, devil-may-care, life-of-the-party style he adopted as if it were his own.

Helen did not entirely share his pleasure in consorting with the rich.

“He would buy the fanciest yachting togs for himself but there never seemed to be money for me to dress so I could feel at ease amongst all those swells. Quite often I stayed home with you which, I am sure, didn't cramp your father's style at all.”

Clothes or no clothes, Helen did not choose to miss an extravaganza held at the ornate mansion of the distiller to celebrate Christmas, 1931. I was taken along although it was definitely
not
a children's party. While the adults disported themselves downstairs, I was left alone in an enormous, chintz-filled sitting room on the second floor to entertain myself as best I could with a pile of silly games and a tray of cake and cookies.

The games soon palled so I explored the room in search of things to do. The house had been built at a time when electricity was available only to the rich and, instead of the more-or-less foolproof outlets in later-day use, had been fitted with brass wall receptacles into which one inserted a solid brass plug through a little trapdoor. Never having seen anything like this before, I tried the effect of pushing my finger through one of the trapdoors. The shock knocked me unconscious and half-way across the room, but did me no permanent damage except, perhaps, to introduce an element of caution into my future dealings with the leisured class.

My allowance during the Windsor years was five cents a week, and Hughie got none at all. Having seen how the rich lived, I concluded this situation wasn't good enough and looked around for ways to supplement our incomes.

The public library was shaded by great sycamore trees, and when these fecund giants dropped their seeds the surrounding lawns and sidewalks were deeply littered with them. Hughie and I gathered a bushel of the seeds which we packaged in Windsor Public Library envelopes and hawked from house to house. Our sales pitch was that the seeds would produce statuesque sycamores a hundred feet in height… which they might well have done, given an equal number of years. Unfortunately Windsorites were not interested in ensuring a forested future, so our sales were minuscule. Even a letter of mine published in the Windsor
Border City Star
and containing this trenchant declaration: “Sicamores [sic] are the rarest and beautifulest trees I have ever seen in my life and should be spread,” failed to initiate a sycamore-seed-buying spree. We gave up on sycamores in favour of another venture.

People with cupboards full of unwanted magazines sometimes could not bring themselves to consign these to the garbage. Instead they donated them to the library with the result that the cellars were full of copies of the
National Geographic
magazine. Nobody seemed to want these so I asked Angus if I could have them. He was delighted to get rid of them, and Hughie and I spent the next two Saturdays hauling hundreds of
Geographics
in our Express wagons to the basement of my home. My plan was to set up a business supplying missing issues at five cents apiece to people who wanted to own a complete set.

It turned out there were all too few such; but Hughie and I at least increased our knowledge of the world from thumbing through our stock. We even learned a little about sex from avidly scanning pictures of bare-bosomed African and South Seas women.

The failure of these enterprises tended to sour me on a genre of books which was then considered essential to the proper rearing of young North American males—books like the Hardy Boys, the Tom Swift series, and especially the Horatio Alger books, whose dirt-poor but dogged young heroes made their ways to fame and fortune by devoutly pursuing their own selfish interests. Hereafter I devoted
my
attention to such nonconformist tales as
Peck's Bad Boy, Huckleberry Finn,
and
Penrod and Sam.

It was in the spirit of the latter that one summer Hughie and I organized a circus in my back yard. Hughie was the acrobat, and a good one too, although one afternoon he gave the audience more than their money's worth by trying to do a handstand on top of our back fence. He crashed to the ground with such violence that the several little girls who made up our audience screamed their heads off.

I was the Master of Ceremonies, but also did my bit as an entertainer. Shrouding myself in a sheet upon which we had painted the outline of a skeleton, with a pillowcase painted to look like a skull pulled over my head, I played a ghost. I nearly became a real one when, blinded by my disguise, I ran full tilt into a concrete pillar, knocking myself out and leaving a permanent depression in my left temple.

We charged a one-cent admission fee and made a profit of fourteen cents, which we spent on two pomegranates (five cents each) and four one-cent, round, black candies called nigger balls.

That was the last spring Hughie and I shared together. Faced with the humiliating prospect of having to “go on relief' in order to feed his family, Hughie's father chose the desperate alternative of becoming a homesteader in northern British Columbia. I remember how Hughie put it, echoing his father: “We'll not become beggars. We'll starve first.”

It was late June when they departed. Four children and three adults (one of Hughie's uncles accompanied them) crowded with all their baggage into their ramshackle old touring car. Camping out along the way, it took them six weeks to reach their destination—a one-hundred-and-sixty-acre plot of primaeval forest. There, with axe and shovel, they began making a new life.

Hughie and I wrote to each other off and on until the 1950s when we finally lost touch. In the autumn of 1992, his sister Margaret appeared at a store in New Westminster, British Columbia, where I was autographing books, to tell me Hughie was alive and well and still living on part of the original family homestead. There I will visit him one day, God willing, and tell him how much I missed him when he left me behind in Windsor in the time of our childhood.

 

 

 

6

 

 

MY PARENTS HAD GIVEN AWAY
our two cats before we moved to Windsor, but soon after we settled into our new home I found a scrawny stray kitten and brought it home. Angus named her Miss Carter after our landlady, whom he did not like. He used to stand on our front steps at night loudly calling our Miss Carter by name, adding: “Come home, you little tramp!”, while the other one, who lived only a few doors down the street, presumably endured acute embarrassment.

Other animals joined us. One was Limpopo, a Florida alligator brought to me by my Uncle Geddes, whose fiendish sense of humour as a youth had suffered no diminution with the years. When Limpopo arrived, he was a starving, six-inch weakling, but he grew apace on a diet of hard-boiled eggs, minnows, and tadpoles until, before we left Windsor, he was two feet long and could glutch down a six-inch sunfish in a couple of gulps.

Although not an affectionate pet, he never tried to eat my fingers, as he might well have done. When we eventually left Windsor, I was told he could not accompany us. I tried to give him away but found no takers. In the end, I took Limpopo down to the banks of the St. Clair River and fed him half a dozen wieners as a parting present before sadly releasing him into the murky waters. Years later I read a news account of a six-foot alligator having been found in the Detroit sewer system. I like to think it was Limpopo.

Jitters was the most endearing of my non-human companions. During one of our visits to Point Pelee I had climbed a pine tree containing what I took to be a crow's nest. It turned out to be the home of a family of black squirrels. I hauled a half-grown young one out of the ball of twigs, stuffed it inside my shirt, and climbed down, much pleased with my acquisition. I was less pleased when I found myself crawling with squirrel lice.

Nevertheless, I was allowed to keep my find and bring it home, where both of us were deloused. Angus then built a clever cage with two compartments and sliding doors, by means of which the squirrel could be shut up in one half of the cage while the other half was being cleaned. This arrangement soon became unnecessary. After a few days Helen began to feel so sorry for the little creature, who spent most of his time clinging to the wire screening and “jittering” piteously, that she suggested we might try letting him out for a little while. This I hastened to do, with the consequence that Jitters soon became a full member of the family, enjoying the freedom of the household.

It was truly remarkable how he fitted himself into our lives—“imprinting,” as Konrad Lorenz might have described it. He house-trained himself within a week, returning to his cage to defecate or urinate. He quickly learned not to steal food but would sit up on his hind legs and beg so prettily for what he wanted that he was seldom refused. Amazingly, he did not chew our belongings or burrow into the upholstery.

His one departure from otherwise almost impeccable behaviour was the merciless way he tormented Miss Carter. Being skinny and undersized, Miss Carter had an inferiority complex to begin with. Jitters made it worse. She spent hours hiding in dark closets rather than endure his gibbering verbal assaults which were often accompanied by a rain of small objects ranging from cigarette butts to walnut shells hurled down upon her from some high point of vantage.

Jitters loved to entertain visitors by racing around the edges of the living-room floor until he had gained maximum velocity whereupon, like a circus motorcyclist, he would begin spinning around the walls, spiralling higher and higher until he reached the picture rail up under the ceiling.

This stunt proved to be his nemesis. One spring day in 1932 he was racing around the
outside
walls of the apartment building (which were of rough-textured brick) for the entertainment of a group of my friends, when he lost his grip. I saw him shoot off into space from a corner up under the eaves. His little body described a swift parabola over the street then thudded to the pavement. He died in my hands a few minutes later. All of us, except Miss Carter, wept for him. If he had lived, he would have been the first black squirrel ever to trek as far west as Saskatoon, and heaven only knows what effect that might have had upon the world's equilibrium.

Pets were by no means my only connection with the Others during my years in Windsor. Probably as a consequence of my earlier adventures with bees, wasps, and spiders, I developed a curiosity about insects in general, and moths and butterflies in particular. Collecting moths and butterflies became a major preoccupation. During the warm seasons I seldom went anywhere without my butterfly net. So equipped, I became a figure of ridicule to some of my contemporaries and I think even Hughie found it somewhat embarrassing to be seen with me.

I learned how to “set” the insects on wooden forms so they would dry in the right position to be mounted on long pins in the bottoms of old cigar boxes. Angus made the frame for my net and Helen covered it with fine muslin. Angus also got me a killing bottle, which consisted of a glass pint sealer into the bottom of which had been poured a mixture of plaster of Paris and cyanide of potassium covered with a layer of cotton wool. The cyanide fumes would almost instantly kill any insect placed in the bottle and, I now realize, could have killed me had I taken a few deep breaths of the fumes myself. What I had was, in effect, a small-scale model of Hitler's final solution to the problem of non-Aryans. It amazes me to think how readily children of my day could come by such lethal devices. At the age of thirteen I went all on my own to a drugstore where I asked for and was sold a cyanide killing bottle made up to order, no questions asked.

Although I collected butterflies with enthusiasm, it was moths that truly fascinated me. I spent countless summer evenings patrolling beneath the street lights on Victoria Avenue to which the mysterious luna moths and the great cecropia and polyphemus moths with their five-inch wing spans were sometimes attracted. I can still smell the fragrance of those summer nights and feel the wild exhilaration of capturing a rare specimen. Although I would not now commit such atrocities against some of the most beautiful creatures extant, I cannot honestly censor the boy-who-was for what he did then.

In December of 1931 I acquired my first dog. My parents and I had paid a weekend visit to one of my mother's former Trenton friends who was living in Cleveland, Ohio. This lady owned a pure-bred Boston Bull which had given birth to a litter some six weeks before our visit. The father of the pups had been an unidentified travelling dog (possibly a dachshund) and the pups were an embarrassment to their owner. I immediately fell in love with them and pleaded to be allowed to take one home. Angus said he thought there were restrictions about importing dogs into Canada, whereupon Helen volunteered to smuggle a pup across the border, concealed inside her coat.

All went well on our return journey until the customs inspector came up to our car at the Canadian end of the Ambassador Bridge, leaned down, and asked through the open window if we had anything to declare. At this my mother drew her coat so tightly around herself that the pup squealed shrilly in protest.

Wedged between my parents on Eardlie's narrow seat, I was sure that all was lost, but I had not reckoned with Helen's ability to deal with the unforeseen. Without a second's hesitation, she threw back her head and began to squeal with high-pitched abandon. Angus, quick on the uptake as usual, cried out, “My God! She's getting hysterical. The doctor said it might happen. I've got to get her home!”

The customs officer hurriedly waved us on for no man likes to be involved with an hysterical woman. We were all three in near hysterics as we turned down Victoria Avenue, home again.

Billy, as I named the puppy, was ill-fated. In the spring of 1932, he was so badly mauled by a neighbour's Alsatian that he had to be destroyed. Jitters did not long survive him. Then, in June, Miss Carter disappeared. I suspected the Alsatian, who was also a notorious cat killer, and, in my desolation at having lost so many of my friends in so short a space of time, I contemplated borrowing my father's revolver and taking vengeance upon the dog. I lacked the courage. I tried to vent my feelings by writing an epic poem celebrating my departed companions and excoriating the villain. It has not survived but I can remember a couplet referring to the Alsatian:

 

I'd like to choke him full of mud,

And drown him in his own foul blood.

 

I am not sure when I started writing verse but the dreadful seed took root after the Christmas season of 1930. For reasons which were never clear to me, I was bundled off to spend the holidays with my maternal grandparents in Belleville. I was told this was because my parents both had influenza, but I now suspect it was because there had been a major rupture in their relationship, perhaps due to another episode in my father's long string of infidelities. If this were indeed the case, then the poem, “Daddy's Dilemma,” which he sent to me in Belleville is demonstrative of his ability to set out false scents. Here is a truncated version of it.

 

Preserved by a Princess

or

Daddy's Dilemma

 

Your Mother still is stretched upon her bed,

With paunchy pillows pushed beneath her head,

While our Miss Carter doth disport herself

On counterpane, like dizzy, dev'lish elf.

 

Her name to Persian Princess has been changed,

(P.P. for short) and she has caught the mange,

From sleeping, while in Oakville, with big Joe,

(They all have mange in Oakville, as you know.)

 

But, as I said, your Mother had a break,

Short-circuited her nerves, and like a snake

That winds and writhes and ties itself in knots,

She her sweet self all twiny twisted got.

(Don't try to say this fast—it's better not.)

 

The doctor came. His face was ashen grey;

“In bed,” shouts he, “a fortnight you will stay!

Some little medicine I'll give to you;

For food, I'll let you gnaw a giblet stew.”

 

Then came a nurse, in cap and apron white,

And gave P.P. and me an awful fright.

She chased us to the basement dank and dark,

Where P.P. wailed and mewed, whilst I did bark.

 

There P.P. lost her voice and 'gan to wheeze,

And Daddy doubled up with cough and sneeze.

We both caught cold down in the dismal cellars,

And sniffed and snuffed and snotted in our smellers.

 

But P. P. hit upon a clever plan,

To fool the nurse and save her loving man.

She dashed upstairs, all streaked with dirt and dust,

And told the nurse that she had seen a ghost.

 

The nurse came down and found me lying there,

All stark and stiff upon the cellar bare.

“Good lack!” quoth she, “What makes you look so old?”

“Fair dame,” quoth I, “I fear I'm taking cold.”

 

Her bleak eyes blazed with blue and bloody glee;

She laughed, and sulphur cinders sprayed on me.

She screeched aloud, while from her raving mouth

Red flames went twisting east, and north, and south.

 

“Gadzooks!” cried she, “I'll do whate'er I can,

To heap more torments on you, dismal man.

I'll fill you full of gasoline, then I

Will touch a match to you and watch you fry.

 

“I'll pluck your eyeballs out with furnace tongs,

And tie your tongue in knots with red-hot thongs.

I'll hitch your entrails up to yonder beam,

And throw live coals upon you till you scream!”

 

Wherewith this jolly lady seized an axe,

Her aim, apparently, to smite some smacks

Upon my unprotected, aging head,

And plash her plods in places where I bled.

 

But in that moment P.P. saved the breach,

Rushed to my rescue and with fearsome screech

Leapt on that maiden's back, and strange

As it may seem, implanted there the mange.

 

“Begone!” she cried. “Avaunt! Avast! Alack!

Depart, thou mangy cat from off my back!”

Then down the street she pooched with pingy pace,

And ne'er again we saw her flatsy face.

 

Your mother sends her love, to which, as well,

She adds a bit for Arthur and for Hal.

I long to see you coming home again,

So I can play with your electric train.

 

Be bad, my child, and let who will be silly,

You will be both, l fear me, willy-nilly.

I now remain, your ever-loving poet,

Angus McGill, begettor of Bunje Mowat.

 

This poem stimulated me to emulation and I became an inveterate scribbler of doggerel. It was an accomplishment which served me well during my remaining school years for not only did my rhymes win me kudos from my teachers but my ability to pillory opponents in verse gave me some protection against mine enemies.

 

ONE GREY JANUARY
afternoon in 1933 Angus brought home momentous news. He had been offered the job of chief librarian in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, a place so distant from the Ontario experience that most people, if they had heard of it at all, thought it was some sort of geographic joke. Despite the fact that there would be no increase in salary, and the Depression was deepening daily, Angus was tremendously excited. Helen did not share his enthusiasm.

“Surely you wouldn't do such a thing,” she cried. “It would be like taking us to Siberia or some dreadful place like that!”

In common with most easterners, she envisaged Saskatchewan as an alien and hostile world, a frigid, wind-swept wilderness in winter and a featureless and dreary expanse of dusty wheat fields in summer. She believed it was inhabited (barely) by peasants from central Europe who lived in sod huts, wore sheepskin clothes, ate black bread, and practised obscure religious rites.