My Grandmother, Jean, was a feisty little five-foot-nothing Scottish lady with shining coal-black hair that would have flowed down her back to her bum if she hadn't always had it rolled up in a tidy knot on the top of her head. She insisted that I call her by her first name. I remember about the time I was fourteen and we moved to the Hotel, that she decided to dye all her shoes red. My first foray into high-heels was in a pair of those dyed red ones that she loaned me. Funny how things things keep popping into mind as I write this.

My Grandfather, Willie, had been a butcher when my mother was a little girl but I remember him working in the pit at the Drummond. He had a heart-attack when I was eight and came to recuperate at our house. Mum had been a nurse and we set up a hospital bed in the big front parlor. Willie was a quiet man, with a bristly moustache and a wickedly dry sense of humor. He died quietly one morning and was buried down the hill in the Auburn Cemetery. And Jean sold "the big house" came down the hill to live with us.

Daddy,Jean & Willie, Mum and me

The Russell Place

Our house was always known as the Russell place because the Russell sisters had owned it before us. Small towns are like that. It was a big chocolate brown, rambling house, with a long north-facing porch that we never used because it was too shady. There were great masses of lillies-of-the-valley below the porch and huge side and back lawns,a barn with a swing (for me) on the side, and an orchard (only apples, plums, and cherries in ours). Nearly everyone had an orchard, and I spent a lot of my time sitting with a book in the crotch of the old crabapple tree next door at Bud and Liza Workman's. (They had russet pears and a big vegetable garden where I could eat baby carrots and radish right out of the dirt).

There was a spruce tree at the side of the barn beside the lilac bushes and I used to pick the balsam off in lumps to chew...I wonder how many people remember "spruce gum"...

And I had a tent of my very own. A huge, authentic army tent (Daddy was in the Army reserve force) that could sleep twelve, if there'd been twelve kids around the neighborhood.

As it happened, until I was about ten or eleven,I was the only child on the Drummond Road. Ah, but then things changed radically. When I was ten, my brother Mike was born. Mum said that if she had more than one child, she'd name them after the "pat" and "mike" jokes that I guess were rampant in the 40s...and she was true to her word. A year and nine months' later, my brother, William Francis (Bill) was born. In the years before "the boys", I was truly an only child. I guess that accounts for all my make-believe friends and the house I built in our woodpile. "Woodpile?", you ask. We had a woodpile and a coalhouse, an ashpile, and a root celler....none of which have anything to do with the tent.

When the boys arrived, so did the wildlife: we had turtles and fish and white mice, a pet skunk named "Flower" (from "Bambi"), and strays: anything that didn't have a home came to live at our place until we could find a family to adopt it. This didn't change when we moved to Ottawa and lived in that teeny apartment, either!

I remember Saturday afternoon movies. I took the boys and sat midst hoardes of screaming little kids while Hopalong Cassidy, the Lone Ranger (and Tonto), Gene Autry and other stars of the western era galloped across the screen. I still remember the words to "Happy Trails to You", Gene Autry's signature song.

Music...there was always music at our place. Mostly it was just us singing along to the radio. Because I had a good singing voice, Jean was determined I should learn all the old Scottish songs (Rose of Tralee, Bluebells of Scotland, Loch Lomond, Annie Laurie..My Mother's name was Anna Laurie)...and Mom taught me Maresy Dotes I have the midi somewhere..and Dad not to be outdone, taught me "The Maple Leaf forever"...) And every Sunday afternoon, Jean would have tea parties at her big house and I would sing for the assembled gathering of ladies, while they drank tea from delicate flowered cups (with saucers) and ate scones, or made quilts. If I'm not mistaken, I may still have one of those cups that survived all our moves.

She was always disappointed that I never "took to" tatting or knitting or fancy work that she tried so hard to teach me. I remember crumpled, grey, sweaty pieces of bleached flour bag on which I was taught to do fancy work with knotty strands of multicoloured threads. Skewed flowers and leaves that ran right off the edge of the cloth. I never learned to play Bridge either, much to her chagrin.

When she died the year I started work in Halifax, she left all her handmade quilts and pillow slips to me in her will.

I remember the wringer washer in the sunny pantry just off the big kitchen. I remember the smell of sunshine mingled with soapsuds and coal dust, as my Mother washed the "pit clothes" in separate loads. No electric appliances, no automatic dryer, just a long clothesline on a pulley, blowing through the center of the backyard. I remember yellow bars of pure old Sunlight Soap...the soap that outlasted the clothes it scrubbed - the stuff was like blocks of sunshiny concrete. In our house, it was also used to follow up on any bad words that might come out of our mouths...remember the threat that was really a promise? ..."If you say that again, I'll wash your mouth out with soap!"

Those were the heydays of radio: programs like "Boston Blackie", "My Friend Irma", "I Was a Communist for the FBI" and "Maggie Muggins" On lazy winter evenings, once the dishes had been done, we made fudge and listened to the radio. Definitely gentler times. Of course we had electricity, but we had a coal and wood furnace and stove, with a giant sweet-smelling woodpile at the side of the house and a coal room down the basement.

I came back home, after an absence of several years, to give birth to my daughter (there's a chapter in here somewhere about that), and after both Daddy and my fiance had died. I will never forget standing in tears in front of the big, open maw of the furnace, crying because I was so tired and scared to death to shut the furnace door where you loaded the coal, in case it blew up. You had to let the coal fumes escape, and then shut the "damper" part way...a delicate balance between losing all your heat in the basement or blowing the whole place to kingdom come!

My Mother and Jean used to make pickles and jams and jellies with gleaming jars that lined the shelves of the basement, beside the potato/carrot bin. I can still, in my mind's eye, see the sprouting tops of carrots and potato eyes poking up through the sand that covered them.


Me and "Flash" Gordon at the Russell Place

And cats...we always had cats (and a hobo dog or two who would drift in, get warm and fed and then drift away again). Nip and Tuck were our two pure white cats who defended our backyard and their territory literally to the death. They were attacked by a roving pack of "wild" dogs. I watched and screamed in terrified horror one golden summer afternoon as their little white bodies were ripped and torn and thrown through the air. Sometimes we forget that life in the "good old days" wasn't always blissful. Thank goodness the days of dogs left to run free and become wild is something that doesn't happen often, in Canada anyway.

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