Horses and Kings

When somebody elsewhere asks about Canada, I grope for solid ground, not wanting the answer to be condescending, evasive or inhuman.  A big country, I saw, about as wide as the Atlantic Ocean, and rather thinly peopled along the southern fringe so that you don't have to go far north of the places where fruit and tobacco grow to find muskeg and tundra and then permafrost and the Arctic Ocean and the nothern islands, glaciated to the east.  In the middle, prairie – a different feel and flora and sky, windy, harvested by machine and no animals much on the land.  Then the mountains, a long spine all the way down from the Arctic Ocean to the Andes, and the tops of the high mountains fractured to shale tips by frost and wind.  And lakes and rivers.  But that doesn't get it right somehow.  The two or three big cities are not unlike any other North American cities of the size; a little prim, a little consciously cosmopolitan, justly proud that Nervi and Mies have left their mark.  The towns seem least changed; yet if they are not progressive they attract no industry and die slowly, so the towns have changed too and the supermarket is a great leveller of any main street.  And the Canadians are stubbornly Canadian; we may prove in our secret way to be as unassimilable as the Jews and as inedible as the Laurentian Shield, though given to much worry about what it is to be Canadian.  Being Canadian, I am not quite sure, being mistaken for an Englishman in Canada and an Irishman in England; and looking for something of my own that is distinctive and perhaps symbolic find certain durable things in my childhood and recall them as things concrete with no nostalgic intent.  The citizens of this land are more diverse than they used to be and more suave; almost everything is smoothed down to the norms of advertising fantasy and inflated to the permissive imperative of everyman's aristocracy.  We aren't easily fooled by anybody these days: we buy antihistomines and tranquillisers instead of snake oil.  People don't lubricate their clocks with coal oil and hardly anybody chews tobacco any more.  And yet there are threads through the labyrinth.

In those days there were horses in the streets.  When I was four, there was a garbage cart in Kingston with a wooden top like a stiff tent and metal doors that hinged upwards to let the garbage in.  I always hoped it would arrive at our door about noon so that the driver would drop his little round anchor there and put the horse's nosebag on, right in front of our house, so that I could study all the refinements of this marvellous machine.  It was a matter of professional interest: I intended to be a garbage collector.  The wheels were not rubber-tired.  That would be the year after the First World War ended.

Only occasionally in fine weather would you see the millionaire's electric car purr down King Street, driven by a chauffeur: steep-sided and straight-backed the car, with plate-glass windows and little cut-glass vases on brackets inside to hold fresh flowers.  With so many horses about the streets, and sometimes frightened by motor cars, few seasons passed in Brockville in those days without the excitement of a runaway horse (even sometimes a runaway child, one of them flanked by bulldogs), or the clumsy bustle of men around a horse who had fallen on the ice and could not be set on his feet again until he was freed from the tangle of harness and the awkward stiff shafts.  Here and there about the town were drinking troughs hollowed out of blocks of grey granite, and big shells and other trophies of war turned to the benefit of the animals; and outside the grand houses (including the Rectory) were mounting blocks for stepping in and out of carriages though the carriages had almost all gone; these were sometimes a haven for an infirm cyclist but they could be a hazard to a bicycle out of control or in the dark.  When we were five or six my sister and I went to somebody else's funeral and sat with the chief mourners because that seemed to be closest to what was going on, and were much grieved over and came home with some flowers and said it was the nicest funeral we had ever been to.  The snowbanks were always high along the streets in winter and on a winter night the street-lights had a glory around them.  In summer the days of swimming at the Waterworks seemed endless, and sometimes in the early mornings when nobody was about but the milk van there was inexpert rock-climbing on the high limestone cliffs that dropped into the river near the Asylum.  Most summers the circus came to town with painted wagons and clowns.  One time an Indian elephant walked slowly along King Street, past the Baptist church, leading the circus procession and band.  My father took a photograph of it at the bottom of our hill, Park Street.  That hill, rocky and steep, plunged down past our highboard garden fence under the maple trees across King Street and so on down to the river, and was a special hill anyway: at the bottom by the river was a milk canning factory that made two brands, one condensed and the other evaporated, one named for a lady we had seen and the other for a girl we played with.  And one day, walking down Pine Street – the other street that goes down from the hilltop where St. Peter's Church and the Rectory stand just as they did in Bartlett's engraving – I came upon a little swarthy man with a one-legged barrel-organ and a monkey in a blue jacket and red fez dancing to the music on top.  I stopped beside him on the sidewalk and watched the monkey gravely dancing while the man turned the handle and the music played.  Suddenly the man, as quick as a snake, darted out his hand and twisted my ear, and I ran away and never told anybody.  And the Rectory had a ghost.  He never frightened anybody, and we all saw him some time or other.  I think he must have belonged to the family and not to the house because he came to Ottawa with us and then to Halifax.  I haven't seen him for a long time now, not since my mother died.

The river was dangerous and deep and two miles wide and wherever you were in the town you seemed to know that the river was where it was.  It was full of ships in summer, cargo ships of many sizes and silhouettes, and we could tell by the way the deckhouses were placed which ones were seagoing.  For a time we saw the big forlorn rusty hulks left over from the war steam slowly past in ballast: Henry Ford had bought them for scrap and was taking them to Detroit to turn into motor cars.  Two white passenger side-wheelers came past on alternate days; they made a bigger swell than any other ship that passed.  When they came alongside at Brockville, children would dive for coins thrown into the water by passengers; if you were quick you could catch a coin by its shimmer in the green water before it went too deep.  That was near the end of the railway tunnel that ran under the town.  Almost every summer a little tornado would drive through the town and break windows in our house and always seemed to lift the roof off the New Theatre and blew down some big pinetrees that hadn't got their roots firmly enough into the limestone.  The river separated us from the United States and from people that we viewed with jealous but ignorant suspicion.  This did not prevent my father, when the little church in Morristown had no one to take the services, from getting out our big motorboat with a converted primitive aircraft engine in it and crossing the two miles of water on a Sunday afternoon to say evensong for a few faithful foreigners.  I usually went with him and by the age of ten or so could play the hymns for him on the harmonium.  It was absent-mindedness on his part, not rigid nationalist spirit, that made him pray on these occasions for the well-being and wisdom of the King and the Royal Family rather than for the President and Congress.  Those were the days of prohibition; our boat, a little narrow in the beam and with a sharp sloping unflared bow, was neither so fashionable nor so fast as the boats owned by some of my father's parishioners.  The water was not always smooth for the crossing, but we had no doubts about the seaworthiness of our boat because we had caulked and painted and varnished her on winter evenings at Harry Going's St. Lawrence Engine Works.  One Sunday evening as we came back towards Brockville we passed near a rowing boat with two men at the oars, and I could see that in the stern of the boat was the body of a drowned man under a tarpaulin.

In those days, even as the time passed, the word "overseas" meant the war.  There was a doctor in town who was known to have suffered from the terrible things he had seen in France.  The war was on the fringes of much conversation, veiled from us, and when men talked with my father about this they would never say anything in our hearing that would clarify or dispel the indescribable horror that we knew lay behind their talk.  After much deliberation we opened a duffel bag in the attic that had belonged to a school friend of my father's; he had left the duffel bag with us and went overseas and never came back for it.  What we found was sadly motheaten and pathetically trifling. Then the Depression brought many men to the door, most of them young; some worked in the garden or cut wood or stayed for a time out of the weather and had a meal, and a few stayed longer than that.  There was one tramp who came every autumn regularly.  He would drink a whole big pot of tea noisily in the kitchen, and with it a large meal, grumbling that teapots were not as large as they used to be before the war.  Then he would go into the town jail for the winter; and in the spring when the weather had set towards summer and he had cut all the grass in front of the jail he would come in for his pot of tea and supper before taking to the road again.  The Prince of Wales came to Brockville as guest of the only people in town who owned a steam yacht.  I had cut my foot with an axe the day before, but walked three miles to look at him and was amazed to find that he was small and beautifully dressed.  In Brockville my father taught me Latin and Greek, and my mother and grandmother taught me to play the piano; and in Brockville my brother tried to burn down the Bank of Montreal and nearly succeeded.  My grandmother also had a green Amazon parrot; she had had it for many years and in the end gave it to me.  It was very fond of rice.  It died fifteen or sixteen years later of cardiac arrest while sleeping on a volume of Prescott's Conquest of Mexico.

There are no horses in the streets now, no side-wheelers on the river, and I don't suppose an elephant will ever again shuffle soft-footed along King Street under a sun so hot that it melts the tar on the road.  There are very few kings left, no organ-grinders, and no hoboes trace out the indolent and dignified cycle of the seasons.  It must be many years now since there was a harvest supper out along North Augusta Road, with dancing under lanterns on an improvised floor outside the farmhouse.  You can get better music lessons now than you could when I was taught; and few children undergo the mastoid operation that I suffered and that twisted the face of one of my school friends.  I have not seen again the brutality I saw in my first school at the age of seven.

When I first took ship for Europe from Montreal it was to go to university in England.  Four years later in a new sub-lieutenant's uniform I set out again easterly from Halifax in an armed merchant cruiser – a liner armed with obsolete 6-inch guns – flagship for a large convoy that had gathered in Bedford Basin; we slipped down the tide on a grey Atlantic forenoon under the wheeling clamour and disrespect of the gulls, past familiar landmarks and seamarks, past havens of peace where butter was sold by the quarter-pound, to bear arms (as the liturgy allows) and to serve in the wars.  For six years; almost ten in all.  And found my country and my own people at a distance, discovered in what regard some Canadians are held, and learned that "O Canada" need not be a derisive comment.  I do not lament what is gone – the horses, and kings, and side-wheelers and childhood – finding here a distinctive savour, subtle, unchanged in spite of all that is harsh, derivative, defensive and pretentious.  Voices have their signal location, saying from Ottawa, Toronto, the St. Lawrence Valley, the Laurentians, Timmins, Petitcodiac, Purcell's Cove, Victoria.  Nothing has stopped the migration of the Canada geese.  I'm hooked anyway; a country and its people cannot be judged by the musical quality of their national anthem.  And some day somebody will find a market for muskeg.