Kid Stuff

Kids really do live in a world of their own, at least I did, a lot. In our first house in Canada, on the Bridgeview flats in Surrey, an addition had been framed in on one side of the house. A great place for a six year old to climb on and hang around. We only had a radio at home but I must have seen a movie with some spear-chucking involved so there I was hanging in the framing with a length of moulding, a perfect spear. Unfortunately, my prey, five year old Donna from next door, came sneaking through the jungle into my line of sight. I tensed, sensed the wind, drew back, and at exactly the right moment I let fly. A perfect, deadly shot but the howl that Donna set up could be heard to the end of the block. I found something else to do inside. 

I started elementary at the Bridgeview School. One Saturday night we went to the Paramount Drive-In on Lougheed Highway to see a western. I remember a lot of US army action against the Indians and hand to hand combat. Exciting. On Monday, at school, I was still reliving this movie and galloped, you know, gimp one leg and skip along holding the reins, past a row of three grade sixers. I was always head and shoulders taller than my class mates so the size difference to these guys wasn't great. Anyway, I galloped past these guys and stuck my fist out and clipped them lightly, or perhaps not at all, on the chin. Before I could ride into the sunset, one of the kids, some mill worker's boy wearing a green plaid flannel shirt, came over and with one good punch knocked me on my butt. What, what! That didn't happen in the movie. Fortunately, the bell rang and we went in.

I don't remember a lot from the couple of years that we lived on the Fraser River flats. I tagged along with older boys whose last name was Gerald and whose mother was Finnish. One of them let me shoot his b-b gun carbine. Wow. The Geralds ran a store on the corner of Blundell and the old Trans-Canada highway that went through Surrey, Manning Park, Osoyoos and on to Crows Nest Pass. Next to the store there was a shack of a cafe. What I was doing down there on the highway I don't know but coming out of the cafe, a guy grabbed me by the front of the shirt and held me against the wall of the cafe with a switchblade in his other hand. I don't at all remember what he wanted but I do remember that his hat was cool. The kind that bikers wear. The kind that Marlon Brando wore in The Wild Bunch.

I did manage to notice girls in grade 1. Our teacher was Miss Davidson. She had blonde, blonde hair that had been curled into waves rather than curls. And she wore poodle skirts and high heels and I think she had a really pointy bra but that last part is kind of hazy. I loved Shirley, though I never spoke to her as far as I can remember but she must have smiled at me to set off my emotions. She lived at the other end of our block on Bennett Road. Halfway through grade 2, we moved to Coquitlam and I went to Austin Heights Elementary. Coming into a class part way through is always a little rough but on my first day Marlo came over and gave me a pencil. I instantly forgot about Shirley. Sixty years later, I still sometimes wonder how Marlo turned out in life.

During my grade 4 year we moved to the end of Austin Road and life as I knew it changed. The Tregers - Jerry, Shirley, Dave, Tim and Paul, lived a few houses down and went to parochial school, Our Lady of Lourdes, in Maillardville. The Netzlaws - David, Earl, and a sister lived across the road. The Pounders - Lloyd, Ernie, and a boy my age who I hung around with but can't now remember his name, lived on the other side of the road from the school at Mundy Road.  There were at least another half dozen boys around the area so something was always happening. We had a couple of creeks nearby which had rainbow trout. We had Mundy and Lost Lake, a couple of peat bog lakes for swimming, raft making, frog egg fights and a bunch of other things that parents never got to hear about unless blood was flowing. We had log booms on the Fraser; orchards at Essondale Institute; sheep to ride at Colony farms; the rail yards in Port Coquitlam. We also had numerous steep hills for testing our bugs on or sleds in the winter.

I don't ever remember moping around the house, or being bored except perhaps at school. During summer holidays we were gone from morning to night. I remember being home for dinner but I don't know what we did for lunches. I learned about making slingshots, bringing down large alder trees with an axe, fishing from log booms and hundreds of other survival skills that finally coalesced into self-sufficiency and confidence. Let them play on their own and they figure it out.