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Thistletown Remembered

I was impressed by the enormous volume of mail generated by the TCI 50th anniversary in 2007. Thanks to all for reminding me of people and events that were buried under all the weight of 60+ years of ‘getting and spending’. I am one of the old-timers now, although there may be folks out there whose recall is sharper and who can correct me on some points. Also, if the memories of an old alumnus are not something you want to indulge, then click me into oblivion and go do your gardening or whatever. As a child, school is a place for you to go to; it is a process of days and years of slow engagement with people and ideas. Only much later do we see it as a place to come from into the world. This is the place I came from.

I was born in 1941 and I remember that my dad, Lewis Peach, built or renovated the little house I was born in. He also built most of the houses on our street, which only later came to be called Sanderson but which I always knew as Second Avenue. I remember that we had an outhouse behind the garage and it didn’t disappear until after we had a second storey added to our house the year after brother Bob started school. I remember the night in June 1948 my brother was playing with matches and set that unfinished 2nd storey on fire and then the rush from parents digging in the garden to get us out of our bedroom upstairs and the sirens and the men on the roof and the crowds of people and then staying at neighbours until Dad could rebuild enough to make us a place to live again.

I remember that when we wanted the garden ploughed or Dad wanted a basement excavated, the old guy from the farm off Riverdale Avenue would bring his horse and plough or dragline and do the job. And of course I remember that my playground, my personal sandbox, was the mound of excavated soil on which I could play with my toy trucks while my dad worked on the building. He was a builder and that meant that he and his gang did all of the work from laying bricks to roofing. But his story is for another time. This is my stream.

Early memories are vague of course, but I do remember a playmate, Terry Mosher, from a small cluster of houses on one property at the end of our street who moved away before school started but who later under the pseudonym of Aslin, became a political cartoonist of some renown. The town became more familiar as my growth and independence allowed me to range farther from home and as my mobility increased from walking to cycling. Then the landmarks became friends’ homes on Second Avenue to Barker and Gibson, sleighing on McGillvray’s Hill (Barker Ave) in winter, the apples to be had from trees on Riverdale and the woodlots across the river which were another world.  I remember too, an aunt and an uncle, both recently decommissioned after the war’s end, passing through Thistletown on their way back to the homestead in Saskatchewan. Associated with that is the wonderful Christmas crate arriving from the prairies in December and which Dad would drive us all down to pick up at the Weston train station. It held a few small gifts, but always some turkeys -- fresh killed and then packed onto a baggage car for a four-day trip from Plunkett to Weston. I don’t think salmonella was part of the common vocabulary in the 1940s.

A telescoped account of my first 12 years would also include a few close encounters with death such as when the ice went out on the Humber in the spring and we fell through; it would certainly include lots of encounters with pain from ill-advised rock throwing at hornets’ nests and cuts from broken glass in our swimming hole, and the inevitable fights as our world became bigger and new kids arrived in our town. Death came close every summer with polio. Mom worked in the sewing room at the Thistletown branch of the Hospital for Sick Children and she saw the survivors of that killer disease and sewed garments for them and worried every year that Bob or I might become infected. There were some schoolmates who weren’t there in the fall. I also remember lining up at the old town hall to get shots, part of the DPT series I suppose in retrospect, but then the polio vaccine came in, first as injections but later administered on a sugar cube to our delight and Mom’s enormous relief.

School was as big an event then as it is today. Older children told horror stories about the beatings that would be routinely administered to us newcomers, but the truth was a curious mixture of tenderness and violence. The old Thistletown primary school was a red brick one-room building on College St (north side), which ran west from Riverdale Avenue. There were other schools for middle grades I found out later, up the Claireville Rd. When I was five, in the June before I would start school, Mom took me up to introduce me to the teacher, Mrs. Bell. She let me come to school whenever I wished, to sit in the sunshine on the front steps and colour, to listen to the lessons and look at the pictures in the books. It was a wonderful way to introduce a child to school. The next year, that building was vacated -- it was later renovated and someone I used to deliver a newspaper to (late of course) lived there -- and all of us primary students went to the legion hall on Irwin Rd for a year while Thistletown PS was built next to the old town hall. We would catch the bus at Barker Avenue and Albion Rd. for the ride down across the iron bridge on the west branch of the Humber and get off at Irwin Rd for the short walk to our ‘school.’  Aside from the delight of taking a lunch box and the wonder of learning to read, the memories that return first are the smells of the outhouse and the splash of water from the pump, two items that were probably far too close together in fact as well as in memory; but then, if salmonella didn’t exist, who cared about cholera? 

Other writers have noted the old town hall and its use as a scout hall or YM/YWCA. Before that it was used as a theatre as well as a meeting place for the trustees of the Police Village of Thistletown. I remember going there to see plays put on by a little theatre group, even if I remember little about the script. There were also films shown there on Saturday mornings before the new school was built -- mostly about Canada. These were the years of Norman McLaren at the National Film Board and his mandate was to ‘show Canada to Canadians’. It was a great treat to go see a film on a Saturday morning and see icebergs off Newfoundland or the scenery of the Rocky Mountains.

For rural children in the 1940s, life was lived outside. It probably is still so today in eastern Canada, i.e. any place east of Vancouver and the Fraser delta, but here in Victoria, the winter rain keeps most kids indoors from October to April, a fact which someone should use to do a correlational study on our consumption of alcohol. But I digress, -- or I will until I refill my glass. Life then was lived out-of-doors. The woods and farms were all around. The remains of the bridge abutments of the old electric cable car line were still in place where the creek (McGillvray’s creek to us) joined the west branch of the Humber and fishing for chum or suckers was usually good in along the deep hole on the far bank. Across the iron bridge on Islington Avenue, from which one had to jump into the swimming hole as a rite of passage, was farmland beyond the shale bluffs of ‘bluebanks.’ Above the bluff was Grant Barker’s farm and it became a subdivision with its own high school, Thistletown Collegiate, built where the hired hand’s small house once stood. 

There were three Barker brothers whose farms encircled Thistletown and I hope they all got very rich when they sold their property and subdivisions grew in the place of potatoes. Yes, potatoes were the main crop in that good glacial clay on which Toronto is built. We youngsters would follow the tractor at harvest time, older boys earning cash each day by riding on the contraption, sorting and bagging the goods, but we small ones gleaning the little spuds that dropped behind between the wires. Years later, sitting on the bench at football games as a Black Scot when I should have had my attention on the game, I often thought of the places where a barn had stood, where we chased or were chased by cows, or where I kissed Betty-Lou, the daughter, my first sweetheart, (and no less sweet because her family owned a television set) on Saturday mornings after watching the Sealtest Circus.

The Humber River and its tributary curled around Thistletown with the west branch offering recreation summer and winter. We learned to skate there, on the flattest, widest spot behind Jan Mayall’s place at the bottom of the hill, leaning on hockey sticks and ankles. And I remember skating once off by myself far upstream, past the iron bridge, past bluebanks, past the curve which after one spring torrent -- not Hurricane Hazel yet -- would become a new swimming hole, and past Kipling Avenue to stop at last in a strange silent farmland, feeling that the whole world might be connected by this white ribbon on which I stood. The new school on Albion Rd would have its own outdoor rink, and the arenas in Weston or Woodbridge would offer much more consistent ice, but most of us learned to skate on the river.

We socialized or, more aptly, ‘hung out’ at cubs, scouts and young peoples’ clubs. It wasn’t a question of ‘if’ but ‘when’ for scouting. Can I join in the fall of the year I turn 6? No, wait until you’re eight. Will I get a new Eaton’s-bought uniform? Maybe part of it, but the Ladies Auxiliary has a store of hand-me-down uniforms and some of it will come from there. Ahh, cubs and the wonderful world of being out with a group, after dark even on winter nights, and the ritual and the wonderful Kipling stories and poems!  I had learned to read and still fondly remember a Mrs. Cameron whose son, Morely, would become cubmaster and scouter and assistant rover leader, but she who as volunteer librarian at the new Thistletown Public School helped me find my first chapter book and introduced me more than any teacher I remember to the world of books and libraries. I had learned to read, and Rudyard Kipling was an author to savour. His jungle books were full of poetry and poetic prose, great villains and strong heroes. The poems I read and re-read until I could, with many others in the pack, recite them whole by heart.

Our first Akela was Shirley Snider whose family lived on Irwin Road across and down a bit from the legion hall and the fire hall. Was it cub pack families or Sunday School families or just community who gathered there around gigantic bonfires on cold fall nights with washtubs of corn boiling by the blaze? Corn never was so juicy as that, plucked -- scalding little fingers -- from the tubs and rubbed in cheesecloth-wrapped pounds of butter. Her father, Jack Snider, a warden in the Anglican Church, was a soft-spoken gentleman who delivered milk first from a horse-drawn wagon, later a truck but both conveyances seemed able to idle at the curb and move on of their own accord to the next home -- or was it only in my young magic-besotted mind? Yes, there were horse-drawn delivery wagons -- bread, milk and ice. Summers, we would follow the ice-cart down 2nd Avenue, scooping up ice chips from blocks that the deliverymen chopped apart on the flatbed of their wagon before slinging them over shoulders in canvas bags and taking them to set with ice tongs into the iceboxes that kept our perishables cool. Summers also, when very young and the thunderstorms boomed and drenched across the town, we paddled in underwear in the puddles of our streets, warm tarry smells mingling with the ozone-scented, new-washed air.

Humber West cubs and scouts, and I suppose, brownies and guides, were the basis of social life for most of us. There were a group of adults who shepherded us through cubs and scouts and they were as involved in church as in scouting. Shirley became active in missionary work and her brother, Ken, was a missionary with the Church Army and would later become ordained and have a parish in the NWT. Religion was something that was just part of their lives and it definitely did not dampen their enthusiasm for practical jokes. Old Rev. Butler retired -- was it true that his son was secretary to the Queen? -- and when Jeff Parke-Taylor came as the new minister at St. Andrews, there was a pot-luck dinner at the Hills. The new cleric somehow got the rubber chocolate from the box and spent considerable time trying to chew it into submission until the sight of so many people weeping with laughter clued him in.

At Sunday School, those of us who had reached the mature age of eight could take turns working the magic lantern slide projector. We put in a big glass slide upside down and backwards and slid it into place in front of the lens, switched on the bulb and then adjusted the focus so that everyone could see the words to the hymn on the front wall. It was a mighty responsibility and we felt very mature to be given the job. Once when a missionary friend of Shirley’s came to speak to us at Sunday school, I was on duty at the lantern and was given a stack of slides to be projected. I put the first one in and switched on the lamp. On the front wall, displayed in full colour, was a group of starving children. The missionary began to talk about the work of the China Inland mission, calling every now and again for a new slide. I was horrified. I had never seen this kind of tragedy before and now, here in front of me, bright lit and larger than life, were dying children. I ran. I got up the steps and outside before someone came after me and I remember crying the breathless choking sobs of childhood. I have obviously never forgotten the incident and yet I never felt that someone was wrong or ‘to blame’ for bringing those slides to show to a class of children. We really were a sheltered group, and the world outside was not all little lambs and kindly shepherds.  Years later, studying the Songs of Innocence and Experience of William Blake, I thought again of those sad children trapped as I was in the magic lantern light.

After Sunday School, came confirmation classes and adult duties as sidesmen and Sunday school teachers and even church choir.  I felt at home in most of those services, except for choir, and I am sure it was providential for the sanctity of the service that I did not continue for long in that group. Young Peoples was the church club for teens. The United Church had such a group also and most of us drifted from one to the other with no sense of disloyalty. Whoever was having a dance or a sleigh-ride or cook-out won us over for the time being. Many of our dances were held at the village hall. Someone would be delegated to get the key from Mrs. Kingdon who looked after such things and be responsible for the sweeping up afterwards. The memories of times in church, Sunday School, town hall dances, corn roasts and camps all pendulum through my memory like a Kurt Vonnegut Billy Pilgrim lost in time. They were all part of my life and the life of my town was what I made of it, and now what I remember. I must have the honesty to say as Ashley Brilliant observed, that ‘Some of the things that will live longest in my memory never really happened’.

The first subdivision in Thistletown went up between Albion Rd and Islington Ave, north (the Woodbridge Road) and I delivered papers there as well for a Globe & Mail route I took on one summer. The word, at the time of its building, was that this subdivision would house the workers needed at the AV Roe plant at Malton where work was proceeding on a marvelous jet aircraft. I remember as you do, watching the first jet planes arc across the sky, locating them, as we never tired of pointing out, by looking way in front of where the sound came from to spot the tiny bright dot riding an exhaust trail so impossibly high above.  There would be great roaring noises at times which we were told came from the test runs of this marvelous engine that would drive the Avro Arrow. There were more newcomers in town too who had brought their skills to work on this phenomenal machine and there were more kids in the scout troop and on the schoolyard and in church groups. And then the Arrow was scrapped. Mom worked at the unemployment office in Weston at the time and she came home shocked herself by the plight of those hundreds who had lined up, most for the first time in their lives, to register for unemployment benefits. A great sorting and reshuffling of families took place after that, but we would not be directly affected by it. Dad was working for Ontario Construction Safety, later Workers’ Compensation, and we had moved to Weston, and Hurricane Hazel had come and gone, and the course of the Humber River and our lives had taken a new direction.

At Weston Collegiate, I was one of over a thousand students and I was entering grade nine. We were crowded I suppose, but we didn’t particularly feel it. I finished my teaching career in a high school here in BC and I say we compare poorly to the institutions of the 1960s in the parts of Ontario I frequented, and that is not just an old man’s hankering for some utopian past -- remember the beatings. Cafeterias there had enough tables and chairs for all who wanted to sit down and eat a hot meal. Class sizes were in the upper 30s and electives were limited, but there was a rich extra-curricular life. I took a first aid course, little knowing that all males would be expected to get a cadet uniform and march for inspection in June -- unless you had taken the St. John’s Ambulance first aid course. In that case, you got to sit under the shade trees on the embankment above the parade ground and trot out with the stretcher to pick up the fainters. Life could be very sweet sometimes.

By my grade ten year, we had moved back to Thistletown and so we bused down to Weston Collegiate until the new Thistletown School was built. These were the years when Etobicoke was the lamplight district in Canada and under an enlightened school board and administrative team, developed cutting edge classroom practices and in-service courses that could earn teachers the equivalent of university units on their pay scale. Etobicoke planned to build one high school a year for a ten-year period. I don’t know if they did complete their plan, but the one they built on Fordwich Crescent where once my first girlfriend’s dad had a farm, that one I will always remember.

To be the first class in a brand new school was a real thrill. We would have a Scottish theme as the basis of our intramural program and there would be some accommodations to be made while construction work was completed. I didn’t know then that the accommodations would include potbelly stoves in those ultra-modern classrooms with stovepipes stuck out through a plywood panel in the window. Some labour dispute had the plumbers on strike and they were necessary of course to complete the installation of heating components. And come spring with track and field meets scheduled, coach Gerry MacMartin set up a track around the upper level quadrangle. You could earn participation points for your clan just by being a mattress holder, -- someone who made sure that the stack of mattresses propped against the wall would stay in place when a sprinter decelerated into them. To be the first class meant no practice field until the sod had a chance to grow and a track could be put in place. 

I don’t know if that particular mattress operation of Gerry’s was part of the avant-garde educational plans of the school district or not; I do know that in the second year of operation we wiped the scoreboard at the June meet, setting records and producing legends that would last a long, long time. We had heroes like George Bartlett and Harry Kiefte who though they fell during the sprints or hurdles, still got back up and won their races. We had relay teams that set District records. We were the little school from the north end out in the sticks and we had drive and now, after seasons of playing our hearts out on the football field and basketball court, we also had the wins. Once, in the mid-eighties, I visited TCI and the athletic board was still up in the gymnasium corridor with the names of record holders like Harry Kiefte, John Crouchman, Andy Birrell and others, but the board was gone the last time I was back in 2005, and the school was a different place.

I know we were a school and the job was to teach and to learn, but no one thinks first of the facts acquired when they recall their alma mater.  We moved from a 40s mentality to a modern age in one generation. From looking for jet trails in the sky we would become pilots and navigators of those jets. From watching Elvis or The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show we would become musicians and technicians and designers. And, from being taught well we would become teachers. Whatever our roles have been, we’ll all have a chance to reminisce this September, and for us it will always be the place where we came of age. It will be the place we came from into life