Jumping and landing

CHAPTER 1: THE JOURNEY

 

During the fall of 1950 it became clear that something in our lives had to change drastically if we were to succeed in raising our family as we wanted. So far nothing I had tried had worked well enough to provide a base for the future: publishing was by now out of the question after two failures, and there was nothing else that seemed attractive or promising. Oom Ru had made it clear that his financial help had its limits and that solutions would have to be sought in other directions. I knew what he was talking about, for he had helped one of my cousins to a job with the company he was in charge of, R. Mees and Zoonen, bankers and insurance brokers. That cousin had a succesful career in the business, but it didn’t attract me at all. It was a nasty situation, and we didn’t see any possibilities that would lead out of it.

Right around that time, but before we were really worrying what we had to do next, Trudi and Lootje Westermann had announced that they were going to emigrate to Canada, where Trudi had relatives living in Duncan, a small town, we were told, in B.C., the most westerly province of that huge country. I still remember Lootje’s enthusiastic grin as he showed us a map of Vancouver Island. “Larger than Holland,” he said, “and look…….just one road that follows the east coast. The rest is pretty well wild….” It impressed us, and it seemed terrific, all this wild country. But at the time we were still hoping that things would turn around, and my training was in publishing. Publishing is tied to language….Emigration was not for us.

But when the time came when we were were stuck, with no room left to manoeuver, we were one evening talking about just that possibility, to leave, to settle somewhere else and start all over, doing something totally different, opening some new perspective. And while talking we came to a decision that seemed at the time a bit foolish. The question was: Where do we try to go? Two possibilities came to mind, because we had contacts there. The one was New Zealand, where a sister of Huub Gerretsen lived with her family, the other was Western Canada, where friends lived, Pem and Mien van Heek. We decided that we would write to both contacts and go to the place from where the reactions seemed most favourable. We had an enthusiasic letter from Pem and Mien in a little over a week, but Huub Gerretsen’s sister never answered. Canada it would be!

From that moment on things were suddenly moving fast. Oom Ru and tante Miek were immediately supportive. The first thing was now to make an official request for immigration. That was the beginning of a suddenly very busy time. It is all like a blur in my memory, but I remember the visit to the Canadian ambassy in The Hague, where I was interviewed by a kindly gentleman who wanted to know what I hoped to do for a living in Canada. I told him I would be a carpenter, for I was then as now interested in working with wood and we were sure that there would be no need in Canada for failed publishers. He had clearly not expected that answer, for he asked, politely, but doubtful :”Have you done much carpentry?” “Yes”, I told him, ” well….quite a bit. “Ah”, he said, “as a hobby? Do you have tools?” I could answer that question honestly: yes, I had tools. He filled in on the form “Carpenter” without further questions. We found out later that, at least where we were going, it didn’t take much to be a carpenter.

It would be months before we would be able to leave and I had to do something in the meantime to earn a living. Somehow I found a temporary job at the university library in Utrecht. It was dull, but fitted the circumstances and paid very little. There was a somewhat older man working there whom I had had as a teacher of Latin for a short while. He was married to a British woman who gave us our first and very necessary English conversation lessons, using a Eaton’s Mailorder Catalogue as a textbook, a very practical approach that has proved to be most helpful.

 

My immediate boss was a youngish man, a nice fellow. He and his wife had two children, and they liked to take the whole family out on their bicycles during the weekend for an outdoor picnic. One day he came in and was in a sort of a radiant mood: they had bought two motorized bicycles, “bromfietsen” in Dutch, or “buzz bikes” in translation. It was a form of transportation that was becoming awfully popular in those days. The original version consisted of a bicycle with an extra heavy frame and better brakes, that had an auxiliary little motor mounted above the front wheel with a rubber roller that pressed on the tire to transfer the power. Those little engines, maybe the size of a chainsaw motor and just about as noisy, could move the bike at speeds of between 20 and 40 km/h., much faster in other words than you could pedal an ordinary bike, that had a maximum cruising speed of about 20 km/h. You started them by pedalling and then, when you reached a certain speed, pulling a lever that pushed the roller on the tire. Because they were legally bicycles, they were allowed on all bicycle paths but not the high ways. The quiet, safe bicycle paths were immediately turned into miniature highways, where ordinary pedal bikes were considered a nuisance because they were so slow. The noise was alarming.

There was, however, a more serious problem created as soon as the engines were sold separately, to be mounted on regular bikes, that had frames that were too light, tires that were too thin, brakes that were totally insufficient. These adapted models were often used by a) young kids who couldn’t afford the real thing but liked the speed and who souped-up their engines to reach speeds of 50 km/h., and b) by the elderly who could now be mobile again without buying a car, but whose reaction times were not well-matched with the effortless speed they attained. Accident rates soared, and quite a high percentage of them was serious or fatal.

However, my young boss was eagerly awaiting the first sunny weekend. It came, but he seemed a bit down the next Monday morning. I asked what had happened? “You know,” he said, “they are everywhere and we could not find a quiet spot to have our picnic.” A problem all right. But two weeks later he was beaming: they had found the perfect solution. The Dutch highways are all parallelled by wide, blacktopped bicycle paths, separated from the main road by a grass strip, about 10 m. wide, I guess. Our young family had found that one could peacefully have one’s picnic on this strip, ignoring both the buzz bikes and the cars. I have seen them, in ’71, lots of them, a colourful nylon windscreen supported by four steel pins stuck in the soil, much like the little windscreens we used in front of our tent to protct our Primus stove. There was even a name for that form of outdoor recreation in Holland: “Boulevard-tourism” (“Berm tourisme” in Dutch). It has become one of our favourite images to illustate to Canadians why we thought Holland had lost some of its charm.

A lot had to be done when the time for our departure came close: the house had to be sold, the furniture that we wouldn’t take had to be sold and the stuff we would take had to be packed by a professional in a huge wooden crate, 6′ by 8′ by 6′ high. (the panels served in Terrace as parts of our woodshed) The packers came to take what had to be in that crate four weeks before we left. It was therefore necessary that the children were somewhere else: Justus in R’dam with the Ep and Kees Baars, Lies in Delft with Hanna and Jaap Hamaker, John in Nieuwersluis with Oena and Hubert with tante Lieske and oom Simon in Baambrugge. That gave us three weeks to say our good-byes to relatives and friends.

At the end of those weeks we collected them again and when we came in Nieuwersluis to pick up John and Hubert, who would be taken there by tante Lieske, Moekie wanted to take Hubert out of tante Lieske’s arms, but he turned his head, buried it on tante Lieske’s shoulder and cried. The tragedy didn’t last long for during a little walk Moekie let her hand hang loose and he, walking between her and tante LIeske, took it and things were fine again. Poor Hubert. He was not quite two years old, had just started to talk, and now suddenly his whole life came apart. I think it was hard on everybody, this change, but maybe hardest on him.

We had instructions from Pem van Heek about the the things we had to have to be comfortable. The more we could take, the less we would have to buy in Canada. And one thing was clear as crystal: emigrants could only take very little money out of the country by decision of the Dutch government. There was no limit set for the “settler’s effects”, but that was of course limited by the costs of packing and shipping. We bought the six wooden chairs that are still in use: four in the Den and two in our bedroom, but in order to save space we got them without the legs glued in place. It was the only way we could do it, but I have cursed them every time those legs had to be re-glued. We bought the beds that are now still being used in the Den, the ones that have the spiral steel support for the mattrass. Their construction would enable you to fold down the legs of one, so that it fits under the other one. It has been a real winner in Terrace, where we slept in the living room and where the bed served as a couch during the daytime.

And I had to buy the tools that I did not have, but the only thing I remember was the Walters axe that is still my favourite when I am splitting firewood. I remember the sense of delight to be able for once to buy tools and not feel guilty, or worried about the price. We lived on a very tight budget in Holland as well as in the first years in Canada. I have always loved buying tools….

The last week we were in “Rozenlust” with tante Miek and oom Ru. I can not think of any place that would have been more appropriate or more comfortable than that dear old house that has taken such an important place in our life. The summer was beautiful and warm. “Rozenlust” had two gardens, the one right behind the house, formal, with stately old trees and curved gravel paths between manicured green lawns, a “tea hut” and in the back the house where Chris lived, the gardener and later, when tante Miek and oom Ru got their first car, their chauffeur. The whole garden was surrounded by a brick wall, about 7 or 8 feet high, and discouraging climbing by broken glass set in cement on the top. That broken glass impressed me much when I was a child.

Just before departure with Tante Miek and Oom Ru

The other thing that impressed me was the fact that you could only get to the house by means of a bridge across a wide ditch that had bright green algae floating on the black and smelly water. If you pressed the bell button the maid had to come out of the house to open the wrought iron gate that closed off the bridge. The name “Rozenlust” in elegant cursive letters was part of the iron ornamentation. I was sharply aware that we had rich relatives. “Rozenlust” was part of that awareness. It was for me a reason to feel more important, standing on that bridge and waiting for the maid to come and let me in. It is good that neither tante Miek nor oom Ru has ever been aware of that sentiment for such feelings had no place in their frame of reference. They lived an austere, frugal existence, where, to the great amusement of my father, butter on your bread was considered an unnecessary luxury. Margarine would do just fine. The fact that they got their first car only after the war was totally in keeping with their lifestyle and convictions. But where others were concerned they were extremely generous……always more or less in secret.

Behind the wall that closed off the garden there was another garden, accessible through a new gate in the wall. The land there had come up for sale shortly after the war, I believe, and oom Ru had bought it to preserve their privacy and maybe save them from having to live in the shadow of some high office or apartment block. As soon as you came from the rather solemn atmosphere of the old garden through the gate in the wall you were hit by the incredible contrast between the two, for the new garden was alive, vibrant with colour and light. At the end there was a low, charming brick cabin with a brick terrace under the same roof and a greenhouse on the other end. For this occasion, our last weeks in Holland, they had not only installed a sand box, but they had hired a girl to “look after the kids” so that we would be free to go and visit where and when we wanted. It was a wonderful arrangement, and my memories of those days are still suffused with the bright sunshine and the colours of that garden.

One of the last visits I want to mention, not for the visit itself, which was a very warm and pleasant good-bye to tante Trui, Mem’s older sister, and her husband, oom Jan Wolff, but for the fact that it was my first solo trip in any car. Oom Charles had lent us his little Fiat (“Molehill” was their fitting nickname). I had my drivers’ license, but what I had never done before was to shift down, from high gear to third, and, if necessary, to second. And since that trip took us through several larger communities, down-shifting was not a matter of choice, but of necessity. I made it, but I looked up against doing it every time I could see it coming as if it was a major operation, and was at the end a nervous wreck. I had ground my teeth every time I had ground gears and that was awfully frequently.

During those days we had our first look, acros the river Maas, at the “Zuiderkruis”, the ship that would take us to the new land. It looked fine. It had been a “Liberty “ship, one of the many that were welded together in the U.S. to replace and enlarge the regular fleet of freighters that had suffered incredibly while under constant attack by the German U Boats in the Atlantic. The losses had been so severe that the ordinary construction method with riveted steel pates was far too slow to keep pace with the demand. I believe that the welded construction was first tried and perfected in these ships. They never had a very good reputation as far as sea-going properties were concerned (not of great concern for the purpose for which they were built), but they had on this ship, rebuilt to ease the demand for passenger ships for the specific purpose of emigration, constructed an extra deck which made it a bit top-heavy, so that it rolled nastily in heavy seas.

Zuiderkruis

And so the day arrived that we were shown our cabin, the most forward cabin of the ship, right on the main deck, with a window that allowed us a fine view of the bow, from behind. I think we were very fortunate to get our own cabin with three bunk beds, and I suspect that oom Ru, who was one of the Directors of the Holland America Line that operated the ship in contract with the government, had something to do with it. The normal arrangement for emigrants was that the men slept in one hold, the women and children in an other.

The farewell was a bit wrenching, but not too tragic: we were facing a brand new life and a brand new opportunity. Oom Ru was going with us to Hoek Van Holland, at the mouth of the river. And so we were towed out of the harbour and from there under our own power through the “NIeuwe Waterweg”. That was as far as oom Ru accompanied us, but I have no recollection of the farewell or of the way he got off and to the shore. What I do remember is the rare view we got from the deck over the green low land of te polders along the river on the one side and the large harbour basins on the other with their forests of huge cranes. And then we steamed into the Channel and we looked back at the view that has brought tears to so many eyes: the receding line of the white dunes. We did not cry. Once out of the coastal traffic we turned south for a short, one-night stop in Le Havre for some reason I don’t remember. Moekie thinks we took on a lot of Belgian emigrants there and that would make good sense. And then : the Atlantic.

It had to be that way, but the sunny summerdays were left behind and what was ahead was a lot of wind, a storm, in fact. I had responded to a call for volunteers to help with kitchen chores and was sitting down below with a dozen other people, peeling onions, when the movements of the ship caused me to feel accutely unwell, so that I just managed to race up the stairs and reach the railing before I was most horribly seasick. I reached our cabin, but I don’t remember whether the rest of the family was there before me or came later. I undressed and got in my bed somehow, and felt terrrible. Eventually we were all in bed and sick, for four days, I believe. The only memories that survived the general feeling of not caring for anything any more are that the two little boys had to be helped out of their clothes at times to do what was necessary, and that bending over was more than enough to bring both of their parents to deepest distress, and that the green-faced stewart brought a tray round: dry white sandwiches with dry smoked beef in thin slices. And every time I tried to eat a bite I smelled the damned onions on my fingers…..I believe that practically everybody was sick. There is another memory that survived: the slow, continuous movement of the horizon, first way, way down, and then way, way up……..And somewhere during those days we were treated to the sight of a huge green wave smashing over the bow…. and we had front seats to watch it. Not an encouraging spectacle. And somewhere during the night, in mid-Atlantic and rolling like a drunk, the drone of the engines stopped……It was a scary feeling, but after a while the vibrations ( quite noticeable: Liberty ships were not designed for passenger comfort) and the hum resumed. We didn’t find out why they had stopped. The last day(s?) of the crossing we were well enough to be sitting on deck in deck chairs, out of the wind and in the fresh air. That was a huge improvement. We saw the pilot come aboard during a thick fog. Our fog horn had been sounding, and there was suddenly that answering horn from somewhere in the fog just before the little pilot boat emerged from the mist shroud and we stopped to let the pilot come aboard. We were obviously getting close. The fog must have cleared, for either that day or the next we saw the rocky shore of New Foundland on the horizon, and we passed a fishing schooner, not sailing unfortunately, but nevertheless impressive. It was already getting dark when we saw the lights of Halifax and we got the children out of their beds to be with us when we had a first glimpse of our new country. Entering the bay was somewhat disappointing, for you lost any sense of direction: we didn’t seem to be heading for the lights on shore. There was the huge bulk of an island that slipped by on our right, and then the anchor was let down and we could get some sleep, awaiting the next morning when we would step ashore.

That important morning was bright and sunny. We were towed (?) to our destined spot at the warf and were astonished to see that there were none of the big cranes on the warf that were such a characteristic feature of the harbours of Rotterdam and Amsterdam. The gangplank was lowered and, following instructions, we went down. We had to report to an immigration office that was located in a huge warehouse covered with corrugated, galvanized sheet metal, cheap and temporary looking. The inside was not much better, but the people we were dealing with were happy to get one set of immigrants who could, more or less, understand and speak English. The formalities went smooth and fast, and we were back out in the sunlight and watching the unloading of the crates with the “settlers’ effects” by means of the ship’s cranes…. a slow process. We heard later that one of the crates had come apart and spilled some of its contents over the warf….. The owner must have been a butcher, for we were told that there was something like a waterfall of huge knives.

We went over to the station, to check our tickets and were told that we hadn’t paid enough……, not only not enough for the roommettes we had ordered, but not even enough to travel “coach-class”. It would take another substantial amount to make up the difference. We paid. It was a most unexpected and unpleasant shock, a blunder of the Rotterdam travel agent who had looked after that detail. We protested later, and got the amount back….it paid for the first electric service in our house in Terrace.

Somebody directed us towards the train that was waiting on a side track. There was some little confusion, because there was nobody whom we could ask if this was “our” train , but eventually that too was solved: it was. I don’t remember whether we went aboard for our first look or walked over to the little store close-by to get some bread, margarine and cheese (our first encounter with the bright orange cheddar, frightening at first to people who have never seen any cheese that colour, but reassuringly good tasting). That simple purchase set the pattern for the next four days or so: whenever there was an opportunity we bought our bread and cheese in a local little grocery somewhere close to the tracks. I suppose we bought fruit as well, for there was no way, of course, to cook or eat a warm meal. There were many such opportunities, for our train was slow and had to be shunted to a side spur whenever the regular train had to pass us. It became a routine: get off, run up and down the track to get some exercise, and buy our food.

When we picked our places, two compartments on either side of the aisle, we discovered that black soot covered the seats, the floor, the little tables…..everything. There were in the toilet lots of paper towels and we cleaned up the mess as best we could while there was time. And time there was… lots of it, for we didn’t move until it started to get dark. As we were travelling, it became quite, depressingly clear where the soot came from: the locomotive pulling us was an oil-fired steam engine, one of a dying breed, that produced copious quantities of smoke…. and soot. And the double glazed windows in the coaches that were at least as old as the locomotive didn’t close very well. It was one of our main problems during that first stretch, keeping things and hands “clean”, until we reached Montreal and got into another train, that was not much, but a little better than the first.

However: we were moving, we were travelling through a new, excitingly wild country, as far as we could see in the fading light. My strongest memory is that we travelled on a curved track through a swamp and that the engineer blew the whistle. That whistle, the old, howling kind of long forgotten movies, that strange, wild, undulating wail, still represents better than any other sound to me the vast empty spaces of this country. I recognized it with a sudden shock, because it was that sound that had marked the dramatic climax of a play I saw as a young teenager in Rotterdam, a play called “The Ghost Train”. It made an impression on me that was most certainly out of all proportion to the value of the play, but it kept me awake most of the night following the performance. There was no doubt about it: we were in Canada.

I suppose that we had something to eat and I don’t remember what we did afer that, but eventually it was time to go to bed. Under the seats we discovered extensions that could be pulled out to fill the space between them so that each compartment could be used as a double bed of sorts. They were fairly hard, but not uncomfortable. What we did not have was any sort of blankets or pillows. Folded clothes would do for pillows and we used our raincoats for blankets. It was a good thing that we were travelling in the summer. Moekie slept on the one side of the aisle between two kids and I slept on the other in the same fashion. In retrospect it seems amazing, but we all slept.

The next day we saw Quebec City with its citadel on the other side of the St. Lawrence, but there were so many new impressions that none of them stands out very clearly. We reached Montreal in the afternoon and changed trains. Our luggage, (there was quite a lot: two suitcases, a back pack, and assorted handbags) were carried over by a smiling black porter On the platform of the station we each ate a “Revel”-with-a-handle, something we had never seen. Delicious! And memorable.

We had all kinds of small toys and games to keep the children busy. They proved to be invaluable. It kept us busy too, making sure they had something to do, but we had time to look outside. There was one moment that we shall not easily forget: Hubert was playing with Dinky toys on the little table. One of them fell off and, quick like a flash, he slid down himself to pick it up, but when he came up again his face and hands were streaked with black….

All I can remember of the two days it took our train to reach Winnipeg is the number of larger and smaller lakes between endless forests, decorated her and there by patches of the bright red of Indian paintbrush where it was rocky, white carpets of dogwood where they found moisture, and the almost complete lack of signs of human activity. An empty, wild country.

We came through Ottawa, but I don’t remember having seen it. Maybe that was during the night, for I believe we left Montreal late in the afternoon. The next day we came through Sudbury, and that left a very vivid memory of a lunar landscape with bare, black rock, completely devoid of vegetation of any kind…. an unmitigated horror. On the other hand there was also the glorious view of Lake Superior, shortly before we came to what was then Port Arthur, from high up the rocky shore, looking down upon enormous rafts of logs, like patterns of matchsticks on the dark water.

Two days after leaving Montreal we arrived in Winnipeg where the greatest adventure of our journey awaited us. We were innocently looking out of the window at the crowd on the platform, when suddenly our name was called outside, over a loudspeaker. I went outside in a hurry, met a fellow under a ten-gallon hat, who told me to get ourselves and all our luggage out on the platform, quickly, because we were going to be taken to another station. I had some trouble understanding what he tried to convey, but that much was clear. I hurried back, we bundled up the children, grabbed our belongings, helped, I believe, by the man with the enormous hat, were in a frantic haste taken outsidethe station, and packed into two taxis.The man-with-hat came with us. At that point we are not too clear what happened, but I believe that, in order to avoid most of the traffic signs, we were rushed via back alleys and the like to the other station. Our English was not sufficient to get a clear picture of the unfolding drama, but I am pretty sure that “they” had kept the regular transcontinental train waiting for us,for something like twenty minutes, in order to avoid having to put us up in a hotel for a night. From Winnipeg we had to go to Edmonton and Jasper, while the other train went to Vancouver by the southern route.

Our guide and the drivers of the taxis (I suppose, but that sort of detail slipped from my memory) took us up to the platform with all our

luggage and there, gleaming, gorgeous, slick and impressive stood that train, all chrome and large windows, with relaxed, smiling, somewhat bemused faces behind them. We were hoisted aboard and made our entry in that luxurious interior, sharply aware now of the questioning eyes of all those well-to-do passengers in their casual neat clothes……. a ragged bunch of none-too-clean immigrants. Being an immigrant is not good for one’s ego on certain occasions. This was one of them.

Moekie asked to have the biggest of our suitcases with her in the ladies’ restroom as soon as the train moved out of the station. She took all four children one by one and cleaned them as best she could before she changed them in the last set of clean clothes we had wih us. When she emerged with the last one, there was a heartwarming applause from the other passengers.

After the two previous trains it was an incredibly luxurious, relaxed and fast trip to Edmonton and then to Jasper. We enjoyed the stretch through the prairies, which we found to our amazement to be not nearly as flat as we had thought, and not really monotonous either, with unbelievably wide, majestic river valleys. A landscape so large that there wasn’t any human dimension to it, but that characteristic seemed to us to be common to most of the areas we had come through before we arrived at our destination. Terrace, by comparison, seemed at first sight to be located in a pleasant, friendly environment; no endless views, no inaccessably high mountains, nestled close to the river in a wide valley. That impression changed as soon as I had begun to work in “the bush”, the forests that surrounded the town on all sides. Nature-in-the-raw is not a human-friendly environment.

We learned from a lady who was sitting in front of us that the delicacies we called “bonbons” were here “candies” and we were grateful that we had insisted that the children should know the appropriate response when they were offered something: “Yes, please”, if you accepted, and “No, thank you” if you did not. It made a good impression. I had a stumbling, awkward dicussion with a bony man about the political meaning and implications of the movement north of the R.C. Church in Holland. I suspect that he may have been a member of an Orange Lodge.

Moekie remembers that after a stop at some station a tall man came on board who took a seat directly behind her. He looked non-European, non-white, but was definitely not black and had a hooked nose. She thought immediately that he might be…. an Indian! Too much of Carl May interfered with her better judgment, and she felt very uncomfortable when he tried to be nice and make polite conversation with her. She had an urge to keep the children close .

My strongest memory of anything specific was that there was a moment when we could see for the first time the snow peaks of the Rockies lining the horizon, like a jagged white border between landscape and sky. It was an exciting thing to see, our first view of the continental divide that symbolically meant to us the divide between the past and the future. The closer we came the more exciting it became. The other passengers hardly looked up and the men who were playing cards in the compartment on the other side of the aisle went on playing without as much as a glance. We wer amazed that people played cards while travelling through scenery like this.

The Rockies may lack something of the spectacular grandeur of the Alps but the peaks are steeper, sharper, less accessible, and the whole landscape is more savage, not so readily exploited for profit. It has retained its character of real wilderness. I think that is what impressed me so much: the wilderness, the apparent absence of the “human touch”, nature left as it was originally. Of course you find out all too soon that the human touch (“grasp” would be a better term) reaches far into the areas which seemed at first to be pristine, but to a newcomer this first look at “wild country” can be an exciting experience. This newcomer came from the Netherlands where every last vestige of wildness has long disappeared and where “nature” consists mostly of green, man-made polders instead of the ranch land in the Interior, and straight rows of planted trees instead of forests. I have had that hankering after untouched, unspoilt nature for a very long time, really as long as I can remember. A born romantic…..

We arrived in Jasper some time in the afternoon and had quite a long wait there for the train that would take us on the last leg of our journey: to Terrace. We went into town for a look at something that was not moving past us and that was Canadian, and we would use that long wait (I forget how long it was, maybe two hours?) to see if we could get a warm meal, our first since leaving the “Zuiderkruis”. We found a small restaurant, very simple, and ate something that we didn’t know or recognize. I thought it was probably something like little yellow beans , half mashed, but they were curiously sweetish. Creamed corn it was we learned much later. At the vegetable stand of a grocery store we found strange, small, soft cabbages that turned out later to have been head lettuce. Then back to the station to wait until the train would come.

I had hoped, if not expected, to travel the last part in a gleaming stainless steel coach like the one we had just left. The train appeared and was a disappointment: it looked more like the coaches that had carried us to Winnipeg, but it was not dirty, and you could not pull out a seat-extension to change the seat into a bed. Furthermore, it moved agonizingly slowly, stopping in every possible conglomeration of litle houses, and there were a lot of those. We appreciated, with amazement, that this train stopped for twenty minutes at a beautiful spot where we were allowed to get out and take pictures of Mount Robson.

We picked a coach that seemed to have fewer passengers than the other ones and were a bit miffed when the conductor tried, in vain, to convince us that we would be better off in an other coach. Since we could sit together in this one, we stayed. I did not get the point he was trying to make, which was probably that the coach we were in would be filled later on with loggers and native Indians, and that it would be better for us and for the children to avoid close contact with those two categories of the population. He was probably acting with the best intentions, but we didn’t have any difficulty and found it interesting to watch what was going on when the coach did fill up. There was an awful lot of passing the bottle and of playing poker on top of a suitcase. We used ours to fill up the space between the seats, so that we could lie down.

We didn’t sleep much that night anyway, for not only were we too excited but there was a young Dutch fellow who had been with us since Winnipeg, who had to get off in Prince George. He travelled by himself and was going to work on an experimental station for the Department of Agriculture. He expected that somebody from that place would be on the platform to meet him. It was midnight when we reached Prince George. The station was deserted and almost pitch dark, and certainly nobody was waiting to meet him. We talked to him, trying to lift his spirits somewhat until the train moved on. While we were waiting we saw the last lights in the town go out, one after the other, and when we moved out we saw the lonely fellow on the platform under one of the few lampposts. We heard much later, that he had passed the night sleeping there on a bench at the station, but that he was met the next morning. He didn’t stay long in that job, found something else that paid better and did quite all right.

Whatever sleeping we did must have been after we left him. The next day, early in the afternoon, we came through Smithers, where we were met on the platform by Piet Dieleman who was still recovering from a heart attack and therefore not at work. He had heard when we were landing in Halifax, had found out what train we should be on and had come to the station to meet us on our journey to Terrace. It was a great surprise and the beginning of a long, special relationship. Shortly thereafter he went back to Holland for a visit, and married Moekie’s cousin while he was there. Their meeting was hardly accidental, for his brother was married to her sister.

And on we went, from little town to littler town, with one stop just before we reached Hazelton, to allow us a look at the spectacular Bulkley canyon, at the point where the river makes a ninety degree turn around a vertical slab jutting out from the opposite rockwall. It is an amazing sight, and was well worth the stop.

In Hazelton a lot of loggers and native Indians got on board. It was our first look at Indians and they did not conform at all to any preconceived notions of what an “Indian” should look like, for these men were rather small, chunky rather than athletic, obviously prone to develop big bellies, and remarkably Asian in their features. No eagle noses, not in the least “aristocratic” looking…… sort of disappointing, really, and not at all romantic.

Fairly shortly thereafter we lived through one of the moments that has given me nightmares for years after: the railroad crosses the Skeena on a threstle that must be over a hundred feet high, built in a curve and, like all railroad bridges in Canada, without a railing. The train slowed down considerably, I looked out of the window to see what was coming and immediately herded all children into the centre aisle, so that they could not look down that dizzying pole-construction directly to the river. In retrospect I am sure that they would not have minded the look, but my own immense and of course totally irrational fears overwhelmed my reason. What made that crossing worse was that you could feel the wheels push and grind against the outer rails, while the whole train leaned slightly, but noticeably, to the left, against the curve. For me this was the worst moment of our long train ride.

From near Cedarvale we must have been able to see the “Seven Sisters”, (which I think is a spectacular mountain, even after all the mountains we have seen over the years) but I have no recollection of it.

In Pacific we got out of the train for the last time for a walk or a run along the tracks. We found some berries that looked a lot like small raspberries, but that didn’t have much taste. And shortly after that we passed through Usk where we looked out of the window while gathering all our belongings in preparation for our arrival in Terrace. To our horror we saw that we were in a valley so narrow, and between mountains so steep, that we had to move close to the window to see the sky. The sight filled us with dread but there was no time to think much about it for we had to prepare for getting off. I remember saying to Moekie something like “If Terrace is like this we’d better go on to the coast….” Little did we know about either Terrace or the coast.

And then the train stopped. We got out onto the platform and there was Pem, but accompanied by people we didn’t know. First he introduced us to Pit van Stolk who shook my hand, a firm grip, and said: “Hallo, verre neef.” (“Hello, distant cousin.”) I immediately liked Pit and thought that we would get along just fine. Then there were Bill and Madzy Brandis who were to become our closest neighbours. It was a very warm welcome. And the mountains were gone to make room for a wide, open plain under the warm August sun.

van Stolk house

We divided people and luggage over the two cars; Pem took most in his stationwagon, I went with Pit. Mien was waiting for us at the van Stolk house with Brigitta and Wendela, and of course we met Enid, Betty-Lee and Ivy, but we went almost straight on to the van Heek house, which seemed to have been built as a guesthouse or something like it, for it was right behind the larger van Stolk home. It was a frame house, whereas Pit’s was built with logs. It had a porch over the whole width of the building. You entered in the kitchen/livingroom that was about half of the total area of the house. Straight ahead was a door that led to a small hall with two bedrooms, one on either side, and a staircase to the attic where we would sleep. At the end of the hall was a door to the outside. Pem told us that he had just cut that opening with a chainsaw in the wall, because he thought that to have just one exit when there would be that many people living under the same roof was not good enough. The casualness of the way he told us about it was for us an eye-opener: just imagine that you would simply take a saw and cut an opening in an existing house……We were very impressed. Things were very different, no doubt about it. Of course he was absolutely right: not having that door would make the house a potential death trap if there would be a fire. There was no inside toilet, only an outhouse, and that, too, was different from what we had been used to.

Pem told us that he had looked all over town for a house to rent or to buy: he had found nothing but an old logbarn that had been used for chickens, seemed to be in poor condition and wasn’t worth further investigation. But he had talked to Bill Brandis, who had offered that we could buy the last one-and-a-half acre of his land. Most of that was a steep sidehill, but there seemed to be enough flat land at the bottom to build a modest house. We were to look at it the next day. The price was right: $ 250.- I believe. And so, on the day of our arrival, we were suddenly submerged in plans that would have seemed less than a month ago unimaginable: building a house from scratch, with our own hands….! Pem offered his help with the building as well as with the financing. It was a very large family around the supper table: ten people. We slept well, as far as I can remember.

The next day Pem invited me to come with him when he went off to work. He was a logscaler for the largest employer in town by far, the Columbia Cellulose Cy., always referred to as “the Cellanese”. They were working on the right-of-way for their main road, the road that would eventually link Terrace and Aiyansh on the Nass River. None of that made much of an impression at the time, but what did was the look at those huge logs that were littering the forest floor, and the stumps that were left, large enough that you could easily have stood on one of them with three people. Of course I had never in my life seen trees like that, so big, so straight….hard to imagine! Pem went about his work, walking over those fallen giants with a casual ease that I found both admirable and amazing, and left me to take pictures and look around. Suddenly there was a silly sound as if somebody had blown on the kind of horn that we used in Holland when we were on a masted boat and had to warn the fellow at the bridge ahead that we were coming, so that he could raise it, a thin, nasal sound. Pem shouted immediately to me that I had to come back to him, fast, and seemed somewhat anxious. When I reached him he told me that they were going to blow up some of those big stumps. I did what was maybe sort of natural for a man who wants to take pictures to send back to his homeland, but it caused Pem to panic: I jumped up and moved towards the scene of the explosion. Pem yelled at me, now really worried, “Come back! Come back!” and the tone of his voice made me do that, without questioning. As soon as we were safely huddled behind a rock outcropping, the blast went off, followed by another one and yet another one and I could hear all kinds of “stuff” hit the ground. That sound shook me a little bit and I suddenly saw in a blinding flash how terribly stupid I had behaved. I apologized to Pem, who felt a bit guilty about not having warned me that this could happen.

That evening, after supper, we went to the Brandis farm and Bill showed us the land he was willing to sell.

Brandis house, 1951

It was surely a funny piece: by far the largest part was a steep gravel sidehill, I would think more than 100 feet high, I imagine part of the original bank of the Skeena River. On the other side of the river there was another bank just like it. When you climbed it, following a zigzag footpath, you came on a wide plain. It looked as if the river in prehistoric times, after the last ice age, had scoured a bed for itself out of that gravelly plain. On that plain, on the other side of the river, the military had built an airport that was and is still in use; an ideal location, for it was flat, there were no large obstacles anywhere, and there was no heavy forest cover that had to be cleared. Eby Road, the road that led to the property, was a dead-end of course, but it did not meet the Bench (the name the locals gave to that gravel bank) at a ninety degree angle. The result was that one corner of our lot was almost at the top of the bank, but the diagonally opposed one was at the bottom, in fact a bit on level ground. That was the corner where we could build, a narrow triangle of gravel that had once been scraped out of the bank to make a road. The piece was perfectly useless to farmer Bill, who would never have been able to use it for anything other than a miniature ski hill. On he other hand he did not want much for it and it suited us fine.

Had I known then what I know now, namely that those gravelbanks can and sometimes do slip and bury the house that stands at its bottom, I would never have built on that spot, for it was dangerous. However, the bank never moved at all above our house, and we were very careful to leave it undisturbed. There was a strict rule in the family: “Nobody EVER climbs on the bank above the house”. There were several advantages to the spot: it was very close to a natural spring on the other side of the road that produced enough clear, lovely water to make it the source of drinking water for the whole town at that time, and it was wonderfully protected against the north wind. During the coldest winters, when everybody took shelter against the fierce northerly winds, our kids could be seen playing at the bottom of the Bench, perfectly happy. And, as I wrote above, the price was right and probably it was the only piece of land we could have bought under the circumstances. We made the deal without hesitation.

The most important thing was to find a job that I could do. Enid had a cousin working as an engineer in the construction branch of the C.N. whose name was Pat McElroy. He was in charge of a crew that had to survey a route for a railroad to Kitimat, where Alcan was building their aluminum smelter. When Pit phoned him on a Sunday when he was home to ask if there would be a possibility for me to find work in that crew he hit just the right time, for they had just lost a young fellow who was allergic to the poison of Devil’s Club and had had to leave. I could take his place if I wanted it. I did. I had no idea what would be expected of me, but I thought that it could not be too difficult if a fellow without any specific training had done it successfully.

The plan was that Pit would drive me to their cabin on Lakelse Lake where I could spend the night and meet Pat the next (Monday) morning. The crew was working just across the lake. I slept well that night but I was nervous the next morning, not having any idea of what to expect. Looking out of the cabin window I saw a man approaching along the sandy beach who fitted the description Pit had given me, so I put my pack on my back and went out to meet him. It was Pat and the way he greeted me was friendly and encouraging. He seemed to be a nice man. Together we walked back to the spot where he had left his crew with the boat that would get us to the camp. The trip across the lake was beautiful and quiet. I didn’t have to talk at all. On the other side we took the boat up the river for a little ways before pulling it up the shore. The camp was just above the spot where we had landed. I was told to leave my pack in the camp and to come along. We walked for maybe a mile or so to the spot where they had stopped the previous day and I was told what to do: together with an other fellow we had to measure, as carefully and as horizontally as possible, the distance between two stakes, keeping the steel measuring tape taut and as level as we could. It was a simple task, and the technique involved was quickly learned. I got along fine with my partner, and had the impression that he was happy with the change of working partner. We worked all day with a break for lunch and went back to camp around 5 o’clock, I think. I had enjoyed the day’s work, which was nice, but what was most encouraging was the fact that Pat seemed to be happy with what we had done.

Back in camp I was shown a tent where I would sleep, I believe by myself. I wondered what I was going to get for a mattress or a bed, but when I asked Pat about that he laughed and told me that I had to make something myself, and that the tips and the young boughs of a certain balsam fir worked well. I had my doubts but set to work and constructed something like a mattrass of tender boughs and twigs and found that it was less difficult than I had thought and more satisfactory. I was not quite finished when there was a call for supper. I thought I would just finish what I was doing, but when I appeared at the table in the kitchen tent everybody was eating and the cook gave me a blast about being on time that I shall not forget. I didn’t get the meaning of his words, but his annoyance and even anger were as clear as the water of the river. Pat explained to him that I was just new in the country, that this was my first work experience and that I didn’t know the rules of the bushcamps, and to me that in a camp the cook is the boss, the undisputed boss. Things got off to a bad start, but soon cooled down. The meal was ample and excellent.

After supper we gathered around a campfire and talked, what for me meant that I said as little as possible and listened a lot. They had great fun teaching me “English”, that is: the English as it is used by loggers and others who work in the bush and mills. It is a simple language, using certain words a lot more often than others, and those words are not to be used in polite company. I think they tried to convince me that their English was what everybody used in Canada and hoped that I would be foolish enough to believe them. They quit as soon as they found out that I was not going to be fooled. I liked the job. My romantic heart loved being in that untouched forest under the canopy of those, to me, unbelievably tall, big, straight trunks, even though there were no bird sounds. But more important than the environment was the feeling, for the very first time in my experience, that I was doing something that was needed and that I did it well; that I was part of a total effort where what I did really mattered and where others relied on the results of my work. I felt part of a team. That they apparently had had some trouble with the fellow I replaced made me feel even better.

After a week we went back to Terrace for the weekend. Pat told me that it would be the last time they could do that, because the next Monday they would have to move the camp farther south and the distance would be too great to make a trip back home for the weekend worth while. That was bad news for me. Pem and I had started working on the foundation for our house, and that work had to have priority over almost anything else if we wanted to move into our house before the winter. There was no question about that need, for their little house was totally inadequate for two families at any time, really, but most certainly during the winter months. We had to move out as soon as at all possible. And because we both had to work during the week, the weekends were our most productive time. And so, after only a week of work on that job and with that crew, I had to say good bye after we had had a few glasses of beer in the Terrace Hotel together. Pat understood the situation immediately, and agreed that this was for me the only thing to do. I was sorry. I had enjoyed my work, my first job in the new country. The fellows who drove me to the Van Stolk home after our visit to the pub made me promise that I would kiss my wife while they were watching us. We kissed, they cheered. Bush workers tend to get very frustrated after a period of isolation…..

Pem found me another job immediately as a compass-man for Dave Hansen, a young Forestry Engineer in charge of the lay-out and construction of logging roads branching off the West Kalum Road, the main road through the area covered by the Management Licence.

The idea of an “Management License” was new to British Columbia. It was explained to me in glowing terms by Ed. Kenney who had been Minister of Forestry in the Liberal Government that had been responsible for the plan. He had an insurance business in Terrace and since I had a house that needed to be insured I went to him. He was fond of talking, especially about his own achievements while in office and particularly to “new Canadians” who had best be turned into Liberals. He failed in my case. But I was very interested in the Management License theory.

The idea made perfect sense: The largest forest companies would be given the sole cutting rights over enormous areas of forest owned by the Crown in exchange for their commitment to care for these lands and the trees. Of course they would take this commitment seriously, for their own future profits would depend on the new crops of trees after the old growth had been cut. The idea was that they would reach the end of the area assigned to them in about 75 years, and by that time the areas where they had started their harvesting would have produced a new crop of second growth trees, not as big individually, but the stands denser, all of uniform size and easy to fell.

It did not work out as planned. Corporations like the Celanese make it their business to cut trees, not to grow them. And in this case the company would have reached the end of their supply within ten years, had they not been granted another supply area north of the first one, twice as big. It was no longer the Celanese…. they had pulled out.

The job turned out to be possibly the most interesting one I had before turning into a teacher. Dave proved an enormously likable man and a most sympathetic and patient boss. He had to be, for his compass man was not nearly as fast and agile on his feet as he was himself and used to complain at times about the rain or the dense growth of bushes, or the snow, or whatever. He used to correct me every time I used the word “impossible” in relation to the road we were planning, when we hit a large rock outcropping or a ravine or whatever. We had to avoid those obstacles in order to keep down the costs of the road construction. “Just,” he used to say, “nothing is impossible; it is all a matter of money.” I thought that his was probably a typical Canadian attitude. And to my delight, he shared with me a sense of the romantic aspects of what we were doing, the sensation that we were possibly the first people to stand on that spot. Nonsense, but alluring. I remember in particular that we suddenly came to a deep, wild little ravine with a creek at the bottom…. a beautiful sight. Since we were always in terrain ahead of the rest of the crews we were most of the time working in old growth forest. Today I would look at those trees with a different perception, but then the only thing that mattered was: how much timber is growing here?

Dave carried a beautiful small double-bitted axe, the kind of axe that was used by “riggers” to top a spartree. He kept it sharp. One day he jumped off a log, swung his axe to maintain his balance, and cut his shin with the axe as it came down. I ran back to where the nearest crew was working and came back with a sufficient number to carrry him out on an improvised stretcher. I didn’t hear a whimper, but he was awfully white while lying in the little truck that carried us back to town. He was off the job for at least a couple of weeks, but I don’t remember that I was laid-off. Trust Dave: he tried to keep me employed as long as he possibly could. When we finally gave up the surveying there was a goodly bit of snow on the ground. And then he made sure that I had another job…..

I’ll write about that one and the ones following it later, but I want to return first to the house-building.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 2: BUILDING

 

We started to build almost immediately after we had closed the deal with Bill Brandis, I would think no later than during our second week in Terrace but maybe even already during the first weekend. It was to be a very simple and small house. We drew up a plan for something of 20 by 28 feet that had two little bedrooms at the one end, one for John and Hubert, the other one for Lies and Justus. We would sleep in the living room and use the bed during the daytime as a couch, which was made possible by the special feature of one bed, with collapsible legs, disappearing under the other.

site preparation

It is interesting to see the progress made by looking at the fotos from that period. It was a slow job, for both Pem and I were totally without any experience and we could not afford to make serious mistakes. One thing that helped was that everybody in the town seemed to be building, so that “building” was the favourite topic of conversation, and you could always and without embarrassment find out how to tackle certain phases or how to solve specific problems. Bill Brandis, a good carpenter himself, (although, like everybody, entirely self-taught by doing it) was a reliable and ready source of information.

The foundation consisted of poured concrete footings. The forms had to be made so that the finished footing, about 2 1/2 feet high, would be tapered, because there was a potential problem with frost-heaving. Of course it would have been much better if we had built the house with a crawl space, in other words on a continuous concrete foundation wall, but that method was never even considered: it would have been far too expensive. Pem was financing the project, and we hoped to build the house for something in the neighbourhood of $ 800.- , which was as much as he could raise. It could be done for that amount….if we used the least expensive materials.

On top of the footings came 6″ by 6″ cedar beams, and on top of those 2″ by 6″ hemlock floorjoists. The least expensive building material was shiplap. All lumber, construction grade, was available for $50.- per 1000 F.B.M. It was good quality lumber, but it had been cut from trees that had been growing in the forest the week before, so to speak, and shrinkage was incredible. We used it inside and outside, over tarpaper, and on the inside there were cracks between the boards after the shiplap had dried through which you could see the tarpaper. The floor boards were nailed with a 45 degree angle to the joists in order to avoid problems when we would be nailing down a subfloor. In the centre of the house we poured a special footing for a chimney.

The windows were a bargain. They were old army-hut windows, saved from the time when the army barracks were pulled down, and they had stormwindows. We paid $ 11.- per set: a window that could be opened by shoving up the bottom half, and a fixed stormwindow. Not a broken pane in any of them. Lots of little panes: 4 rows of 4 in each window, 32 per set, and we bought 8 sets I believe. They were a pain to have to repaint, and they needed painting, for they all had retained a most awful colour green from their army days. There were lots of army huts in Terrace: the elementary school and the hospital, for instance, consisted of army huts, as did the “Home for the Aged” , on top of the Bench above us, the logging camp and office of the Cellanese, and there were quite a number of families living in them, one on Eby Road close to where we lived, the Christies. They were unmistakable; architectural designers didn’t work for the army.

One of the main causes for the slow progress we made, apart from the fact that we could only work in the evenings and on weekends, was that we used shiplap, instead of plywood and gyproc, on all walls. That required an enormous amount of cutting and nailing. The weather remained sunny and warm for an amazingly long time: right through September, and that helped. We had the building under a roof covered with roll roofing before it started to really rain, in fact, before we had the windows in place. I remember that because one evening, when we were still working after dark by the light of a Coleman lantern that was hanging from a nail in the middle of the room, the lantern caught fire. Pem somehow grabbed the flaming contraption and threw in in one heave out of the window., or rather: out through the opening where the window was supposed to be placed.

That roof was the only slightly distinguishing feature of the house. Because we were living so close to the Bench, which made that side of the house sort of dark anyway, we planned a covered porch on that side to keep our boots outside but dry, and to store things that we didn’t want inside, and entered the house through a door that led from the porch into the kitchen. To get enough height to stand on the porch, the roof over it had to be designed as a lean-to, and we didn’t like that, or the wall had to be higher, and we didn’t like that either, or the whole roof had to be lower pitched than was desirable, for Terrace gets a lot of snow at times. We solved the problem more or less by placing the ridge off-centre, so that the north side, where the Bench was, had less pitch than the south side. People passing by often commented on that rather odd looking roof: “Look at that: a crooked roof!” It worked quite well. What caused some concern later was the roof construction. We used 2″ by 6″ lumber for the rafters, and that was considered by most of our friends (after our roof had been constructed) too light for the possible snow load. We didn’t have any problems, but I was never quite at ease when there was snow to be expected. A lot of people could be seen clearing off the roof on their house after a heavy snowfall, so the problem was a very common one.

the house at the end of Eby Road: before the first winter

The ceiling was, of course, made of shiplap like the rest, nailed to 2″ by 4″‘s There was no insulation anywhere. In the walls we thought that the dead airspace between two layers of tarpaper would be sufficient and there was an attic space above the ceiling, accessible through a small trapdoor. I made a special little ladder to get up on the attic, which was a bit tricky, for you could step only on the 2 by 4’s. We didn’t have to be there often, for only our suitcases were stored there initially. The light lumber that supported the ceiling was more or less justified by the support given by the walls of the bathroom and the two bedrooms for the children. It was amazingly satisfactory, but I did eventually nail short vertical connections between rafters and ceiling joists, which made the whole construction more like frames. The very first insulation we used was a 2″ layer of vermiculite spread on top of the ceiling, and that was already an enormous improvement. The walls were later insulated as well, when I had to take out walls anyway while adding our bedroom, a proper entry and Lies’s little bedroom, and improved the wiring at the same time.

Originally the house had no electricity at all; lighting was provided by coal oil lamps. Our main lightsource was the tall brass lamp with the milkglass shade that we still have. Our first electricity came in March of the next year, when we received the money from the C.N., a four-circuit service. We did have water, for we could just hook up to the water main that ran past our house from the pumphouse over the spring at the foot of the Bench on the other side of the road. The iron pipe that was used for that purpose ran for the first 20 or 30 feet in a ditch that was no deeper than 12 inches, for that was the depth at which the main was buried. They could not go any deeper, because under the layer of gravel you hit the swamp and digging there was not only useless, it was impossible. During the severest winter we have experienced in the Terrace years, when some water mains that were put down 6 feet below road level in town were frozen, we had only once trouble for a few days. That was not a frozen pipe but a bit of an obstruction in the connection between the main and our pipe, a shut-off valve that had probably caught a bit of ice. Ice needles came down with the water from a creek north of the town that was the source of our water supply after the spring had been abandoned because it it was insufficient for the growing population. The welder came out, connected his clamps to that valve and our tap, turned on the power, and the water flowed again, immediately. The problem was that one had to dig down to reach the valve on the main. In our case that was not too bad: you lit a fire and poured a lot of sawdust on it. That pile smouldered all night, and the next morning you could dig out 6 inches of soil. I had to do it twice, but to reach a pipe that is 6 feet down you have to have that smouldering pile going for two weeks…. There were that winter a lot of people burning sawdust along Eby Road. Our pipe, running through swamp water did not freeze up.

first winter

What did freeze during the second winter in our house was the short bit of pipe that came up under our sink. It was protected against freezing by sawdust in a wooden box that fitted exactly between the soil and the floor. The first winter that worked well, but in the second winter the sawdust had become wet from the condensation that formed on the iron pipe, and that wet mass froze solid. I tried to get it thawed out by using a gas torch. The sawdust surface smoked and glowed a bit, but the heat didn’t travel down, and eventually I had to call the welder. I am sure that, facing similar circumstances, I would now avoid using a gas torch in that situation. The image of me lying down on my belly in front of and partly under the sink, desperately trying to get a mass of sawdust to burn, right under my own house, in the middle of the winter and without water, makes me cringe.

Our “bathroom” was spartan: it was an empty little room, no bath, no toilet, no water. The small children could use a white porcelain bowl that used to be a common feature of most bedrooms in Holland when we were young, carefully hidden in a little cabinet beside the bed. We used the great outdoors, and because there was a bit of snow on the ground when we moved in, the end of October, and there was quite a bit more snow that winter, it was a frigid business. So the first thing I did was build a toilet-of-sorts. It consisted of a plywood seat with a hole in it, that was connected with a dug-out pit below through a funnel shaped tube I soldered together from galvanized sheetmetal. The pit had a vent that stuck out above the roof. The trouble was that one could not dig a deep enough, big enough pit in that location, between the foundations of the house and the Bench, for there was no room and if you dug deep enough, let’s say more than 3 feet, you hit the swamp and water would fill your pit. The fact that our house was built in that location and on a layer of sand and gravel that was literally resting on the soft, black soil of the original swamp determined the strict limitations of our options. It was not an “easy” spot. We never managed to find a satisfactory solution for our septic tank and for the drain field that was needed.

While we were building the crate with our furniture arrived in a box car that contained three crates, all approximately the same size. Terrace in those days had no equipment to faciltate unloading containers of that size and weight; no forklifts, no hydraulic equipment other than cats, which were useless for that purpose, not even a platform along the spur where the boxcar had been left. The box in the centre was relatively easy to move, and it had gone when we came with the truck of the “Terrace Transfer” to get ours. It was shoved against the endwall, and it fitted nicely, not leaving enough room on either side to allow a person to get at it from the side. I don’t remember in detail how we went about moving it, but I think that we lifted the bottom edge that was facing us by levering it up, bit by little bit, which was difficult enough because it was shoved against the wall, until we could get a piece of pipe under it as a roller. Then somebody had to get the thin end of a big crowbar between the box and the wall while kneeling on top and somehow pry it away from the wall. As soon as there was a bit of a crack we could use heavier bars and more manpower. Eventually there was an opening big enough to allow a person to get behind it and place a hydraulic jack between the wall and the crate. It was slow work, but we did get it away from the wall and eventually in front of the door. The truck was backed up against the boxcar and with the use of rollers and levers and manpower we managed to move it sideways out of the door and onto the truck deck. As soon as the driver tried to move his vehicle, going slightly uphill from the track, the truck’s frontwheels lifted off the ground. We could only get it uphill to the road by having two people stand on the front bumper to keep the wheels down.

Unloading was something else. Our piano was inside and you couldn’t just drop it off the end. Bill Brandis had the answer: he had just had a big pile of topsoil delivered; by backing the truck up against it with a little jerk, the end might slide off and come to rest on top of the pile. It worked and when the truck left the crate was sitting on top of that big pile of black soil, a bit leaning, but not damaged. What I remember vividly was that it was a grey, darkish day, and that I felt relieved, but a bit worried about leaving it there, covered by a tarp that Bill provided, open to the weather. It would be several weeks yet before we could start unloading it. When we moved in we had to heat the house by means of an enormous old cookstove in the kitchen that we had bought from Jim Smith for $ 8.-. It had three broken lids, but they had been neatly brazed by Ed Shaw, who was working in the machine shop of the oldest and largest of the two sawmills in town. He and his wife lived down the road, opposite the Brandis farm. Our fuel was a pile of slabwood, mostly cedar, and not dry at all. The stove was hooked up to the brick and flue chimney that I had built on the foundation Pem and I had made. I found it terribly difficult and frustrating work, building a chimney. It looked so easy, and it was hell. The end product had the looks of a modified corkscrew, and when, after years, we invited a bricklayer to plaster it, he looked at it in amazement, and asked, disbelief in his voice: “Who in Hell’s name built that….?”

Most novices with wood stoves will have some trouble lighting an old kitchen stove, but one of the first requirements is surely that you must have good, dry kindling and good, dry firewood. We had neither. Result: Moekie lit the monster and then everybody cleared the house for 30 minutes or so, until it started to burn. When she returned the house would be filled with thick smoke. Once it was going it was not too bad, but it was not a good way of heating a house. Of course our house had the added disadvantage of having a chronically cold floor. She told me recently that during that first winter she had never had warm feet during the day. Eventually we got a box heater as well. To stop the wind from blowing under the house we piled snow around the foundation, and that helped some. The next spring or summer I put a skirt all around, but it was probably never a comfortably warm floor.

Added to those problems was Justus’s illness. He had been to school, back in grade one, because we thought it would be best for him to repeat the year now he had to learn a new language. He didn’t find the reception very friendly. He had very light blond, almost white hair and stood out like a sore thumb. His classmates called him “ghost” and teased him. And then he became really sick so that we called the doctor. “Kidney infection” was the verdict, and he had to come to the little Terrace hospital for treatment. He was there for a week. Since we had so recently arrived we were not covered by hospital insurance and the cost of $10.- per day was more than we could bear at that time. Moekie explained as best she could to the doctor, Roger Hicks, who was a nice man, what the situation was, that she had been a nurse and that she thought she could take care of him at home. He looked a bit doubtful but consented. Justus did come home and had to be treated with great care. The litle room where he and Lies slept was so wet from that drying shiplap that shoes under the bed were covered with white mould after a few weeks. And when it started to freeze Moekie removed his bed from the wall where all the nailheads had little white frost caps. But he did get better. And he learned to speak English, because Madzy Brandis came every morning to teach him. When he had recovered and went back to school he fitted in pretty well and the teasing stopped.

more clearing

 

In the spring of ’52 Pem and I started to do some work on the ten acres he and the Samsoms shared, in preparation for the building of the prefab that was being shipped from Holland. The first thing he wanted to have was a small shed to keep all the tools dry. That was a fun project, for it was built of small logs. When that was done we could start with the excavation, by hand, of the basement. It was hard work, for the soil consisted mostly of tough blueish clay, but by fall we had it done. While we were digging the bundles with the prefabricated panels arrived, neatly wrapped, and were delivered and piled on the road allowance we had cleared, an extension of the existing road. They were covered with tarps and left until the next spring.

During that winter we gathered large and small pieces of rock for the fireplace. We found them in sufficiently large quantities on the other side of a steep-sided little valley close to the building site. In order to get them across that gully we constructed a miniature cable car: a heavy cable was anchored safely on both sides, and because the rocks were found on a spot that was higher than the place where we wanted them on the other side, we could load them from a platform on a flat tray suspended from a pulley that rode along the cable. The contraption raced across by itself. A somewhat elaborate, but fun-to-make piece of equipment, designed by Pem. It worked quite well.

When we got ready to start work on the foundation the winter rain and snow had made a horrible mess of our excavation; part of it had sloughed in and the rest was looking more like porridge than as a firm base on which to pour concrete. We did manage to pour the footings after things had dried, but on the spot where the clay had been most mushy the footing cracked and sank a little after we had built the walls for the foundation, not much, but just enough to cause considerable trouble when we erected the wall-panels on that side because the top plate was no longer totally level. All panels were pre-finished: insulated and painted. They were approximately 4 by 8 feet and 2 inches thick. We did get the house up, and, as far as I know, it proved to be quite comfortable. The fireplace was magnificent.

van Heek prefab under construction

The Samsoms, too, were building; in fact when we first met Ied she was standing on a stepladder, nailing shiplap to the side of their tiny, two-room house and she was obviously pregnant. It didn’t take very long before Niek decided that they needed more room, and a more convenient space. Their house was enlarged long before ours.

Samsom house

We all started out by using powder boxes for kitchen cupboards. They were strong, well-made, of a practical size, and easily painted, and they didn’t cost anything: you just picked them up wherever they were left. And since all four of us, Pem, Niek (also a scaler), Dave Hansen and I were every day working on the right-of-way for the main road or close to it, we had no trouble finding them.

Dave had shown me his arrangement in the kitchen-livingroom of their house, and I was impressed: they made excellent cupboards, although they had no doors. Dave and Kay’s house was also small, two-room, but built on logs, “skids” as they were called. In logging camps heavy machinery, like donkeys (the winches to pull the logs to the “landing”, where they were loaded on logging trucks) were often mounted on skids, so that they could be dragged to where they were needed. Dave didn’t have a piece of property when he built that house, and, knowing that he would have to move it, made it moveable. And when he bought a piece of land and did move his house on to it, it was easy to find: we just followed the double track of white slivers left on the gravel and the blacktop right across town.

Dave and Kay Hansen’s cabin

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 3: TERRACE

 

When we arrived in Terrace, in 1951, it had a population of maybe 2000 people, but that is a guess. It was a small town, where most people still knew each other, although oldtimers like Pit van Stolk complained already at that time that the town had grown so fast that the fun of attending the New Year’s ball in the Community Centre (which was the old army drill hall, a huge, empty, hollow space) had for him largely dissipated: there were too many peope he didn’t know any more, newcomers. When we left six years later the population had risen to over 3000 people and what it is now I don’t know, but much larger. We always believed that it would grow, primarily because of its location on the spot where the Skeena breaks through a low mountain range and becomes a wide, usually placid stream without rapids or other impediments to navigation. A little further to the west the Kalum River flows into the Skeena and the two valleys, one running east-west, the other north-south make Terrace a natural centre for the region.

Its favourable geographic location is important, but you must first get there, and getting there was never easy. The original connection with the outside world was the Skeena. Travellers arrived by boat in Pr. Rupert, transferred to a river steamer and arrived eventually in Terrace, where the steamer was refuelled. That was Terrace’s first commercial activity: wood for the voracious appetite of a wood-fired sternwheeler. After having taken on the fresh supply of fuel it went on, through the narrows of the Kitselas canyon that made it necessary to pull it with winches past the treacherous rocks in the middle of the river, and then all the way to Hazelton, its terminal.

Later came the link provided by the railroad, and it was a big improvement. But the trains were slow, stopping at every little settlement, and better suited for hauling freight than passengers. Then came the second world war and Terrace got a new role as a place where the army trained its reservists. That made it probably necessary to make two major improvements, the airport was constructed and the roads, both east and west, were improved and became officially Highway # 16. That meant that they were now maintained and passable most of the year, except in “break-up time” in early spring. It did not mean that they were good highways. They were still gravel roads, frequently terribly potholed, with rather great variations in width, very muddy when it rained, very dusty in dry spells.

During the time we lived there the road to Kitimat was started and the road from Prince George to Prince Rupert was improved. The drive from Terrace to Pr. Rupert used to be a slow trip. I did it once with Bill Brandis… there and back in eight hours. The road was winding here and there around the bare, rocky shoulders of the mountains. That meant that there was an acute danger of avalanches after a heavy snowfall, but also that you had to be careful at all times, because the road was narrow and vision was very limited in these spots. A drive to Pr. Rupert was a bit of an undertaking, although it is a distance of only 90 miles. The scenery is breathtakingly beautiful: steep and rugged mountains rising straight out of the green water of the river, which is west of Terrace as wide as an inlet.

It is questionable whether the towncentre was established at the ideal location, so close to the spot where the river breaks through the mountains. Because it sits on the meteorological divide between the Coast and the Interior, winters as well as summers in Terrace are unpredictable. We have lived through summers like the one when we built our house, almost two months of steady sunshine, and summers when there was hardly any sun at all. We had winters that were relatively mild and wet and winters when the temperatures went down to twenty below zero F. When that happens the high pressure in the interior causes an outflow of cold air to the coast, and that wind, when it comes whistling through the narrow gap formed by the Skeena, makes life in Terrace really miserable. I have stood behind the display window of the Kalum Hardware, where I worked at the time, and watched a heavy electricity pole right in front of me, carrying the wires that ran east-west as well as those that ran north-south, sway in the wind while it was close to twenty below zero. That was the same morning when a gust of wind lifted the closed lid of Pem’s car, breaking the hinges, and sliding it the whole length of the roof, across the hood, until it landed in the snow in front of the car. We had borrowed the car for the duration of the Van Heek’s stay in Holland. It was a bitterly cold morning, but it was the wind that made it so awful. On the other hand, at the Frank’s farm, at the western end of town, where the Kalum River joins the Skeena, there was usually hardly any wind at all.

The town’s location was, according to a story I heard, but have never had confirmed, due to a clever move by George Little, who had offered the C.N. land for the building of a station for free when they were preparing for the construction of the railway. Where the station was the town would come….. George Little, who was still living in one of the largest houses on Lakelse Avenue, the main street, when we came to Terrace, had a good eye for business opportunities. In the early days, so the story goes, he didn’t pay his workers’ wages in cash, but in vouchers that could be redeemed at his general store, so that he gained twice from their work: first by selling the products the mill produced, and then again by forcing them to pay most of their wages back through the store. That was apparently common practice in little mill towns in the late nineeenth and into the early twentieth century.

The town centre was at the crossing of the highway, Lakelse Avenue, and Kalum Road, that went straight north from Lakelse Avenue before curving to climb up the Bench, and south down a gentle hill in the direction of the river. All the main stores were along those two roads. The two grocery stores, Jim Smith’s and the Co-Op, were on Kalum south of Lakelse, Johnstone and Michael, the hardware, on the corner of the two, the Kalum Hardware also on Kalum, north of Lakelse. The Liquor store was one block north from Lakelse on a street running parallel with it. The only movie theatre in town was on Lakelse, as was, at least in later years, the post office. The Terrace Hotel, which had the beer parlour, was on Kalum south, roughly across from the Co-Op.

The Elementary School was located at the east end of town south of Lakelse, relatively close to the point where you entered the town after crossing the Skeena bridge. The Cellanese logging camp was a little further west on the northside of the same street and the little hospital about a block to the west from there, on a street that ran parallel to Lakelse a block north. At the point where the highway left town Eby Road ran straight north and our house was at the end of Eby Road, where it hits the Bench.

The total distance the kids had to walk to get to school was two miles: one mile along Eby Road, and one mile through town. That last mile was always a little worrisome because there was quite a lot of traffic on Lakelse. It was, after all, not only the main street, but also the highway. It had beautiful big birches on one side, roughly from Johnstone and Michael going west for two blocks. Those birches really made that otherwise featureless thoroughfare into something almost acceptable. George Little’s house was along that stretch. I believe he was the one that had them planted. To my total amazement I discovered, coming in from Shames where I was working at that time, that there were loggers who had not only no idea what sort of trees they were, but who had never really noticed that row as something different, special.

The distances we had to cover were not great and riding a bicycle has not been a hardship at most times. Looking after the bicycles was a bit of a chore, for the gravel roads were hard on the chains, and they had to be cleaned and oiled fairly frequently. Of course all our bikes (except mine I am sorry to say) were single speed models. Not fast, not fancy, but nearly indestructable. I had a de luxe three speed Raleigh, at that time the very summit of bike technology, but I don’t remember how I got it. The kids, each one in her or his turn, had to learn to ride a bicycle. I believe that Justus had learned in Holland, shortly before we left, but the other ones had to be taught. That involved a lot of hard work on our part. Moekie in particular did a lot of running. I remember that I developed a method whereby I grabbed the child by a belt fastened around his or her chest, and then climbed on my own bike. Somehow it worked. It surely reduced the effort. I don’t remember that there was any one who had trouble learning.

Eby Road from the Bench

 

During the winter months it was not much fun, it is true. Eby Road ran north – south, and during the winter there could be an icy wind blowing that took your breath away. It could be so bad that the children, coming home from school, walked the whole length of Eby Road, 1 mile., backwards in order to avoid having to face that blast. On your bicycle you have to face the weather, and I took precautions when I prepared to go to work in the morning by putting on extra clothes: first my regular woollen winter jacket over a heavy woollen sweater, a scarf around my neck, then a wind-tight rainjacket over top. On my head a balaclava, the bottom turned up to cover my mouth, then a skihat with a long peak and earprotecting flaps, finally a pair of woollen mittens, and over that a pair of very large canvas mittens, lined with rabbit fur. The bicycle had sleeves over the handles to keep your hands dry and out of the wind. Equipped like that I could ride my bicycle if, on the way back, I pulled down the peak of my hat so far that I could just see the road ahead of my front wheel in order to keep the wind off my face.

We rode our bikes until the spring of ’54, when we bought our first vehicle, a G.M.C. panel truck, from the garage where Billy Onstein worked. It rattled a bit, but served us well until we got good old reliable Betsy. The winter before we got the truck we had been fortunate to have the use of Pem’s nice Austin while they were in Holland. It spoiled us, I’m afraid.

To prevent cars and trucks from getting so cold that they could not be started in the morning was everybody’s concern during the winter. Most vehicles had built-in block heaters, but our truck did not. I bought a heat lamp, mounted it on a flat plywood base, plugged it in with the help of a long extension cord, and shoved it under the oilpan. With an old piece of blanket over the hood that did the job. I still have the original heatlamp and have used it to keep the pump in the workshop from freezing.

I did get my drivers’ licence in Holland, but when Pem offered us the use of his car, after years of not driving at all, I thought it would be wise to re-learn before getting a Canadian one, and I took lessons from Teun van Burken, in his Dodge pick-up. When he felt I was ready I applied at the R.C.M.P. office in the centre of town, on the crossing of the only two paved roads, Lakelse Avenue and Kalum Road. The constable got in beside me and told me to drive north on Kalum, turn right at the first side road, turn right at the first crossing, right again on Lakelse and once more right back to the station, in other words: just around the block, and “that was all there was to it”, to quote Teun. There were only two ways to fail: gross incompetence, and not stopping before turning back onto Lakelse. I passed and got my license, a temporary one, only good for driving within 100 M. of Terrace, until the testing crew would come up to give me a real test.

That took a while, and both Moekie and I felt that she should learn to drive as well, so I gave her ten lessons in the evening, after supper. She, too, passed and got her temporary license. But when the testing crew came they were so busy that they reduced their load by testing only the males. That left Moekie with her temporary license at the time we drove to Victoria, and forced me to do the driving after 100 M. on the road to Pr. George. She had done a lot of driving in Terrace and passed her test without any trouble as soon as she could do it in Victoria.

I must mention the time that there was anything like a difficulty. I was phoned while working in the hardware that my wife was stuck across a ditch on the Bench Road, and would I go up and help her get out. I borrowed Ray Juby’s fine stationwagon and found her as described, across the shallow ditch on the right hand side of the road, and stuck because she had shorn off some bushes, and one stout little trunk was wedged behind the front axle. With a hatchet I could cut it to get the truck back on the road. There was no damage. What had happened was that, driving up a road that came out on the Bench Road, there had suddenly, at the moment when she was making her right hand turn, appeared a car at a ridiculous speed that scared the daylights out of her. She must have hit the gas- instead of the brake pedal while turning. The only reaction of the kids had been: “Oh, Moekie…..” The driver worked at the “Home for the Aged” (from where he had phoned) and had been late for work.

In Terrace the churches played an important role in those days. The question people used to ask when we met them for the first time was usually: “And to what church do you belong?” We decided that we would belong to the United Church, which seemed the closest to the church we had belonged to in Holland. The other three main congregations were Anglican, Christian Reformed and Roman Catholic, but Moekie mentioned that there were over twenty different services held in Terrace every Sunday morning. The United and the Anglican churches were attended by largely the same kind of people, and, in fact, if one of the two had a very good or a very poor minister, the other one suffered or gained temporarily, because more people would attend the church where they heard the best sermons. The Christian Reformed church attracted all the Dutch immigrants of Calvinist persuasion, who in Terrace as in other communities formed a tightly knit community.

As soon as word got out that Moekie could play the piano she was asked to play for the church services, and that entailed playing for weddings and funerals as well. It was a job she did as long as there was a piano, but as soon as they acquired an electronic organ she quit. We sang in the church choir, with enormous programs at Christmas and Easter. We were fortunate in having a capable and enthusiastic choir director in Vi Seaman, the pre-school teacher, and I have good memories of the practices at her house….until, during the practice for our last Easter service we had to sing a religious text to a melody that was very familiar to us: it was the song that was “sung” by all supporters of all soccer clubs in Holland, wherever they travelled, a simple melody that was shouted, roared, blared by the fans until they had no voice left. The crudest and lowest form of folk song imaginable. Our memories were so strong and so awful, so gross and so anti-musical that we had some serious misgivings before we gave in. Since it was part of a whole program of Easter hymns there was not much you could do but quit altogether, and that we didn’t want to do to Vi.

There was one other occasion where I felt very uncomfortable. It happened during a regular weekly practice for the coming Sunday. Vi’s husband had died and I had offered to take care of that service. We had to come up with something appropriate that we could perform after only one practice. The night before I had had a brainwave: we would, in honour of the deceased, sing a round, “Dona Nobis Pacem”, beautiful, fitting, easy. A noble piece of music. I suggested it, but, to my bewildered amazement, encountered immediate, total resistance from two members, one of them, (the most vociferous) George McAdam. “That is Latin….! That is a popish piece of music……! Never!!” I had overlooked a basic fact, namely that part of the United Church’s members, particularly those from Scottish background, came from the Presbyterian Church, where anti-Catholic tradition was strong. Had I only put other words to that music, the night before…

It was through our affiliation to the United Church that I got familiar with a new tool, that made painting of large surfaces so much easier: the paint roller. I was a steward of the church, and it is the stewards’ responsibility to maintain the building. So, when it needed painting, I was there to lend a hand. The paintroller was new then, and controversial. Many people who took pride in their ability with a brush didn’t want to hear of this new-fangled gadget that was a threat to their claim to recognition. I must admit that I tended to side with them…. until I had this opportunity to try one. It didn’t take long to convince me: we all had so much to do, and so little time to do it in, that any help was welcome. Who would even dream of painting inside walls with a brush now?

Terrace was a more or less typical small, “northern” town, a logging community, but it had a few redeeming institutions: there was an active community orchestra, conducted by Frank Gavin, who was a “cat skinner”, and whose heavy hands seemed to be suited only for that kind of work. But he carved astonishingly delicate flying geese as decorations for his lamps, and his enthusiasm for music was great and genuine. Pem and Pit both played in that orchestra; Pem violin and Pit cello. Of course I joined. I was the only flute, and I had the strong impression that my contribution was somewhat futile, because I was sitting in front of the large brass section and usually could barely hear myself. Moekie played piano, made possible when Bertha Gavin, Frank’s wife, offered that she would come and babysit at home. One of the enduring memories of Pit’s playing was that he used to tune his instrument rather quickly, and then declared that it was “good enough”. It has remained one of the family stories.

The other cultural activity was the “Little Theatre” that performed once a year. They had some real talent and an enormous asset in their director, Loreen McCall, a strong, driving personality. Mien was heavily involved in it, worked very hard and was soon one of the main pillars of the group. Their performances were polished and, I thought, amazingly good. It was a popular institution in the town where the only other form of visual entertainment was a rickety movie theatre. Moekie was somewhat involved in one of their productions, “Arsenic and Old Lace” where she had to play a few bars of theme music. It was a small, but essential part and she had to attend some practice. Little Theatre practices were always at night, mostly during the winter. We had our van at that time, and she had her license, but only just. The van was at times a bit difficult to start in cold weather and after one of the practices it refused. “No problem,” the other members told her, “we’ll give you a push. Just put the van in second gear, push down the clutch, and let it come up when you have a little speed. It should start then.” To their amazement it did not, and they pushed her all the way home. She had been so intent to keep the van on the road that the last part of the instructions had been forgotten….

When we arrived Terrace did not have a library. But our kids always had books for there was the “Open Shelf”, operated by the Provincial Library in Victoria, a wonderful service. They sent us their catalogues on request, each child filled in what he or she wanted, and the books were mailed out free. We could keep them for six weeks and mail them back, again free, with the new order. It was a festive day when the parcel with books arrived. By the time we left all of our kids were ardent readers. And when we were living in Langford we drove once a week to the Open Shelf and they could pick and choose literally from the shelves. When we moved to Victoria that stopped of course, for the purpose of the “Open Shelf” was to provide a service to places that didn’t have a library.

Mien was eager to try to get a library in Terrace and put together a committee for that purpose. I was interested and became a member of the committee. I don’t think I have ever had to do anything, but my name is mentioned as one of the “founding members” of the Terrace Public Library. I must admit that I am a bit proud to have my name associated with an institute I deeply believe in. For the first couple of years it operated as a branch of the library in Pr. George and we received every half year or so a big chest full of books that had to be returned at the end of the stipulated term, but I believe that is all history, and the Library in Terrace is now part of the cultural fabric of the town.

Hunting was big in Terrace. Pit had hunted a lot but I don’t think he ever went out any more. He had beautiful hunting stories, though. Every hunter hoped to get a moose in the fall, for that would keep a family in meat for the whole winter. His hunting partner was Sam Kirkaldy, the postmaster. The story Pit told about Sam was that he had been out in the bush, looking for signs that would indicate that there was moose in that area, when suddenly he came upon a splendid, large animal that slowly approached the spot where Sam was standing, through the bushes. He didn’t hesitate, fired and saw the animal go down, but then unexpectedly heard a whole string of furious oaths come from the spot….Small wonder, for he had killed a harnessed horse that was being used to pull logs. The owner was fuming with anger. The incident cost Sam dearly, for he had to pay for the horse, and the laughing back in town was never-ending.

The sale of freezers tended to jump during the hunting season, with the result that both hardwares sold the ones they had in stock, and you could almost count on it: as soon as the one we had had for a year was sold there would be either a customer or a phonecall because somebody else had been lucky. It didn’t matter that you promised to phone in an order that same moment, and that it would be delivered within a week: if you have butchered a moose, you need a freezer, right then and there.

Shooting a moose is made difficult by the very fact that they are enormous beasts. It was no good to shoot a moose somewhere deep in the bush, for you could never hope to carry it out. You had to shoot it close to a road where you could get to it with a truck. Dave Hansen and a friend were out looking for moose a whole long afternoon, without even sighting one. When they finally returned to the spot where they had parked their truck and sat down under a tree for a little rest, facing the clearing, there was a sudden movement in the bushes behind them and looking over their shoulder they saw a fine moose right there, within maybe twenty feet. They shot it, hardly daring to believe their good fortune, and shared it between them.

As soon as the road to Kitimat was “in” there were people buying land along it. It was probably not very expensive land, for there were of course no services at all. One man who had built his house there was apparently a practical joker. He made, from cardboard, a lifesize moose and attached, somehow, a pair of real moose antlers to it. He planted it in some bushes close to the road, and it looked remarkably realistic. He got a charge out of seing people drive by, stop, back up for another look, get out of their vehicle with their rifle at the ready, take careful aim and shoot what they thought was their kill of a lifetime, so close to the road. When the moose did not move they went up to have a look…. swear loudly, hurry back to their vehicle and race off. The story has it that he had to replace that moose several times, each one shot to shreds. I can not swear that it is a true story, for I have not seen that moose.

As far as I know there were no people skiing in Terrace. Dave Hansen got around on snow shoes on occasion and you saw the odd pair of snow shoes hanging in people’s entries, but no skis. I am sure that must have changed, for there was a ski hill cleared and a lift installed on the slopes of Thornhill Mountain during the years after we had left.

There was a curling rink in the town, but we never went there to skate. The Brandis farm had a low lying area, the most productive land on the farm by far, that would flood most winters, and if it was cold enough it would make a good, albeit rather limited, skating rink in the Dutch tradition. We did skate on that ice, and it was fun, but I can only remember doing it once, and I don’t know why. Probably because I had to work during the week and the times when there would be ice during the weekend may have been few. And maybe it was often just too cold…

Summer activities were easier: there were places where you could hike, or go for a swim, or have a picnic. We hiked up Thorhill Mountain, the first time only Justus and I with Bill Wellings, the manager of the Bank of Montreal, and his family. They introduced us to Bakers Dot chocolate as a good trail treat. It was a fine hike; the trail was good, rather steep in places, but well maintained, and the views were incredible. The higher you came, the thinner the trees of course, and in the end you actually rose above the tree line. That may seem rather strange, for Thornhill is only a bit over 4000 feet high, but it is of course the result of Terrace’s location: it is so much farther north than where we are living here. The winters are longer, there is more snow earlier on the mountains around Terrace, and it stays longer. Thornhill mountain, with its deep snow and strong winds (you could see a vane of flying snow coming off the top in the winter) is a harsh environment for trees. In Terrace during the summer it was much longer light and Moekie and I remember working together on the roof, nailing asphalt shingles, well after ten o’clock at night. The noise didn’t seem to bother the children at all.

Northern lights are an almost common spectacle, sometimes like random searchlights flashing across the night sky, but on one occasion turning the whole sky an amazing, an unbelievable red. That is, I believe, a pretty rare phenomenon. Ed Shaw, who had been a prospector in Northern Ontario, said the next day that he had seen it only once before.

Our second hike up Thornhill Mountain was a few years later, with the whole family. Arriving at the top and looking at the sparse growth and the ponds in that rocky waste was always a thrill. There was the fire lookout cabin on top, securely anchored by steel cables to the rock, where during the summer the guy lived who had to spot starting fires. It must have been a boring job, for you were so utterly alone up there, although you had radio telephone to maintain communication with the Cellanese office downtown. There was nothing to do, but you had to remain watchful all the time. Lots of time to read, I suppose. Teun had that job usually and did not mind the loneliness, or so he said. The lookout was changed to a different site at a lower elevation in the years when we were still in Terrace, because Thornhill was too often hidden in clouds. I wonder what happened to the old cabin on the top.

And there was Lakelse Lake. It seemed to me that all the old timers living in Terrace had a cabin on Lakelse. The road that connected Terrace with its favourite summer recreation spot was an old logging road, built on the cheap and avoiding all major tree stumps. We were told that there were, I believe, over 130 curves in a road 17 miles long. I never did count them, but there was hardly a straight stretch anywhere. The only one I can remember was at Jackpine Flat, I guess about one mile long, and for the rest the road twisted and turned like a snake in a frenzy. It was a narrow road as well, and terribly dusty. It was advisable not to try to go fast. They warned you in Terrace to be careful and stay out of the way of Dud Little, who took pride in the fact that he didn’t slow down for anybody. All the cabins were on the east side of the lake, for that was the side where the road led you. There was no access road to the other side in those years, and the few hardy souls that built cabins there had to cross the lake. One of the families who did that was the McCall clan. I remember that we rented a cabin for a month during the summer. At the end of that month we found the whole family McCall one morning on our beach: they had had a skunk for a visitor, and their dog had chased it under the cabin, where it had protested and let go. It is an unlikely vile smell. We quite understood that the McCalls could not stay inside. I believe they had spent the whole night on the beach in front of Ed Whalen’s cabins. They had thrown whole cans full of tomato juice at the spot where the skunk had hit, because they had heard that it would neutralize the stink…. they knew better now than to waste good tomato juice. Even scrubbing has only limited effect…. if you can stand to get so close that you can scrub. Skunks are not intimidated by any animal; they know their power.

I have very happy memories about that stay, although we had a case of badly sunburnt feet: John and Hubert standing on a raft they had assembled, their feet wet all the time, and in the hot sun. They sailed their two model boats and I took a picture of those. We sailed in Susie Adam’s boat after Moekie had made two sails from bedsheets provided by Susie. We had to get our sewing machine from Terrace for the production. The next summer the boat had sailmaker-made sails. It was a joy to sail.

We went with Ed and Ann Shaw to an old house on the south side of the lake that had had a hot water system by piping the water in from a hot spring that was located near by.

You reached the hot spring by walking along a “corduroy” road, a road made of parallel logs. The corduroy construction was necessitated by the swampy soil at the south end of the lake. After a while you saw mist slowly rising from an open spot between the trees. Coming closer you could see that it was not mist, but rising steam. And then the wide, round opening in the forest came into view, with in the middle the still, dark water of an almost perfectly circular pond, some thirty or forty meters in diameter, bubbles breaking and steam rising in its centre. The shore consisted of a very slippery, grey clay that gradually showed darker as the water got deeper. It seemed to slope very slowly at first, but faster as the distance from where we stood increased, until it plunged, like an inverted exponential curve, toward the black centre where the bubbles continuously rose and broke. It was very quiet, very peaceful, but that slippery curve and the black centre were nevertheless menacing, an unspoken but clearly stated threat. The scene left a strong, clear impression of something going back endlessly in time, notwithstanding the little basins that people had dug on the edge, to sit in the water after it had cooled off a little. They were the only signs of human activity I can remember, although there must have been something indicating where the houseowner got his share; wooden troughs or pipes, or whatever.

We have seen the same spot later, after the road to Kitimat had been completed (it ran quite close to the hotspring) and the water rights had been obtained by a Terrace logger/entrepreneur who had built a motel, reduced the circumference of the original pool drastically, built a swimming pool and so on, and so on. We could only feel terribly sorry that nobody had had the foresight to secure it as a park.

We had picnics, on our own property, on Pem and Mien’s property, but also, once in a while, on the top of Terrace Mountain, which wasn’t a real “mountain”, at something like 2000 feet, but a big lump of rock looming behind Terrace. From the top you had a lovely view of the town and the valley. The hike up was not too strenuous, but just enough to make it sort of interesting.

And one of the favourite spots was Kleanza Creek, Gold Creek , which emptied into the Skeena some ten or fifteen miles upstream, on the other side of the river. It was a salmon rearing creek and it was there that we saw for the first time the humpbacks struggle upstream to spawn. A beautiful spot, protected, even in those days, by its park status. The last stretch of the creekbed is wide, and the water rushes down to the Skeena in a joyful, fast current. On the flat shore, under the trees, stood a number of camp tables and a logcabin, where an old fellow lived, who looked after the park. Against the wall of his cabin leaned a number of wooden stilts he had made for kids to play with. At the far end of the flat part the creek came thundering through a narrow canyon in a series of falls. You could climb up a litle steep trail to the rim of the canyon , from where you could see the creek at its original own self, a wild little stream in a wild vast country. In the creekbed were left the rusty parts of what I have always thought of as an attempt to use the creek for generating purposes, gears, wheels, assorted metal rods and such. Because they rather emphasized the untamed nature of the creek, (the attempt had clearly failed) they seemed to us to be more part of the environment than intrusive and misplaced. And in those days we still had a very romantic view of prospectors, miners and, especially, gold diggers, a view that didn’t take into account the obvious motivation for their activities: raw greed. To us they belonged to the adventurers who had “opened up the country”. Adventurers they were, but “opening up the country” is a loaded term that has a nasty racial connotation: it considers the recent invasion by the white man, a mere 150 years ago, as the start of history in a land where aboriginal peope had lived since the ice retreated.

It’s less than 50 years since we arrived. It seems hard to believe that in that short span of time the harsh consequences of human greed and an explosive growth in human population have become so disturbing that we wonder what is left for our grandchildren. At the time I am trying to recall forests were “endless”, mineral resources “waiting to be discovered”, real, untouched wilderness was everywhere as soon as you went a couple of miles outside the village, and grizzlies were more threatening than threatened. Of course all the signs must have been there, but we didn’t recognize them. It was that frame of mind, that sort of innocence, that made it possible to start and complete projects like the Kenney Dam, the Bennett Dam, and all the other dams, mines and projects that have had far greater and far more devastating environmental impact than was predicted at the time of their construction. It’s as tempting as it is useless to speculate what might have been the results if the plan to build a mono-rail right through the Rocky Mountain Trench, as proposed during the W.A.C. Bennett years, had been realized.

The Skeena River system was, of course, important for the salmon fishery and sport fishing was very popular in Terrace. Pit van Stolk had been a keen fisherman and took me to the hardware of Michael and Johnstone especially to show me, with the enthusiasm that was so typical for him, fishing rods made of glass…… I couldn’t believe what I saw; I had never even heard of such a thing. But while I was working in the Kalum Hardware and met all those who actually did catch fish I was inspired to buy a rod like that myself, together with all the paraphernalia deemed necessary. I could hardly wait to try my luck. During our first trip to Lakelse Lake after this purchase I had to try it out. So, when we crossed a little bridge over a nice creek, I parked the van and announced, with appropriate casualness, to my admiring family that I was going to do a bit of fishing, because this did seem like a good spot. Mine was a casting rod, and, working in the place where we sold this stuff, I knew how to use it and when and where. I picked a spot where there didn’t seem to be any obstructing branches, selected a nice, colourful lure, attached it carefully, and started casting. So focused was I on what I was doing that I paid little attention to the movements of the children. I hadn’t made more than half a dozen casts, when suddenly there was a loud scream behind me. Turning around I saw Lies bending over and clutching her leg…..I had caught my own daughter and the vicious barbed hook was deeply imbedded in the calf of her leg.

There is no way you can extract a fishhook without doing a lot of excruciatingly painful damage. We cut the line and drove as quickly as possible back to Terrace and to the hospital, where the nurse took one careful look at the situation, and explained to me that there was only one way to go about it: cut the eye off the hook, and push it all the way through. “Don’t attempt to pull it back,” she warned,”that would make it far worse.” She was not volunteering to do the job for me. I suspect that this was meant to be a lesson to the dad of the unfortunate victim. We learn by suffering. Lies was incredibly brave during the operation, performed after we had come back home. The hook was brand new and apparently clean, for the resulting wound healed quickly and without infecting.

The incident reduced my enthusiasm for fishing by quite a bit. I remember going once, with Justus, to the Zymoetz River, where it joins the Skeena, a short distance upstream from Terrace. It was supposed to be a terrific place for catching steelhead trout, but I caught nothing. It was a grey, blustery day, the river was fast and grey and cold, and we didn’t have a lot of fun. We didn’t stay long. When I got my lure tangled up behind a rock I cut the line and we left. I may have tried again in later years, but I never developed a taste for fishing. It was more rewarding to pay one of our customers, a kid about fourteen years old, fifty cents for a ten pound salmon. He always caught fish, far more than his mother could use, and he could pay for the lures he had to replace by selling the surplus. He got his lures at the Kalum Hardware.

Terrace was a logging town. Excessive drinking was common. We talked about it around the dinnertable sometimes; it was impossible to avoid talking about it, for it had a profound effect on the town and the people living there. Apparently our talking had been so effectice, that John, when he heard that his father had bought one bottle of spirits for Christmas (I believe it was a bottle of Bols Cherry liqueur) was furious, openly hostile and obviously terribly upset: his dad was going to go to pieces any time now, for he was starting to DRINK.

The Liquor Store once sold during one day, maybe the day before Christmas, for over $10.000.-, all in cash, of course. For a population as small as the one in Terrace, that is a lot of liquor.

At the extreme west end of town, where Eby Road joined with Lakelse, the road made two unexplained right-angled turns, first south and then almost immediately west again. In a highway that is not a good feature. We used to refer to that corner as “Kirby’s corner”. It was there that I almost caused a terrible accident during the very first days after our arrival in Terrace. Pem had invited me to drive the families to the spot where we were going to build our house. I came with moderate speed up to the corner, but didn’t realize that it was really ninety degrees, not just a somewhat tight corner and didn’t brake nearly enough. I almost lost control, the van careened around the corner leaning sharply to the right, maybe on two wheels, and Pem, screaming at me :”Just.. !! Just.. !! Brake…!!!” got the shock of his life. We all did. I felt terrible, but grateful that nothing had happened. It was the end of my driving for years, until I got my second set of driving lessons from Teun.

On the highway, just before that corner, was the building materials store of Albert and McCaffery that burned pretty well to the ground some five years after opening. I had not believed it possible, but during that fire I have seen whole sheets of thin aluminum, used as insulation on the inside under the gyproc, burn while flying around in the draught like sheets of flame before coming down.

At that corner, too, was the dirt track that took you to Sande’s mill, where I worked for a year. But that is another chapter.

Sande’s mill: the deck

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 4: FAMILY LIFE

 

A problem when trying to write down one’s memories is that they are by definition personal, the writer’s memories. They can include bits and pieces of memories of those around him, as they are told to the writer, but they cannot give more than a one-sided picture of the time. In this case that means that little was written about the family members, whereas they form in reality the core of all that went on. It was the future of our children that was the strongest reason for leaving Holland. Time, then, to turn to them and try to patch together a picture that places them in the centre.

It is amazing how children adjust to almost any circumstances and make do with the little they have. Our children had very few toys. We could not bring much with us and they didn’t have much in Holland to begin with. But they were not unhappy children. Who knows? maybe the lack of bought toys stimulated their imagination and their inventiveness and was a blessing in disguise.

There were the Dinky toys, and they formed the most highly valued part of their treasures, shared by all, endlessly played with both inside and out (although I believe that there were certain ones especially for playing outside). They were a main source of amusement during the endless train ride across the country, they were played with in Terrace, later in Victoria, and there are even some that survived and are played with by children who visit us on Denman. The collection grew with every birthday and Christmas, they became more sophisticated, but the older ones were never abandoned.

We brought with us a few wooden toys: a doll buggy and a truck, both of which have survived and are still serving their purpose today when we have young visitors. The wheels of the truck were very badly worn afer we had been in Terrace for about a year, which was not surprising after the hours it had been used in the sand at the foot of the Bench. Fortunately I met a fellow at work who owned a wood lathe and offered to make new ones. And when those were worn out I had a lathe myself so that they could once again be replaced. It seems to me that the wheels of the doll buggy are still the original ones. The doll that sleeps in it at this moment is still the original Nancy that was one of the first toys bought in Canada, from the Eaton’s Catalogue

I believe.. She has become pathetically pale over the years. In Terrace one more wooden toy was added: a tugboat that, somehow, never got painted, but it survived and is, still unpainted, part of our collection of toys.

I remembered from my own childhood the fun we had with Meccano and when we discovered that it was still available we started to collect our own set, adding to it with every opportunity. I still have a very soft spot in my heart for the different elements that together make up a set: the strips, the plates, the platforms, the bright colours, the little bolts and nuts, the wheels and axles, the wide variety of bright brass gears….. all together a wonderful toy. It was not a toy that was totally suitable to the environment of our house. We lived for years on shiplap boards for flooring, and the nuts and bolts tended to disappear in the cracks . Without those, no Meccano construction. Moekie found the answer: we got a magnet. And I am surprised when still, time and again, I find those little bolts in places where I had not expected them at all.

The other toy that proved immensely successful was a log cabin building set. It was a “Sinterklaas” present, offered by the holy man himself when Susie Adam introduced him at our house one year. The parts of that set have been used in so many different applications, from log cabins to harbours for little wooden boats or to whatever was needed at any time that it is hard to imagine any play situation inside where they were not used. I have a suspicion that that set is at least partly responsible for John’s preference for log construction.

Our kids grew up with tools and lumber, for they lived in unfinished houses and the finishing was done by ourselves, so that they were close to, and more or less part of, the process. It was really not surprising that they wanted to make things of the scraps of wood they found. When I was making something there would often be one of the kids sitting on top of the workbench, watching what I was doing. Therefore I should not have been surprised when I noticed that they, as soon as they were allowed to use chisels, knew how to hold and use them, but I was. I was also very proud.

One of the most successful toys made of wood scraps, was a little bulldozer, made by nailing one thinner piece to the end of a thicker one of the same length. Soon all kids had their own for playing in the sand at the foot of the Bench, building roads on which the Dinky toys could travel. They were followed, if I’m not mistaken, by boats, but I don’t remember whether those were used in the creek or only on the floor of the livingroom.

A workshop has most of the time been an essential and often useful part of our lives. In Terrace I built one of reject lumber, with two cedar logs as a foundation. It was a very simple structure but it served us well. I had forgotten this, but Lies remembers that in that workshop a round lid of a tin can was nailed to the inside of the door. It served as a target for little arrows that had nails stuck in the end and that made a wonderfully satisfying “clunk” if they hit the target.

the workshop

Interesting detail: smells tend to linger in our memories. All the kids remember the gluepot that contained some kind of animal glue, made, I believe, from hooves, horns and the like, that was heated in a small cast iron pot, suspended in another cast iron pot that contained water, “au bain Marie” you could call it. It was the most common glue used in those days and when heated it spread a most peculiar smell, a smell I didn’t mind, but strongly disliked by the kids. I heated it on the what we used to call an “airtight” heater, (which was anything but airtight) that I used to heat the workshop. It was made of sheetmetal, with a domed lid through which it was fuelled, and a round opening at the bottom for a draught that could be reduced or closed by a little circular piece of sheetmetal. The whole contraption was flimsy, but it produced a lot of instant heat and it was very popular with trappers and the like, because it was light and cheap. You had to put a layer of rocks or sand in the bottom before lighting it for the first time.

It worked quite satisfactorily until a spark escaped and set the whole workshop on fire, which burned totally in a short fierce blaze. Lies told me that she has a vivid memory, not unlike some kind of a nightmare, really, of waiting with the whole family at the foot of the Bench for the first sign of the firetruck, way down the road. It took apparently some time. The only thing somebody had thought of taking from the house to save was a little yellow blanket over Hubert’s cot.

Nobody was in the house, which was, miraculously, untouched, and since we had insurance we did not suffer a financial loss. I lost most of my tools, and some of those were irreplaceable, but I did not use them very often and have not missed them much. The man appointed by the insurance company to estimate the total loss was a local contractor I knew quite well. He measured the floor area of the original building as indicated by the ashes and told me that a building of that size would cost so much to replace. I don’t remember the figure he used, but I do remember that it was an awful lot more than what I had paid for the materials. Then he wanted to know if I remembered more or less what tools I had had, and asked if I could produce a list for him? That was no problem. When the cheque came it was more than enough to buy new tools, and there was some left over to do something about our house. I did not replace the workshop, I suppose because we already knew that we would be leaving.

With the workshop I slipped back into the topic closest to my heart, myself. So: back to the family. As soon as we had moved into our house Moekie took all of our children for an exploratory walk, first along the old road, that time and growth had reduced to merely a trail, then up the Bench, and back along the road to the place where the zig-zag trail led back to the pumphouse. All this was accomplished on wooden shoes. The gravel of the road proved to be disastrously effective in destroying wooden shoes that were already quite worn, but when the kids were back most of them had holes in the soles. It was a quick lesson: wooden shoes were not practical. The thing to have was rubber boots.

That first winter we had a lot of snow. Because the Bench sheltered us against the biting north wind the children could play outside in the snow when everywhere else it would have been too cold. It was deep enough to allow them to dig tunnels into it. If, for some reason, we went to town as a family (I imagine that going to church would have been such a reason) we had to walk, of course, but Hubert was too small to walk that distance, so he was bundled up and put on a sled.

“That first winter….” In retrospect I wonder how we got through it, but at the time it didn’t seem like a big deal or a struggle. I certainly don’t have any really bad memories. It was all so new, so different. There were certain things that caused problems, our difficulties with the language among them. When Moekie went shopping on Saturdays at the Smith store, she was glad that she didn’t have to talk to anybody, or ask questions, because she could take from the shelf whatever she needed. But not at the meat counter; there she pointed to what she wanted. That worked, except when she wanted ground beef. She knew enough to be able to ask for “One and a half pound, please,” but was disturbed when the butcher on the other side didn’t understand what she wanted and made her repeat her request. She did: “One and a half pound, please,” but he looked at her, still puzzled, not comprehending, until suddenly he grinned and said: “Ah, pound-a-half!” in such awful chewed-up American that it seems unlikely that Moekie could ever have said it the same way.

Justus started school a month after our arrival in Terrace It was not easy for him: shorts were not worn in Terrace because of the bugs, and so he had to have jeans. He was very fair, his hair almost white so that he stood out in a group and he didn’t speak or understand English. He was called “Ghost”b y his classmates. After a month he picked up a “flu-bug, and ended up in hospital with kidney infection. µoekie had to make doctor’s appointments and had to use the phone. Those phonecalls required careful preparation. For some reason, using the phone is almost more frightening than anything else to people who are struggling with the language. I remember the feeling of momentary panic when taking the thing off the hook before answering it. She did it; there was no choice, but it must have been a terrifying experience. We have gotten over our fear.

What made life for Moekie a lot more complicated was that we had no electricity to begin with, but even if we had had it there were certain things we wouldn’t have been able to use, because both the little Hoover washing machine and the vacuumcleaner were wired for 220 V. which is the normal power for domestic use in Holland. In order to use them the armatures of their motors had to be re-wound, and that was done in Vancouver. Our first electrical service was installed after we had received a cheque from the railways to repay what we had been charged extra (and erroneously, as it turned out) in Halifax when we arrived. It was a minimal service: 4 circuits, but it made a world of difference. We could suddenly use our double electric hotplate for which we had bought the special, square-looking pans that are still in full use.

Eventually the hotplates were changed for a “rangette” that provided us with an oven, that is to say: if you didn’t want to use the top, for you had to choose: one element on full, or two on half, or the oven. And Moekie could do her laundry in a working Hoover. How she managed before I don’t know, but she did. I don’t even understand how she could do the laundry for our whole family in the Hoover, which was really tiny compared with what we have now and use to do the laundry for two people…. It gets even more amazing when I recall that three of our children were wearing diapers, Hubert all day, John and Lies at night. Lies used them until she went to school. (Annalies apparently had the same problem, happily explained by her mother as a sign of superior intelligence) I suppose that the years we spent on the “Janneke Jans” were good practice for what was waiting for my wife in Terrace. I am sure it was good preparation for me.

Life was, even after electricity, not easy for her. There were the boxheater and the kitchenstove that had to be lit and kept burning. We were not well prepared and didn’t have dry firewood in abundance. We did not have dry firewood, period. But even the wet cedar slapwood that we used was at one point gone, and there was nothing else. So the lady grabbed an axe, walked off into the snowy world and felled a litle tree, an alder or a birch, cut it in pieces and hoped that it would burn. It did…. reluctantly. I got the story when I came home and was proud. There was no insulation in the walls, or in the floor, or in the ceiling, and we needed a lot of wood, I’m sure. Moekie dried the diapers on the attic, which could be reached by means of a little ladder through a trapdoor in the ceiling of the livingroom, and often found them frozen stiff. The first insulation was a 2 inch thick layer of vermiculite, spread by hand between the ceiling joists. You had to be very careful on the attic to step only on the joists or on the loose boards across them, for the nailed shiplap that formed the ceiling might not support the weight of an adult. The vermiculite may have been laughably inadequate, but it sure made a big difference. The rest of the insulation had to wait until we started to make drastic changes in the house, but by the time we left all the walls were insulated as well, with 2 inch blackish, nasty fibreglass that stuck in your hands, packed between two layers of paper like in an envelope, which was stapled to the studs. The storm windows that were part of the sets when we bought them proved to be a blessing, although they were very far from airtight.

The floor was not insulated either of course and the only thing that stopped the wind from blowing there and make our feet into icicles was the bank of snow I had piled all along the edge of the house. It was more or less effective, but it didn’t stop the temperature from dropping to below freezing. Our waterpipe came up under the kitchen and ran through a wooden box that was fitting exactly the space between the soil and the floor. It was filled with sawdust, for insulation. It was such a logical idea and for a while it worked fine, but unfortunately the air had been moist and that moist air had condensated against the iron pipe until the sawdust was quite saturated with moisture and became a first rate conductor for the frost. The result was naturally that our water supply was one day cut off, because the column in the pipe running through the box was frozen. We had very little money, and to order the welder to come and thaw it out was something of an expense that might be avoided. Pem had a blow torch, one of those old brass tanks with a pressure pump, filled with kerosene or gas and equipped with a burner that produced an impressive flame. It used to be the standard equipment of all plumbers and roof repair crews (in the construction of roofs, especially large roofs, lead was often used to seal valleys, to form gutters, and so on). I would bet that it is a piece of equipment that has more contributed to church fires than anything else. Anyway, that night I crawled under the sink, opened the floor above the box, found the frozen lump of sawdust and started merrily to heat the pipe, hoping that the heat would eventually travel down along the pipe and thaw it. Heat doesn’t travel well downwards and what I produced was a smoking smouldering top layer of sawdust but nothing else, no matter how enthusiastically I tried to set our house on fire. I don’t remember exactly how we fixed the problem, but I seem to recall that I ended up breaking down the whole box and removing the frozen sawdust bit by bit. The pipe was of course insulated again in some way, but I have only the haziest recollections and don’t remember how it was accomplished. Effectively apparently, for that section of the pipe didn’t freeze any more.

January 1953: woodshed, house, workshop

We were not totally without water during this episode, for we had the spring that supplied the town with its water right across the road, and it was not too much of an effort to fill a bucket with the purest water I have ever seen or tasted.

 

That spring was the source of the creek that flowed past our property, followed the Bench and crossed Pit van Stolk’s property way downstream. Pit had visions of having a trout stream on his property so that he could fish them for supper right there. To that purpose he constructed some kind of a dam across the creekbed, which was very shallow, to create a pond in which he hoped to raise the trout. Whether there was ever any sign of trout in the creek I don’t know, but I am convinced that his dam was one of the causes of poor de-watering of our land, among a host of other ones. The creek was not only shallow, but choked with debris for its entire length: trees, branches, weeds, you name it. After we had left it was cleaned out and made a lot deeper, and the result was that our swamp dried out.

It crossed Eby Road of course, and the little wooden bridge there was a favourite place for the boys to float their “boats”: They threw sticks in the water on the on side and then quickly crossed the bridge to see whose would be first to reappear. Justus was as interested in the game as his two younger brothers and on one occasion was in such a hurry that his foot caught the beam on the other side and made him fly, head-first, into the creek. While he crawled out, sopping wet from top to toe, the other two were watching him from the bridge, laughing their heads off. Their joy with his misfortune made him so mad that he chased them furiously home, without catching them because his wet clothes slowed him down. His mother’s reaction is not recorded.

Just on the other side of the road was the property of the Petryshyn family, father, mother and two daughters. The children played often together, and I have a feeling that the two Petryshyn girls taught our kids, and especially the three younger ones, a lot of English. According to Lies the real attraction of the Petryshyn girls was that they had access to almost unlimited amounts of fruit, blackberries and apples . The chickens, she said, had made little tunnels under the blackberry bushes, and the children were small enough to crawl under there to find the biggest, sweetest and juiciest berries. Notwithstanding the fact that they lived so close there never developed a real friendhip between the Petryshyn girls and our kids, and over the years the distance seemed to get bigger, rather than less. The parents were nice people with whom we had only the most casual contact. He worked for Charlie Adam as a projectionist in the movie theatre. They invited us over one evening for “coffee and dessert”. It must have been soon after we arrived, for we didn’t have the slightest notion of what that meant. The dessert consisted of pie with baked Alaska and Mrs. Petryshyn was delighted to find out that we had never even heard of it. To say that we were surprised when we found out what was coming is an understatement: it was almost like another meal and very different from anything we had ever enjoyed after supper. I think I felt sorry not having been forewarned so that I might have eaten less at suppertime: the pie was delicious but I couldn’t do it real justice.

On the Petryshyn property lived a bachelor in a trailer, a young fellow whose last name I don’t remember, but he was known to anybody as “Larry”. Larry was keenly interested in things mechanical, and particularly if they had anything to do with electricity. He drove a magnificent black Dodge panel truck on which he had mounted an electric winch to pull him out of tight spots. It was an object of great interest to all of us, for we had never seen anything like it. We had not even heard about that kind of equipment, for which there was in Holland probably less use than in Terrace. But Larry’s stature increased beyond that when we discovered one day that he had brought home the fuselage of a real airplane….I don’t remember what he did with it, if anything at all, but it seemed full of romantic promise at the time.

Winters in Terrrace could be cold and the frost would then go down deeply, particularly if the frost came in the wake of a wet fall. There was one winter when the water main down-town, 6 feet below the surface, had frozen. During the spring there was always a period when the roads became very muddy: the sun melted the ice in the top layer, but the water could not drain away because the deeper layers were still frozen. “Spring break-up” was a serious situation, for during that period, which usually lasted a couple of weeks, all heavy trafic was stopped in order to avoid exessive damage to the roads. Everybody was used to muddy roads, but during the break-up the gravelroads turned soft and suddenly there would be spots where the mud was very deep, I suppose as a result of extra exposure to the sun and poor drainage, and then, if the mudhole was as wide as the road, the road became impassible. One spring such a mudhole had developed on Eby Road. For some reason (probbly the break-up !) Moekie and the children had taken a taxi to get home from town, a nice, low-slung, racy looking new Studebaker that much impressed the boys. When the driver arrived at the mudhole, he surveyed the situation and announced, wisely, that he wouldn’t try to get across. They had to walk the rest of the way, and because the mudhole was fairly close to Kirby’s corner, that was a fair distance to walk, especially for little Hubert.

Hubert had his problems with mud during the spring. The sand at the bottom of the Bench, where they often played, was also subject to spring break-up apparently, for it turned into fairly deep mud. Hubert didn’t realize what he was getting into, waded in a ways and, once in, couldn’t get out. When he tried to extract one foot his boot stayed behind in the mud. He was caught until his father could rescue him. I suppose I had to carry him inside and get his boots afterwards.

In many ways the place where we lived in Terrace was ideal for children, and particularly for the very small ones. The only vehicles that ever came that far belonged either to our friends or to Curly, the municipal employee who was responsible for the pump that provided the village with water. We had rarely any worries about where they would be and they had an amount of freedom that is unknown to kids living in places where traffic is a constant concern. And what a place to play, with the sand on the one side of our house and the forest on the other.

The time of the year when they could be in that forest was somewhat limited, it must be said, for from late spring until the first frost would hit us the place was alive with mosquitoes and no-see-ums, those tiny little flying pests that are small enough to crawl through mosquito screens. We were lucky at that for we had no trouble with blackflies which like drier country with lots of shrubbery. I remember the blackflies that made life miserable for the Doormannen: they took literally a bite out of your skin and the bite itched violently for days if you touched it. But the mosquitoes that our swamp produced were quite bad enough to keep the kids and us out of the forest during the warm weather. I used to pour kerosene on the pools in the swamp to kill the mosquito larvae, but I don’t think it was ever very successful.

August 1953

During the spring we used to have picnics under a cedar tree in front of our house. We were proud that we could have a picnic on our own property. That part of the property was later cleared to make room for a garden. It was not an easy job, that clearing. The first time we had a cat in, it was an oldie, a second-hand one that somebody who worked for the Cellanese had bought to see if he could make some extra money. He didn’t quite realize what he was getting into and ventured out to somewhere in the middle of what was to become our garden, but then he he had to change directions, and because the soil was so soft it was difficult for him to turn. He promptly ran the right hand track off the rollers and there he sat, unable to turn, unable to get the track back on the rollers, unable to do anything. I don’t remember how he got out of his predicament, but I imagine he either had to winch himself out or call another cat to do that for him. He did not charge us.

The next cat driver was more careful, assessed the conditions and decided to stay on firm land and use his winch. We all remember the moment when he started to pull out a fairly big stump: it moved slowly, stately over the black muck, not unlike a thing floating upright on water, leaving a wide, black, shining strip behind it. With the stump came a patch of soil in which Lies had planted some bright nasturtiums. The catskinner jumped off his machine, picked the little flowers and returned, offering his colourful bouquet to Moekie, with an appropriate flourish, before getting the stump on the gravel and pushing it in the bush.

I think we got yet another cat in, this time Ralph Easton’s, by far the biggest cat the boys had ever seen, a monster with sixteen inch wide tracks, to finish the job, using the same technique. All the stumps were shoved into the bush where we couldn’t see them, at least not from the house.

The small stumps and the srubbery we removed ourselves with the help of a handwinch we had gotten from Ed Shaw. The boys were eager to help by turning the crank. It was very hard work, but it did the job: once the stumps were pulled partway out it was possible to cut the exposed roots, and after that it was easy to pull out the rest.

At one point I imagined that I could do what everybody else did: blast the larger stumps out with dynamite. The dynamite, the blasting caps and the needed wire I bought where everybody else got it: in a little store along the highway east of Terrace at a location that carried the grand name of “Copper City”; not only not a city, but no other houses than that one little store. The technique of blasting is treacherously easy, the result spectacular: a terrific bang, an impressive amount of dust, dirt, bits of rock and wood, and, presuming that the blaster knew his business, after everything has settled a split stump with torn-off roots. In my case everything went as planned: the bang was great, but the dust and what have you were replaced by a lot of black, wet garbage and when that settled the stump was sitting there with a big open space underneath, undamaged, with all the roots intact, albeit exposed. Blasting did not work in our swamp. Hence the cats.

Because there was so much we had to get rid of as a result of our clearing efforts, branches, bushes and other assorted pieces and chunks of wood, it seemed that there was no end to the fires we had to start to get rid of it all. The kids loved it and to me it seemed like something that finally could (and did) satisfy a yearning that has been part of my awareness since my earliest childhood memories. In Holland outdoor fires were almost unheard of and where we lived, in the driest part of town, with at that time a large number of open grass fields and small bushes of scrub oak that separated clumps of houses, the threat of a devastating fire was real and clear to practically everybody. One of the charms of our summercamps was that in our organization the cooking was done on outdoor fires and that at the end of each day we gathered around a central campfire.

Burning the branches that we gathered and cut in our swamp was not without risk. The swamp soil was of course very wet, but under a hot fire that had been burning for hours the accumulated ashes were glowing for a long time after the fire was out, and those ashes were quite capable of drying out the wet peat and starting a smouldering fire that could creep for days, even weeks, undetected, underground to suddenly flare up at a considerable distance from where I had burned the rubbish. I have seen such a peat fire on the Brandis farm and understood Bill’s worries. You can’t tell where it is or where it is heading, and the telltale wisp of smoke is as scary as it is welcome: you know where it is at that time and can then fight it.

We did have a garden, and the pictures to show it, the neat beds separated by narrow paths, which consisted of boards lying on the soil. I am grateful for those pictures, which fix an image that was, I’m afraid, related to a short-lived victory. It proved impossible to keep that system going, for the board walks disappeared in the muck and the effluent from our septic system turned the water in the only drainage ditch an alarming nasty green. I am sure that we did not solve the problem of the septic effluent, but left it (I am just a trifle ashamed to admit it) to the people who were living in the house after we had left for Victoria. For a long time after we had left Terrace I have had guilty feelings while thinking about the plumbing in our house at the time when we left, in particular the septic tank and the disposal field. It was some relief when, during our brief visit to Terrace with Elsie Smith, oom Charles went up to the house and talked to the new owner, the fellow we had sold the house to. I didn’t have the nerve to do that, mainly because of that plumbing problem. He returned with the message that the owner was quite happy with it and thought he had had a “bargain”. It stopped my worries.

The kids remember the garden with pleasure because they had each their own little plot. John was proud of in his rhubarb plant that thrived and the stalks of which he chewed raw, and his enormous sunflower. And they remember the cress I had sown, representing each child’s initial. While struggling with the awful soil in our garden in Victoria, which contsisted of the most vicious yellow clay imaginable, I have had recurring wishful thoughts about that garden in Terrace with its deep, black peat.

It was just as well that our kids found so much to keep them happily busy at home, for there wasn’t very much in the way of organized sports in Terrace, and if there had been we would not have been able to get them there and back, because we only had our bicycles. But there were Scouts and Girl Guides and as soon as John reached the age where he could become a member, we tried to get him involved. Bessie Vosburgh was the Cubmaster at that time. When we approached her she told us that she wanted to get out, was looking for somebody to take over the pack…. and why wouldn’t we do that? She would continue to help us in the beginning. I don’t remember how long it took us to make up our minds, but we did do it and became Akeela and Bagheera. It was a matter of either let the whole idea slide into oblivion or take it on. It seemed a shame to disappoint the boys already involved and now John as well.

One of the strange discoveries, very early in our involvement was that when we read to those little boys Kipling’s Mowgli Stories they were not interested and became quickly bored, no matter how interesting we thought the stories were. And so we switchd to reading the story at home and then telling it to them in our own way. The result was amazing: they were instantly spell-bound. The problem had obviously been that Kipling’s language went straight over their heads.

It was fun to lead the cubs, at least for a while. We tried to bring some sense of excitement into our activities. One of the high points was the meeting on the Samsom farm, where we played a game of “conquer the flag” and roasted wieners and marshmellows over real little campfires. Lies was there to take part and has told me that she was jealous because in Brownies they didn’t do that sort of thing; they learned to crochet and to knit…. And one of the low points was the parade on Armistice Day. The Cubs and Scouts then wore shorts, summer and winter, regardless of the weather, because that is what Baden Powell had decided was proper wear for real boys, never mind the climatic conditions. But what was possibly not too bad in Europe was lunacy in Canada, where the bugs could eat you alive in the summer and where you could suffer from frostbite during the winter. The Parade that year was held in clear weather with serious frost and those little boys got far too cold. If I only could have known what the weather would be….. We should have said “Go home and stay warm. You can ask your mom for a cup of hot cocoa instead of drinking it in a hurry after the parade is over.” We didn’t. Baden Powell didn’t know Canada and we should have known better.

Not an awful lot of “leisure time” in our life during that period, for there was so much that had to be done, so much to build up, so much to get used to, so much that couldn’t wait. It meant that there was not much opportunity to do things with the whole family. But we did manage to take time for some things. The first and simplest was to have an outdoor picnic on our own property, at the foot of a big cedarstump or tree, I don’t remember. During the first spring and summer that was quite exciting for kids who had never lived in surroundings in Holland that would permit that sort of thing after we had moved away from the “Janneke Jans” (and they were very small when we made the move to De Bilt). But it didn’t take long before there was something a little more ambitious needed. Of course there were the frequent trips up the Bench for visits to Ied and Niek Samsom and to Mien and Pem van Heek, but that wasn’t adventurous either. “Swimming” at Little’s Island in a slough of the river was more like it; that was a real outing. There is only one less pleasant memory associated with it: Lieske’s friend Gail had stepped in a piece of glass and had to be taken to the hospital to be stitched up.

A little more advanced was a trip up Terrace Mountain, the rocky bump that bordered the town to the north-east. “Mountain” was far too grand a description, for it was really not much more than a steep hill. We looked out at it from our livingroom window and that by itself was enough to set us wondering what would be up there; there were no houses as far as we knew. But the view from the top would be quite impressive, and so we climbed it with the whole family. It was not a strenuous climb, just enough to give us a sense of satisfaction when we reached the top and enjoyed the view. We had lunch there and the picture shows that we had Hades, our big black dog, with us. That detail indicates that it must have taken place after we had bought our first vehicle, the good old G.M.C. panel truck. The summit, if my memory is correct, was wooded with enough open spaces to allow us to look out over Terrace, the river, the valley leading south towards Kitimat, and the mountains that formed the valley through which the Skeena flowed west. Yes, it was worth it.

More challenging by far was the expedition up Thornhill Mountain. That now was a real hike, up and up the zigzag path that was, although easy and well maintained, fairly steep and long. It had been built to construct, maintain and supply the fire look-out on the top of the mountain, where a lonely watchman spent the whole summer all by himself. The cabin itself was closed and kept locked if there was nobody there and it is likely that it had already been abandoned at the time when we got there with the family, for its location was too high to serve the purpose for which it had been built: too often it was in the clouds, making it impossible for the watchman to spot a fire. But it was an interesting destination, a litle building that evoked all manner of heroic and fanciful thoughts about the brave souls that spent their days and nights in fearsome isolation, experiencing howling winds, thunderstorms, unmitigated exposure to a merciless sun, all to save the people in the valley below from the effects of a devastating forest fire that would threaten their jobs. The reality was probably somewhat tamer, but the fact that the little building was anchored to the rock by steel cables was suggestive of the bitter forces it had to withstand.

What made the hike especially interesting was that the path led through pretty dense forest at lower altitudes, then reached the sparse stunted growth of trees that survived near the timberline, and finally took you to the bare rock near the top, all in one easy hike, while the views were stupendous. For immigrants fresh from Holland it was quite an experience, like Canada-in-the-raw, the real thing. Not all of us enjoyed the hike up. Lies complained bitterly, about the steep trail, the bugs, the heat, the length of the climb, all the way up, but danced and skipped on the way down as if we had just started out.

As soon as we had our first vehicle, the good old G.M.C. truck, we could go farther from home and once used that possibility to go on a picnic during the early spring, the first spring after we acquired the truck. We drove a ways down the highway to Pr. Rupert until we found a inviting looking side-road that allowed us to pull off the highway and have our picnic in a spot that can’t have been very far from the highway, but there was so little traffic during those years that it made no difference, really. What I remember well is that there were still patches of snow around the spot where we were eating our lunch.

One favourite spot was certainly Kleanza Creek, or Gold Creek as we called it usually. The first time we went there it was with Pem and Mien and we were impressed and delighted. I imagine they wanted us to see the spawning salmon, humpbacks I believe they were, right before our eyes. It is a marvellous spectacle under any circumstance, but an incredible thing to witness for people who have newly arrived from Europe. And I can’t imagine a better place to see it, for the creek is as clear as it is shallow, has a gravelly bottom and the shores are flat and grassy. Where the creek breaks through the rock, at the end of the flat area where the picnic site is, there are rapids and a little waterfall and you could see the salmon jumping. A trail leads from there up the rock to the edge of the canyon that was carved by the creek. Looking down into that ragged crack and the wild, white creek at the bottom I had the feeling of being in a very wild country, almost untouched, although the rusting parts of some machinery in the water were emphatic evidence to the contrary. The old fellow who looked after the picnic site lived in a log cabin under the trees, and kept, leaning against the wall of his cabin, several pairs of stilts in different sizes for kids to use.

One day we drove to a spot on the way to the airport where a creek came down the steep slope in several small waterfalls on its way to meet the Skeena. We climbed the slope to the foot of the first fall, where some big rocks made it possible to cross the creek, which was neither wide nor deep. In trying it I slipped on the wet rock, fell into the creek and found myself right under the fall, pinned down by the water, unable to get up, let alone to get out. Moekie reached out from the shore, grabbed my hand and tried to pull me up, but had to let go because I was too heavy and the waterpressure too great. It was a rather frightening experience for there was the chance that I would have been washed down by the current and might have been badly bashed against the rocks. Moekie suggested that I might try to slip down to the next pool, which was less deep, to get away from the fall. I did that and from there I could get out with her help.

On the day we became Canadians we drove, together with the Achesons, to the south end of Kalum Lake and and celebrated with a picnic. It was most certainly a very Canadian spot to celebrate the event. Also with them we went one winter to Lakelse lake that was frozen solid, a remarkable event because the water in the lake was warmed by the outflow of the hotspring at the other end. We were watching a fellow in a truck who was turning and slipping in wide circles on the ice but neither of us got out there to try it. Instead we roasted weiners over a campfire on the shore.

Most trips to Lakelse Lake were of course summer trips, with Pem and Mien, with Susie Adam, with Ann and Ed Shaw. Lakelse was for most people in Terrace typically THE summer place, excellent for swimming and fishing and boating. Later, when Susie’s boat had sails, we added sailing to its charms. It had lovely sandy beaches. The number of people who had a cabin-on-the-lake must have been enormous, and all on the east side off the lake, because the other side was difficult to reach: there was no road there in those years. The Mc Calls had to cross the lake by boat to reach their cabin; however, once they were there, they were alone (with the skunk, alas), whereas the crowds and the noise from outboards tended to be a bit much on the other shore. Nevertheless, I have almost no other than happy memories of the Lake, and particularly of the summer when we rented a cabin from Whalen, on the south end, for a month. Wonderful. The cabin of the Adams was close-by and we used to watch Max, their mongrel shepherd, try to catch fish close to the shore by snapping at minnows. The photo we have of John’s and Hubert’s boats sailing there puts me right back in one of the happiest summers in Terrace.

I have often thought how Lakelse Lake would be now, halfway between Terrace and Kitimat. I fear that a comparison with Hornby (only so far as summercrowds are concerned) is not far-fetched. And both used to be so wonderfully natural, simple, almost primitive. I imagine that most of those small one-room summercabins have been changed into architect-designed villas. I am not tempted to go and have a look; one look at the hotspring in ’67 was enough warning of things-to-come.

There is one not-so-happy memory related to Lakelse, but it is Moekie’s and Lies’s, not mine. In the summer of ’56 the Terrace Rotary Club decided to organize swimming lessons in the lake, during the summer holidays, as their community effort for the year. They got the volunteer teachers, of whom Moekie was one, and solved the transportation problems. Lies was one of those who were going to take the lessons. Everything was well prepared, but what can one do about the weather? The date was set and the weather was lousy, cold and rainy. It was not a pleasant experience for either the instructors or the kids. Lies remembers that she got thoroughly, bone-chilling cold and was almost getting sick during the twisting ride back to town. Moekie still p[ictures her daughter standing in the water in the chilly air, shivering, her hands clasped together, the image of an unhappy child. The Rotarians were delighted with the initiative they had taken and were wise enough to stay home during the lessons. They had organized it; surely they didn’t have to be there? During the festive evening where they were going to thank all the volunteers who had participated, there was a “thank-you” supper with chile-con-carne for the volunteers, who each got a silver teaspoon with the Rotary symbol. We still have it, but Moekie doesn’t need it to remember the occasion. Lies learned to duck her head in the water.

So much for the outdoors activities; what did they do inside? All our children were more or less involved in all building activities and eager to help wherever they could, and they helped with the general things that had to be done around the house. I don’t remember that we ever found it necessary to assign special tasks to them individually, not at that age level. That came later, in Victoria, when help was so much needed, and with it came the usual squabbles and fights.

Reading was to them as natural as eating, it seemed, and, brother, did they go through a lot of books. The provincial “Open Shelf” service was an absolute godsend in our life, and something we had never known in Holland. We could hardly believe it when we learned that the books were not only sent out free of charge, but that you could return them free of charge as well, and that there was no charge for borrowing them either. There was never a shortage of books. It is hard to imagine what those early years in Terace would have been without that service, especiallyduring the fall and winter.

Even while we were living in Langford the relationship with the Open Shelf continued. The service was, of course, intended to serve communities that had no other access to libraries, and Langford must have been a borderline case, but since it was in an “unorganized area” we could continue to draw from that rich resource. Whether that was “normal” or “exceptional” we’ll never know. We went there ourselves and wandered freely through the stacks to select what we wanted; it was great.

Another favourite was drawing, but our supply of paper was limited, and the pieces handed out were rather small. Later, while we were attending Victoria College, we learned from Mr. Johns that children should be given large brushes to work on large sheets of paper; that to force them to work on a small scale is contrary to their needs in developing the necessary motor skills, that it might stunt their emotional growth and that it was therefore dangerous to their development into harmonious, balanced adults. Well, if any of our offspring shows stunted emotional growth, the years in Terrace and the ignorance of their parents is clearly to blame. As soon as it was possible, in Victoria, we changed to rolls of newsprint, the last bit of which has just served in 1995 to mask the windows of the shed when it was re-stained.

When Lies went to school she was so totally involved in this new experience that she re-enacted at home everything that had happened during the schoolday, giving her mother a clear view of her little daughter’s activities and experiences in Mrs. MacIntosh’s class.

We remember that teacher with gratitude, especially after John’s rather dismal start under her successor.

Then there was the festive Sunday tea that was a special family highlight. It was the beginning of a tradition of certain little ceremonial resting points in our otherwise sometimes rather hectic existence. It has changed over the years, but the tendency is still clearly recognizable, and it is still a meaningful characteristic, a treasured element: coffee-time, sherry-time….. celebrations of “family”.

When we were prep[aring for our departure from Holland, Moekie asked Mien van Heek if she would need anything special to cope with housekeeping duties in the new environment. “No”, was the answer, “the only difference is that the women here bake their own bread and cut their manfolk’s hair.” Neither of these proved to be exactly correct, but she did both. I can’t remember that we ever ate any store-bought bread in Terrace. There was a bakery in Terrace, but women with a family did a lot of baking: cookies, cakes, pies and certainly bread. We started eating the bread from a little bakery when we came to Victoria. There just wasn’t time for Moekie to bake her own for as long as she and I were both totally involved, first in attending college and then in our work, but as soon as she quit teaching, there it was again, our lovely home-made bread, until very recently, when Denman got its own bakery.

Cutting hair became a routine, and still is as far as my hair is concerned. I dare not estimate how much we saved, but I am thinking that the amount, plus the interest on it, would be staggering.

There was the eternal sewing of new clothes and the repairing of the existing ones. There was simply no money to buy much, and most of that was spent on the stuff I needed. Unfortunately that was quite a bit, for my clothes wore fast and had to be changed when I changed jobs and needed different things. And jeanses we bought, as well as coats. But shirts and dresses were all home-made from material that we ordered from the Eaton’s catalogue. It was a good thing that we brought so much clothing with us from Holland and therefore didn’t need too much the first years. But the sewing machine, the old hand-cranked Singer Moekie had bought when she was living in Amsterdam, was much in use. It was an investment, but certainly a major improvement, when we got our first electric service, and ordered from the catalogue the little motor that made it so much faster for her to sew. That old Singer is still in good shape and used when something has to be sewn of very heavy material.

Neither Moekie nor I (or, for that matter, Lies herself I imagine) can ever forget that she had to have a new dress, a “party dress”, when she and her grade one class had to perform during a school Christmas concert. Did we know what was meant by that term, “party dress”? To us it was important that the dress be nice, festive, but warm and usable for more than just partying. So Moekie made for her little daughter a beautiful woollen dress, colourful, but practical. And when the class was lined up on the stage there she was, in the front row, in her beautiful warm dress, with new ribbons in her pigtails and neat brown loafers, next to a girl in a silly, frilly, silky pink outfit with ruffles and ribbons and black patent leather shoes. She was so impressed by her neighbour’s dress that she forgot to sing, but could not take her eyes off her neighbour and had to touch that dress. Finally she bent down and flicked a bit of imaginary dirt off her own sturdy brown shoes, to the great amusement of everybody but her parents who were embarrassed. New Canadians…..

Animals have always been a part of the family experience. The first one was a kitten, a typical tabby, grey with dark stripes, a white front if I remember correctly, and white paws. Whether a “she” or a “he” I don’t know, but tiny, for sure. One morning when Moekie was making the beds and shoved her bed under mine (the legs collapsed and had then little rollers that made the operation easier) she felt resistance, heard a squeal, pulled the bed back and saw to her horror that our little kitten came sort of rolling from under the bed, tail at a weird angle and obviously at that point not in good shape. We feared the worst, but the little thing survived and recovered, although it always had a weird kink in that tail.

And then came Claudius, gorgeous on his long legs. I have no specific memories about him though, and I wonder now what we did with those cats when we left for Victoria. I suppose we gave them away, but to whom? Most certainly they did not come with us.

The next was Muffy, a little spaniel cross that came wandering in and liked it and stayed…. for a while, for he disappeared as he had come, suddenly and into nowhere. A friendly little vagrant without any sense of belonging or loyalty.

Not so Hades. Ed Shaw found him. He was a lean pup, very black, with a lot of Lab in his blood. The size of his paws indicated clearly that he might be big when full-grown. He was. Ed could not keep him, for he had already two or three big dogs and thought of us. So he came, with Hades, to the door and pleaded his case, Hades’ case mostly. We needed a dog, he had decided, for a family could never be complete without a dog. We had four kids and no dog…. ridiculous. We wanted a dog, he knew it. The end of it was that Hades was accepted as our dog. He was a very good dog, too, loved to play with the children as soon as they came home from school. During the day he lived in his own kennel, a fenced-off square with his own doghouse. The fence was about three feet high, made of chickenwire, and we thought that it was high and strong enough to keep him there. We had no reason to think otherwise, for Hades never got out without permission. Until, one morning, while it was still dark, there was a furious barking and a somewhat nervous male voice, trying to calm the dog down. We investigated and found Hades standing on the deck in front of the frontdoor with his rough up, his teeth bared, growling like a demon and looking at a somehat white-faced Curly who was standing at the foot of the stairs that led to the deck and the door and not risking to come a single step closer. One look at Hades convinced me that it was probably a wise decision on his part. I grabbed Hades and calmed him somewht down, while Curly explained that he had come to ask if he could use our phone: there was something wrong with the pump across the road. He thought we had one hell of a good watchdog. We hadn’t known that before that moment, but we agreed and were proud of Hades. We forgave him that he had jumped over the fence of his kennel.

Hades was a bit of a scavenger, I suppose, and developed a nasty lump in his neck, but before anything was done about it (I don’t even think there was anybody like a veterinary in Terrace at that time) the lump burst, created an awful looking mess, but cleared up rapidly afterwards. And how could we possibly blame the dog for going off to the Petryshyn house after they had butchered a moose and dumped the legs across the fence in the bushes? Those legs were far gone, and the stench around the dog when he returned was fearsome. It was clearly impossible to keep him tied up until nature had taken care of the rotten meat and we decided that the time had come to give Hades away to someone who would love him. One of the hardware’s customers expressed interest after he had heard the story of Hades’ efforts to keep strangers away, liked the dog when he saw him, and took him. I am sure the dog found a good home there. We did not like to get rid of him, but later, when we decided to leave, it was a blessing not to have to worry about Hades.

The one topic I haven’t dealt yet deserves to be kept till last, because it is really not a very interesting subject, but is nevertheless important enough in this family to be mentioned. It is Cars.

Of course we had no other transportation than our bicycles to start with. Those worked well for a long time, but Canada is a big place, and distances, even in a small community like Terrace are very much greater than what we were used to in Holland. So, when Uncle Teun was found willing and even keen to re-teach me, I was happy to grab the opportunity. Learning went smoothly and without a hitch, but I do remember the first night out on the road (there were no suitable parking lots in Terrace, and, at any rate, I had earned my Dutch driver’s licence, and was therefore not as green as other new drivers). We met another vehicle and I had a brief moment of panic: can I manage to avoid a collision? I did, and it seems amazing now that the thought hit me at all. One gets used to meeting other cars. At the end of the instruction I passed my (temporary) test and felt grand. But had no car. That winter Pem and Mien left to go for a long period to Holland. Were we interested in using their car for that time? Yes, indeed, we were. I drove them to the airport and took the car, a spiffy, new, little Austin sedan, back home. It was a great help during the weeks that followed, and it gave me a chance to drive in snow and on slippery roads. I’ll never forget that time when I was picking upone or several of our kids from the school, had to come down the icey little hill leading down from Lakelse Avenue, saw another car approaching from the right, tried to brake, and found that there was nothing I could do to stop or avoid a minor collision. There was no damage, fortunately, but the experience was as scary as it was instructive.

After the borrowed car we were spoiled, of course, and when I found an old G.M.C. panel truck at the garage where Billy Onstein worked, a panel truck he recommended, we decided to buy it. Never has an old truck been more lovingly dealt with. I had the engine, which was using some oil, re-done, but otherwise that truck has served us well. I got stuck a couple of times, being an inexperienced driver, but the truck did not let us down. We used it until we knew that we were going south and realized that the truck just wouldn’t do.

We found a fine scond hand Pontiac that had just been overhauled by its owner, a mechanic in one of the garages, and found him willing to sell it to us. “Betsy” was certainly a step up from the panel truck. She looked good, she was comfortable, sound and reliable, took all six of us and an incredible load of luggage (clothing and bedding for a year, plus a newly acquired tent and other camping gear)all the way to Victoria, via the Okanagan Valley even. After that she did the job of providing basic transportation for quite a number of years. When I was working for Charlie Adams and had parked Betsy behind the apartments where I had to paint I was more than a little bit pleased when he looked it over and seemed somewhat surprised that it was our car. As was Aunt Enid when I drove her home one day. Altogether a good vehicle. The panel truck we sold to another Dutchman with whom I had worked in the mill, Herman van der Hende. He used it for years and was happy with it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 5: PEOPLE

 

In this chapter I would like to remember some of the people who were important to us during those first years in Canada or who were so remarkable that their stories should be told in these memories. I won’t say much about most of those who are still living and in some ways connected to our present life, but I would like to pay tribute to those who are either no longer alive or who have disappeared from our horizon. I must, however, begin by writing a little about Pem and Mien van Heek, who made it all possible by sponsoring our immigration. It would be difficult to imagine better or more conscientious sponsors. Without them we would in all likelihood not be here. How does one thank a person for that? We shared with them a general background and a similar motivation. They were facing a future that didn’t appeal to them, as we did, and they found in Canada opportunities, chances, that opened doors and allowed them to build a life that was rewarding and satisfying, just as we did. Their ties with Holland have always remained a bit stronger than ours, but neither they nor we could ever go back to what was lovingly called “the old country”. It has become too small, too full, too pressurized.

I must in this context mention one lesser known fact, namely that I have tried, for a brief while, to follow Pem’s example and become a forester. I applied for the course and got the first papers, which had to do with mathematics, logarithms I believe. I did not last more than two weeks at the most: the mathematical aspects of the training defeated me before I got started. It has always been that way. When I enrolled in my first course for a Masters degree in Arts, specializing in Education, (you could not get a Masters in Education then) it was a course in statistics. The textbook was charmingly titled “Statistics, an Intuitive Approach.” My only intuition was loud and clear: give up and stay out. I dropped the course before I was halfway through. It was mathematics, you know….. The people that pop up in my mind immediately when I think of the friends we had in Terrace are Pit and Enid Van Stolk. Pit had come to Terrace in 1937, upon recommendation of someone he had accidentally met during the boat trip to Montreal. From there he went to Edmonton where he looked for a farm, but he didn’t like the Prairies and came to Terrace. He met Enid who was cooking in the Terrace Hotel and they got married in ’39. I feel that I, of all people, have least right to joke about men who marry excellent cooks. During the war years Pit joined the Dutch army, was in England, Ontario and Surinam, but after the war the couple returned speedily to Terrace. I suppose that he had already built the enormous addition to their log house before they left. It has always been a mystery to me how you could use logs of the size you could see in the kitchen; how do you move the heavy brutes ? The addition was entirely in keeping with the existing house, but that doesn’t answer the question. I wonder why I never asked Pit about that. There were times during the first years in Terrace when we got sort of discouraged with the endless amount of work, the slow progress, the fact that what we wanted to achieve in our daily surroundings seemed forever to lie beyond our reach. If that mood struck there was one sure-fire solution: a visit to the Van Stolks. In their warm, wonderful living room that sloped downward in one corner, or at the table in that big kitchen, you felt instantly better, reassured, more optimistic. Something reinforcing got transmitted by the magic of those two natural, generous hosts. How we enjoyed the sheer luxury of a glass of sherry in front of their huge fireplace…… Luxury was an illusive concept for us in those days. It has always remained like that: a visit to the Van Stolks was an occasion, an event, a lifting, warming experience, whether they lived in Terrace, or in Victoria, or on Quadra or in Saanich. There was always the feeling that you were “special” in their eyes. Their range of interests was enormous, the conversation stimulating. Pit used to quote: “Du choc des opinions, la verite s’elance.” In later years, when they lived in Saanich, Enid and we used to discuss ideas about education that were more or less foreign to him but there was never the slightest indication that Pit was annoyed.

Pit was a very good teller of stories, and especially one of them, about a hunting adventure, is part of our family folklore. His friends and he were duck hunting in the swampy area south of Lakelse Lake when they saw a large, round rock not too far away. They didn’t recognize it as something they had seen before, and it seemed strange that it would be there for the soil seemed too soft to support its weight. They approached it, moving slowly and with difficulty through the mud, when suddenly the rock moved, raised itself up on its hind legs: a grizzly. He was standing, slowly moving his head from side to side and sniffing the breeze, which was fortunately blowing in the hunters’ faces. Their shotguns would have been useless. Grizzlies have poor eyesight, but excellent noses. The hunters stood motionless; the bear didn’t smell anything suspicious and after a tense and agonizing while lowered himself again to resume searching for whatever had attracted his attention. Slowly, carefully, they started their retreat, pulling their boots out of the mud: “slurp….slurp….slurp….” The bear gave up his search after a few minutes and sloshed off in the opposite direction. Too close for comfort, that encounter, but it was Pit’s telling, complete with action and sound effects, that made it unforgettable.

This sketch would not be complete if I omitted a story about Enid, a story that is just as famous in our family as the grizzly story. By marrying Pit she had automatically acquired Dutch citizenship, for Pit had not yet changed his nationality. The Dutch law does not recognize dual citizenship. Nobody paid much attention to that detail which had no consequences for their daily life. But when Pit applied for and got his Canadian citizenship, it became suddenly clear that he was now Canadian, but his wife was still Dutch. She, who was born and bred in Canada, had to apply for a change in nationality as if it was a favour she was asking for instead of her natural right. I think that may have hurt a bit, but the real crunch came when she had to appear before the judge during the citizenship ceremony. She and Pit knew the officiating judge quite well, I believe. He had a wicked sense of humour, and when her turn came he asked her, as he had asked all the other applicants, really new Canadians, to prove that she knew enough English, by reading to him a few verses from the Bible. Enid, furious, had no choice but to oblige, but it took a little time before she, too, could appreciate the joke.

We stayed with the Van Stolks in Herriot Bay during the summer holidays a couple of years after they had moved to Quadra. I must admit that I don’t remember any details of the interior, except that it was very much Pit’s and Enid’s house. What I do remember is the string of sheds and storage spaces to the left of the house when you approached it from the road, all more or less under one long roof. It was there that I discovered the long bow that is still in the workshop and used once in a while in the summer. Pit gave it to me because he never used it any more, he said, and he was happy to know that it would be appreciated in Victoria. It has been a great success with sons and grandchildren. We heard later that all those sheds had burned down to the ground, but that the house had been saved, miraculously.

From the house the lot sloped down to the water’s edge, where a previous owner had built a sort of a guest house or a large tea house or whatever its original function had been. That’s where we stayed. Between the house and that bungalow was an orchard, surrounded by a somewhat rickety fence of fish netting to keep the deer out. It didn’t work very well, for at night we could hear the “plop….plop…..” of deer jumping over the ‘fence to help themselves to the fruit.

The view from both the house and the garden was beautiful, but somewhat limited by the big rounded mass of the rock island that lies in the middle of the bay. At low tide you can reach it walking, but a soon as the tide comes in you may find yourself stranded. That’s what happened to Justus and Lies, who had to be taken off by Pit in his aluminum boat. In that boat we made a lovely sunny trip to a white shell-covered beach lining a bay somewhat farther north. I wonder now if that was on Reid Island? We had a look at the remains of an old lime-producing plant there. Pit took us for our first look at the amazing Rebecca Spit. He introduced us to friends who had some kind of a ranch (?) farther north and more in the interior of Quadra, where we sat on (riding is a very different thing) horses and listened to the tales of the owner, who hunted deer by running them down on foot. If I am not mistaken, it was during that summer that we ate our very first fresh raw oysters, the gourmet’s delight that has never quite convinced either Moekie or myself. Quadra seemed a long way off from Victoria; that was our only stay with them while they were living in Herriot Bay. It was very good news when we heard that they were coming to Victoria. How Pit managed to find those spots is a mystery to me, but they always seemed to end up living in very beautiful locations. They found a lot in Saanich that overlooked Island View Beach and James Island beyond, on the edge of a steep hillside and built a lovely, roomy Panabode, where Dan and his family lived after Enid decided to move out. Of course we saw more of them now they were so close-by, but we always wondered after each visit why we didn’t do it more often, since we enjoyed it so much? That feeling seems common. It may contain a sort of a compliment to the people you visited, but it also holds a warning: it takes a little effort to maintain friendships. Our neighbours in Terrace were the family Brandis, Bill and Madzy Land their three kids, Marianne, Gerald and Joost. Bill was farming, growing vegetables for the local market. They owned twenty acres before selling us the two and a half acres where we built our house. They seemed unlikely farmers, he and his wife. Both were raised in well-to-do families and neither had any connection with farms or farming as far as I know. Bill was trained as a manager of large estates, which usually contain both farms and forested land, so he must have had some theoretical background. Those estates are pretty rare and far between in Holland, and becoming more so with the passage of time. There must be enormous pressure on the owners to “develop” or sell to a developer in a country as densely populated as Holland is. They are really an anachronism, a remnant from feudal times when wealth was expressed in real estate and not in capital. Jobs in that field are sparse of course and when Bill considered his options emigration must have been an attractive possibility. What brought them to Terrace I don’t know, but it could be that they knew Pit, or knew of Pit. They must have come shortly after the end of the war and they must have had some money, for they were able to buy their land as well as a truck. I don’t know whether they built their house or bought it with the land, but I am inclined to believe that they must have bought it. Not that Bill was incapable of building; he was a good carpenter, fast and accurate. While Pem and I were working on our house he was our main source of information. He was a hard worker as well. He had to be, running that farm by himself. When the winter started and farmwork got less, there were the jobs that had been postponed during the farming season, as well as the looking after firewood, first felling it and bringing it in with the help of his horse, then cutting, splitting and piling it. There was never a time when he could relax.

The most productive part of his land was a low-lying area with moist, deep, black soil. It was very productive and admirably suited to the crops he grew: carrots, turnips, cabbage, cauliflower, and the like. During the winter months it flooded, and if it started to freeze it made a fine skating rink. It took a little time in spring to dry up again, but Bill didn’t mind the yearly flooding, which, so he claimed, killed the insect pests that lived in the soil. I remember well the planting of the cabbage seedlings where we used to help. Moekie remembers another not so pleasant job she did for Bill. He had sown peas, but had had no time to look after them, so that they were incredibly overgrown with weeds. In order to save at least some, he suggested that Moekie would take on the weeding, after which she would get half of the crop. It was a bitter task and the remuneration didn’t seem to be nearly adequate for the hours spent in very hard work. There was one more field where they had crops growing, very close to us, a part of the swamp that had been cleared. It grew magnificent cabbages. The difficulty was to get them off before the land flooded, and there was one fall when Bill was just too busy. Those cabbages did not come off, at least a substantial number were still on the land when it flooded and the harvesting became impossible. During the winter that was nothing to us. We were sorry for Bill, that’s all. But during the next spring…. that was another matter. The cabbages rapidly started to rot and spread the stink associated with that process everywhere. It was unbelievable…. and there was nothing we or anybody could do until the soil had dried. By that time the last leaf had rotted and smelled.

Bill and Madzy didn’t have a cow; they had goats instead. A splendid idea, for the goats require not nearly the same level of care, and their milk is actually better for a person than cow milk. Unfortunately, they also intended to do their own breeding, and kept for that purpose a billy goat. You could smell him when passing the farm if the wind was right, but there was no need for a lot of wind. It is an appalling, a fiendish smell. I had never quite understood why the devil has always been portrayed as part-goat, but the smell explained that perfectly. Rumor has it that to keep a billy goat in the same environment where you have milk goats makes the milk almost undrinkable. Don’t doubt it. When fresh and cold it is ok, not terrific, but ok. Heat it and you can forget about consumption: the billygoat jumps at you. Porridge, anything that required cooked milk….. out of the question. Nobody would or could eat it.

Bill and Madzy ended up giving the billy goat away or selling it. I imagine that their choices were limited in this matter: if you want your children to drink goat milk either you do away with the billy or you lose your children. Their children won. Bill dedicated the house where the creature had lived as a children’s playhouse, after extensive cleaning. It was not a good idea: the billy goat came, so to speak, inside their house. And ours. It didn’t last long, for nobody wanted to play there.

By now I must have established an impression that life next to the farm was pretty awful, but nothing could be further from the truth. They were excellent neighbours, and good friends. We were more than just very grateful to Madzy when she came to teach Justus English during his illness that first winter, day after day, week after week. It has made all the difference.

When the summer came to its peak, Bill cut hay on a field across Eby Road. To bring that in was always a festive, a summery occasion: the celebration of farm life at its cheerful best. If Bill was not a typical farmer, Madzy was certainly not a farmer’s wife. Her health was always a bit shaky, she was physically not strong, and over the years arthritis made her joints very stiff and painful. She wrote well and loved it. Her story about their life in Terrace, published in book form, struck us as a valiant attempt to think away all the unpleasant aspects of their life and to focus on the romantic, the happy, the beautiful moments. The result was, in our eyes, a rosy, but essentially untrue story. An unconvincing story. She was a brave soul, but to “tell-it-as-it-was” would have destroyed the element of success that had to be preserved at all cost.

Madzy’s aggravated arthritis, combined with the fact that the farm had proved to be a struggle that could not be won, made them decide to move. They sold and went to Vancouver, where Bill went to U.B.C. and got his degree in agriculture. They ended up in Ontario where he got a job as a consultant for a fertilizer company. Madzy kept up a correspondence with friends everywhere for a long time, and when that became impossible because her hands couldn’t hold a pen any more, she spoke “letters” into a taperecorder and sent the tapes. There was a time when I tried that to make contact with Holland easier, but it proved more difficult than the writing of letters. Making a tape sound “natural” and “spontaneous” is almost impossible. It was as if having a mike in my hands turned me into a (phony) performer. A bad experience that lasted only one or two tapes.

Right across the road from the Brandis farm lived Anne and Ed Shaw. They were good friends of the Brandis family and especially of Madzy’s. The gate that gave access to the path to their front door was named “The Madzy Gate”. Anne worked for a bank, I believe the Royal, but I’m not sure of that. Ed was at that time working as the operator of a big metal lathe in the shop of Little, Haugland and Kerr’s mill. I write “at that time” because Ed had done more things in life than a dozen ordinary people accomplish between them. Among these things: trapping in Northern Ontario, manufacturing candy in Prince Rupert, farming in Terrace and inventing in Gibson’s Landing. When we had bought our cook stove with three broken lids, Ed brazed them together and they worked fine.

He was a big man, an impressive man with his silvery white hair and straight bearing. But most amazing was his language….: immaculate Oxford accented English, spoken with a soft voice. He didn’t particularly like his job, but it paid well, and he was proud of his skill. It was therefore an annoyance to him that he was ordered to make and keep a good stock of a certain bolt, used to fasten the headsaw to the face plate, only to find that there was time and again a messenger coming over to the shop from the mill to get another three bolts. Always three, and they never lasted longer that a couple of weeks. Until, one day, he had to be in the mill for another reason and saw that the crew was changing the saw. He went over and saw to his amazement that the four holes in the faceplate did not exactly match the four holes holes in the saw, and that for that reason they used thinner bolts, but could only get in three instead of four. Nobody had ever mentioned the problem to him. The mill had suffered endless temporary stoppages when the three too-thin bolts once again sheared off, thereby causing a loss in production time that had cost very much more than the making of a new faceplate. He made a new faceplate and the problem was solved. Nobody said “thank you”.

The mill was only temporary in Ed’s plans. What he wanted to do was grow tomatoes….. the scientific way. He had read whatever he could get his hands on, and was convinced that it should be possible to do so in Terrace, profitably. The problem was that the long daylight hours in the area did not make up for the short duration of the growing season. That being the case, was his reasoning, one would have to extend that growing season on two ends by artificial means. To that end he would use a greenhouse of his own design. It was most unusual, but it seemed to make Ha lot of sense. He built it himself. It had a high, insulated north wall without windows, a south wall that was almost all glass, sloped to maximize the sun’s effect, and a concrete floor that was a shallow basin for water. By closely controlling both the temperature and the humidity he could use it for four purposes: first to grow young tomato plants from seed, then to produce a very early crop of tomatoes, long before anybody else, then to ripen green tomatoes that had been picked when there was a chance of night frost (and they ripened almost without fail, beautifully) and lastly, during the winter, to grow mushrooms. The secret was the water in the floor basin that was heated by thermostatically controlled heating cables. It kept the temperature and the moisture at exactly the right level for what he wanted to grow. The only failure was the mushrooms, and that was his Achilles heel for he had to have that to give him an income during the winter. He needed horse manure to grow them and the only outfit that used horses commercially refused to give him a contract for the manure. Without a guaranteed supply of horse manure the whole thing collapsed. Justus worked for Ed during the summer months, in the tomatoes.

Ed liked music and was the first one among our acquaintances who had a high fidelity record player, originally with only two records “Sound-Off!” and “Oklahoma”. We were greatly impressed. He was a real dog-lover; they had two or three large mongrel shepherds and when another pup arrived (I don’t remember where it came from) for which a family had to be found he convinced us that we needed a dog and so we got Hades, who grew very large, was very black, very protective of our house and property, and irresistibly attracted to the pile of foul smelling moose bones the Patrishyns had thrown over their fence. The dog’s smell after those escapades was something else. We ended up giving him away and it was a heartbreak.

Ed’s stories about life in Ontario’s North were aimed, I think, at stopping our complaints about the blackflies and mosquitoes that came in thick swarms out of the shrubbery in the swamp as soon as the snow had gone. He used to tell us of mosquitoes so thick, that a net over your hat was absolutely mandatory. You didn’t worry any more, he told us, about half bare arms. They were permanently covered with mosquitoes…. you just wiped them off once in a while, like a messy covering of insects and blood, your blood. And Ed could make the most incredibly wonderful candy.

He had an inventor’s mind. One of his inventions was the magnifying glass with built-in flashlight that was meant to make map-reading in a car at night a snap. It worked well, but Ed didn’t have the money for an advertizing campaign, and the venture fizzled. We used ours for years. He also had an idea for a solid insulating block, using tiny, microscopic plastic bubbles. That, too, was a great idea, but he failed to find an answer. The problem, as he explained it, was that the air had to be pumped out of the case that contained the bubbles, without making it collapse, in order to produce a block that had built-in, really superior insulating properties. What he was looking for was a light-weight insulating brick-of-sorts. Anne and Ed left Terrace and lived for years in Gibson’s Landing, where Moekie and I have visited them. Anne was at that time still working in the bank and Ed was working on the insulation problem with a grant from U.B.C.

I want to write about somebody who is still living, very much alive. II do it with hesitation, but since I have nothing but good things to say about her I shall take that risk. I am talking about Susie Adam, who came to Canada as Susie Hiensch. She had lost her husband during the war. He was working for a “resistance” or “underground” organization in Amsterdam, was caught by the Germans and killed. He left her with two little boys and no means of supporting herself and her family. Her decision to leave Holland after the war and come to Canada was based on the same reasoning that motivated all of us: the opportunity of starting all over. She left her boys with her sister and went by herself to find another life in Canada. Why she came to Terrace, I don’t know. She spoke no or very little English, but she was bright and learned fast. She was hired by Charlie Adam who needed a housekeeper….. and oh boy, did Charlie need a housekeeper ! He had been a bachelor all his life, and his housekeeping skills were not well developed. He found a lady who was determined, intelligent and hard-working, but she happened to be probably the best unattached housekeeper in Terrace as well. Charlie’s life became quickly much easier and happier, notwithstanding all the new rules he had to submit to. As soon as Susie felt that she had solid ground under her feet, economically speaking, she had the boys come over. It must have been very difficult for them, to get used to a strange environment, learn a new language, and go to school in Terrace. Ed must have been in gr. 9, and Rob in gr. 6 or 7. When Ed was facing his graduation and seemed to be heading for a failure in Math. Susie asked Moekie to coach him, and, miracle of miracles, Ed passed.

Charlie liked his new lifestyle and the lady so well that he proposed to her. I imagine that it must have been a difficult decision for Susie. I don’t think she was in love with him, madly or otherwise; Charlie was not the kind of a man who sweeps women off their feet in a swoon. Susie had been very deeply in love once; it was just as well to leave those memories undisturbed and safely tucked away. But she knew that Charlie needed her and that she could make him a much happier man than he had ever been. Charlie was a thoroughly decent human being and would be good to her and to the boys. There would not be any more worrying about a future. They needed each other and isn’t that the very best basis for a successful marriage? She was determined to make it a success. It was a success.

Different people have talked to us about the “courage” of immigrants. They don’t understand the mechanics, the motivation behind the decision to leave one’s country. Most immigrants have a strong desire and that is worth more than courage. Susie is an exception. She had the desire, certainly. But to take a clearheaded decision of that magnitude, and then to go on and make it work, make it a success for all involved, that requires a strength of character that I admire. She developed an amazing skill in her relationship with Charlie, who had, to meet her expectations, to make some changes. They didn’t come fast, they were not easy, but they did come. Their yard was no longer a mess, there was order in their lives, the house was pleasant, clean, a real home…… and Charlie was a happy man. We think of Susie as a very warm, very generous and very courageous lady. Most of all, she is a dear and faithful friend.That was Susie. What about Charlie himself? An original, for sure. Born and raised in Scotland, but an immigrant in Canada at a young age, I believe, he settled in Steward on the Pacific coast north of Prince Rupert. Why there? I have no idea, but I suppose it could have something to do with the reputation of the town as a possible “boom town”. Charlie was poor, very poor. He shared that problem with a good many other Scots. I have a theory that the (in)famous Scottish parsimony is a straight and obvious result of endemic poverty. Poor people don’t throw things away that might have some value and the habit becomes so ingrained that even an end to poverty doesn’t succeed in changing the habit.

Charlie told us that he and all the other people living in Stewart had a strong belief that yes, it was going to happen: Steward was going to boom any time now, certainly the next year. He had an automobile dealership and it seemed worth waiting just another year …. there were rumors of a mine opening up in the area, that might bring a lot of people, and then he could sell a lot of cars. And so he waited, year after year and the boom didn’t happen. In fact nothing happened, not in Steward anyway. And finally he gave up and moved to, of all places, the Queen Charlottes, not because there was a boom expected there, but because life was cheap, I imagine. The famous story in our family has always been of Charlie living in some kind of a self-built cabin on the beach and heating it by shoving whole logs in the heater, bit by bit, until the log was gone. I can’t vouch for the truth …… Charlie was a great teller of stories.

From the Queen Charlottes to Terrace. And there the miracle would happen: Charlie would earn money, real money and quite a lot of it. What gave him the idea I don’t know, but he started a movie theatre, the first in the town, and it pulled people in by dozens, if not hundreds. There was no other movie theatre in the place and precious little to do for people during the evening. We visited that movie place once or twice, and it was pretty grim: a narrow building with rickety rows of chairs and the all-pervading smell of popcorn. Maybe our judgment was unreliable because we had no basis for comparison other than movie theatres in Holland.

At this stage Susie entered his life and things started to change. The yard around his house was littered by numerous piles of old lumber. Wherever you looked it seemed that there were more piles of old lumber, mouldy, half decayed shiplap, two by fours and what have you, clearly taken away from demolished buildings and piled in his yard. You never knew when it might come in handy, was Charlie’s credo. After Susie started to take part in decision-taking you never knew how many piles quietly disappeared…… Certainly Charlie didn’t know. But the yard took on a different look.

He had some weird ideas about building, particularly about insulation. Nothing could beat sawdust in the walls, of course, but the next best thing was corrugated cardboard, or, if there was not enough of that (you didn’t need a lot, mind you) newspapers did an admirable job.

How she managed it, I don’t know, but Susie got Charlie to act as “Sinterklaas” during an honest-to-goodness celebration in Terrace of this most Dutch of all Dutch festivities, where all her Dutch friends were invited, with kids of course, especially with kids. He did a fine job and I think he got a real kick out of it.

After he retired the two went traveling, cruising all over the world and it was during one of these cruises that he suddenly died in mid-ocean. It has always seemed to me such an appropriate ending for this man who had known poverty as a most direct crushing weight on one’s life, who had been lonely for such a long time and who had found real happiness late in life, to die at an occasion that to him must have seemed like a crown on his efforts, leisurely, luxuriously cruising together with his wife. He was buried at sea, and that, too, seemed appropriate, right.

There were two grocery stores in Terrace in those years, the Co-Op and Smith’s. The manager of the Co-Op was Corby King, who lived on the Bench. We dealt with Smith’s and didn’t get to know Corby, but I’ll never forget him. He and his father dug a well, by hand, through the gravel of the Bench until they hit water at, I believe, 115 feet. They did it by making a strong cribbing in sections of, let’s say, 3 feet high which were then lowered by digging away the gravel that supported them. As soon as the top of the first one was just below the surface the second one was placed on top, and so on, one man digging, the other one winching up the filled buckets and emptying them…… over a hundred feet deep. A dreadfully monotonous epic, more boring than the Fairey Queene, but a heroic struggle.

They can’t have finished it much longer than five years before the water supply in the town was changed from the spring at the end of Eby Road, opposite our house, to a creek that was running year-round, I imagine flowing into the Kalum River. This change allowed all people living on the Bench, who had never been able to use the old system, to hook up. Niek Samsom was one of the first ones to do so….. in secret. He was found out and, I believe, fined. An embarrassing event for the whole family, for everybody knew about it, as it is bound to happen in a small town. I understood why he did it, having witnessed the years of his fighting with a neighbour about the water rights on a well just across the road from his house. Of course he was hooked up shortly after he had been forced to disconnect.

There were three brothers Smith living in Terrace: Jim, the oldest and the owner of the grocery store, Fred and Harold. It was Jim who sold us our kitchen stove: $8.00. Had we had dry wood it might have worked well; it might even have kept us warm, but to get heat out of a kitchen stove in which you have nothing to burn but wet slab wood is asking much. Jim was a big, kind-hearted man. After he had retired he and his family moved to Victoria. He told us an amusing tale: he wanted to buy a t.v. set, but being a business man he did not want to pay cash for it, knowing that in doing so the outfit where you bought it has no longer any interest in you. Buying on credit assures that they will fix it if anything goes wrong. Jim was a wealthy man, but he had never bought anything in his life for which he had not paid cash. The store owner wanted to have some credit references….and Jim didn’t have any. No credit rating…. no t.v. set on credit. I believe he had to involve his bank to establish a credit rating.

After our professional year we were practically broke. I needed work in the worst way and wanted to go back to Terrace My chances would be better there than in Victoria, where I didn’t know anybody. Jim went back to Terrace every summer for some visiting, some fishing, a feeling of being “home”. He had always been a big fish in a small pond, and felt a stranger in Victoria. He offered me to travel with him; he would pay for the motels along the way. It was a fine trip, although I am afraid that I abused his new Dodge by using the passing gear maybe more than was unavoidable. Jim never complained. We stayed on the way up in Kamloops with his brother Stan and his family. I was there that I played crokinole for the first time. Jim proved to be most entertaining company. I learned more about Canada and basic Canadian values from listening to his stories of life in a small prairie town during the dirty thirties than I had during the years we had lived in Terrace.

After Jim’s sudden death his wife, Elsie, gave us the large cast iron frying pan that had been his. He used it during his fishing expeditions to Babine Lake and wherever he went fishing. It was Elsie, of course, who played an enormous role in our lives. The whole family stayed in her house while Jim and I were away in Terrace. Our rental unit in Morrowcrest Court, where we stayed during our professional year, had been found and rented on our behalf by Elsie. Under the circumstances we could hardly have been better off than we were there. The fact that we had two bedrooms, (we had the only cabin that contained two bedrooms!) made a big difference. By using a pole in the middle under each mattress we converted each bed into two singles, but that divider didn’t stop Hubert from bothering his brother and eventually we had to get a folding camp cot for him. We slept on the pull-out sofa in the living room. What we really liked was the almost idyllic rural scene we looked at from our dining room window: a cow grazing in a meadow. When we lived in Langford we started looking for a house, because Elsie had promised that she would provide the funds to buy . We really tried and looked at several houses, but there was always something drastically wrong; usually there were not enough bedrooms. We needed four: one for us, one for Lies, one for Justus and one for John and Hubert, and there was no escaping from that arithmetic. Most houses had only three bedrooms. When we reported back to Elsie she said that we had better start looking for a lot then; her offer would still stand. We found a lot, the one on Kingham Place. She paid for that. We made a plan and had drawings made, she paid for that. We hired a carpenter and started building and she paid for the works, just as she had said, to a total of $16,000,–, and by that time we could move in. Her lawyer made up a contract and pointed out to the lady that this was a most unusual arrangement, and a very unwise one. What collateral did we have? None? Ridiculous. If we would default she might lose the whole investment. An impossible deal and he advised strongly against it. But that is what the lady wanted, for, so ran her argument, there was no doubt in her mind: we would not default. He made up the contract and we were proud that when we handed her the last cheque we had not missed a single payment.

After Jim’s death Elsie sold the house in View Royal and bought another one, a smaller one that had almost no garden. She was anything but a gardener. Whatever there was by the way of grass and borders she had blacktopped over. But she didn’t stay there very long: she wanted something smaller yet, and bought a mobile home, for which she found a spot in a trailer park in View Royal, one of the less horrible ones. She was happy there, and we visited her regularly, delivering our monthly cheques.

The highlight of our close relations with Elsie was undoubtedly the trip to Terrace in her car, pulling her trailer. Moekie and tante Lieske were sleeping in the trailer, oom Charles and I in our tent, and Elsie insisted that she “was fine” on the backseat of her car. It was a memorable, a marvellous trip. It gave us an opportunity to show our guests not only the place where we had lived for five years, Terrace and our house, but a good chunk of the province as well. They loved it, every bit of it.

I honestly don’t know what we would have done if Elsie had not entered our lives. Probably we would have found some other way of doing what we did, but she made it happen at a time when it was so very important to have space. The location was ideal: close to town, but far enough out to enable the boys to enjoy the adventures by boat on Portage Inlet. Far enough, too, from our neighbours, by sheer luck of our location: a double lot on the one side, a road allowance on the other and an only partially developed sports park in the back. There was no way we could have done anything remotely similar at that point in our lives if she had not helped. Our combined income was so small that we could never have made a workable deal with the bank. The simple fact that we had no assets, no collateral in either real estate or capital, would have necessitated a prolonged stay in inexpensive rental housing. Our Langford house was fine for those two years, but all of us disliked living there. Elsie Smith has been a very important, a critically important person in our lives.

When Jim retired his younger brother, Fred, took over the store. Eventually it changed into an Overwaitea store and most people in Terrace seemed to like that change. To me it was like just another take-over of an independent business by a big, powerful competitor. We didn’t know Fred well; I had a lot more contact with Harold, who owned the building where the Kalum Hardware was established., and who had his own office next door. I used to hop over quite often for a chat.

I want to write about Teun van Burken. Maybe I should have mentioned him much earlier, for he became a very close friend. He had come to Terrace, I think, because he knew Bill Brandis. He, too, was manager of an estate, although his background was “Jacht Opziener”, a game keeper, the person who looks after the wildlife for the purpose of enabling his employer, the owner of the estate, to come and shoot it in the fall. It was an occupation that ran in the family: his father had been in the same job and his brother was still doing it when Teun lived in Terrace. His nephew held the job for the Dutch government in a planted forest in one of the new polders.

In this case the owner lived on the estate. It was a famous place for wildflowers and botanists all over the country knew and loved it. It was known as “The Plasmolen” but I believe that was really the name of the restaurant that was located on the highway running past the estate. It was open to the public, but in those days it was considered too remote to attract many visitors, at least not “many” in the sense that we attach to the word; the restaurant was more popular. But the estate, with its forest, farmland and meadows, and the creek that ran through it, was beautiful. It was located almost on the border with Germany, south of Nijmegen. Teun lived in a small house on the property. Having free living quarters was part of his remuneration.

He was an enthusiastic photographer and had a collection of photographs, all taken by himself, of all the wildflowers found on the estate. He had spent years collecting it. It was a unique and valuable catalogue-in-pictures and he was very proud of it.

He met, fell in love with, and married a nurse who worked in the t. b. sanatorium in that area. I don’t know how long they were married when it was discovered that she herself was infected with the dreadful disease, but it must have been very soon after they got married. She died. Teun remained a bachelor for the rest of his life.

It is as if Fate had it in for this generous, kind and wonderful man. When the war broke out he was evacuated. All his possessions that he couldn’t carry, and those included of course his books and photos, he put in his basement, where they seemed safer than anywhere else. There was probably no time to take them somewhere else or find another solution. When the war was over and he returned to what had been his house, all that was left was a basement filled with water. The estate was practically destroyed. All that had been of value to him had been smashed. When he heard that Bill Brandis, whom he had met during the war, was with his family emigrating to Canada, Teun, realizing that there was no future for him in Holland, followed him to Terrace. After a period of work on the Frank’s dairy farm, where he undoubtedly learned enough English to get by he found a job with the Columbia Cellulose. Since he had no academic qualifications and a very limited grasp of the language, he never got past the lowest pay scale. Enough to live, but not enough to get ahead. It was ironic, to us in any case, that this man with his enormous experience in practical forest management should always get the jobs that did not require any knowledge or experience of any kind, the jobs anybody could do. Jobs like clearing brush, or menial jobs on survey crews, or occupying the fire look-out cabins during the summer forest fire season. I believe of these jobs he liked the last one the best: he was by himself, he had a certain responsibility, and lots of time to read. How he managed to do so has always been a mystery to us, but he saved, enough to first buy his own lot and build his little house in Terrace, later to buy the farm in Abbotsford.

He came over to our house quite regularly for an evening meal, and always brought a brick of ice cream. He wouldn’t eat it for it hurt his teeth, he explained. (He had all his teeth, which seemed in perfect condition, and I believe he never saw a dentist.) We had no refrigerator, so the ice cream had to be finished at once: a celebration ! I Teun was a loner, if ever a loner existed. But he didn’t become bitter; he never complained. He liked people and company, but he liked it also to be alone. He was, by any standard, a terribly lonely man; isolated by his speech in the places where he worked and, coming home, facing the evening by himself. Many, if not most, men living under those conditions would soon decide that there was really little point in keeping the place where they lived tidy and clean. Not so Teun. We have only once seen his house not immaculately clean and had on that occasion the feeling that he had sort of given up looking after himself. He looked a bit disheveled and uncommonly down. That was when we visited him in Abbotsford for the last time. He had sold his farm and had realized that it wouldn’t do to continue living on the place while it was obvious that his advise to the new owner had fallen on deaf ears and that the place was seriously going down-hill. He had moved next doors and seemed totally at a loss what to do next. We could convince him to come to Victoria for a real break. A It was the beginning of what we think was the best and happiest time of his life, the years he lived in Sidney. He suddenly found himself surrounded by friends who appreciated him, who counted on him. He had a garden and grew all kinds of vegetables. He had a very special relationship with his neighbouring lady, Alice Anderson, who was quite a few years older that he was and a wonderful person, with whom he played endless cribbage. He loved sharing his fruit; there were several fruit trees on the property. And he continued to come regularly to Kingham Place for a meal and a lot of talking. Every time he left he would install himself comfortably behind the wheel of his green Rambler, take out a cigar and light it. It was his only vice: he smoked cigars like a chimney. The Rambler which we inherited after his death reeked of stale cigar smoke. We lost in him a very good friend.

There are only few people left on the list of those I wanted to remember. First the “Doormannen”, Rein and Jan . Rein had met Nico Samsom, because they held the same job: they were in service of the Canadian Pacific, accompanying the trains that carried new immigrants across the country to their destinations. It was their job to make sure that the individuals reached those destinations and then, later, to check in order to see that everything was all right. Rein had bought land in Terrace, across the river, where land was cheaper. His was a twenty acre piece. He hoped to farm it but he needed help and invited his brother to come from Holland to share in the venture. Neither one had farming experience, but what was worse was that they had no start-up capital, no money to invest in machinery. In order to pay for the land and then for the machines needed to turn it into a productive farm, they both had to work. And over the years the dream of the farming became hazier an foggier, until it dissolved.

They were very nice people, and hard workers, but not farmers. They seemed to fit better in a “high society” environment than on the edge of the wilderness on an isolated stretch of partly cleared land. Across the clearing you looked at the forest and at night the coyotes would come out and start their howling. They had mean tricks, those coyotes: the females lured the male dogs of the Doorman farm, first the one, then the other, over to the forest, from where they did not return. They were no match for a pack of wild coyotes. The brothers hated them with a passion, and so, in furious desperation, plotted revenge: they used to lie prone, side by side, on a bed in front of an open window, and shoot their rifles at the sounds in the dark. They never found a dead coyote. I remember that we needed some lumber and heard from Jan that there was a pile of one inch boards, that had been left there after a little mill had gone. Justus and I went over to get some. We could use their tractor, for the trail was not for cars. But they insisted that we take a rifle, loaded, for it was possible that there would be a grizzly around…..

I had never fired a shot with a rifle, and Jan wanted to make sure that I knew how to handle it, so we had a quick practice, shooting at cans. I don’t remember whether I hit anything, but it didn’t matter: I knew how to use it. And so we went, the rifle at the ready. It was warm, even hot, the lumber was lousy, even worthless, but the thrill was terrific. No grizzly showed, thanks be given…..

The idea of the farm became vaguer as time wore on and little progress was made. They both had to work full time to make a living; there was never any serious time or money to do something constructive on the farm, and eventually they gave up. Jan got an offer to become a sales representative for Bols in Vancouver and accepted it. I remember that I was a bit jealous when I heard what his starting salary would be, but I also remember a feeling of real relief: this seemed to us to be so much more what they were good at. Rein got a good job somewhere else, but that was after we had already left.

Then there was Bill Wellings, the manager of the Bank of Montreal and his wife Eileen. A nicer bank manager could not be imagined, we thought. He was friendly, helpful, thoughtful. And he tried to help in a very practical sense. He and his wife were among the first people who invited us for tea one evening, in their apartment above the bank. We admired the apartment and were amazed to find that the living room was not painted in one colour, which had been the standard in all Dutch homes where we had ever been, but that the end wall was painted much darker (I think it was brown) than the rest of the room. It had been done with the obvious idea that it would make the room seem less deep, and it was effective, we thought. We have applied the idea ourselves on several occasions: the end wall in our living room in Victoria was yellow, for instance.

We were kindly instructed in correct English and learned that it is not right to talk about your children as “kids”, not in polite company. I have often thought about that but never found that it was an idea that was generally accepted. And we got goodies with the tea that had been specially prepared…. delicious and very different from our Dutch point of view. The epitome of good manners, a wonderful set of hosts. Not typical for our experiences in later years.

They took Justus and me on a hike up Thornhill Mountain, an exciting, even terrific thing to have done. It was the first time that we had hiked, in Canada, that far and that high. Thornhill is not a high mountain by any standard, but the top is above the tree line and the views from there are stupendous. You are looking east at snow covered peaks, a real mountain wilderness, and west lies the wide valley in which Terrace is located, and then the Skeena valley proper deep between more rugged mountains. The fact that there was a cabin on the top for the fire look-out during the summer months, anchored with steel cables to the rock to prevent it being blown away (in the winter we could often see a plume of snow blown from the top of the mountain) gave the long hike up a certain romantic satisfaction, a goal. Teun has lived in that cabin a few summers, until it was abandoned because it was too high for the purpose: the summit was too often in the clouds. On the way up I saw my first wild colombines in flower.

When Eileen had to be away one Easter (I believe because she had to visit her parents with the children), we invited Bill over for supper. He brought us beforehand an enormous ham for the occasion. We had no idea what to do with it and I don’t remember what Moekie did, but I vividly remember his disappointment with the result, a disappointment we could better understand after having seen and tasted what Canadian cooks are supposed to do with ham….There is a tradition among Canadians when it comes to Easter ham, and it is unwise to break that tradition. Little did we know about Canadian customs and/or cuisine. .D

Bill was transferred to a bank in the Fraser Valley before we left Terrace and seemed to be pleased: it was supposed to be a promotion. We stayed with the Bank of Montreal as customers, but have never made personal contact with any manager. There is a lot to be said in favour of starting in a small community if you are immigrants.

I cannot leave this topic without mentioning Mrs. Foster, who was Lies’s grade 2 teacher. She and her husband owned a little grocery store close to the Kalum Road Elementary. She was a good teacher, but belonged in a previous era, when a dunce cap for trouble makers was an acceptable form of punishment. She believed firmly in drill, and drill she did, until even Lies knew the multiplication tables. But her heart was big and she was totally sincere. There was nothing phony about either Mr. or Mrs. Foster. We have always believed that she was good for Lies at that stage of her development. She had given Lies a poor mark for arithmetic because Lies was sloppy and didn’t like the drills. Moekie went over to talk and during that conversation something clicked between the two ladies. Mrs. Foster was very surprised to run into a mother who thought that the poor mark was not only deserved, but probably a good thing. Most parents who came to see her wanted her to change a poor mark into something better….

When we considered the possibility of going into teaching, we asked Mrs. Foster for advise. The principal of the other, larger, elementary school had told me that he thought our chances of being allowed to teach at elementary schools would be so slim as to be negligible. “Unless you have the qualifications to teach at the secondary level I don’t think that you will be accepted, for I doubt that the government will allow you to teach the Queen’s English with a foreign accent……” was what he said. When Mrs. Foster heard that story she caught fire: “Stuff and rubbish!” she exploded. “You get your academic records to Victoria College with your application right away and wait. They will accept you… I think you two would make excellent teachers.” We did and the rest is history. But for Mrs. Foster’s strong backing at a critical junction things might have turned out quite different. We owe her a lot.

In rereading what I have written about the people we knew in Terrace there are two things that strike me. The first one is that I left out so many and the second that I seem to have committed the same sin of which I accused Madzy: presenting too happy a picture, with so many really wonderful people. My defense is that I avoided writing about all those who are still around and “in the neighbourhood”, so to speak, with a exceptions, and that, unlikely though it may seem, the picture is true: we were surrounded by the nicest people. When we needed money to go to college in Victoria, we had no trouble finding two people who agreed to guarantee our loan: Harold Smith and George MacAdam. When I needed work, there were always jobs, like cutting birches for Fred Kirby, and, later, painting the outside trim on his house for Ralph Easton, or painting the inside of new apartments for Charlie Adam. I’ll go one step beyond that: I cannot recall meeting anyone whom I actively disliked (except the weird foulmouth who wanted to prove himself as a highball logger). My memories of those six years in Terrace that were so crucially important to us are all the happier because we met so many people we liked. And if that sounds too rosy: so be it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 6: WORK AND JOBS

 

If I don’t count that first, short week on the C.N. survey team, my first real job was with the Cellanese, as a compass man for Dave Hansen. One could not ask for a better or a nicer or a more patient boss. I am afraid that I did a fair bit of complaining about the weather when it was raining, certainly when there was wet snow on the ground. But he remained cool, chiding me jokingly, and never showed that he was getting fed-up. He had reason to be fed-up, though, when I complained, for I suspect that it was largely his concern for me that kept him going after the good weather for our work was over. He had enough office work to keep him out of the rain.

It was his job to locate and mark the branch roads that would make it possible for trucks to reach the spars in the middle of the cutting block where the logs were piled. They were loaded on the trucks that hauled them to the landing near the railroad, at the beginning of the West Kalum Main on the highway. There they were transferred with a huge A-frame to railroad cars for shipment to Pr. Rupert.

I loved his sense of humour and his feeling for the few romantic aspects of what we were doing, like finding old posts or witness trees, or coming upon a particularly beautiful stretch of the forest. “You could easily think that you were the first white man to stand here, couldn’t you?” was his question when we were standing on the edge of a narrow canyon that had a wild little river running on the bottom. Yes, you could.

I loved the care he used for everything he did, from making sure that every curve was as perfect as it could be, to his annoyance when the cat operator had ignored his stakes and thereby loused up such a curve, and his pride when he could tie a certain spot to a given marked spot on the map.

In the morning we usually got a ride with Bud McCall, the bull bucker, in his pick-up. That was convenient, but I found it often a bit difficult to accept the natural fact that I was as green as grass. Bud would be driving, Dave sitting next to him, and I next to him, at the end of the seat. They would keep up a lively conversation, but it took me weeks, probably months, before I could more or less follow what they were talking about. I felt shut out, not on purpose, but by my lack of fluency in English. I had little trouble understanding what was being said directly to me, but to be able to follow a casual conversation between others is much more difficult, of course. On the other hand, being with Dave the whole day, I learned fast. It was probably just about ideal as far as learning a new language is concerned, for he is very articulate. It was just about ideal in every sense.

When it was really getting too snowy to continue, I suspect that it was Dave who got me another job. It must have been in January. The job was a boring one, but it paid the same hourly wage: $1.50.

In the spring before we arrived the company had tried to get logs to the plant in Pr. Rupert by way of a river drive, the method commonly used at that time in the Eastern U.S. and Canada. The logs are thinner and shorter there and they were cut during the winter, when it is easier to work in the forest than in the spring or summer. They were piled along riverbanks where they would be carried away by the streams during the spring freshet. The rivers on the east coast are faster flowing, but even there the losses were such that the method of transportation has been largely abandoned. In B.C. the method resulted in a disastrously small percentage of felled logs arriving at the mill near Pr. Rupert; the rest was stuck along the way, hung up in sloughs, on islands and along the river bank.

It was an unfortunate beginning for a corporation that had just started up on the west coast. There was a lot of money involved, so that something had to be done about it. A crew was sent out in a (or several) riverboat(s), to find the missing logs and note their location, before crews could be sent out with equipment to try to salvage as many as could be pulled free to be piled on the islands close to where they were found. The idea was that the sloughs, in the summer full of water, would freeze over during the winter months, allowing loaders and trucks to reach the islands and take off the logs.

It was winter now, and not a little bit. It was cold and there was snow on the ground. It was time to get those logs and to do that a temporary road had to be plowed out of the snow from the highway to the island, a distance of maybe a mile or a mile and a half. It was done by a cat but safety regulations made it mandatory to have another person there with the operator, in case there would be an accident. To be that “other person” was my job. I had nothing to do, just be there, walking behind the cat as it plowed its way through the deep snow.

We were taken to the spot where the cat was parked by a “crummy” . In other logging outfits a crummy is usually a tiny little bus, but we were transported by a 3-ton truck with two three feet plywood sides, two plywood ends that were pointed and supported a pole, and a canvas top. There was one small electric bulb attached to the front panel. From the pole was suspended, by means of a wire, a small coal oil heater that was attached to the floor by a second wire to prevent too much swinging. Two benches the length of the truck completed the interior. Nothing could be simpler and only an open truck colder. Years of service determined your place: the longer you had worked the closer you could be to the heater. I was sitting closest to the back. Not that the tiny heater made much difference….I left the house at half past six and walked to the place where the crummy would pick me up. By the time I got there my feet would be fairly warm. By the time we reached our destination, an hour later, they would feel like lumps of ice and the walking was welcome.

Every morning the cat had to plow out again what had been opened up the previous day because it had snowed some more. By the time we were finished the snow walls on both sides were close to six feet high. The operator made a feeble attempt to teach me how to operate a cat, but my aptitude was not terrific, and his patience wasn’t that great either. I frankly preferred to walk. I did a lot of walking. Our lunch bags were kept from freezing by putting them as close to the manifold as we dared. We usually tried to make a little bonfire at lunchtime and that always kept me busy for a while, because it was not easy to find wood that would burn. At the end of the day we made sure that we were well ahead of five o’clock back at the highway, so that there was enough time to do to the cat what had to be done before the crummy arrived to take us back to town. We were not paid for “traveling time”, just for our eight hours of “work”.

Finally the day came that the road was “in” and there was an opening, large enough for a logging truck to turn around, at the other end, where the salvaged logs lay in a big pile. While the cat operator worked on that landing I amused myself by carving huge faces out of the blocks of snow he had pushed roughly into a circle. I was rather pleased with the result: all these awful faces staring down on our human activity in the clearing. But the foreman was not amused when he arrived to check what we had done and explained to me in some detail why I had been there and why I was paid to be there. Carving faces was not in the job description, and he made that quite clear.

It was interesting to see the loader, a big shovel with claws instead of a bucket, slowly move under its own power down the road like a prehistoric beast between the two snow walls. As soon as it had arrived the real work began: the loading of the logs. I was there for the duration but I don’t remember what I had to do; hook up the logs, I suppose.

After those logs had gone I got a job setting chokers on the Shames Flats close to the spot where we had been working. The previous fall there had been logging going on there, but the logs were not removed. They were now covered by a thick coat of snow, thick enough to make it difficult to see where they were and how they were lying. First I was assigned to a young fellow who was new in the area and who wanted to establish a reputation for himself as the fastest chokerman in the district. He was quick on his feet, it is true. He was also one of the most unpleasant fellows I have had to work with, nasty, full of the most god-awful language I had heard (and I had heard quite a bit, for such is the company of loggers), jokes that were invariably obscene and crude, and possessed with a feeling of his importance that was totally misplaced, but that made working with him a daily ordeal. I went to see Bud McCall after a week, explained my problem, and the next morning we found to our mutual satisfaction that we now had different fellow workers. My new crew was great. I was not a good chokerman, willing enough, I believe, but rather too old to match willingness with agility. The cat operator, Bill Robinson, was terrific, skillful and very careful.

Setting chokers is a dirty job and not without danger, for you can never be quite sure whether the pile of logs you are working on is stable, and you frequently have to crawl half under a log to reach the chokerhead you have just thrown over. A young fellow who has always worked in logging and has done little else than walk on logs is far more sure on his feet, of his movements, than I was. And a cat that is operated by a somewhat careless individual is a lethal, enormous chunk of steel that can turn at an absolutely amazing speed. If you happen to stand in the way of that rapidly swinging blade…..I remember Bill with gratitude. On the day I told him I was going to work for Public Works the next day he wished me well, shook my hand, and then, smiling, looked me over from the high seat of his cat and said slowly “Well, after all I didn’t kill you….” Devastating.

By the time I left it was spring. I can vividly remember the exhilarating moment when three trumpeter swans came flying over low, sort of melodiously talking to each other. I had never seen wild swans. And one morning I heard with amazement a sound that I could only interpret as the sound someone might make if he was trying to start a small engine, a small boat engine or something: a rapid sequence of low, little beats, quickly tapering off to silence again, but always repeated, time and time again, never catching to the roar of an engine coming to life. When Bill returned after pulling the logs to the landing, I said: “Listen, somebody is trying to start an engine….” Bill climbed off his cat, came over to where I was standing, and together we waited until the sound was repeated. He laughed uproariously, slapped my shoulder and said: “That’s a grouse calling a mate. They stand on a log, a hollow one if handy, and beat their wings against it.”

Spring on the Shames Flats has left a good memory. If I was lucky at the end of the day, I could get a ride back in the cab of another member of our crew, who sometimes took his own truck to work, a baby-blue International. That was wonderful, because it was warm and you could see where you were going, in contrast to the crummy, where you could only see a small section of where you had been….if the door was open in the back. The landscape was spectacular. The road, winding around the mountains, was a bit scary, particularly when I noticed that our driver sometimes took the inner curve when the road turned to the left around a rocky shoulder. There was no way he could have seen what might be coming from the other side. When I mentioned it to him he said in a reassuring voice: “I know what’s coming. I don’t know how, but I just know if there is anything coming from the other side.” A few minutes later he said: “Watch,” and took the outer curve. Sure enough: we met a car coming around that curve. I found it creepy and wished he would not rely so totally on a sixth sense, that was to me of doubtful reliability.

I don’t remember why I changed jobs other than that setting chokers was not much fun, and I believe we had been through one short strike. That is a dreadful thing to happen when you rely totally on that pay check. And we did, for apart from our own expenses we had to pay Pem every month. Anyway, when I heard that there was a surveyor’s helper needed at “Public Works” in town, I applied and got the job. The surveying wasn’t much. I remember that we were one day doing some measuring at the spot where the traffic turned off the bridge across the Skeena to enter town, but there wasn’t much else. The rest was what all casual labour did for Public Works: repair bridges, clear corners and shoulders along the highway to improve visibility, cut, pile and burn shrubbery where it threatened to encroach on the traveled part of the road, place or replace culverts. I did it for almost a year, didn’t mind it and didn’t enjoy it either: it was a job, a steady one at that, the guys I was working with were all right and sometimes we had good times. Like on a major clearing job of one of the gravel shoulders just east of town during a cold spell in winter. Beautiful clear weather, freezing, and with a strong outflow wind coming down the river, making us all work hard to get some really big blazes going that were warming us up. Lunch posed a problem: it was much too cold to just sit and eat your frozen bread. But half a mile at most from where we were working was the cabin of a fellow who, I believe, worked occasionally as a “powder man” for Public works, the fellow who blows up stumps and bits of rock. They all knew him at any rate, and immediately contact was made. The result: “Everybody welcome!” Big relief. He was a nice man, thin, tall, clean and, above all, a very good, a natural story teller. His cabin was heated by an “airtight”, one of those thin sheet metal jobs that is anything but airtight, but that heats very well, if you put enough wood in them. There was lots of wood, and the thing was showing bright patches of cherry red on its cheeks while it roared. The crew was sitting in a tight circle around that little heater, ate their lunches, while our host told us the stories of the days when he had run a trapline in the upper reaches of the Zymoetz Creek. There was one story about the day and night when he had literally been kept indoors by a furious black wolf that wouldn’t leave, but I don’t remember how he had managed to fool the beast in the end.

The story I remember very well was an adventure while he was working at the timberline where he had built one of his cabins. He had left in the morning with his Winchester carbine, the favourite rifle of all trappers, because it is small but packs quite a wallop in the shorter range. On his way he had come to a steep, deep ravine that was narrow enough that a single tree had fallen right across, and trees don’t grow very tall that high up. He had found that to walk around the end of the ravine would mean another hour or so of walking, and had decided that he would cross it by sitting on the tree and moving himself in little jerks, moving his hands along the trunk. He said that he had been pretty scared while doing it, for that ravine was deep. After crossing he walked on and came eventually to a shrubby spot on the upper edge of a valley. Down the slope a grizzly was walking with her cub. It was spring and the cub was quite small. Since the wind was blowing in his face the bear had not noticed him. He watched the two for a little while, but then, in a foolish impulse, he had taken a shot at the mother. The distance was too great for the bullet to have any other effect on the bear than to infuriate it instantly…. if he hit her at all. It didn’t matter, the explosion was enough; she wheeled around and came storming up that hill like a locomotive on a rampage. He cursed his stupidity and ran…. and ran….. and didn’t stop before he was back at his cabin and bolted the door. The bear didn’t show up at all. It had probably been satisfied that the enemy had gone and that the scene was safe again.

After he had regained his breath and his composure he had made himself a cup of coffee. While he was drinking it suddenly dawned upon him that he hadn’t crossed that ravine as far as he could remember and he wondered how he could have missed it? He decided that he would go back the next morning to see if he could find the solution to that riddle. He did, and arrived at the same spot where he had crossed the ravine by sitting on that log and inching himself across. The log was still there, undisturbed. the only thing he could see was that in the middle, halfway between the two sides, a little chunk of bark was missing. In the bare spot he could see the marks made by a caulked boot…. his.

The job that was most challenging was the replacement of bridge decks, using three inch planks that had to be nailed with eight inch nails, using a six or eight pound sledgehammer. The nail had to be hit right on the head, otherwise it would be instantly flattened. I was no good at it, but there was one fellow in our crew who never missed. He was a native Indian, a short, chunky man, who was totally deaf and had never learned to speak. He was smart and could understand signs (not sign language) with unbelievable speed and accuracy. He was the expert when a bridge had to be repaired or replaced. One of the other crew members placed the nails, tapping them with an ordinary hammer, so that they would stand at a certain slight angle, then he would follow and drive it home in one or two strokes.

There was a lot of clearing and burning, and all that stuff was of course wet. The smoke of our fires got into all the clothes we were wearing and was hard to get rid off. They got also filthy, not only because we were often working in the dirt, but by contact with half-burned sticks and stumps. All we had for a washing machine was the little Hoover we had brought with us from Holland, the engine of which we had re-wired to fit the voltage used in Canada (Holland has 220 V. standard.) Of course it was important that I had work, but this job took more than just my effort: it was hard on Moekie.

In the next spring I heard that there was a job opening at Sande’s mill and I applied by talking to the foreman, Pat Beaton, who hired me. In the mill the job was not dirty, just hard on clothes, and quite an experience. All three mills in Terrace were built according to the same basic plan. Their main method of shipping lumber to other places was by train. It may well have been their only method. I cannot remember that at Sande’s we ever loaded a truck with lumber that had to go somewhere out of town. And because the train was so all-important, the mills were all located along the railway, each on its own spur. What would seem odd nowadays was the fact that they were all built on a platform, some five or six feet off the ground: heavy cedar posts, connected by timbers, then a layer of two by eights on edge as joists, and a deck of two inch planks. This made it easier to load the boxcars: instead of having to push every stick or plank up to the guy piling the lumber inside half of the load would go down. It made a huge difference, both in time and in effort.

That platform almost did me in the very first day I was on the job. I was standing with a little group on the edge of the deck while something had to be done with a heavy three by twelve beam lying there. I tried to help, grabbed the beam at one end and pulled hard to move it closer to the edge, when my hands slipped and I smacked five feet down, flat on my back. It quite knocked the wind out of me, and when I got up, a bit dazed and finding it difficult to breathe I saw to my horror that my head had landed less than a foot from a sharp knot in an old piece of lumber and close to a steel rail. I was sent home for the rest of the day. An unfortunate beginning, but the only accident I suffered during the year I have been working there.

Logging trucks were driven around the mill to the back, where they dumped their load on a platform of logs., at right angles to the saw. The sawyer could then roll them relatively easily with a peevee on to the saw carriage, that moved them past the head saw, in Sande’s mill a five or six feet circular saw with removable teeth. The only source of power was steam from a boiler that was fired by refuse from the mill. The mill was old and suffered break-downs rather regularly. We didn’t mind, as long as the break-down could be fixed quickly. If it was a matter of at least a day we were sent home of course, and that made a difference on our next pay check.

The mill’s garbage, the sawdust and the shavings from the planer, but also the things that couldn’t be used for anything, not even for slabwood, were burned in a beehive burner. They are now outlawed because they create incredible amounts of smoke, but were then in general use. Among the garbage were sometimes the slabs of wood that came off the saw as a correction if the second cut had not been perfectly at right angles to the first one. They were always shaped the same way, like a thin wedge in cross section. But sometimes they were otherwise perfect: clear of knots and much wider than the rest. I used to keep my eye on those slabs, particularly if we were cutting cedar, and if I saw one that was beautiful, I ran down to the chute that carried the waste to the burner and pulled the thing out to take it home. I had quite a collection and stored them in the space between the rafters and the ceiling joists. From those slabs, after a lot of hand planeing, I made the cabinet between the bedroom doors in our house. It looked quite nice.

The mill’s age showed in other ways as well. There were no mechanical devices for moving lumber. From the moment it came from the saw it was moved, piled and loaded by hand. The moving was done by piling it carefully on a “dolly”, two steel wheels, about 20 inches in diameter, connected by a four foot steel bar that was square between the wheels. If you piled the lumber correctly on that square axle the load was just about balanced, a little bit heavy at the front end. To move it you pushed down on the rear end of your load so that the front cleared the platform, and wheeled the whole load to where it had to be piled or loaded. The first rule you learned was that you never walked alongside a loaded dolly, no matter what. The reason: the planks of the platform were old and rotten, and if one of the wheels went through there was a real chance of a nasty injury when the whole load shifted and slid off. It could easily cause a broken leg or ankle.

Once I have witnessed the terrible mess resulting from a rear wheel of the loaded company truck going through the deck. Of course the truck had to be unloaded and the lumber temporarily piled somewhere, before they could even begin to get the wheel out of the hole and back on the deck. It tied up the mill for most of a morning. I was glad that it was the foreman himself, Pat Beaton, who was driving the truck at the time. His fury would have been spectacular had it happened to anybody else.

Pat was a remarkable man in several ways. When I met him for the first time, the day I was asking him for the job I had heard about, three things struck me: his very clear, deep blue eyes, his soft, almost melodious voice, and his articulate, precise speech, the speech of a well educated person. He was built like a prize fighter from the waist up: a powerful torso and broad shoulders. But his legs were pitifully incongruous, probably due to the fact that he was pathetically flat-footed. He walked much like a duck, swaying from side to side, his toes pointing way out. “A colossus on clay feet'” was my first thought when I saw him walk. His clothes were always in need of washing and repair. I had the feeling that he slept in the same clothes he wore during the day, only taking off his shoes. One day he delivered a load of lumber to our house and stayed for a little visit. He had for the occasion a brand-new green sleeveless sweater on. A month later that same sweater was held together by the last bit of the original knitted front, close to the v-neck, and for the rest the front was replaced by a large, inverted, open V. Because we didn’t have any easy chairs yet, he sat on the bed. Moekie had an awful time to get rid of the smell he left behind in the bedspread. He seemed to wear the same clothes summer and winter.

I once went with him to his cabin, behind the mill, at lunchtime and watched with amazement when he took a carton of eggs off the shelf and broke them all in a frying pan. When I said that I couldn’t eat many eggs, because I had my own lunch, he answered without taking his eyes off the eggs in the pan “They are for me….You eat your own lunch.” He ate them all.

He drove a model “A” Ford. In his yard, which was an incredible mess of derelict furniture, useless metal and old rusty machine parts, and a lot of chickens, he had two more of the same vehicles, in various stages of demolition. “Handy to have,” was his comment, “for when I need parts that have worn out on the car I drive.”

Moekie and I once went to visit him. It was a clear, frosty night with a bright moonshine that threw dark shadows across the road. Pat had no heater on in his cabin, and it was almost too dark in there to see. I don’t remember what we talked about, but we listened to a record he liked especially. He had a very old wind-up gramophone; cranking it up became something of a ceremony in itself. He carefully put a new needle in the head (I’ll never understand how he managed to do it in the semi dark) before lowering it gently onto the record. The sound of those machines was pretty awful, but human voices suffered less than string instruments and the voice of an Irish soprano singing folk songs was pure and hauntingly beautiful.

I think that Pat was essentially a very lonely man. I don’t think he had any friends he saw regularly. I suspect he had no friends. He knew his job and was respected by the people working in the mill. I found him pleasant on most occasions and easy to work for.

My working buddy was another Dutchman, Herman van der Hende, trained as a cabinet maker and small boat builder. We got along well and worked together as a reliable unit. Both of us were very keen on piling lumber so that the front of the pile was straight and square, something Pat appreciated, even though he commented occasionally that it seemed to take us a long time. That may have been true, for we were not likely to overwork ourselves, but the fact that what we did was done properly was to Pat most important.

Once he got really mad at us. I suppose he had had an argument with Sande and found us handy to vent his frustrations. We were loading a boxcar with two by eight cedar planks, seven feet long, that were being shipped to an eastern mining outfit. They used that, frequently beautiful, lumber as floors in mining galleries because it withstood rot and the floors were often wet. We liked loading that stuff: it was an easy size, it smelled great, and it was light. But Pat thought that we were loafing (we were not) and gave us a demonstration of how he was used to go about loading it. Herman came out of the car on the deck, and helped me to feed the planks down to Pat at a rate that made it almost a continuous avalanche of planks. Pat worked his butt off, threw planks into piles at a phenomenal rate, but not very neatly, and emerged after five minutes, red as a cooked beet, and panting like a mad rhinoceros. “See…”?” he shouted at us “That’s the way it should be done….” and stomped off, back into the mill. Herman and I looked at each other, laughed, concluded that it had been a fine show…. but that it had lasted only for a very short while and that the results, both on the lumber and on the man did not seem to recommend it. We went back to work feeling pretty good.

Pat’s fits of temper were rare. As long as you did the job and took some care to do it well, he was not hard to get along with. He often picked me as the man to help him at the re-saw, where two inch lumber was reduced to one inch boards. It was a rather tedious job, but not hard work, and I didn’t mind it, certainly not when it was very hot outside. During the winter the jobs outside were as bad as the ones inside, because the main building was built at a ninety degree angle to the railroad, which meant that the north wind sliced through your clothes at least as badly as it did outside. Being outside you could find some shelter in the lee of the high piles stacked on the deck. Herman and I tried to get into the boiler room after working half an hour outside when it was really cold. Nobody seemed to mind….

The owner of the mill, Ernie Sande, lived on the property, behind the mill, with his family. I don’t know how large or small that family was, or who the members were, for there was hardly any contact. If there was a Mrs.. Sande, I have never met her. There was a son, Ray, a nice , good looking young man in his late twenties I’d guess, but I don’t know whether or not he lived in that house. I have a faint idea that he was married and lived in town. We did see him from time to time, but what his relationship to the business was I don’t know. I remember that he and one of his friends built a fine “river boat” on the deck from the most gorgeous spruce lumber I had ever seen: twelve inch wide planks, sixteen feet long, without a knot or blemish.

There was a daughter, married, I believe, who lived with her parents. She kept the books, if I am not mistaken, and in that capacity she came to the mill once in a while to talk things over with her father. One morning she came running up to me, holding her left wrist in her other hand, together with a pair of pliers. “Just,” she said urgently, “can you pull this out?” and showed me her left thumb, with a sewing machine needle right through the nail and protruding on the other side. What can one do? I clenched my teeth, grabbed the pliers in my right hand, her hand in the left and yanked the needle out. It was not difficult. She didn’t make a sound, but thanked me and went back do what she had been doing.

Ernie himself was a small, tense, wiry man who never scolded anybody, never swore at anybody, never got impatient with anybody. I heard him swear once. I was working on the deck, and Ernie was down below, trying to couple two boxcars without anybody helping him. The rails at that point were sloping just the tiniest bit. He was using a tool that made it possible for one person to move a boxcar, albeit very slowly. It consisted of a hollow wedge that fitted the rim of a railroad car and a long handle. If you placed the wedge tightly under the wheel and moved the handle down, the top of the wedge came up, moving the car an inch or so forward. You released the handle, moved the wedge quickly forward until it made contact with the wheel again, pushed the handle down…. and so on. It took time, but it did work. Ernie, when I saw him, had managed to get the cars together. All he had to do was to hook them up. So, when he heard that they had made contact, he left the tool, ran to the front of the car…..but the slope in the rails had just caused the one car to roll back a couple of inches, and the coupling would not reach. Ernie ran back, started levering his car up again, raced forward at the critical moment, only to find that the same thing had happened. He tried again, and tried to run faster this time, but it was not quite fast enough and the cars could not be coupled. After trying three times he swore violently before trying once again….with the same result. At that point his frustration broke his patience, his self control, his reason, and he let go….. a string of blasphemies so terrifying and so imaginative, combining all the members of the Holy Family in unimaginably obscene situations….. it was not only fascinating, it became pure artistry. I had never heard anybody swear like that and listened in awe. He has not been aware that there was a witness to his fury.

I worked there for about a year, joined at one point by Jan Doorman, who owned a farm on the other side of the river together with his brother Rein. They were nice people and I will have to come back to them and their farm in the next section. Jan had a truck, which made it possible to go to our house for lunch.

You learn what you have to know in a small mill like that in a month. After that it is routine and it becomes pretty boring. It is heavy work and, as I said earlier, hard on clothes, even though we wore leather aprons at all times. And there are situations where there is actual danger involved. The following story may illustrate that point.

The mill had received an order for squared timbers, to be re-sawn and made into “value-added” lumber somewhere else. They were cut in Sande’s portable mill in the bush. Of course it is not very well possible to handle ten by ten timbers the same way one handles two inch lumber. There was an established, ingenious system to load those heavy beams, all green, of course, and up to twenty feet long, on a flat deck rail car. The truck that had delivered them to the mill was parked on the deck, close to the edge. In the space between the frame of the truck and the truck deck we inserted four by fours sticking out far enough to extend over the flatdeck car below, on the rails. Then the two steel posts were lowered against which the load had been piled. I climbed on top of the load, while Herman and Jan were on the flatdeck, and dropped, with the help of a peevee, one beam on the extended four by fours, then a second and a third one. By that time the combined load of the beams tilted the truck just enough to allow the first beam to slide off by itself, on to the flatdeck. Jan and Herman stood well over to the other side when it slid off, and each time I dropped another one I shouted. They hooked their pickaroons (an axe handle with instead of an axe head a five inch curved steel hook, like a claw, very sharp) in that beam and pulled it to where they wanted it, against the posts on the far side.

It worked very well. Until, somehow, while the truck was half empty, there was one beam too many on the extended four by fours. The extra weight made the whole truck lean suddenly, and before I could jump off the whole load started to roll, leaving me no choice but to scramble up over the rolling timbers as fast as they came down. Nothing happened to me or to the other two below, but it was a situation where a serious accident could have resulted.

In the spring of ’53 I heard that there was an opening at the Kalum Hardware. That seemed like a good job, clean, indoors, dealing with the public…. Not a lot of money, but no less than I had been earning. I applied and got the job. A big change.

The store was part of the Marshall Wells chain of hardware stores. It was, like all chain stores, privately owned. The owner was Ray Juby, an immigrant in Canada from the southern United States. Ray was a nice man, easy going, trusting, pleasant, easy to get along with. He liked to live comfortably, but had no great hopes of ever becoming rich. He didn’t have it in him to become rich, for he lacked drive, initiative, ambition….the necessary ingredients for making a lot of money. He was aware of this. He once said to me: “If I would relax I wouldn’t move at all….” He was also a thoroughly decent man, a man who would find it impossible to pull a fast one on anybody, I think. He just didn’t want to work too hard. He was happy that I would open the store in the morning, have the two oil heaters going during the cold months, the floors swept, generally: have the store going before he arrived. The main “push” in his life came from his pretty, plump, spoiled wife, Mary, who would have loved it if Mrs.. Juby would have been an influential, well-to-do-lady in the community, but who had been forced to get used to the idea that she was, in fact, the wife of an average store owner in a small community, a nice man, a good husband and a good father, but not a rich or gifted or super ambitious man. He had been somewhat of a disappointment to her, I think, and she let him know it. I don’t think Ray had an “easy” life at home, and suspect that he found in the store a rather convenient, for legitimate, excuse for getting away in the morning.

Mary was used to getting what she wanted and when she had set her mind on a special car that was going to be sold (I have no idea how she knew about it) she made it quite clear to Ray that, yes, they needed another car, but it had better be that particular car, for nothing else would do. It was a Pontiac station wagon, and it was special: one of the last ones made with real wood instead of fake. Maybe not particularly practical, but certainly special. Ray bought it…. of course, for the alternative, I imagine, was pretty horrendous to contemplate.

The fact that I was a bit older than he was and had a family to take care of was maybe a factor in my appointment: he felt, I think, that he could trust me. And in a very short while he left the ordering of the builders’ hardware, tools and paint entirely to me. I liked that little bit of responsibility. Marshall Wells offered to the employees working in their stores a very basic course in paint so that they might at least have some idea of what they were selling. He encouraged me to take it and was satisfied when I passed the “exam” with flying colours: it meant that was another area he wouldn’t have to have much to do with. I liked that section, particularly when Marshall Wells came out with their system of custom-colour.

During the time I was working in the Kalum Hardware plumbing changed from black iron to copper. New houses were from that moment built with copper plumbing; the only customers who wanted iron fittings were those who had started out with it. We had one customer who came back for more and more fittings, and judging by what he bought he had real problems. He was a Ukrainian and his mastery of English was not good. It was always a real challenge to understand what he wanted to do and what he needed. As soon as he got into the door Ray would get up from behind his desk and withdraw after a hasty whisper to me: “You deal with him…..I’m gone.” He usually found his own stuff, but once in a while he wanted to know if there was such a thing that would accomplish the far-fetched, if not the impossible. Those were the moments I dreaded. Not only did you have to understand what exactly his problem was, but then you had to figure out a way of solving it by an imaginative combination of standard fittings. I don’t believe there was a single fitting left in the store that was not represented in his collection. He and his wife lived across the tracks in what was generally known as the Keith Estate. They didn’t have a car and everything they bought they paid for in cash and carried home, including all the pipe they needed. It was a two mile walk…. They were both immensely strong. His wife left the store once with two rolls of six feet high chickenwire, one under each arm. They were also immensely strong emotionally; they had to be. In recalling the two while I am writing this the term “indomitable” sticks in my mind; it seems the only term that does them justice. They had a car before we left Terrace.

What bothered me was that the store sold “fancy bone china” teacups, made in England. My problem was not that they were horrendously ugly (although they surely were), it was the fact that they were displayed on glass shelves in the front of the store, and in order to sell them those shelves and the cups had to be kept immaculately dust-free. It took the best part of a morning to do that job, for there were quite a few, and they had to be taken down, dusted, and replaced after the shelf was cleaned. There was the acute danger of breaking one of them, and if that happened I would have to pay for it. The idea of having to pay for something I thought was awful was enough to make me hate the job.

Ray understood my dislike for that aspect of my duties, and had his doubt about my ability to fake enough enthusiasm to sell them. He hired a woman, Kay Gordon, to take over that part, bless him; she was nice to work with, she brought a feeling of “homeliness” with her that improved the working conditions, for there suddenly was the time and the equipment to make coffee in the morning. She had a family, her husband was the operator of some heavy equipment, they were friends of the Juby’s. When she had to leave for a reason I can’t remember she was replaced by Bertha Amdam, a young, bright, energetic woman of Norwegian stock. Bertha and I got along famously and I was sorry when she left, but happy for her, because she got married to a handsome, very nice young fellow. Moekie and I attended her wedding.

Once a year the store received a shipment of breakable stuff, all kinds of it: cups and saucers, jugs, vases, and so on. It was always shipped in a crate made from heavy gauge steel wire mesh, filled with copious quantities of straw. I suppose that it was an efficient way to pack and ship it, but it was a pain to unpack it, with all that straw over everything in the book worm. There was, as a result of our reluctance to face the job, always a very good reason necessary to tackle it. One year that reason was simply that the whole crate had been left sitting outside. It had rained and snowed on it; it was dripping wet….. something had to be done to it, and quickly. I don’t remember how it came about, but Moekie got the job of unpacking it. It was a miserable job, for the straw was not only wet, but freezing cold as well, and it stuck to the shipped items as it it was glued. Everything had to be checked against a shipping list, cleaned and marked.

It must have been in the summer of ’55 when Ray met a young fellow,

named Sid (I don’t remember his last name) who was a trained sheet metal worker. They made plans to go into the heating business together: Ray would supply the space and the tools, Sid the labour and know-how. The space was planned to be added to the warehouse, at the back of the store. I could use a bit of extra income and asked if I could build it. It was to be the simplest of the simple constructions. I suggested that I could do that in my spare time, during the evenings and on weekends, and that it would be a lot cheaper than to have a contractor do it. That was all right with Ray. I started immediately, and worked for about a month most of my evenings and weekends on that project. It got done within the allotted time so that the new tools could be moved in as soon as they arrived. It was probably a foolish thing to do, for the hours of my regular working day were quite enough, but no lasting damage was done.

Bertha Amdam’s wedding was close to the end of my work for the hardware. We had decided that we would go to Victoria for teacher training and I had told Ray about it. That must have been in April or early May, and we were not planning to leave until June, after the kids were out of school. Ray said that he was happy to hear that, for he had to let me go, and my announcement made it easier for him to do so. He was clearly embarrassed. His father-in-law had retired, was coming north to Terrace to be closer to his daughter and the two grandchildren and had expressed the hope to find some kind of work. Mary Juby had decided that Ray could let me go so that her dad could take my job. I did not feel very happy at that moment. It didn’t matter a lot; I could surely find some temporary jobs before we would leave and I did, mostly painting, first for Ralph Easton, an outside paint job. It was during that job that I heard, saw and identified a flicker. They are common, but in Terrace at that time they were not; I at least had never heard or spotted one.

During the last weeks in Terrace I got a job painting the inside of apartments for Charlie Adam. They were both pleasant jobs; it was summer and it was sunny. Just before I started work for Charlie we had bought the good old Betsy that took us to Victoria and served us well for quite a few years afterwards. Charlie was impressed.

Twice I needed a temporary job during the winter, when I was laid-off; the first time in January 1952, before I got the job watching the cat plow a road to the island in the Skeena , the second one the next year. In both cases it was Niek Samsom who managed to find temporary jobs for both of us.

That first winter was a cold one. Work on the railroad to Kitimat had started and it was important that the line that would link Kitimat by land to the rest of the province would be operational as soon as possible. Work on the line itself could proceed regardless of the weather, but the critical part was the bridge across the Skeena at Terrace, parallel and close to the traffic bridge. The river is narrow there and rock on both sides made it possible to give the bridge a solid foundation. Two circular building pits had been made in the river by means of interlocking steel beams. To prevent the concrete from freezing an additive was added to the mixture that would raise the temperature. The two bridges would run side by side so that it was possible to dump concrete in the building pits from the traffic bridge. To make sure that the trucks carrying the concrete would be in the exact right spot to hit the target somebody had to stand on the bridge as a “spotter”. The traffic bridge was the acknowledged coldest place in town, right in the path of the fierce outflow winds that came whistling through the gap in the mountains. One could not be choosy when it came to getting winter work. Niek got the job and never complained. But it was bitterly cold….. so cold in fact, that he had to be relieved every half hour to warm up in the shack.

He told me that there was another job available. The cement used to mix the concrete for those piers had been stored, I believe for years, in a hangar on the airfield, a short drive from the bridge. There was a person needed to help the driver of the truck to load and unload the bags. It had to be done by hand, for there was in Terrace no machinery to do it. I asked for the job and got it. It was heavy work, but under the circumstances that was not bad: it kept me warm. And so we went, up to the airfield, back the flat deck truck up to the pile of bags, load the bags, back to the bridge where we unloaded them, and then the procedure all over. I don’t remember how long it lasted, maybe a couple of days. Every day’s pay counted….. I do remember that it was the first time I saw vibrators being used to make sure that there were no air spaces in the concrete.

The other job came also during the winter. Winter was of course the difficult time because the snow stopped work in the forests. The local movie theatre was owned by Charlie Adam. The original building where he operated was old and narrow, the seats not very comfortable, the whole thing probably a fire trap. I believe it was because he had heard that there was a plan afoot by other interested parties to build a competing show, but it doesn’t matter what was the motivation: Charlie bought another piece of property on the other side of Lakelse and built a much larger, much better theatre that passed the local safety regulations. It had a projection room built of solid two by fours nailed together all around, so that a fire in that space would not immediately spread to the rest of the building. When the building was near completion his wife, Suzie, wanted to know what he planned to do to cover the plywood in the entrance hall. Charlie didn’t plan to do anything : the plywood was good enough. But shortly after that he had to go to Vancouver to order the new season’s films. Suzie saw her chance. Niek and I were unemployed; she needed instant help: this was just great. She had ordered the asphalt tiles and the cement before, so she contacted us and we went to work. It was a large surface; it was winter and cold. The tiles, totally rigid and apt to break when we had to cut them, were difficult to work with, but we managed to have the whole floor covered before Charlie returned. Suzie went with him the first morning after his return and watched his reaction with worse than just a little flutter of anxiety in her stomach…… To her amazed delight Charlie’s only comment was that it looked all right. She believes that in his heart he really liked it. He used to take visitors to his new show and never failed to point with pride to the finished floor in the entrance hall.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 7: VICTORIA

 

Our intended trip by car to Victoria took some careful planning and preparation, for we had to take enough to last us for a year, but the space on and in the car, a second hand Pontiac named Betsy, was, of course, very limited. Everything we did not need had to be put in storage in various places, most of the small stuff on the attic of our house, but the piano went to somebody in Terrace who could use it, and the record player to Ied and Niek.

We bought from Eaton’s a canvas tent of the traditional kind: eight by eight feet, and seven feet high, with a centre pole, four metal rods that kept the top edge square, four poles for the corners and two more to keep the flap out that made the door so that it formed during the daytime a protective “porch” over the entrance. It served us for many years until finally, on Denman, the carpenter ants found it and built their nest in its folds. They must have liked the taste of linseed oil, for they had chewed the canvas full of holes. I burned it, ants and all. It was sturdy, heavy, durable but it offered somewhat questionable protection in rain, first because you couldn’t touch it when it rained without causing instant leaks, second because in aging the material became less water repellent. It served us well and I remember it with fondness, not so much for its qualities, but because it was part and parcel of so many memories.

We bought a camp stove, the classic two-burner Coleman. We still have it in the Den and use it during power outages. And we bought a nest of two pans plus a lid/frying pan and four plastic plates plus four cups two of each in green, two in yellow, and also our first plastic boxes. Plates and cups we still have, some of the boxes are still in use, and the smallest pan is used by Moekie to melt pro wax. Amazing: all that stuff is by now forty years old.

I built a large, sturdy plywood box that would fit on a roof rack. It carried the tent plus most of the stuff that we didn’t often need: the trunk with the clothing, the boxes with the kitchen stuff we would need after we were settled, a small suitcase with what little we had of medicines, etc. etc. The rest went into Betsy’s large trunk. I find it at this moment hard to believe that we fitted it all, six people and what we needed for a year, into that one car, but we did it, and it worked.

We started out on that long trip around the first of August. The first day we didn’t go any farther than to Smithers, where we stayed with Hannie and Piet Dieleman. Piet showed us the next day around his mill and even took us up to the back of Hudson Bay Mountain, where one of his crews was working with a portable sawmill.

The next day we got to Fraser Lake, but not without trouble. The road was being upgraded, which was, by the way, very necessary, for stretches of what was officially Highway #16 were no better than any narrow, twisting, potholed local road. The work being carried out that summer involved huge amounts of gravel being spread, and in the dry summer the dust was at times so bad that you had to have your headlights on to be seen by other cars going in the opposite direction. But there were stretches where the new gravel was very loose, and Caterpillar tractors were standing by to pull vehicles through. In one of these stretches, near Endako, we had to cross a pretty high ridge of loose gravel, and the resulting bump was too much for one of the front shocks of our very heavily loaded car. We could still drive it, but it was not pleasant and we had to be extremely careful. In that condition we came to Fraser Lake, where we spotted an older house, sitting on a nice piece of property overlooking the lake. We stopped and asked the owner, an awfully kind, elderly man, if we might pitch our tents on his land for the night. Permission was immediate, and after supper he visited us and told us interesting stories about the Finnish settlers that had tried to make a go of a farming community on the other side of the lake. You could still see the clearings. And he told us about the huge sturgeon they used to catch in the lake. Our host seemed to like the pancakes we could offer him. That evening, looking out over the very large, very peaceful lake, we heard a loon calling. It could have been the first loon we had ever heard. Altogether that first real camping night with the whole family was a very good experience that has left wonderful memories.

The next day we went on, slowly, carefully, to Vanderhoof. We found a garage where the broken shock was replaced. It was the only thing that went wrong with Betsy that whole trip. After that was done we could travel a bit faster, and we arrived in Prince George early enough to look up people we knew from Terrace, the Skinners. Fred Skinner was an electrical engineer, and I believe he was in charge of the Pr. George generating plant for B.C. Hydro. We had a devil of a time finding their house, because the house numbers on the road didn’t go up high enough before you reached a dead end at the foot of a steep hill. It took some time to figure out that the road continued on the other side of that hill. He showed us their stand-by: the engine of a jet airplane. I believe we had lunch with them, but went on soon thereafter, for we wanted to keep going and they were planning to spend a couple of days in their cabin at a nearby lake.

We went as far as a campsite just north of Quesnel, Cinema, on the Cottonwood River, a lovely flat spot in the curve of the little river with a fringe of small willows (or were they cottonwoods?) along the water’s edge. There was, however, a downside to the campsite, for as soon as we were out of the car we were surrounded by a veritable cloud of no-see-ums. I have no recollection of anybody lying awake the whole night, so somehow we must have managed.

The next morning after breakfast and the usual clean- and pack-up we went on. Just before reaching 100 Mile House we turned off to the east and reached Canim Lake campsite, in time to pitch our tents on the shiny black sand of the beach before a thunderstorm broke that we had seen while it was impressively approaching from the east. Our tent stood up quite well, and we were snug and dry.

Sunny again the following morning. Back to the highway and then south, destination the magical Okanagan Lake we had heard so much about. Fine campsites there, said our map, and large: 80 sites, 90 sites: lots of room; no hurry. So we stopped at the Painted Chasm and marveled at the kind of scenery one associates with more exotic places. At the edge I found some trees that I didn’t recognize. They had a distinctive rough furrowed bark and they reminded me of the trees Dave Hansen had described: Douglas Fir, not very beautiful examples , not very impressive trees, really, but undoubtedly Douglas Firs, the first ones we had seen. And a bit further south we stopped at the amazingly clear, blue-green little Kelly Lake. Moekie believes that it was located on the road to Pavillion across the plateau where one of the oldest and most famous ranch houses in the province still stands. Soon after that we must have reached the blacktop but I don’t remember where it was. What I do remember is the delight of comparatively noiseless driving which was totally new to us.

When we were in Kelowna we did a bit of shopping before crossing the lake over the pontoon bridge. We came to the first campsite, and it must have been 6:30 or 7 o’clock. Of course that campsite was full, all 80-some sites. A bit disappointing, but there were more to come. There were the towering rock pinnacles to admire, sculpted by wind and weather, and we looked across the lake at the other side, where we saw a fairly narrow green area of the hillside along the lake indicate how high the irrigation allows the existence of orchards, and above that a dried-up, almost desert-like landscape. Both Moekie and I found it sort of scary. I began to dislike that countryside, with its vehement blues and greens in ochre surroundings, but after we found the second huge campsite filled, I began to hate it. They could have the whole Okanagan valley; give me some greener country, some naturally green country.

Just before we came to Penticton, still without finding any place to pitch our tents, it was getting dark. The children were hungry and worried, as were their parents. We stopped and made something to eat-on-the-run before driving on. Darkness closed in around us and there was nothing to be found…..We were so new at this form of camping, so inexperienced and I felt hopelessly the new Canadian. We drove through Penticton where all the lights were on: nothing. Lots of auto courts with inviting signs, but we had to be very careful with our money. In the dark we climbed the slowly curving road out of the town. I was worried and scared. There we were, together in a car in the dark, no place to pitch our tent, and the leader of the expedition not able to come up with anything better than vague attempts at reassuring the others that “something would turn up… soon” while anxiety was increasing and the morale was getting lower by the minute.

And then the headlights lit up a seemingly flat, empty bit of land, straight ahead, at the spot where the road started a slow turn to the left. I stopped and Moekie and I looked the situation over, by the light of the head lamps. It was very close to the road, but it seemed possible to pitch our tent there: more than enough room, fine gravel and sparse grass and no nastiness like sharp rocks and the like. The decision was quick: here we stay; put up the tent, by the light of the headlamps, all in one tent was o.k. for one night, a bit tight, but possible. And, with everybody’s help, the tent was up in no time, the blankets and sleeping bags rolled out, and the family ready to go to sleep. It didn’t take long. There was traffic, heavy traffic, all night long, for the refrigerated trucks with fruit prefer to travel at night, when the roads are empty and the temperatures lower, as we found out the next morning. They roared past awfully close, but we slept anyway.

The next morning: brilliant sunshine. Everybody got dressed in a hurry. We discovered that where we had put up the tent was actually an old unused curve of the road, cut off when the highway was improved. It didn’t take long to get packed up. We decided to move on to a better, quieter spot to make breakfast. We found it not too far from there, and I don’t think breakfast eggs have ever tasted better. Not even the faint sound of what could have been a rattle snake was a damper on the festive mood.

After breakfast to Keremeos, where we bought and drank a gallon of apple cider, and then to Princeton. The slow, long and curvy climb to Manning Park and Allison Pass proved to be quite a job for Betsy, but she did it without a murmur. What struck me in Manning Park was that you saw so little of the gorgeous scenery. We stopped to look at the Similkameen River, and noticed on the way down from the pass the enormous burned-out area, marked by a huge monument to the cigarette that had been tossed away carelessly and that had started the fire. The kids were as impressed as their parents. The long descent to the Valley is hard on the brakes, but we survived that too. Along the four-lane highway through the Valley to Abbotsford was an easy part of the trip and finding Teun on Boundary Road was maybe not “easy” but we managed it without much trouble, after we got some information in Abbotsford. The reception was quite as warm as expected.

We went with him all over the property, looked at the raspberry canes, row upon row of healthy, lush growth, neatly tied to the wires, and at the hen houses where he kept the “fryers” earlier in the year, the young chickens that were raised not quite to maturity, strictly to provide the market with tender chickens to be fried whole, but that were now occupied by some East Indian families that were picking the fruit. He explained to us that his fortunes in raspberry-growing had dramatically changed for the better since he had been able to install irrigation with money he borrowed from his brother. The farm looked typically “Teun”: tidy, carefully looked after, well organized. Justus had his first chance to drive a vehicle: with Teun standing on the machine behind him he drove the farm tractor.

We pitched our tents on the grass in front of Teun’s little house, three rooms: a kitchen, a living room and a bedroom, immaculately clean, had supper with him and enjoyed a quiet evening. I think we stayed one more day, met the Apeldoorns who lived close-by on a dairy farm and I believe we went with him into Abbotsford. The next day we moved on: the last leg of our journey.

Vancouver looked really big-cityish to us. We crossed the Fraser by means of the Patullo bridge and Burrard Inlet via the Lions Gate bridge, which was still a toll bridge at that time, and got to Horseshoe Bay to board the ferry to Nanaimo, the only day-link with Vancouver Island. (There was still a night sailing from Vancouver downtown to Victoria.) It was all pretty exciting stuff, first crossing a busy, big city, then that large ferry with the several decks that could be explored, and finally the trip south to Duncan.

We went straight to the centre of the city and phoned Trudi and Lootje Westermann from there, giving them as accurate a description as we could of the location where they could find us, and then we had to wait, but not very long. We were guided to their house on Bell Mc Kinnon Road and were amazed that they had such a large piece of property, at least I was. Lots of room for our tents. Such a warm welcome….. Lootje had just discovered a wasp nest behind one of the cedar boards that covered the outside of their house. I helped him, as soon as it was dark enough, to squirt insect killer into the opening before closing it with a rag or something. Welmoed, Lootje’s sister, was staying with them and it was with her that we went the next day or the day thereafter for the first time to Victoria, that is to say, Moekie and I went, the children stayed in Duncan to play with the Westermann children.

Lootje had told us about the blacktopping of the Malahat Drive, that had been completed just earlier that summer. Before that it was just a gravel road, like most roads in the area, which added to the hazardous driving conditions for which the road across the Malahat was notorious: it is heavily used because there is no other road linking Victoria with the rest of the Island, it had too many curves, nasty corners and fairly steep grades, combined with frequently occurring fog. The summit was of course much more exposed to frost than the lower stretches and after snow it was a road we tried to avoid. As long as we lived in Victoria there has hardly been a Sunday when we didn’t hear one or more ambulances racing north, and usually they were attending to the victims of yet another accident on the Malahat. Blacktopping improved the road enormously, but also allowed higher speeds. Whether or not there was a sudden increase in accidents after that summer I don’t know.

We were quite impressed by the incredible views over Finlayson Arm and the Saanich peninsula. It was summer and it was sunny: Victoria could hardly help making a favourable impression. We were amazed and amused by the spectacle we witnessed on the lawn behind the Crystal Pool: a number of quite elderly ladies and gentlemen, dressed in immaculate white, each with a little cloth hat on her or his head, who were intently and earnestly rolling balls across the bright green, immaculately maintained and cut lawn. It was their seriousness that we found so funny… they didn’t seem to be doing this because it was fun, they made it look as if they were performing an ancient, sacred rite. Later Jean Green, who was Hubert’s teacher and who was living in a neighbouring cabin in Morrow Crest Court, commented, after she had seen this uniquely Victorian (or so we thought at the time) spectacle, that these people, living in the “colonies” and wishing that they could live that way “back home”, were developing traits that made them look more British than the British. Caricatures of what other people thought were typically British characteristics. The trip left a pleasant, albeit very superficial, first impression.

I suppose it must have been on or just after the first of September that we moved to Victoria with the whole family and installed ourselves in Morrow Crest Court. We met Elsie Smith there. It was Elsie who had found this accommodation and who had made all the necessary arrangements. We were very lucky, because cabins with more than one bedroom were very hard to find; ours was the only one of that size in the autocourt. Moekie’s and my first impressions are vivid and quite similar: the flowers and the well looked-after garden, and the view from the kitchen window over a real meadow with cows: David Aujla’s parents lived there.

There were two bedrooms, one was to be shared by Justus and Hubert, the other by Lies and John; we slept on the pull-out sofa in the living room. The combination of Justus and Hubert didn’t work out at all.

Because Hubert was moving around a lot in his sleep he was installed on a camp cot. Lies and John were separated by a pole in the middle. The parents had to get used to the not-very-comfortable sofa but slept reasonably well on it after that.

As I was writing this a sudden thought flashed through my mind, a thought that had never before become conscious. We were at this point heading in a totally new direction in our life and the circumstances under which we did it were certainly making things more complicated. Most people make their important career choices at a much earlier stage of their lives, and at a much younger age. We were well past thirty and had a family of four kids. We had very little money and were putting every bit of it into this venture, for which we had to mortgage our house. This was going to be the critical year: if we succeeded we would have jobs and eventually a brighter future, but if we did not succeed the future looked glum, even dismal. Objective observers would have had another reason for not being overly confident of our chances to come out the winners: my academic record at school was at best somewhat dubious, and my performance during the one year I spent at university was downright grim. Combine that with very crowded accommodation during that crucial winter session and one would have to come to the conclusion that there was reason for some anxiety and worry.

The thought that hit me while writing this was that there was nothing of the sort troubling our minds, that we were confident and positive, and that the thought that we might fail never entered our minds, not at this stage anyway. Twice during the months of training in Victoria College, from September ’57 to June ’58, we felt less certain of success. The first time when we got back the results of our English 200 midterm, which both of us failed miserably (with something between 20% and 25%), the second time at the very end, when Moekie sort of collapsed mentally during the last practicum in the classroom of a very poor teacher. Both times we survived. But I am running ahead of the story.

The children had to be registered in their schools; Lies, John and Hubert in View Royal Elementary, which was delightfully close-by, while I took Justus to Colquitz Jr. the first school day and left him there with a slightly troubled heart; it seemed like a very big school. All of us were facing big changes. We, the parents, went to Victoria College and found it to be a school of sorts, I imagine by its nature as a teacher-training institution as well as by its size. The instructors were really more like teachers than like professors, and the classroom routines were very school-like. The total number of students was, I believe, less than 600.

The first day we had a somewhat funny experience in the class of Mr.. Loft, the Social Studies professor. He wanted us to sit in alphabetical order so that he would be able to recognize individuals. When he came to the “H” he read from his class list :”Johanna Havelaar” and looked up to see who this was. Then: ” Justus Havelaar” and another, amazed, longer, searching look at both of us. “Are you related?” he asked, almost unbelieving. We informed him of the facts of our life while the class laughed. “You don’t have to sit together if you would rather not…” he said pleasantly. We preferred to stay where we were. It was a sure signal of things to come: we were very conspicuous; proudly conspicuous I may add. We liked Mr.. Loft.

We liked most of our instructors, that helped. We were training to be elementary school teachers and it could have been pretty awful, but it wasn’t. The only course that was definitely not any help for elementary school teachers was of course English 200, but they all had to pass it in order to get their teachers’ certificate, come hell or high water, for some very deep reason, cultural as well as intellectual. Moekie had one teacher on her staff who passed it on his eleventh try with 51%. That man had spent ten summers in summer school, ten wasted family holidays. His main interest was P.E.

I loved it, particularly because it was taught by an inspirational, enthusiastic instructor, Roger Bishop. After our dismal showing at the fall midterm I went to see him in his office, and asked if he thought that I could do it, English 200. “Of course you can do it,” was his answer, “but you have to learn to really study for it. It is hard work.” He was right: fully 50% of my time was spent on that blessed course during the rest of the college year. But I did well and didn’t mind. He assigned the first essay and announced that he had on the door of his office a list with topics from which we had to choose; no more than four people for the same topic, please. I was in no hurry, but when I finally made it to his office door all topics in which I was interested were signed up. The only one that looked somewhat interesting was on English madrigals. I worked on it, found it interesting, but got hold of the book I really needed after I had virtually finished my essay. It meant a lot of re-writing. I got a good mark for it.

In order to avoid that predicament I went to see him before he had listed the topics for the second essay and asked him to assign a topic there and then. He thought that was a good idea and said: ” Why don’t you write on John Bunyan and the “Pilgrim’s Progress….” I had no choice, but didn’t like the idea at all. However, the Pilgrim proved to be much more interesting than I had thought, and the author, as well as his church, were absolutely fascinating, so that it was all together a worthwhile exercise.

The Christmas exams came and went and I had worked hard. I thought I did all right. When he discussed the exam early in the new year he ended by mentioning that he had done something he had never done before: give full marks for an answer to one of the questions. It had to do with Milton’s “Paradise Lost”. It happened to be my answer. I am sure that he was as pleased with that result as I was, after my shaky start.

Moekie found out pretty early that she had to drop English 200 if she wanted to pass her other subjects and went to see Dr. Hickman, the Principal, who was sympathetic but tried to convince her to finish it. She might spend less time with her house- and family duties, he thought. Had she ever learned the trick of….(a gesture imitating using a can opener) She told him we bought vegetables for a whole week for $1.–at a local Chinese market garden, and he understood that our budget didn’t make allowances for canned food. In the end she was allowed to drop English 200 and take it later in a summer session. That decision saved us: during the first years of teaching we needed her income to survive.

English Language was taught by Mrs.. Christie, who valiantly tried to make us understand the intricacies of English grammar. After a discussion one of us raised a hand to ask an explanation. She smiled wanly and said: “I am scared when either one of you raises a hand,” and admitted that English grammar is not always capable of reasonable explanations, a conclusion we had arrived at independently.

Dr. Mason dealt with childhood psychology. His lectures were stimulating; the course material was more or less familiar to us from our own experience. We were not the only ones in that class who had a family; there was another married woman who had kids. But we were the ones who asked questions and stated our opinions on occasion, something he rather liked and encouraged. At the final exam he gave us a whole exam of true/false questions, 250 of them, and it proved to be one of the toughest we had to write, for we knew that in so many cases there was no clear-cut “true” or “false”. We passed without trouble, but when we afterwards complained to him about his exam he laughed and said: “You people know too much, that’s all. For students who had just studied the text there was no such ambiguity.”

In our arithmetic classes with Dr. Farquharson a few very basic mathematical facts dawned upon me, facts that I had never seen in that light, for instance that multiplication and division are fast forms of adding and subtracting. The thought that my miserable experiences in math could maybe have been avoided if I had had better teachers and had tried a little harder has never quite left me since those lectures, but it is no consolation: the light came too late and was too feeble.

Music was taught by Dr. Gaddes, who also directed the College choir and encouraged us all to participate, which Moekie and I did. It was fun, even the performance we gave in the auditorium. He had a brother, his identical twin, who was a psychologist, studying development patterns of identical twins raised in different environments. The twin brother we visited in England, much later, in 1971, while staying in Oxford, waiting for our rental car. He had exchanged houses with a British psychologist who lived in a small town just west of Oxford. It was the second day of our driving experience in England. Right in the centre of the town where he lived the highway made two right-angle turns. We went very slowly, staying carefully on our half. It almost cost us our lives, because a sporty Brit came from the opposite direction, at a ridiculous speed, cutting both corners. He missed us. Gaddes said, when we told our story, that he had tried driving in England, but found it too nerve wrecking.

I think our favourite class was art with dear, kind, stimulating Mr.. Johns who managed to bring out the best in all of us, as far as artistic creativity was concerned. But his classes were dealing with actual projects and techniques that could be useful to us in our classrooms. There was never any emphasis on our artistic talent or the lack of it. What he had taught us proved to be enormously helpful and valuable later in our work. I had liked those classes so much that I took the next summer another, more advanced, art course, taught by an American from Seattle. He was, I believe, of the opinion that there must be an artist lurking in the shadows of the souls of everyone in his class and that he would bring that artist into the light of day. It took an enormous amount of time to finish all the projects. Most of it was sort of fun, but it didn’t teach me anything useful other than that I was not an artist. The curved piece of driftwood with the nails hammered into it that is still standing discreetly in the tall window in our house is one of the products of that summer.

We had to settle right quickly into a certain routine, if we were to find the time to work for our courses. The only time available was of course in the evening when all the kids were in bed. They must have understood their parents’ need for that time, for they co-operated without a murmur and were in bed at an hour that seems now, in retrospect, almost absurdly early. I don’t remember much of those evenings in any detail, except that we had to make “visual aids” and used the floor of the living room to sort and cut out pictures from the old issues of the “National Geographic” we had found in a little second-hand store in Victoria. Most useful, that magazine, for beginning teachers.

On Sundays we always did something with the whole family. We discovered Thetis Lake Park that has always remained such an important element in our lives in Victoria. We got to know it intimately. On one of our first walks there we were together with Jean Green. We have a picture of her struggle to cross the bridge that was supposed to span a creek at the far end of the lake, but had collapsed.

During our “professional year” Thetis Lake was the area where we collected the twenty specimens of local wildflowers that was a compulsory part of our science course. We have always been grateful to Mr.. Brand for that assignment. It was tapping into a keen interest in wildflowers we had brought with us from Holland that has spread to all other members of the family. In later years, after my first visit to the heart specialist who told me to start walking daily, Moekie and I walked around Thetis Lake every day after school, never tiring of the scenery. We got so familiar with the park that we knew more or less precisely where we would find which kind of flowers. If we had brought work that had to be done during the first years in Victoria, we usually found a sheltered sunny spot while the kids played their games in the Thetis Lake “wilderness” and were happy.

We discovered a wonderful beach near Metchosin, usually not heavily populated, full of interesting driftwood, Taylor Beach, that became one of our most important weekend refuges. To get there we turned off the main road into a short dead-end road that led to a more or less open area where we parked our car. On the left was a sandy cliff, on top of which a house was built in later years, to our disgust and dismay. I must admit that I watched over the years with a sense of satisfaction when, under influence of wind and water, the cliff face was eroded to the point where one could see that the house might well end up sliding down into the stormy water of Juan de Fuca Strait.

We crossed the washed-up logs that separated the parking space from the beach area and usually walked a little ways to the left until we found a convenient log where we could settle down, sheltered from the wind. Moekie and I had always lots to read and to prepare that first year, and in later years we used the time to do our marking. The kids spread out over the beach, in search of logs that would be suitable for use as kayaks. To get these into the water wasn’t always easy and sometimes my help was required, but once they were afloat they provided endless fun. It has always puzzled me that they could stand the numbing cold of that water on their dangling legs. I remember that I once retrieved a log that had ended up quite a ways down the beach by rolling it into the water and pushing it to where we were sitting. It didn’t take longer than maybe fifteen minutes, but when I arrived my legs were blue and numb. Hubert reminded me that his log was wide enough to allow him to keep his feet on top, not dangling alongside. Maybe the other ones did the same. Towards the end of the afternoon the logs were hauled up on the beach, (a major effort) and more or less covered with sand to make it less conspicuous that they had been and could be used as boats-of-sorts. We usually found them back.

When the water was really too cold the kids constructed shelters from beach wood or played with whatever they had brought with them, (we went through a period when they all made toy boats from bits of lumber in our workshop) but the amazing thing was that the beach worked on them like magic, dispelling antagonisms, promoting co-operation, soothing and stimulating them. For their parents it was as much of a blessing as it was for them.

To the left of where we were usually sitting the beach stretched a long way; to the right it ended against a rocky knoll where a high fence stopped further explorations. Beyond that was an area belonging to the Department of Defense, Albert Head.

Years later, when we had finished the little yellow dinghy, it came with us to the beach, an enormous improvement over the logs. Justus and I sailed it back once, all the way into Esquimalt Harbour to the spot in View Royal where you could reach the water’s edge by climbing down a little slope. I remember that occasion vividly, because after we had gotten on our way I was not at all sure that it was a wise thing to do, in a boat not quite eight feet long, and the sky was threateningly black. Nothing happened, and after arriving safely I felt that it was something of a little achievement. There was no real danger, because we were always close to the shore.

During the week the kids played usually in the rocky area that lay between the motel and the railroad. It was undeveloped and pleasantly wild. During one of those games John got hit on the head by the edge of some piece of fairly heavy metal, and had to be stitched up by Dr. Roach, who used to say in later years that he never saw the Havelaars unless they had to be stitched back together. And he didn’t do the worst of those stitchings, when Justus cut his thumb while he pulled a stuck blind, that he tried to close, from the wall and almost severed the tendon of one of his thumbs. That repair had to be done in the hospital.

Christmas came and, thanks to Elsie Smith and Miss Fleming, one of the faculty members of Victoria College, a single woman who lived with her mother, it was a happy Christmas, albeit very different from our celebrations in Terrace. Miss Fleming and her mother invited the whole family for an evening to their house, where we had fun learning Scottish “reels”. At the Smith house we had “Christmas dinner with all the trimmings”, including pistachios and funny paper hats. It was some dinner. We had never had anything quite like it. I imagine it was the first time we had turkey, and it was certainly the first time we had yams. It was very festive and very different.

There was, during that year and the following four, no way Moekie could make her own bread, and we had to find places where we could buy a reasonable commercial bread. We found such a store on Hillside, a little bakery shop, where we stopped every day on our way home. They had their steady customers, people you could meet time and again. One of those was a little lady from Scotland, quite elderly, who had lived for more than forty years in Canada, but talked about “home”, meaning Scotland. Later we bought our bread of course at the View Royal bakery.

Coming from Terrace we were utterly amazed (and delighted !) to find flowering calendulas around our cabin in January…… That year there was no real winter in Victoria at all. Somehow the gray skies and the rains have not left an impression, for I don’t remember having been affected by them at all. Maybe it was our Dutch background: we were used to low, gray skies and lots of rain. But the spring was real and much admired: all those flowering Japanese plum trees throughout the city !

With the spring came the practice teaching assignments. We had done some observing in classrooms in the fall, and probably taught one lesson or so, but this was our first exposure to the real job, being in front of a class every day, for a week, and trying to teach them something, under the critical (but mostly sympathetic) eye of the regular teacher. We were both assigned to View Royal Elementary, which was conveniently close-by. It was also the school where three of our children attended, Hubert in gr. 3 with Jean Green, John in gr. 4 with Miss Wallace , and Lies in gr. 6 with Mr.. Davies, the principal, helped by Mrs. Collins, who taught the music. Lies liked her a lot. That was the class where I would be, while Moekie was in gr. 5 with Mrs.. McAuslin. I don’t know how nervous Lies was, seeing her father there in front on his first try-out, but I don’t remember having been very nervous at all myself. Somehow we were involved in a topic I had first-hand experience in: logging, I suppose either in Reading or in Social Studies, and I remember the thrill of feeling that you really could tell those kids something about a topic you were familiar with because you had done it, not by reading, or hearing others talk about it. Lies behaved like a model-daughter, and if she had been nervous, she didn’t show it. I got along very well with Mr.. Davies, and had altogether a good time. My self confidence soared, but what was more important, I loved it and looked forward to the next time.

That was two weeks in another gr. 6 , but in a very much larger school, George Jay. Moekie was in another gr. 5, a “slow” one. The teacher was marvelous, a fairly young woman, and a dedicated, enthusiastic, even inspirational professional. Mine was very good, a smallish, slim redhead who ran a tight ship without authoritarian emphasis on discipline. It was not an “easy” class; there were a fair number of not very bright kids who were not easily motivated. He had discovered that they were very good at map-making and had some almost incredible successes with that. The finished products were pinned on a display board at the back of the class and the quality was phenomenally high. Competition was keen and their pride in the results of their efforts was wonderful to see. I loved getting involved in that project.

The one thing I did not like at all was that the principal was a “snooper”, who preferred to wander unnoticed through the halls of the old building, listening at doors, peering through windows, over the normal direct approach of checking on teachers by sitting in their classes from time to time. I found it quite unnerving when I caught a glimpse of his white hair at the door window while I was teaching. The classroom teacher laughed when I mentioned it to him and commented that everybody knew that he was doing it, but that “you got used to it.” I resented it.

And so we came to the last practicum, four weeks in Marigold, a bright, modern school in a suburban setting. I was again assigned to the gr. 6 where the principal, Mr.. Jarvis, taught, helped by a part-time teacher, a pleasant, efficient and unexceptional woman in her forties. Jarvis could not believe it when he discovered that this student teacher, who wanted to teach grade 6 kids, had never played ball, either of the soft or the hard variety, and was totally inept in catching balls by using a glove. The student teacher, on his part, could hardly believe it when he was asked by the principal to accompany him on a walk through the area after lunch, because he wanted to check on the number of houses that were being built, a number from which he calculated his salary the next year. I had a suspicion that he was a good deal more interested in that aspect of his job than in the kids he had to teach. Mr.. Jarvis and I got along just fine, although there was one morning when I found a note on the desk: “The discipline in this class is deteriorating rapidly. Do something about it.” I hadn’t noticed, but what I did in the class was not what he would have done and this was, after all, his class. Apparently I took care of the discipline problem to his satisfaction for I got a first class mark at the end. Neither one of us shed tears when we parted.

The teacher Moekie got was something else. She and Jarvis shared a keen interest in “playing ball” and she was good at it, so he told me. As teachers go she was a disaster, at least by the standards we had been told to apply. The arithmetic book in use in elementary schools was organized in a way that interspersed the text dealing with computations, fractions, etc. with separate, shorter chapters that dealt with special subjects, like “measuring”, “estimating”, “weighing”. The lady had found it distasteful to have to make visual aids for all these subjects and had conveniently skipped them to leave them till the end of the year, when she would likely get a student teacher to deal with them. The extra amount of work that entailed didn’t bother her at all, but it was a ridiculously heavy load for a student, who, furthermore, would have not one subject in arithmetic she or he could develop and work on for the duration of the practicum, but instead had to start a new subject every week.

Her arithmetic drills were handled in exactly the way we had been told to avoid at all costs: she started, let’s say, in the right hand bottom corner of the class and then worked up and down the rows so that every child knew exactly when her or his turn would come, and pay no attention at all during the rest of the exercise. That was the way she insisted Moekie had to do it as well.

In Social Studies we were supposed to deal with B.C. History, because this was the year of the Centennial Celebration. She had kept till the end of the year Mackenzie’s over-land voyage to the coast, and that entailed a discussion of the various Indian peoples who inhabited the region. She had undoubtedly avoided the discussion because it entailed of course a lot of reading and preparation. Wonderful, to get a student in your class towards the end of the year.

For us it was towards the end of a very difficult and heavy year, and we were tired. Moekie would have handled almost any other situation just as she had the other ones, that is to say: very well. This, however, was too much. She suffered a sort of a nervous breakdown. The College supervisor was called and arrived on the scene. It was clear to everybody (but the classroom teacher) that here was a case of a potentially very good teacher who was going to quit right there and then. Moekie was in tears, wanted only to be left alone, and forget about teaching. We drove to the coast where we ate our lunch, sitting in the car. I don’t remember what we said, but in the end we did go back to the school, where the experts had found a solution: she could spend the rest of that practicum with the Kindergarten teacher, dealing with nice little kiddies, a teacher’s helper of sorts. That her whole training had been directed towards intermediate classes was of no importance apparently, nor was it that she had not the faintest idea what to do in a Kindergarten class.

In retrospect I find it all hard to believe. These were all education specialists…. couldn’t they see what had happened and why? Was there not any other solution possible? Did anybody take the trouble to check the teaching assignment? Was there maybe reason to give that classroom teacher a very stiff talking to? Jarvis wouldn’t do that; I doubt that he could recognize a poor teacher if he saw one at work, as long as the discipline was looked after. But the College supervisor? Kindergarten, indeed. In the years that followed not one of her colleagues or principals has had any doubt at all about the quality of Moekie’s work. If vindication was needed, the four years that followed this scene of professional ineptitude have demonstrated beyond any possible doubt just how good she was. At the time it was as if our whole year’s efforts were about to evaporate…. and it was pretty grim.

She survived, I survived and all turned out pretty well. But thinking about Marigold holds no pleasant memories for either one of us. It meant, of course, that Victoria was not particularly interested in hiring her, since her final mark was a “Pass”, but the official explanation was that “it was against the school board’s policy to hire husband-and-wife teams”. She got the job in Langford and proved there to Mrs… King what stuff she was made of. And after that Victoria was no longer considering that hiring a husband-and-wife team was undesirable, and took her on with glee.

It was a nasty ending to a challenging, a difficult year; not difficult in an academic sense, but in all other ways: housing, finances, family adjustments, exam tensions, first exposure to teaching, etc. The winter rate we had paid for our cabin changed to the normal summer rate in June, and we had to get out. We were flat-broke and it was absolutely mandatory that I should earn some money. Jim Smith came to the rescue. He had made it a custom to go back to Terrace for the summer months, staying with his brother, doing some fishing in Babine Lake with his buddies and having a good time with all the people in Terrace he knew so well. I think he liked being once again a big fish in a small pond. He offered me that we could travel together in his car, there and back again, so that I could take over part of the driving. It sounded too good to be true, for I knew that my chances of getting a job for the summer in Terrace would be infinitely better than they would have been in Victoria where I didn’t know anybody.

I am still blushing a bit when I think about my driving during that trip. His was a big 8 cylinder Plymouth, automatic, quite powerful. I had never driven a car like that for any distance. I loved it and drove like a teenager, using the passing gear too often and for no good reason, driving too fast in general, while Jim didn’t complain once…. The first night we stayed in Kamloops with his brother Stan and his family. That evening we played crokinole, a game I didn’t know, but that I thought was quite interesting and fun. The second night we stayed in a motel in Pr. George (Jim paid !) and the third day we got to Terrace, where I found work right away in construction and could live with the Samsoms.

It was a good summer. I worked hard, with lots of concrete mixing and not very much painting, which was the job for which the (Dutch) contractor had hired me. I imagine I was too slow. But I didn’t mind the hard work and I earned a reasonable wage. The staying with the Samsoms was ideal.

Moekie and the children all went to stay with Elsie Smith. I imagine Jim and I must have left already well before the end of May, for I had earned some money by the time June 4th rolled in sight, and I could celebrate-from-the-distance by sending flowers, which were a real hit in Victoria. Moekie found, through the help of the music Gaddes, a temporary job by working in a kindergarten in Oak Bay, which helped financially. And she did some house-shopping and found the house in Langford where we lived for two years. It was brand new, big enough, and not expensive, the upper part of an “up-and-down” duplex. The owner was Mr. Dodd, a Sikh and a very nice man. It could hardly have been better, for it was close to the school where Moekie would teach and John and Hubert would be. Lies and Justus were registered in Belmont which was even closer.

` It sounds awful, but I have hated that place. It was built on a gravel bank where almost nothing would or could grow; there was, it is true, a wee bit of forest left behind the house (if “forest” isn’t too big a word for that small patch of spindly trees) but for the rest it seemed like a barren and nasty place to me. It looked out over he Public Works yard across the street (John enjoyed that part, for there were big machines coming and going) and from the side window across the gravel pit in the direction of Belmont school. It was, as apartments go, a pretty roomy place: a fair sized living room, three bedrooms, and a huge kitchen where we ate our meals.

Two truly amazing things I have to mention here. The first one is that Mrs… Dodd, a tiny, sinewy woman who spoke no English at all, started a garden in the gravel between their house and our apartment. She somehow Doug the patch and removed all the stones she could find that were of any size at all. It was, by definition, an impossible job, for there was no end ever to the stones, but she did it. After that she planted seeds for herbs she wanted, spicy, hot herbs, watered them every night, and, miracle of miracles, the tiny garden grew a crop, right on top of the gravel. Mr.. Dodd was sitting in his chair, which he tipped back against the wall of his house, to watch his wife toil, but never moved a finger to help her. That, we were told, was entirely in keeping with the customs of their people.

The second thing is that our children managed to create something where there didn’t seem to exist anything at all: they made a complicated, tricky course of narrow paths through the little bit of forest, and enjoyed riding their bicycles there. I thought their imagination was remarkable and a hopeful sign for their future development. We were invited, not to ride our bicycles, but to eat bannock, a mixture of flour, water and salt, rolled into balls, which were then stuck on the end of a sharply pointed stick and toasted over a little smoky bonfire.

We occupied the top floor of the building. Below us lived a family of three: a couple with a teenage son, who played the trumpet, or tried to. The sounds were awful, and because the whole place was built on the cheap, insulation between the top and the bottom was either non-existent or insufficient. We could hear every note hit or missed. They were friendly people. One of our bedrooms was located above their garage. Our downstairs neighbour wanted to make a motorboat of plywood, covered with fibreglass. He did that in the garage, and John and Hubert, who slept in the room above it, were exposed to fumes of the fibreglass resin beyond belief. In retrospect I think that we should have launched a complaint, for there was definitely a health hazard involved, and besides anything else: they could not sleep in that stench. It took him quite a while before the job was finished and the boat was sitting in the driveway: an ugly, heavy boat with enormous fins to suggest supersonic speeds.

Lies and Justus slept in one bedroom, Moekie and I in the third. Somehow we decided that changes were in order after a while, and we moved to the room above the garage where we slept on the floor on the new mattress we had bought (our first and only two-person mattress, now still in use on the bed on the loft).

But I am running way ahead of the story. It must have been about half of August when Jim and I returned from Terrace. It was wonderful that Moekie had found that apartment, but our belongings were still in Terrace and had to be brought down. We rented a truck from Tilden, and set off, accompanied by Justus. It was a fast trip. We camped, because that was the least expensive way, but did not take the time to look around or to make interesting side-trips. On the way up we took the road through the Fraser Canyon, where a lot of construction was going on. There was one section where we actually had to travel on a road very close to the river, I believe built on a trestle overhanging the water. We traveled on boards, that I remember very clearly, and it was very narrow. But the scary moment came after we had crossed the river and were traveling on a stretch that was carved out of the rock, twisting, narrow, with a lot of tight curves. In one of these curves we banged the right hand top corner of the truck against overhanging rock. But, fortunately, when we stopped and checked, we could not find any real damage. It was a good thing that those corners were protected by metal. The sound of the impact was awful…..We were in no position to face paying the cost of repairing damage to that truck.

I believe we camped just north of Quesnel but am not too sure about that detail. And we must have spent a night with the Dielemans (we would never just drive through Smithers without seeing them) but, again, I have no recollection of that visit.

We pitched our tent on the Samsom property in Terrace and watched the egg sorting and checking. We had never seen that and found it quite interesting. And heard that evening a lot about Niek’s struggle with the marketing board, a classic example of an entrepreneur’s fight with the bureaucracy of a large government-supported organization. It was created to protect “the egg producers” against the sort of competition that would likely kill the business, but was used to protect the interest of the largest producers, all located in the Fraser Valley, against the aspirations of the few outside that area to secure their corner of the total market.

The next day we collected and packed our belongings, wherever they were stored, beginning with the piano, which we got inside the truck and stored against the end wall without a hitch. When we had everything we needed we had a very full truck. I believe it was all done in one day.

` There was an urgency to get back, for there were rumblings of a threatening strike of ferry workers, and we didn’t want to (nor could we afford to) get stuck on the mainland.

The trip back was fast and uneventful. We wanted to avoid the Fraser Canyon, having learned our lesson on the way up, and went back via Kamloops, Keremeos, Princeton and Hope. There were only two moments I remember distinctly. The first one was when we were just past Prince

George traveling on a stretch of highway that had been reconstructed and was covered with loose gravel. It was late in the afternoon and we had to find a camping spot. A car approached us from the opposite side at high speed, a big, bulky Ford with a wrap-around windshield and an U.S. license. We were surprised when the same car overtook us shortly thereafter and even more so when the driver signaled to us to stop. We did. The driver of the Ford, a smallish thin man, was clearly quite mad and invited us to come and have a look at the damage we had caused to his, apparently brand-new, car. His grand windshield had a hole in it and a lovely star around it.

He told us that, at the moment that we passed him, a rock had been thrown up by our rear tire that had hit his windshield. He wanted us to pay for the damage. I explained, as reasonably as I could, that such was the risk of traveling on the gravel roads of Canada, and that I had no intention whatsoever to pay him, but that he might try his luck with the company that owned the truck, although I felt I should warn him that he didn’t have a hope of getting a nickel. He saw that he would not get anywhere and since he had no means of compelling me to fork out the money, he turned, beet red and furious, and snorted in departing that he was going straight back to the States, which seemed to us like a very sensible idea. Shortly thereafter we found a camping spot in a meadow behind a wooden gate

and pitched our tent, leaving the truck on the road side of the gate.

We were early on our way the next morning and made good time, even climbing the long winding road up to Manning Park and Alison Pass. The second memorable event took place while we were descending on the other side of the pass. Moekie was driving. In front of us was a little car with a very timid driver who used his/her brakes quite unnecessarily and far too often. We were in a hurry, because of that threat of the ferry strike: we wanted to get across that same day. And so, when her usually inexhaustible patience under almost all circumstances had finally evaporated, seeing a clear downhill stretch and no cars coming, she floored the accelerator. I said it above: our truck was very full and very heavy, and contained all that we possessed. Hard braking, with that load pushing us on a steep downhill slope was futile, if not just about impossible. I remember the strange mix of exhilaration and pride and cold fear that riveted me to the front bench as we roared past that little car, finally, and also the enormous relief when we got safely past and could slow down again to a more normal speed. Justus’ eyes were shining with admiration for his daring, cool mother. I don’t know how often she has been teased by members of the family for that bit of driving, even years after. In retrospect it was probably not very dangerous at all.

We got to the ferry and across without trouble. If my memory is correct, the strike was called off. Upon arrival in Victoria it must have been too late to unload, but neither Moekie nor I have any recollection of what exactly happened. We do remember that we backed it up to the steps that led to our front door, enormous concrete steps in a quarter circle. I suppose that must have been the next morning. Mr.. Dodd, our landlord and neighbour, came over to lend a hand with the unloading of the piano. What had worked well in Terrace while loading it did not work at all on this occasion: the piano slipped on the dolly and fell sideways against the wall of the truck. Mr.. Dodd, who tried to hold it, got his finger between the piano and the plywood of the truck….. and got it horribly smashed. It looked like a real mess and he was bleeding badly. I felt terrible about it, but couldn’t do anything to prevent it because I was pushing the dolly. He was quite heroic about it, wrapped his handkerchief around the injured finger and continued to help us to get the piano back on the dolly and into the house before going back to his own house to have the finger properly looked after. It was not an auspicious entry into the house where we would live for two years.

In Terrace we had always belonged to the United Church, and in Langford we found a welcoming acceptance. The most remarkable people in the congregation were a retired couple, the reverend Atkins and his wife,who had worked like missionaries all their lives and were now retired. they were wonderful people, very true Christians, of the kind represented by Oena who lived in the coach house of Over Holland. During the second year in Langford I was elected to be an Elder, together with Ken Dillabough, whom I liked very much and admired for his honesty and sincerity.

We had a new minister, and he proved to be the worst by far of any of the United Church ministers we had known. Not only could he not preach a reasonably decent sermon, but he was a bigot and an anti-semite. I could not stand to be in the congregation during his services and asked, and got permission, to teach the older boys in Sunday school. But eventually things got to the point where I felt that, in my position of Elder, I could no longer remain silent, for I felt that the reputation and the future of our congregation were at stake. I went to visit the Atkinses one evening, to talk over my concern with them. They gave me a warm and sympathetic hearing and said that they knew that I was not alone in my concern, but could not mention any names. However, they felt that if I thought long and hard, I would have no trouble locating the people they had in mind. I did just that and concluded that they must have meant Ken Dillabough and his wife. I visited them too, and carefully probed their minds. I could have opened a dam’s sluice gate. We decided that it was our painful duty to go and have a talk with the minister, to ask him to do at least some serious thinking and preparation for his sermons. It was a disastrous visit. He looked for just a moment with undisguised fury at me before turning to Ken and saying: “Ken, that this man would come here to say these things to me doesn’t surprise me, but that I would find you here hurts me deeply.” Total rejection of our criticism, not a hint of understanding that something might be wrong on his part, only fury that we would dare to come to him with such a request. We both got up and left. Not long thereafter we more or less patched up the rift, but nothing changed and I resigned my position and never went to that church again.

I would like to finish this chapter with a brief description of the schools where we started our teaching, and begin with Langford Elementary under Miss King, its small, ferocious principal. To get along with her was difficult enough, but, as a teacher, to win Ruth King’s confidence was an achievement, for her standards were exacting and she made sure that every teacher on her staff knew that by enforcing the rules, of which there were many, with an iron hand. In the Victoria district she was known as the “Dragon Lady”, the sole survivor of a long-extinct breed. Her distrust of any and all teachers around her was monumental. She made a point of personally administering I.Q. tests because it was her firm conviction that teachers would “embellish” the results. She was popular with the officials of the Sooke district because they believed that she saved the School board money, and with most parents, who liked the emphasis she placed on discipline. She was known to “run a tight ship”, and in an area like Langford, where parental discipline was often either brutal or non-existent, discipline was considered to be an item at the top of a list of goals of school education.

One of the school rules was that classes were to line up before they filed into the building, and that there was to be no talking in the line-up. Another, and more ridiculous one, was that art supplies were available only from Miss King herself, who was available for this distribution from the little locked storage room (she was the only one who had a key) between 4:00 and 4:15 daily. If a teacher came at 4:17 the wicket was closed and the room locked. You had to know precisely what you needed and you got exactly as many sheets as there were children in your class, not a single one extra, counted out by Miss King. This was one of the items quoted when the school board mentioned the fact that she saved them money. That she chased good teachers away because they did not want to teach in a school run by her, was never mentioned.

She liked Moekie from the beginning and gave her the support that she needed when she needed it. She did not like a gr. six teacher who had immigrated from England and who had the audacity to disagree with her on a matter of principle; I imagine it could well have been the fact that Miss King may have told him that she was going to administer the I.Q. test herself. Whatever it was that caused the rift, it was there and her dislike for the man caused her to write a report on him by the end of the school year that made it impossible for him to get any other job in the district. He was a nice man; Moekie quite liked him and she thought that he was probably a competent teacher. What happened to him was scandalous, but typical of the autocratic ways of the lady who did it to him. You disagreed with Miss King at your peril. He found a job teaching in a school in Ucluelet, at that time almost as isolated a community as one could find anywhere, and virtually only to be reached by boat or by float plane. It had trouble finding teachers.

The one thing that upset Moekie in that school was the preparation, in class time, for the Christmas bazaar, for which every class had to produce items that could be sold. That was not an option, it was a requirement. The bazaar made a lot of money for the school. The teachers were of course responsible for the originality of what was made, and for the finish. It took all the art periods for weeks on end and was a terrible extra burden for the teachers. There was never any complaint about this abuse of class time from either the parents or the Superintendent. I firmly believe that nobody had the stomach to cross Ruth King.

At the end of her second year we were going to move into our new house, and Moekie applied in Victoria, supported by a glowing report from Miss King. She was immediately accepted and got a job in one of the rather choice schools in the district, Doncaster, where the principal, Mr.. Taylor, was particularly interested in the fact that she played the piano: he needed somebody who could teach music. She was in charge of both the junior and the senior school choirs, worked incredibly hard, but remembers the school with fondness.

At the end of her second year at Doncaster the temporary license that had made it possible for her to teach without having passed the English 200 requirement ran out and she had to get that credit in order to continue teaching. We decided that she should take it in a winter session. There was the housework and on top of that a lot of studying. To find time for that was possible only with the total co-operation of everybody in the family. Maybe it would have worked if she had had her own room, separated from the rest of us but she worked in the living room and could not find the quiet to concentrate on the course. The kids, delighted that she was back in her place in the centre of the family, behaved as they had always behaved, complete with the usual squabbles about whose turn it was to do the dishes, and she was drawn in time and time again……it proved to be impossible to concentrate on her work. Another crisis was clearly at hand. We had a talk and decided that it was more important to have a family than the teacher’s certificate. My salary had increased to the point where we could just manage on it alone. It has not been an easy decision, but it was the right one and we have had reason, time and time again, to be thankful that we chose the way we did. It has proved to be blessing.

My own first school was South Park, a school that had the rather dubious distinction of being housed in the second-oldest school building in the city, built in 1905. When the only older school was declared to be unsafe, maybe two years later, we were the unchallenged champions in old age. It was a strange building. There were actually two separate buildings; in the main one there was an auditorium (with a small stage) that was two stories high, the office and a tiny staff room on the main floor, plus four classrooms. The upper floor had four more classrooms. At the ends of the upper hallway there were two steep staircases that led directly to outside doors: the fire escapes. The treads were made of concrete. During my five years there I have never quite overcome my worries connected with those stairs, for they were so steep and so high, that anybody falling could have caused a very nasty accident. In the second building was the workshop, on the main floor, and above that there were two more classrooms. The two bathrooms for the main building were in the basement. All classrooms had genuine slate blackboards.

South Park was the school with the “special classes” for “slow learners”, kids with mental handicaps: two junior, one intermediate and two senior classes. Besides those there were five regular classes, one grade four, two grade fives and two grade sixes. Mine was a grade five. The two junior special classes were located on the second floor in the annex.

Originally two schools “fed into” South Park: James Bay Elementary and Beacon Hill. The latter was a tiny little school, located in a remodeled large private house at the very beginning of Douglas Street. It had only three classes, a grade one, a grade two and a grade three, and there were three women teaching, one with the title “teacher-in-charge”, but the principal responsible for the school was the principal of South Park. The three women attended our staff meetings. It was a curious arrangement, unique in the district, but it worked quite harmoniously.

James Bay didn’t start as a full elementary school; it went only to grade four, but it had its own principal. During the five years I was in South Park it was changed to a normal elementary school, the first official “Community School” in Victoria, and it got its own, new building.

The teachers at South Park were a dedicated and competent bunch. Most of them had taught for many years. They were not given to experimentation, they were not innovative or creativity-inclined, but they were thorough and hard-working.

The principal was Wilf Orchard, a friendly, pleasant man, not an inspired or an inspirational individual. Few principals were. He was a member of the local Masonic Lodge and during the years I was at South Park it was his turn to lead that organization for a year. He confided to me that he was working hard to prepare himself for the task, and that it meant that he had to learn by heart the whole book of prescribed formulae for every one of the apparently countless ceremonies. I understood that the ceremonial aspects of the Lodge meetings were by far the most important part of their gatherings and that members were judged by their flawless recitation of the phrases, the responses and the set sequence of each of the many ceremonies. I suspect that he had joined because many people in the upper echelons of the Victoria educational scene were members, and it was believed that your chances of “advancement” (meaning: your chances of becoming a principal) were very limited if you were not a Lodge member. It didn’t seem to do Orchard much good: he was a principal all right, but of one of the smallest and least important schools in the city and without hope of ever getting a more challenging job.

He was a man of principle, based on a sturdy, unshakable set of moral values. He did not find it difficult to distinguish between “right” and “wrong”, certainly not in children’s behaviour, and knew that girls wore skirts, and boys wore pants. So, when a group of girls came to school, one bitterly cold morning, dressed in jeans, he did not hesitate at all: he sent them home with the message that they could only come to school wearing skirts. That they must have worn the jeans with permission of their parents did not make any difference: girls wore skirts, period.

The senior special class boys were entitled to get woodwork, since they were in the same age bracket as kids in the Junior High schools. When I joined the staff that job was being done by Bill Hardy, their teacher. He did not like it very much; he did not like to be with special class kids all the time, so that when he moved on to become a teacher in a normal Junior High school, Central, he suggested that I take over his duties in the workshop. Orchard took the science in my class, and I taught woodwork to the Senior boys.

It was an eye-opening experience, and often a frustrating one. There were no power tools to speak of (one electric jigsaw) which was understandable and in my case quite all right because I didn’t have any myself and would not have been able to teach the safe use of, for instance, a table saw to any kid of 14 years old, let alone a mentally handicapped one. It was difficult enough to teach the use of hand tools to these kids. The vast majority never learned to distinguish between a crosscut saw and a rip saw or when to use either one.

Measuring was for most of them a difficult, if not impossible concept. The only measuring tools provided were a class set of wooden rulers, the same rulers that were used in their other classes to draw straight lines. If I asked them to measure and mark eight inches on a board of six inches wide, with the idea that we would get eventually a piece of wood eight by six inches, the result would invariably be that they drew a line along the ruler somewhere in the neighbourhood of the 8 inches mark. It did not matter that I would endlessly, patiently, explain and demonstrate to them that what was needed was a little mark at a right angle to the ruler so that we could draw a line through that mark with a square for cutting. I would ask them to point out to me where exactly they were going to cut along their drawn line and they looked at me with bewilderment. Some did grasp the idea and went on to learn a few basic things about woodwork, but for most “measuring” remained an obscure idea. It was perfectly clear to me that I was not by nature a special class teacher…..We did have a good time together; they loved coming to their woodwork classes, and with a lot of help they did make some book stands, bird nesting houses, and a few other simple things. Their pride in the finished products made me feel that all that energy was, in the end, maybe not wasted at all.

From woodwork we shifted to working with clay, making pinch- and coil pots, which I could get fired in the kiln at another school. That got rid of the measuring problem but added a few in a different field, for clay is an excellent medium for fooling around. But we did all make pots of some kind and they were fired and glazed and widely admired by all other teachers and the parents. They liked working with clay better than with wood I think: the results were more spectacular.

It was a sad day when I learned from Orchard that the workshop was to be repainted and would be closed for that purpose for about a week. The painters in service of the school board were not a hard-working crew. They used to arrive late, then had to have an immediate coffee-break in the furnace room, before getting on with the job. Then there was another coffee-break before they reached lunch time. There was a tea-break between lunch and quitting time. It was amazing to see how long they could spin out a simple job, but it was infuriating to see them go about their business in their slow process that was keeping the workshop closed to us for over a month. What that crew needed was the vigorous supervision of an energetic person who had a proper training in his trade and knew how long a certain job would take. There was none. It drove me nuts and I complained to Orchard, but there was apparently nothing he could do either. When later some one, who had been a painter for the school board somewhere, turned on his vitriolic contempt for teachers, based on what he had seen during the years when he worked as a painter, I could only laugh, for I had seen the painters at work, and I told him about it. Of course he had not been one of those….

I can not leave South Park without mentioning two more details. The first one is the heating unit. It consisted of a huge furnace, occupying most of the space in the cavernous basement, that was fueled with coal and wood, great big chunks of it, and a massive and impressive fan that pumped the hot air in the ducts to get it to the classrooms. It was mysterious, but a fact nevertheless: some classrooms got a lot more than others. Some were absolutely dreadfully cold in the winter. Mine got the heat. It didn’t seem to make any difference whether the custodian adjusted the baffles that allowed or prohibited hot air to get through the different ducts: some classrooms were cold and others were not…. a matter of luck. It had nothing to do with a preference for certain teachers and everybody was convinced of that. If you happened to be in a cold classroom you dressed for that unpleasant but unalterable fact: more sweaters. What made the whole system even stranger was that one morning a whole shower of the ashes of burned paper came spouting out of the register above the blackboards and virtually covered everything. It was a minor disaster, but everybody in that building dealt with such disasters without getting too upset. They were part of your workload. I don’t know whether anybody ever found the connection between the chimney and the hot air ducts, the existence of which was revealed by our black shower.

The other little detail involved a seagull, which we named “Gulliver” ( “we” stands for our class). It was noticed and duly brought to my attention that there was a seagull who perched on the roof of the Annex every morning at about 10 o:clock. Those who were aware of it claimed that it was always the same individual, and that they could distinguish him (we assumed the seagull to be a male) by a spot above his eye. I doubted the story, but started to pay attention to it and pretty soon had to admit that, yes, he was there every morning at the same time approximately, and yes, it was always the same gull. We put some bread out on the outside windowsill and the gull slithered down the slate roof of the Annex, sat for a long time on the edge of that roof, facing the bread, but not having the nerve to fly across to get it because there were faces on the other side of the glass. But as soon as we went again about our business, he flew across and grabbed the bread before flying back to his perch.

It became a daily routine. The kids brought “Gulliver bread” and every morning we enjoyed his visit for a short while. He totally overcame his original reserve and came to sit on our windowsill, even pecking at the window if his bread wasn’t there waiting for him. It was wonderful, to have a pet-of-sorts. He even chased potential competitors off. I told about it in the staff room where we had a good laugh about it. Until the teachers in the Annex started to complain to the custodian that Gulliver made their passage in and out of the Annex hazardous by coating the narrow passage way between the buildings with his white, large and frequent droppings. And the custodian added to that his trouble of clean-up. The result was a total ban on feeding Gulliver, who continued to visit for a short while, but gave up fairly soon when there was no response to his knocking on our window. The class was saddened but understanding. Exit Gulliver.

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 8: COMING HOME

 

During our second year in Langford it became more and more clear that we needed a larger house, at least a house with more bedrooms, for Lies and Justus should have had their own rooms already for some time, and it would be nice if we could separate John and Hubert, but in any case we needed four bedrooms as a minimum. We discussed our problem with… who else but Elsie Smith. She encouraged us to start looking around. We did so, for months, but did not find a single house that had four bedrooms, hard though that seems to believe. While talking it over once again with Elsie, she suggested that she would help us finance the building of a new house by providing a mortgage for the lot and the building of up to $ 15,000.-, which was in those years enough to get a house livable, not finished.

I had met in one of my winter evening courses a teacher in Belmont who was teaching construction I believe. His name was Bob Peach. He and his wife and family lived on Kingham Place in View Royal. He mentioned , when he heard that we were looking for a building lot, that there was a lot available close to where he lived, and that he thought that we should have a look at it. We did and fell in love with it at first sight. On the one side there was a double lot with one house on it, right in the middle, on the other side there was a road allowance and in the back it bordered on the View Royal Ball Park, and that part of it had not been developed but was still a tidal flat. The water came right up the little gullies at high tide, and the whole flat was flooded if the tides were very high. Across the flat we looked at a forested area with a heronry.

It was almost too good to be true, for here we had guaranteed privacy on both sides, plus an almost undisturbed bit of natural land at our back door and a lovely view. For our kids the change from Terrace, where they had enjoyed total freedom in a natural environment, to Victoria where their playing area was a lot less, albeit not bad for a city environment, finally to Langford where there was almost nothing for them, had been difficult. What we found here would solve that problem beautifully. The price seemed right; we talked to Elsie who saw the lot, liked it, and bought it for us. She had some trouble convincing her banker that what she did was wise: she was providing a total mortgage for the purchase of land and the building of a house to people who had no collateral of any kind. The bank suggested that this was unheard of and far too risky to be taken seriously, but Elsie insisted that she knew what she did, that she knew she would be paid back and that she had no doubt or hesitation about closing the deal. When finally, many years later, we offered her the cheque for the last payment we had the pleasant feeling that we had not let her down: we had never missed a payment.

We immediately started drawing sketch floor plans while looking around for somebody who would design the house. We came up with an architect who was Dutch, but had worked for many years in Canada. We visited him with our floor plan, told him what we wanted and left feeling that he had understood. But when he showed us the plan he had sketched he announced quite happily that it looked something like a Swiss chalet, didn’t we agree? Yes we did, and a Swiss chalet was not at all what we wanted, so we went back to square one and explained to him again what we had in mind. It was not easy, but when it finally dawned upon him he said with unmistakable disgust: “Ah, I see…. you want something like a chicken coop….” He would draw us a chicken coop. When the plans came we used them for the basic dimensions, but changed the placement and sizes of the windows.

Then came the search for a carpenter whom we could trust enough to let him go ahead without any supervision, for it had to be built during a time when I would be taking summer courses at UVic and during the fall, when we would be at school. We found exactly what we were looking for in Peter de Lange, who had been warmly recommended to us by the View Royal pharmacist. Peter’s national origin was no point of consideration in our decision to hire him. He was an excellent craftsman, a totally reliable and honest person, intelligent and very easy to deal with.

When the house approached the stage where we felt that we could move in (which was very far from completion) our money ran out and we had to tell him that we were not able to keep him working any longer. But by that time most of the essentials, the wiring, the plumbing, the heating (the house was heated by an oil furnace and forced air) were all in place and we felt confident that, over time, we would be able to handle the completion ourselves. It was a little bit optimistic, for the dry-walling, for instance, proved to be very much more tricky than anticipated and took quite an unexpected lot of time.

By the end of October we moved from Langford to Kingham Place. Mr. Dodd came to inspect his apartment and found several things that had to be repaired: there was an inside door that had a hole in it (Lies had kicked it in an attack of blind fury) and he noticed that the doors in the kitchen cabinets under the sink had some damage, but I could demonstrate to him that we were not really responsible for that damage, because it was caused by faulty plywood that should never have been used in that application. The door we replaced, of course, and the damaged door we took with us. It was later repaired and used in the hall in Kingham Place for the coat closet.

Bob Muir came to help with his four wheel drive army vehicle. He moved almost all of our stuff, and I don’t know how many trips we had to make, for the truck was rather small. Fortunately the distance was not great. The piano, always the main cause of problems when moving because of its weight and shape, arrived safely. The living room had a floor of just diagonally laid shiplap without any finishing layer of plywood, and if we sat in front of the fireplace we could look straight at the front door, because the wall between the living room and the hall consisted of 2 x 4 studs that had not been covered. We finished that wall rather quickly, both on the living room and on the staircase side, but lived on the shiplap for a long time. It had its draw-backs, for there were knotholes in it, and we lost at least one teaspoon that way.

It took years before we had the whole house finished, working on it whenever there was money and time. In fact, when we wanted to sell it after I retired, because we wanted to move to Denman, there were still no baseboards in the basement rooms. I spent most of that fall putting in the finishing touches, 20 years after moving in…..

I think it is true that we have loved that house, all of us. That is not to say that it did not have any shortcomings; there were several, and some were quite serious. For one thing, the drainage system for the septic tank, that had been installed very carefully to comply with new regulations, consisted of a two feet deep bed of coarse sand, about thirty feet long and four feet wide that had a V-shaped bottom, dug out of the clay. Two drainpipes, connected to the septic tank, were laid on top of the sand bed and one in the V at the bottom, connected to a drain that came out in the garden. It looked like a perfect system, but it failed totally within five years because it didn’t have sufficient capacity and had to be replaced.

More serious was the lack of insulation in the roof, which was also the ceiling of our living room: two inch cedar planks, tongued and grooved, and covered by hot tar and pea gravel. When there was an aerial night survey conducted to show which houses were poorly insulated (the infrared photos showed those lighter than the ones with sufficient insulation) our house stood out like a beacon. Had we stayed in Victoria we would have had to do something about that problem, as well as the enormous window, six by eight feet, single glass in a metal frame, that looked out over the garden. When it was blowing hard that window bulged visibly inwards, so that I, in order to secure it under those conditions, had to make a special brace system that could be placed against the glass on the inside and that was held in place by wedges top and bottom.

The carpenter ants loved the roof, for the grooves gave them perfect highways and the cedar was easy to chew. We were notified of their activity when we found on the top shelf of a little-used cupboard in the laundry room next to the kitchen a neat pyramid of sawdust about six inches high. We called a pest control outfit. They inspected the problem and came up with a drastic solution: we had to vacate the house for a day, while they would inject a powerful insecticide into the grooves and finally light a smoke bomb, also a very potent poison, in the basement. At the end of the day we could return and open all the windows. When we did return we found the whole house filled with a dense blueish fog that smelled abominable and threatened to make us sick. Even after we had cleared it out by literally opening all the windows and doors we spent a most unpleasant night. There were dead ants everywhere, not only on the floor of the living room, but also in the basement, clear indication of the massive nature of their invasion. Strange was that every spring thereafter we would find a number of dead or dying carpenter ants here and there, mostly in the living room, but throughout the house. The only possible explanation was that the poison used was still active and taking care of new arrivals. Collecting the corpses was a yearly and unpleasant ritual of late spring. But no more piles of sawdust…..

Notwithstanding those shortcomings it was a nice house, a different house, very much our own house. The heavy beams that supported the roof in the living room gave that space a very special character. But, above all, it proved to be a most pleasant house to live in, where every member of the family had his or her own space. And all those rooms had their own, special charm, reflecting the nature and needs of the occupants. What I found out after they had all left and I settled in Justus’s room in the basement as my study, was that those basement rooms were impossible to heat adequately when it got cold, because they all had low, concrete walls that sucked the heat out faster than you could blow it in. Insulation in those years posed a not very clearly understood problem.

We loved to light the fireplace and did so most winter evenings. Wood was not a problem during the years when we lived there, because logs floated in on the high tide from the Inner Harbour. We used to row out into Portage Inlet and drag them home as far as we could float them. Then, when we had a really high tide and they floated again, we pulled them over the area that would be dry as soon as the tide moved out again to cut them up with a rented power saw. The rounds were then moved by wheel barrow to our garden, where they were split and the firewood piled in the little corner at the side of the house under the wedge-shaped window in the end wall of our living room. On one of those occasions I happened to be by myself, the tide was coming in, the rounds had to be moved fast, before they would float away, but I had cut them rather on the big side, and it was a big log. I did get them in, but at the cost of a soon-to-be-detected hernia that put me in hospital.

I wrote above “very much our own house.” Yes, it was that. We had designed it, and we designed the many special touches. The beams, it should be said, were not so much “design” as structural necessity to support that cedar plank roof. But the entrance with that special mailbox-and-bench feature was designed, as was the railing that separated the hall from the staircase, and the bookcase in the living room was, too. Not very practical maybe, but rather nice visually were the different levels between living room and the kitchen/hall area. What worked very well was the division of the bathroom in two parts, one for the bathtub and one for the toilet. Both had washbasins, which sped up the morning proceedings.

We liked the black and white tiles of the hall, and the lovely, light coloured sheets of cottonwood plywood used to cover the walls. And the screens we built to more or less hide the kitchen door and lead visitors who came via the driveway to the front door worked well as a design, particularly when Moekie made a special design for the concrete slabs that paved that area, alternating pebbled surfaces with brushed ones.

I must mention especially the carport, built over the septic tank, which necessitated that the floor had to be removable to get to the tank for cleaning. I had poured the support walls and left in those a rabbet for planks. But where to find suitably heavy planks? Luck came our way. The inner, old city was rejuvenated, and to that purpose the old, and certainly characteristic but not beautiful, old warehouses had to be pulled down to make room for Centennial Square. Just at the time when we were looking for the planks we needed there was an ad in the paper offering beams, 32′ long, 3″ thick and 14″. I needed planks that were 16′ long….. It was close to the time when the crews at that wrecking job would be going home. We got into the car in a hurry, drove downtown, found the foreman still on the site and closed the deal. I wished I could remember how we got them home, but I don’t. We did cut them in half on the site. They were incredible: solid Douglas Fir, hardly a knot in any of them. Just imagine what one would have to pay for beams of that size and quality on today’s market, if they could be had at all, which is by now rather doubtful. They clearly dated back to the days when fallers cut the part of the log off where the branches started, because only the clear bottom part would be used. They worked just fine, and we all remember with fondness the wonderful rumble they produced when the car left or came home.

One last feature I want to remember is the very large deck with built-in seats on two sides, that could easily accommodate a dozen people or more, in the shade of the fairly big Douglas Fir growing next to the corner. It was lovely to sit there during the warm weather in spring, summer and fall. The deck was supported on one side by a large walk-in cupboard for garden tools and there was enough space left between that and the house to park a second car under the deck. Not totally successful were my attempts to make the deck waterproof, but it was good enough for most purposes.

We lived in that house for twenty years; it became part of the family traditions, part of family life. When we left it there were some serious misgivings. I think that those would have been stronger if we had moved somewhere other than to Denman.

The house did us a last, but important favour at the point when we sold it. It was put on the market late in the fall of 1980, but nothing happened for a seemingly long time, until, suddenly, in January, it was sold for a price that represented just the peak in house prices; within a month thereafter those prices tumbled.

It is fair to say that 51 Kingham Place was the home of a family that had grown roots in their new country.

 

 

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