In His Own Words (part one of dad's story)

My first coherent memories are from the year 1936. By that time we
had moved from a flat in proletarian Rosemount to a small bourgeois
town at the eastern-most tip of Montreal Island, Pointe-aux-trembles.
I was five and still English and English-only in a French
environment, but making friends with local boys and girls
in a tentative way. I also hung around a nearby school-yard
trying to get the attention of teachers with my toy blackboard.
We lived in a solid two-storey brick house owned by a local grocer
who occupied the second floor. I suspect that his name is buried in some of the older first-colonized neurons of my ageing think-box. But try as I might I cannot remember where. He was a man of some means in those depression years. I don't think he drove a car, but he had a boat with an outboard motor. I know this because there is a memory of a trip to a small island in the placid branch of the St. Laurent that flowed by placid Pointe-aux-Trembles (PAT). It was more like a sand-bar overgrown with grass than the rocky islands that I (much) later explored east of Quebec City. This excursion is one of my fondest memories of that fine year. The island must have belonged to somebody at some time. But it had been abandoned in those depression years. It had a very primitive ecology, sparse grass, hundreds of tame field mice, red-winged black birds and asparagus as far as I could explore during our hour on this little land apart. I think it was spring or early summer, because the asparagus was only a few inches tall and tender as new grass. We filled the boat's spare space with these lovely little sprouts and shoved off to the homeward shore.

M. X kept most of the crop, and he may even have sold it, but we had
more than enough for ourselves-- me, my parents and two young sisters.
Our surplus went to my father's extended family. They lived downtown in Montreal's English quarter and we visited them often in our car, an opulent luxury in those days.




Pointe-aux-Trembles was a relatively prosperous suburb. Our next door neighbour had a Pomeranian that bit me and a fancy green car--an Auburn, I think. I had an electric train. But there was poverty nearby.
My friend Gilles Rocheleau who lived on a downscale side street within my six-year-old roving range had a father who was laid off from an oil refinery a few miles away. Because we had a car he thought my father must be a ''boss''. He asked me to ask my father if he knew
about any jobs. My father said no. Sometimes men came to the door asking for work or food or both. Sometimes my mother gave them
a sandwich. A young woman came to the house once a week to help with cleaning. I would go to the butcher shop with a quarter from
my mother and return home with a pound of hamburg, a pound
of butter and dime in change. I was sent to l'Academie Roussin less than a block away from home for two reasons: there was no English school very nearby and I had already spent a lot of time talking to some of the teaching brothers in the school-yard trying to get them
interested in my efforts to read and write. Once in school I got to speak French and write within a few months. I tried writing to Pere Noel that December. What a little smart ass!