Read Online Otherwise by Farley Mowat - Free Book Online
Authors: Farley Mowat
Tags: Biography
Ads: Link
living aboard when not inspecting the far-flung bastions of his empire. He wrote occasionally to assure Helen he was diligently seeking a suitable home for us. The truth was that, having got his Dream Ship, he had no intention oftaking on the financial burden of a house as well. He could hardly have afforded to do so. Buying and refitting
Scotch Bonnet
had left him barely enough money to rent a roof over our heads.
At the very end of August he finally appeared at Hawk Lake.
”Couldn’t find quite the right kind of place to buy so I’ve rented one until we do. Bridge End House it’s called. Twenty miles north of Toronto near a picturesque little village called Richmond Hill which has a small but excellent high school. The house is right out in the country with its own little stream running through it and birds and beasts galore. I’m sure it will suit all of us very well.”
As with so many of my father’s plans, there was a hitch: we would be unable to move into Bridge End House until mid-December when the current tenants were supposed to vacate. My mother, father, and Mutt could live aboard the boat, now moored at Toronto Island, until the house became available but I would have to start school in Richmond Hill on September 3. Angus solved the problem by finding me board and bed with an elderly couple near the school. They made a living selling ”home bakes” and, though amiable, were not stimulating company. After the evening meal (which generally consisted of fried potatoes and fat sausages followed by stale pie), my hosts would crouch over a squawking table radio and listen entranced to
Amos ‘n’ Andy
.
In consequence I spent a lot of evenings in my room building model aeroplanes out of balsa wood, reading until my eyes ached, and fantasizing about accompanying a famous explorer named Frank ”Bring-’em-back-alive” Buck on exploring expeditions deep into the heart of Africa.
The bright side of that long, dark autumn was that for the first time in my life I found myself in a school I really liked.
Richmond Hill High School was a red-brick 1920s-style structure, four-square and unpretentious. Its two storeys housed just eighty students in five grades. Grade 12 (which I had managed to scrape into) had only fourteen students, and Jimmy Stewart – our class teacher and also the school principal, a kindly, somewhat myopic middle-aged man – believed in allowing us lots of latitude.
Foremost among the teachers was our hawk-nosed, piercingly black-eyed English teacher, Miss Edna Izzard. Her ”sidekick,” Miss Jean Smith, was a mousy blonde who was supposed to teach us French and who did succeed in getting us to read a lot of French classics, if in English translation. These two shared a cat, a car, and a house, but nobody in that day and age would ever have admitted to the suspicion that they might also be sharing a bed. Their home was open to any of us who might be in need of advice or encouragement. Edna (I can call her by her first name now, though I would never have dared do so in life) gruffly assured me I could write, and her recognition of my efforts to do so gave me a status I had not known in any previous school.
Only a few of my fellow students were actually from Richmond Hill. Others came from adjacent farms or had been parachuted into our semi-rural school by parents from distant places chasing the few jobs to be found during the Depression. Whatever our origins, all of us had been shaped to some degree by the adversity that characterized those lean years. In consequence we had mostly put aside competitive behaviour in exchange for the camaraderie, tolerance, acceptance of singularity, and loyalty to the clan that I would laterencounter in the army and, later still, among the native peoples of the Arctic and the fisherman of Newfoundland.
Late in December, Bridge End House finally became available. A shoddy imitation of an English country cottage, it squatted forlornly in what had once been
Scotch Bonnet
had left him barely enough money to rent a roof over our heads.
At the very end of August he finally appeared at Hawk Lake.
”Couldn’t find quite the right kind of place to buy so I’ve rented one until we do. Bridge End House it’s called. Twenty miles north of Toronto near a picturesque little village called Richmond Hill which has a small but excellent high school. The house is right out in the country with its own little stream running through it and birds and beasts galore. I’m sure it will suit all of us very well.”
As with so many of my father’s plans, there was a hitch: we would be unable to move into Bridge End House until mid-December when the current tenants were supposed to vacate. My mother, father, and Mutt could live aboard the boat, now moored at Toronto Island, until the house became available but I would have to start school in Richmond Hill on September 3. Angus solved the problem by finding me board and bed with an elderly couple near the school. They made a living selling ”home bakes” and, though amiable, were not stimulating company. After the evening meal (which generally consisted of fried potatoes and fat sausages followed by stale pie), my hosts would crouch over a squawking table radio and listen entranced to
Amos ‘n’ Andy
.
In consequence I spent a lot of evenings in my room building model aeroplanes out of balsa wood, reading until my eyes ached, and fantasizing about accompanying a famous explorer named Frank ”Bring-’em-back-alive” Buck on exploring expeditions deep into the heart of Africa.
The bright side of that long, dark autumn was that for the first time in my life I found myself in a school I really liked.
Richmond Hill High School was a red-brick 1920s-style structure, four-square and unpretentious. Its two storeys housed just eighty students in five grades. Grade 12 (which I had managed to scrape into) had only fourteen students, and Jimmy Stewart – our class teacher and also the school principal, a kindly, somewhat myopic middle-aged man – believed in allowing us lots of latitude.
Foremost among the teachers was our hawk-nosed, piercingly black-eyed English teacher, Miss Edna Izzard. Her ”sidekick,” Miss Jean Smith, was a mousy blonde who was supposed to teach us French and who did succeed in getting us to read a lot of French classics, if in English translation. These two shared a cat, a car, and a house, but nobody in that day and age would ever have admitted to the suspicion that they might also be sharing a bed. Their home was open to any of us who might be in need of advice or encouragement. Edna (I can call her by her first name now, though I would never have dared do so in life) gruffly assured me I could write, and her recognition of my efforts to do so gave me a status I had not known in any previous school.
Only a few of my fellow students were actually from Richmond Hill. Others came from adjacent farms or had been parachuted into our semi-rural school by parents from distant places chasing the few jobs to be found during the Depression. Whatever our origins, all of us had been shaped to some degree by the adversity that characterized those lean years. In consequence we had mostly put aside competitive behaviour in exchange for the camaraderie, tolerance, acceptance of singularity, and loyalty to the clan that I would laterencounter in the army and, later still, among the native peoples of the Arctic and the fisherman of Newfoundland.
Late in December, Bridge End House finally became available. A shoddy imitation of an English country cottage, it squatted forlornly in what had once been
Similar Books
