Chapter 5

1951
We pretty well stuck to the general style of weddings in those days, although a few couples branched out and hired a hall with a band and sit-down dinners.

Hal and I were as sophisticated as a couple of fruit flies so we opted for the standard Anglican service, including the word, "obey". It was meaningless then and now but we wanted tradition at any cost.
We had finger sandwiches and the ever-present petit fours,tea, lots of tea and the mandatory iced fruitcake.
The wine was reserved for the toasts. Heaven help me, I think it was Port.
It was quiet, formal and mercifully brief.

We had a brief honeymoon, brief because you can only go so far on a hundred dollars, particularly when one of us spent sixty dollars of it at the last minute renting a car, which precipitated a heated discussion. That was swiftly settled by my mother's vehement,
"I don't care if you never speak again for the rest of your lives; you're going to that church and you're going to get married and that's final. "

We drove to our honeymoon destination Harrison Hot Springs, a nearby resort town surrounded by breathtaking mountains and pine trees and we stayed in a bargain-rate cabin just big enough to hold a miniature kitchen,a double bed and a slide-in-sideways bathroom. The next morning when I was making the bed and tried to push it against the wall was the moment I painfully discovered the bed was bolted to the floor. it's fun to ponder what led the landlord to perform that action.

We ran out of money quickly and landed on the doorstep of good friends in nearby Chilliwack. They gave us their bedroom while they camped out in the living room with their baby and made us meals and it was a lovely honeymoon.

That’s quite a change, decompressing between engagement, marriage and finally, real life. It’s like breaking in a pair of new shoes designed to last a lifetime; you begin gently and wiggle about making adjustments until shoe and foot are a perfect fit.Eventually they get a bit scruffy, a little loose and at times you get good and sick of them.
But you age along with the shoes and if you’ve learned anything you’re not so quick to toss them out in favor of something brand new and un-tested.

We returned from our honeymoon to our basement apartment and unpacked the wedding gifts, then quickly repacked the silver rose baskets and nut dishes and anything else we wouldn’t be using for a while and we exchanged a few electric coffee percolaters for a pressure cooker.

This wasn’t so different from playing house as kids, but the china was real, the small appliances had working cords attached and it was okay to play doctor if we wanted.

Our furniture was sparse: we had a bed and dresser, three gift lamps, one of them a stubbornly unbreakable black panther with glittering green glass eyes, my carved oriental cedar hope chest, a card table and two chairs. We hauled out the wooden packing case containing my Shirley Temple doll and collection of movie star scrapbooks, draped one of our new Irish linen tablecloths over the box and declared it to be a coffee table.

In those days, refrigerators and stoves weren't supplied in flats so we began literally with only a kitchen sink.
We found a vintage electric stove with three working burners for five dollars and my father managed to find the parts to get the fourth one working. My parents donated the old familiar chesterfield suite from their den and we spent Saturdays prowling second hand stores for more bargains until the place had a worn but comfortable look. I’ve stuck with that look ever since.

Most evenings I’d study my brand new cookbook to see what I could do about my limited repertoire while my bridegroom pounded at his typewriter on the card table, working on any free- lance assignments that came his way. Sometimes his pay wasn’t much larger than the streetcar fare to deliver the completed work, but we didn’t think of it that way.

When we had a free moment one of us rolled out the cigarettes, a task I remember so clearly. The cigarette- maker was a clever piece of equipment. You stuff a handful of tobacco into the tube section, then peel off cigarette paper from a booklet, insert the paper somewhere, a twist and turn and presto—an extremely long cigarette eventually rolls out and you cut it into four. This is repeated until you have the quota for the next day.

My first married- woman crisis came when I set to work studying the pressure cooker manual to ensure an efficiently cooked meal after work. First I had to get over my terror that the cast-iron Mount Etna might explode. Wait until the steam squirts out the spout, snap on the gauge, lower the heat, rush to the bathroom, cower against the wall with ears covered and slowly count to fifty. After that, if the walls were still standing and they always were, it was safe to return to the kitchen.

chapter 4

Our relationship warmed up and graduated to “lights off,” a signal familiar to all responsible families with daughters who were dating in the 1940’s. A farewell left-handed wave to parents meant the porch light should be left on and the wildly waved right hand meant go ahead and blow the fuses. We hadn’t dated long before the lights were automatically turned off but if they forgot and left them on, Hal was unfazed

He was always strapped for cash so we broke the rules and pooled our meager funds for dates and depended on public transportation to get us where we wanted to go, leaving us with lots of time to get to know one another. On the first and last time in his life when he had a cash surplus of seventy-five dollars he bought a decrepit green Studebaker named Maggie, who was old and crotchety and chronically parched for gas and oil. One memorable day she ran out of brake fluid and we coasted safely and miraculously through a red light at the busiest intersection in town. If I caught my children doing that they would be grounded for ten years.

I spent more and more time with that skinny guy with the floppy hair. I don't remember a moment when I thought I was madly in love. I just couldn't imagine not being able to see him every day.

He proposed in a park across from English Bay, after sunset. We walked for a while under the trees and stopped to spread down the car rug. It was so dark we hadn't realized we were stationed directly across a pathway, and if we hadn't been so intent on an agenda that was going to affect the rest of our lives, we might also have noticed the almost constant flow of couples picking their way carefully around us. I still don't think it was necessary for that man to mutter, "For god sake, say yes and get off the trail." He did speed us up, though, and I said yes and we got off the trail.

We made vague plans to marry after he finished university. We did have a plan of a sort; after getting married we would save enough money to get us to England where he'd begin a distinguished newspaper career on Fleet Street, and during the brief time it would take for this to happen I would continue working before starting a family.

London seemed a good place to raise children. We had the notion that the English popped the little mites into boarding school immediately after nanny got them potty trained and they were returned years later with all the rough corners smoothed off.

Way off at the opposite end of the city we found a basement suite in a tiny bungalow occupied by a fertile couple with eight children. "How can they possible keep on producing children when they haven't any place to put them," we smugly asked one another. God got us for that. The place met our rental requirements, forty-five dollars a month, offering an enormous living room with adjoining bedroom and kitchen, and when it was necessary to use the bathroom, a phone booth- sized room with no tub but a shower that never quite shut off, the route was through the basement door past the coal furnace. I never got over the fear that some nameless THING would grab me on the way, and I took to rushing inside and slamming the door, an exercise that forced the landlord to conclude that either I had a serious bladder problem or we fought a lot.

Before the wedding we painted the ugly brown Masonite walls a cheerful chartreuse and one end wall a splash of flaming red. There was a window in that room, high up on one wall. It didn’t give any light but it was nice to know it was there.

My mother joyfully devoted the next part of her life to the phone, committing large sums of money to flowers and petit fours and declaring that absolutely no one has a chocolate wedding cake so put that out of your mind young lady and my father said it would be worth his while to give us the money and a ladder and my mother cried and said how can you be such so callous with your only daughter and hardly anyone asked our advice, although we did get to choose our sterling silver pattern, just the thing for a couple who couldn't even afford to have a telephone installed.

Mum, who could have ended World War Two faster if she'd been in charge, worried about my cooking repertoire, Belgian meat balls and tinned finnan haddie on toast, so I bought a cook book and began to study it. It was her own fault, really; she'd breeze into the house from bridge and tear through the kitchen organizing a meal, shooing us out of the way until it was time to set the table or do the dishes. Hal was a decent cook, having earned his university fees one summer working as a cook on a commercial fishing boat, but it never occurred to us that he should take on this task. Today's system of sharing the chores makes better sense but back then no one could beat my husband at making French toast. You can be sure no one was trying.

Our families got together for strategy plans; weddings don't just happen, they're calculated events. We were called to the summit occasionally about the color of the flowers or the length of the veil and to be truthful, this did not hold the full attention of my beloved, who was by this time juggling a night shift reporting job at the Vancouver sun while finishing his last year of classes. He could look reasonably attentive while the discussion waged on over calla lilies versus sweetheart roses but he was using the time to rough out his assignments in his head

I envied his capacity to tune out, and he had it perfected by the time we were enduring heavy monologues with adolescents on whether or not waist-length hair was acceptable for boys, even if it was going to be washed every three hours and that meant the drains would be clogged again.

On the eve of our wedding he stopped off at the apartment to leave some clothes before heading off to his bachelor party, and ended up absent-mindedly putting the final touches to the last wall, which we'd abandoned for lack of time. The party members soon tracked him down and the party began. His work was evident the next day when I slipped his wedding ring over a puckered chartreuse finger.

Chapter 3 Courtship

I met Hal when I took a job with the Kerrisdale Courier, a weekly neighborhood newspaper. Hal attended university classes daily and sandwiched in the newspaper job after classes. He acted as editor while I juggled the roles of reporter, secretary, emptier of waste baskets and, the critical one, wrestling a bunch of nine? year old paper carriers into order once a week. Talk about auditioning for your future life's work.

I remember the first time I saw him walk into the office. He was rail thin and wore a wine v-neck sweater, had a floppy blond pompadour over his forehead (very IN) and a cigarette hung out of the corner of his mouth. His hands shook slightly, presumably from lack of sleep and he radiated nervous energy. We both earned $29.50 a week.

He rushed in after classes each day and settled at our shared desk, cigarette dribbling smoke from the corner of his mouth, and a phone tucked under his chin, using any available moment to ruthlessly edit my copy, taking insensitive aim at my obituary notices.

"In this paper, people don't pass away, they die, got it? Die."

It was not love at first sight.

Our dates were not what I’d been used to. I was used to my dates taking me to the Georgia Hotel bar with the mandatory separate entrances for unescorted men and women. As I recall, no matter which entrance you chose, you ended up in the same big room.
Beer was less fun than coke floats but we were conscious of our new adult stature so we deadened the bitter taste by sprinkling salt over the froth. We’d have a beer, possibly two for my date, lots of discussion and then the boy would take me home on the streetcar.

You couldn’t buy liquor in the more sophisticated night clubs, so people smuggled in paper bags containing their bottles of alcohol. If you were hell -bent on buying it you located the closest government-run store, then you wrote out your order giving your name and address and you signed it swearing that you were over twenty-one. The clerk at the counter took the form and went to the racks to get your order, wrapped it in a paper bag and took your money. You weren’t off the hook just yet. By law, you were then expected to go straight home with the purchase, the seal remaining unbroken until you were safely indoors.

When I dated a university student, we’d either go to his frat house to shoot pool and drink rye and coke or we’d be off to some organized dance. Eventually some of them could borrow their father’s car but mostly transportation was the streetcar or bus.

Dating has changed since my courting days; that’s because we had them. Dates, I mean. My children seemed to find their mates without actually spending a nickel on the movies or dinner out and they believe a corsage is something made of whalebone that our great grandmothers wore to give them tiny wasp waists.

Hal was putting himself through university and had no time to consider fraternities but he was active in the Universities’s publications board (he wrote a mostly humor column once a week, titled, “Gobbledygook.”). We socialized with this group of people.

Our first date was combined with business. The Kerrisdale Arena had just opened and Hal was to cover a hockey game from the press box. He knew beans about hockey and at least I knew who Foster Hewitt was. I wore my best poodle skirt and was dismayed to find that the press box was unfinished. Above my head I could see a platform without walls, but containing two chairs. I sighed, then hiked up my skirts over the stiff crinoline and climbed a crude ladder leading to a platform. This was the press box. We picked up enough from the dialogue below us and from what came on the scoreboard to make a passable attempt at covering the game, while he cheerfully told me about the time he worked as high school sports correspondent for the daily paper without ever having a free moment to see any of the games. I remember chatting maniacally and gripping the stool tightly, praying I wouldn't tip over the edge into the crowd below.

We were standing in a movie line-up early on in our dating when he said casually, “I’m looking forward to the day when I am married.”
I had never in my life heard of a man even thinking that and I had no idea how to respond. It wasn’t personal then—he didn’t necessarily mean me. He just wanted to be married.

Chapter 2

Hal and I were both average middle children in a family of three well spaced offspring and statistically we were cinches to raise two-point-two children, drive a navy blue sedan and play Canasta every Tuesday night. Listen, in time we had a shot at all those things; but we skimmed over the ‘point two’ so quickly, we were forced to consider buying a station wagon or a bus unless we wanted to make two trips, and we lost the energy to play cards or do anything that required thinking after nine o'clock at night.

We were raised in adjoining Vancouver neighborhoods and shared many of the same friends, although we never met until we were grown. All of us kids knew how to make slingshots out of forked branches, fastening them with red rubber bands cut from old inner tubes. We played in the plentiful vacant lots, building forts and preparing for battles. The fun was in the preparation, so we didn't actually spend much time at war. Our parents seldom intervened and children were left on their own a lot, despite what you might have read.

We knew that wearing your rubbers or gumboots all day in the house or school could affect your eyesight permanently and I know my mother tried the cabbage patch birthing theory on me because I used to leave my dolls out in the vegetable garden under the cabbages at night. In the morning I was bitterly disappointed to find the dolls hadn’t become live babies. And if you caught measles, and everyone did, you had to rest quietly in a dark room and avoid reading or you might lose your eyesight. My mother also solemnly told me that swallowed cherry pits would sprout in my throat and eventually cherry leaves would grow. And gum—if you swallow gum it sticks to your stomach lining forever and impedes digestion.

About those gumboots; eventually they developed a leak, generally at the toe end and my big brother was delegated to patch it. He’d take a piece of that everlasting red inner tube and glue it to the leak. This red patch was mortifying to me and I can’t recall anyone else suffering that fate. Everyone else had black patches or replaced the boot, I was never sure which it was. On rainy days, when I needed the boots, I’d find a big Maple leaf and plaster it to the patch and then shuffle along carefully to school.

Our mothers were home coping with ice- boxes and wringer washers and waiting for the Chinese greengrocer to come by the back alley in his ancient model T Ford with the back part cut out to resemble future flat bed trucks. The fish man came on Tuesdays in his old modified Ford and the bread man and milkman came every day with their horse-drawn carts. Mr.Philps, who lived two doors away used to run out with his dustpan and broom to collect the horses’ leavings for his garden. The rag and bones man called his arrival with his horse drawn cart, down the back alley. No one ever seemed to stop him because we wore our clothes until they turned themselves into dust cloths and bones went into the soup pot.

In my mother’s circle, it was assumed that if a woman worked outside the home it was because her husband couldn’t support the family on his own. They said to one another proudly, “My husband wouldn’t think of letting me take a job.”

Mom had a maid until the onset of World War Two so she managed to get away to play bridge once or twice a week and attend frequent tea parties. Our maids never wore a uniform but we hadn’t reached the democratic manner of all eating together. She ate her meals in the kitchen and came to take away plates when Mom rang the little hand bell on the table.

For a long time I was the only girl in the neighborhood and I spent a lot of time in my room
writing stories and poems, drawing and planning an adult life with plenty of children, although I don’t recall that a husband fitted into my plans.

There was always a tiny store standing kitty? corner to our schools, run by a husband and wife who blended in comfortably with the rows of boxed cereals and tins of beets. The big attraction for us was the candy display by the cash register where we bought jaw breakers and gum balls for a penny. If you gambled your nickel allowance on an all day sucker you might win a lucky coupon tucked under the wrapper, entitling you to a second sucker.

The girls traded theirs for tasseled hopscotch beads which someone's fond aunt had painstakingly fashioned out of sparkling jet beads. I remember thinking it would be exciting to have a glamorous aunt who wore those flashing, daring earrings.

The boys negotiated their extra suckers for lacrosse balls or better still, golf balls cadged from the nearest unprotected golf bag. They bounced smartly if you exerted every scrap of muscle power, and later you used your jack knife to peel them open, gushing out worm?like strings of rubber.

One ritual was still going strong when I had children. Each spring, on exactly the same day through some mysterious unspoken, unseen signal, children set off for school in the morning with a drawstring bag full of marbles, the bags hurriedly stitched together the night before from an old pillow case in a solid color. Any mother who produced one with stripes or worse, flowers, would carry her shame to the grave.