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.