Check out my new podcast at http://liveonpurposeradio.com/writing-on-purpose/?doing_wp_cron=1631406323.6732180118560791015625
I was thrilled to be a guest on Dr. Paul’s webcast, Live On Purpose, check it out. Tons of things to hear and learn on his site.
When we arrived in the north, I had two outfits to wear to school. One was a pink fuzzy sweater with short sleeves, which I wore with a grey box-pleated skirt that was obviously an adult size, as the hem reached my ankles and the button on the waistband had been moved over several inches to fit my waist.
The second was a red corduroy jumper that I was very fond of. It had ruffles over the shoulders and I wore it with a white blouse. These clothes had come out of the donation box at our home church. By the end of our first year there, I had grown and could no longer wear the jumper and blouse, to my complete despair.
There was a real technique to dressing for the northern climate. In winter we dressed for warmth. Believe me when I say, you don’t forget the feeling of frostbite on your fingers. And once you experience it, you never want to go there again.
Here is how we dressed. Put on a pair of underpants, then a long underwear top. Then pull on long underwear bottoms and tuck the top into them. Then put on the first pair of socks, tucking the underwear bottoms into the top of the socks. Then put on a sweater, then put on pants and tuck the sweater into the pants. Then put on a second pair of socks and tuck the bottom of the pant legs into the top of the socks.
When ready to leave the house, pull on your boots with the felt insoles positioned in the bottom. Put on a scarf wrapped around your neck and crossed over your chest. Then put on a first pair of mittens with the sleeves of your sweater tucked into them, then put on the parka. Zip the parka, put on a toque. Pull up the hood and tie a second scarf to cover your face, knotted behind the hood. If it was a day of heavy wind, a third scarf might be needed to cover your forehead. Put on a second pair of mittens, tucked into the parka sleeves if possible.
When we first arrived up north, my parents still had money from the sale of our house in Duncan. We all got parkas, boots, insoles, as needed. But during the next couple of years, the money had been spent and I had a growth spurt so my original parka and boots didn’t fit any more. There were times when I wore Mum’s parka and her boots for the walk to school, and she was left at home with two little kids and no warm coat or footwear if she had to go out. It was worrisome.
In the summer, things were different. During the first months of spring there were huge clouds of mosquitoes and during the next two months there were biting flies, horseflies. So, although it was much warmer, it wasn’t advisable to venture out without covering our skin, especially in the early morning or late afternoon. We were also short of shoes. Nell and I often went barefoot. We didn’t have footwear other than a pair of shoes used for best, and it was just easier to go about the homestead without.
WATER – Water was always an issue on the homestead. In the spring, my sister, Nell, and I took buckets and walked to the slough which was about a half mile away. We filled the buckets and carried them back to the house. We would do that several times a day, or as often as it took to take care of our home. If Mom was doing laundry, it was pretty laborious. If it was just a regular day, we filled the barrel, the wash tub, the reservoir in the cook stove and brought extra buckets for washing dishes.
Trips to the slough were required every day. The water was actually quite clean until about mid-summer. By then it would begin to taste slimy. The number of frogs would have markedly increased and the mosquitoes would be popping out of the water in clouds. On top of fetching buckets of water, we would walk the cow and calf to the slough to water them. Often we were walking barefoot as shoes were sometimes hard to come by. Once I remember, as we reached the slough, the cow stepped forward to take a drink and landed her hoof on Nell’s bare foot. Luckily she was standing on the edge of the slough where the mud was soft. Her foot sank into the water under the pressure and she stood still, waiting in pain until the cow finished drinking before we were able to make it step back.
By late summer the water in the slough was no longer palatable. Our neighbour, Olaf, had a well which he kindly allowed us to use when needed. Dad would hitch the horse to the stoneboat with a few barrels on it, drag it down the dirt road a couple of miles to Olaf’s well, and handpump the barrels full. None of us appreciated it very much. The water was heavily sulphered and bitter to drink. But of course we couldn’t have stayed there without access to water.
Then it would snow. We had a 45 gallon drum standing upright beside the barrel heater in the living area of the house. At the first heavy snowfall, we would fill the barrel with snow several times a day over a week or more until the barrel was full of water. This water was used for drinking, dishes, washing and laundry. After the barrel was full, we only had to fetch snow in buckets a few time a day to keep it topped up.
Once a neighbour lady had come to visit Mum. As she walked around the small living space during her visit, she removed her false teeth and casually rinsed them in the barrel. Nell and I watched in horror. As expected, Mum had us empty the barrel and begin the process over again until the barrel was full of clean water.
After we had lived on the homestead for a few years, Dad hired a guy with a back hoe to come and clear some trees for planting a crop. In addition, he had him scoop a dugout, which filled up with water in the spring. This worked well to provide water for the garden and the animals throughout the summer. We also swam in it a few times. But the water was full of leeches and when we emerged from our swim we would find the blood suckers burrowed into our skin. Removing them was painful.
SCHOOL – The local school had two rooms. One room was for grades one to four. The second room was for grades five to eight. When we arrived in Cecil Lake, Nell and I were both in the second room. To our surprise there were a lot of boys in that class who were fifteen and sixteen years old. Most of them had missed a lot of schooling because of staying home to help out on their family farms. They would leave the school year early, in April or May when the ploughing and planting of the land began. And they would arrive in class later than the other students in the fall, usually in October when the harvest was finished. As a result it would take them a few years to complete each grade.
There was no bathroom in the school, but a couple of outhouses were provided, one for boys, one for girls. A third building was attached to the schoolrooms, a teacherage which had a boardwalk leading to the classrooms. The year my sister and I started school in Cecil Lake, there were two young women living in the teacherage, both having just graduated from University of British Columbia with their teacher’s degrees and about to begin their first year of teaching. The substitute teacher for when one or the other was sick or off on a course was the mother of one of my friends. This woman had taught at the school in years past and kept her hand in for when she might be needed.
The children in each classroom were lined up in rows of desks by grade, so one row per grade, or two if needed. When we had spelling tests, the teacher would walk across the front of the room, call a word to the first row, shuffle the spelling books in her hand, call a word to the second row, repeat. After reaching the last row, she would walk back to the first row and begin again with the second spelling word.
The back wall of the room held a giant row of coat hooks. A line of parkas and scarves hung there, a shelf above holding toques and mittens, with an unruly row of snow boots along the wall beneath.
After we had been attending school for a couple of months, the other students seemed to get their nerve up. Nell and I were suddenly surrounded at lunchtime by a group of girls who were all asking where we were from. As always, we said we were from Duncan, on Vancouver Island. “No,” they said, “you’re from England.” I guess Mum’s proper pronunciation had rubbed off on her daughters. That was not the only time I was asked that question.
One day, in the first year we were there, Dad was escorting us to the bus stop, but we were late. We missed the bus, and watched it drive away before we reached the end of our road. Dad didn’t give up. He kept us going. We walked another mile to the main road, then two more miles to the Co-op store and gas station, then another mile to the school. The kids at recess surrounded us, wanting to know how we got to school, because they knew we didn’t have a vehicle. Some of them had also seen us approaching from up the road, when the bus stopped and then took off without waiting.
When we said we’d walked, no one believed us. No one walked that far. We did. (more to come)
Snow usually came early. The girls at our two-room school were required to wear skirts or dresses to school until the end of October, which is when we were allowed to attend class in pants. But the snow always arrived before that. Hallowe’en was carried out in the snow up there. As the road to where the school bus stopped to pick us up was a mile and a half away from our house , it was a jarringly cold trek in a skirt. Sometimes we wore pants under our skirts to ward off the frigid temperatures.
As the snow deepened and continued to fall intermittently over the winter months, it began to pile up and the depth increased. There were times we walked through snow up to our mid thighs. It could be a tough slog. Our family didn’t have a vehicle that could navigate such conditions, so there wasn’t another option for us. Dad tried to train our dog to pull a sled so Nell and I could take turns walking and riding on the sled. Unfortunately, Captain was a pretty undisciplined animal. The only way we found to get him to turn around and come back to us was to roll off the sled into the snow. Then he would continue racing down the road, and as he got further away, we would call him and he’d roar back, pulling the empty sled.
The wind could be wicked cold as the snow fell. However, when the temperature dropped, the wind died down. By the time it hit thirty below Fahrenheit, usually there would be no wind. The air was crisp and clear, crackling around me, but didn’t feel as cold as when the wind blew in slightly warmer temperatures.
The school closed when it hit minus thirty and the bus didn’t run. Dad would listen to the radio every morning and if the school was closed, there would be an announcement sent out to the community. The last thing we wanted to do was walk the mile and a half, wait for a bus that didn’t come, and walk back.
After we had lived there for a little more than a year, it seemed to register that a family with school children lived on our road, not just the two bachelors who had settled there some years before. Thus when the snow plow came through, our road would get ploughed too, which was a real luxury. It was much easier to walk the road after it had been ploughed. No trudging through knee-deep snow that day. Given how often and much it snowed each winter, the clearing of our road only happened sporadically and most days the snow was pretty deep. Our winter boots were stuffed with insoles and we wore several pairs of socks with pant legs tucked into them so the boot tops were blocked and the snow didn’t collect inside.
We had a driveway to the house, which had been cleared by felling the trees to open up a path when we first built there. It was seldom used, as we had no vehicle. However, when we had visitors the snow would get packed down from the wheels of the visitor’s trucks. But, we didn’t walk out to the road that way. Going out the driveway to the road and then down added a good half mile to the walk to meet the school bus. We had forged a different path through the trees, emerging at the ditch beside our road. When the snow first started to fall each winter, we would plough through, getting snow in our boots. As the winter extended, our feet tamped down the snow to create a useful trail. The snow got hard and the trail, although elevated due to the depth of snow compacted on it, would be easier to walk.
However, in the spring, when everything began to melt, the trail would get slippery and a bit difficult. The softened snow crust would weaken, and we would break through the path, sinking deep into the snow. We would pull our feet out to try again. Eventually, it was easier to walk beside the trail in the melting snow rather than stick to the trail and continue to break through the crust with every other step.
When we arrived in Fort St. John, we had the car that we had driven there. That vehicle worked for about a year. However, in the first fall, Mum had gone berry picking with Sarah Greene, a neighbour who lived a couple of miles away. They were out in the bush with buckets picking saskatoon berries and had several buckets full.
At the time, Mum was pregnant with our youngest brother, Teddy, who was born in early spring the following year.
After a morning of picking, Mum was heading home. On the way, she parked on the side of the road in front of the Co-op store to pick up the mail. But before she or Sarah could get out of the car, they were rear-ended by a transport truck.
The buckets flew into the air, berries spraying everywhere. The front bench seat disengaged and banged backward into the rear seat. Mum had whiplash and the baby was knocked about in her womb.
The car was a total write off. The insurance company took the truck driver to court, where he testified that the sun was in his eyes and he didn’t see a car parked on the side of the road. He paid one hundred dollars damages, which in no way could replace the car. We were left without any transportation.
Pamela, my older sister, still has the rear window from that car. She always intended to make a coffee table out of it. (More to come)
During the month of our occupation of the basement suite in Fort St. John, Dad spent his days out on the homestead. He built a small structure on the land which would eventually become the kitchen for the house. It was eight feet by twelve feet, walls and floor made of quarter inch plywood, no insulation. They bought a cast iron kitchen stove, wood fired with a water reservoir, and set it up with thicker pieces of wood beneath the feet to support its weight. Then we moved in. There was also a dry sink against one wall. A dry sink has no water supply. It is used usually with a basin in it, and the water in the basin can be let out through the pipe in the bottom of the sink. Sometimes that pipe leads straight outside. Sometimes, as in our situation, it lead to a bucket under the sink. The water could thus be reused to water the garden, or the animals as needed.
In the kitchen, my parents set up a double bed with a single bunk positioned above it, and the rest of us slept on the floor. It was now October and the temperature had plummeted.
Pamela, my oldest sister, began distance learning, what we then called correspondence, which was conducted through the postal service, as she was past grade eight, and that month my second sister, Nell, and I began to attend the two-room school in the village of Cecil Lake.
Dad was felling trees in preparation for building the actual house, and the surrounding neighbours generously organized a house-raising day. Trucks began to arrive early that morning, and men tumbled out of them, carrying axes and saws. More trees were felled, limbed and dragged to the construction site where the ends were whittled until they fit together. By the close of that first day, the walls of the structure were about eight feet high, no floor as yet.
Dad dug a root cellar in the middle of the square of walls, to be used for the storage of produce and canning in the future. Little did he know that when the snow melted in the spring it would always fill with water and Mum would find her canning jars had floated off the shelves and hovered in the water just below the trap door used to access the cellar.
As the weeks went by with all of us living in the small kitchen, we began to get sick. Once we all came down with the flu. Most of us stayed in bed when not throwing up in basins or buckets. Dad went out to chop firewood, vomiting into the snow when necessary.
Several of the men kindly returned for more days of voluntary work and eventually the house was built. The roof was erected and covered with tar paper. The floor of plywood was installed on a grid of logs to hold it up off the ground. There was a short staircase to the small second floor that was positioned beneath the eaves with a window at each end. This would be the bedroom for all the children.
Dad cut the doorway through from the kitchen to the house on Christmas Eve that year.
To follow Sylvie's blog, click on the friendly Follow button on the lower right of the site.
