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The Homestead

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Firewood

Firewood was a vital part of keeping our house livable. It was used for the kitchen stove, which provided all the cooking and for keeping the kitchen warm enough to work in. It was also used for the barrel heater in the main room of the house.

Nell and I shared the job of bringing in the firewood. We took turns carrying in armloads of wood for the kitchen stove. Dad had to split this wood into smaller pieces to fit in the fire cavity and moderate the temperature in the oven. To bake, Mum would use larger pieces to bring the temperature to the level she needed. Then she would feed in smaller pieces to keep the fire at a steady elevation. There had been times when a cake didn’t rise, or rose too fast and then fell due to the wrong temperature. I remember once Mum opened the kitchen door and threw a cake pan into the yard. Playing outside, my sisters and I watched carefully to see if the door was going to open again, because obviously Mum was angry and we didn’t want to provoke her response.

When the door stayed closed, we crept closer and devoured the cake, flat but tasty.

The heater in the main room was a barrel heater. Dad took a forty-five gallon drum and laid it on its side. He took two pieces of metal, each about two inches wide and several feet long. He bent the metal pieces to act as legs for the barrel, and soldered the legs in place. Then he cut a square out of the top of the barrel and added hinges to allow it to be opened and closed with a metal hook to catch the handle and keep it closed. This was the door to allow wood to be put onto the fire.

Across the barrel’s bung hole, he attached a metal piece held in place with a screw to allow the metal to be moved to cover or uncover the hole below the door. This allowed air into the burning fire and regulated the speed of burn. Lastly, he cut a hole at the back of the barrel and installed a stovepipe. It went straight up through the floor of the upstairs bedroom and on through the roof. This heater provided the main source of heat for the house.

The wood for this heater was quite different from that for the cookstove. Dad would chop down a tree, and using his bucksaw, cut it into four foot lengths. My sister and I carried these into the house as well, stowing them in the long wood box beside the heater. Dad would throw them into the heater, one at a time as they burned down. At night, he would fill it up and shut the bung hole, usually having to rise once in the night to add more wood.

It was always chilly in the house in the morning. We would rise from bed and quickly struggle into the long underwear and socks, adding a wool sweater if we had one.

Wood was not always in plentiful supply. Most men might cut the wood all summer to ensure a winter’s supply. Dad often left it until we had a strong need of it. A few times he was able to borrow a horse from a neighbour. That’s when he would cut trees in the woods with his axe and drag them to the clearing near our house. There he used his bucksaw to cut the different lengths, some for the heater, some to be chopped for the cookstove.

One winter’s night, I was washing the supper dishes in a basin in the dry sink when I heard Dad scuffling at the wood latch on the kitchen door. I walked over to open it for him. Often, with the mittens he wore, it was hard to manage the doors. When I opened the door, he staggered in, holding one hand over the side of his face.

The light was dim, I was working with the coal oil lamp on the counter, but I could still see something dark dripping from beneath his mitten and onto his parka. He took his hand away and I saw a deep gash across his cheekbone. Apparently he’d been using the chainsaw to cut firewood and it hit a knot in the tree, flashed back and caught him in the face. Luckily it didn’t take his eye out. It was so like Dad not to say anything or call out for help, but just scrabble to open the kitchen door.

I yelled for Mum. She came quickly, assessed the situation, and dragged him into the main room to seat him on the bench. She got a damp cloth and got him to hold it over the cut, then put her parka and boots on. At that point, we had a vehicle, a secondhand tractor. They hitched a wagon to the back of the tractor and set off for town. Nell and I were left to close up and stay with the younger kids.

Later we learned it took them about four hours to get to town. The old road wound like a snake down over the breaks to the bridge below that crossed the Beatton River, then back up to the other side. Luckily the hospital was on that end of town. Mum parked the tractor in the parking lot which was nearly empty, and ushered Dad into the Emergency entrance. The doctors on duty stitched him up, sprayed a plastic bandage over the wound and sent him on his way. Mum and Dad got back on the tractor and headed home, arriving before midday.

Homestead, Part Seven

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Clothing

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.

The Homestead, Part Four

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Building the House

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.

The Homestead, chapter two

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Our Journey North

My parents met in Esquimalt when Dad was sent to Vancouver Island for training in the Canadian Navy. They married during the Second World War. After the war ended, they settled in Victoria, where my two older sisters, Pamela and Nell, were born. I was born there also. When I was five, our parents sold their small house situated near the Gorge, and bought a box truck. Dad loaded everything into the truck, positioning a couch in the front facing forward with a window cut out of the box allowing us to see through the windshield of the cab. This is where my sisters and I travelled, looking through the front window as we drove.

We ended up in Nipawin, northern Saskatchewan, Dad’s old hometown. However, we weren’t there long. Obviously things didn’t work out as Dad had thought they would, and about eight months after we arrived, we were riding in an old Ford car headed back to Vancouver Island. It was Christmas Eve when we stopped on our journey to overnight at a hotel in Regina. I remember running up and down the hallways on the second floor with my sisters, working off steam after a long day of travelling in the car. There was an elderly bachelor in one of the hotel rooms who invited us in for a sip of pop and some candies. We never got pop, and were thrilled to receive such a treat.

Once we arrived back on Vancouver Island, we stopped in Duncan, just north of Victoria, and bought a house there. This house had three rooms, and was about four-hundred and fifty square feet in size, with a front porch and a set of stairs at the back. After about a year, Dad had enclosed the front porch to create a bathroom, and dug a new well in the yard as the old one was too shallow and ran out of water in the summer. The fourth daughter, Cindy, was born there, as well as the first son, Derek.

Dad was a journeyman carpenter, able to perform just about any task. He raised our house on car jacks and built a foundation for it. But he didn’t fit the mold of a regular working man. He took several jobs while in Duncan, one of them working on the construction of the Chemainus mill, but none of them lasted very long. After six years, Duncan proved to be a poor fit for our family and our parents had become interested in the land grant program in the North Peace River area.

Dad found an old truck and cut the box off it. He welded a ball mount hitch onto the frame of our car, and a towing hitch onto the front frame of the truck bed. We loaded all our stuff into the truck bed, including a full-sized pump organ, beds and linens.

By now there were five children. Mum and Dad sat in the front seat of the car with our youngest sister, Cindy, positioned between them. We three older girls sat in the back, with our one-year-old brother, Derek. He crawled restlessly over our laps and legs during the entire journey.

It is a long drive from Vancouver Island to the North Peace River area, especially in those days with the type of vehicles we had. Today, it is eight hundred and fifty miles or thirteen hundred and sixty kilometres by road. We camped along the way, sometimes in someone’s field. We met some kind and interesting people that way.

Pamela, who at fifteen years of age had already started high school, was devastated by the decision to move. She cried pretty well the whole trip north, mourning her lost friends and life at school. Nell and I, at thirteen and eleven, were less concerned, likely because we didn’t have a good grasp of how our lives were about to change.

Once we reached the town of Taylor, situated on the Alaska Highway between Dawson Creek and Fort St John, we discovered that when the ice left the Peace River earlier in the spring it had taken the bridge out with it. The only way across the river was over the railway bridge. This is how the locals were getting back and forth until a new bridge could be built.

It was hair-raising. Dad maneuvered the car onto the railway, the truck/ trailer bumping up behind. Between the ties, we could see the river roiling below us. I remember holding my breath in the hope we would get safely across. So that is how we arrived in Fort St. John, after driving across on the narrow railway ties high above the Peace River.

(More to come )