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GROWING UP IN A SHOEBOX
by Ron Bezant
If you are as old as dirt and you grew up poor you probably didn’t realize it. But something you doubtless can remember are those stinky canvas running shoes you wore all summer long. They came in black with white trim and in white with black. Circular rubber patches with the circumference trimmed as with pinking shears were glued to the ankles. When the rubber soles started to fall apart you got another pair unless you were really poor and then you sat on the front porch in your bare feet, chomping on the heel of a loaf of unsliced bread slathered with mustard and brown sugar or whatever else was in the house.
I mention all this by way of introduction to our old growing up neighbourhood that amounted to street after street of wartime houses in Hamilton, Ontario. You know the wartime houses? There are still a few around if you know what you are looking for. They were erected in a hurry during the war. Ours was a two bedroom affair. The rent was $25 per month. Perfectly square, it measured 24 feet on a side. Others were a storey and a half with two bedrooms down and two up. They all had pitched roofs with the gable ends at the sides. Whether a family qualified for a two or four bedroom model depended on the number of children rounding it out. One family in our neighbourhood had 14 children and they slept crossways in their beds. Another fellow got kicked by a horse and he still limped but that was before he moved into a wartime house and it was part of another tale anyway.
In 1943 when we moved in my mother was so pleased that she cried. “Bloody little shoebox,” she called it affectionately. You will recall that we had moved from a mansion where my father sublet the second and third floors to two other families. I think that she was especially fond of the wooden sidewalks leading from the dirt street to the front porch and continuing around to the rear of the house. But do not lament. It wasn’t long before the street was paved with tar and gravel and our running shoes stuck to the stuff like a healthy sneeze to a screen door.
Each dwelling was set on a concrete pad with a spooky 18-inch crawl space under the floor. I guess that there would have been posts and beams under there but one might have to use Newton’s method of approximation to figure out how they all fit together. Our house was composed of four little rooms and a bathroom. The floors were hardwood. The walls and ceilings were beaverboard. A little combination coal or wood space heater was nestled in a corner of the living room and a mail order catalogue coal or wood cook stove sat in the kitchen beside a hot water tank. A metal tube carried cold water from the tank, formed a coil somewhere inside the stove and took the heated water back again. Of course to obtain enough hot water to fill the bathtub in the summertime meant that the house became hot as Hades and this gave rise to the invention of the Saturday night bath and the transmogrified running shoe. Every other night or so we heated water in an electric kettle and washed our feet in the bathroom sink.
Some nights were so warm that everyone sat on their front porches till midnight and held conversations across the street. The real juicy tidbits were relayed up and down till they reached either end of the street and went right around the corners. By the next morning all the kids knew that I had a bowl of mushroom soup and eight slices of bread for lunch the day before. Or that someone was a strikebreaking scab.
Now if you think that hot summer nights in a sweltering shoebox were tough, let me tell you about winter mornings. That’s when the fires had gone out and one of your parents crumpled up newspaper and kindling and cursed and swore and later on wondered where we learned our trooper vocabularies. One of my grade school teachers summoned my parents to show them the scraps of paper on which I had written obscenities to pass around the classroom. She allowed as how I was a very good speller. But winter mornings, as I said, were tougher than summer nights. Hardwood floors over an unheated crawl space in mid-January spelled chilblains. If you grew up in a wartime house then you will know the sensation of trying to keep your balance while standing on a lumpy mattress and struggling to step into your trousers.
Did I tell you about the shelves in the kitchen and the shelves for linen in the alcove between the living room and bathroom, right across from the doorway to the rear bedroom? Or about the bedroom closets? The trick is, you see, that they had no doors. So most mothers stitched up some curtains from calico or old sugar sacks and strung them across the openings. I mean, these houses were meant to be torn down again after the war ended.
Each summer the ragman rattled down the street with his horse and cart. We were never able to make out what it was he hollered. It sounded like “Pythagorath! Goebbelth! Copernicuth!” But we could tell from the stuff in his cart that it must have been something else. The scary thing about the ragman is that when we kids were bad our mothers threatened to give us to him. The only other catharsis as effective was “If you don’t behave I’m going to send you to reform school.”
A couple of years ago I attended a neighbourhood reunion where I met friends from back then. Some I hadn’t seen in over 50 years. Upward of a hundred different kids lived in the thirty houses on our street as families came and went before I moved away in 1953. You might wonder how some kids will turn out when they grow up. Let me tell you . . .
Only a couple of them made it to university. Many didn’t make it out of public school. One of them donated the grand door prize of an all expense paid weekend at his hotel and golf course. Another one made it into Who’s Who in Canada. Yet another flew in from California in his private jet just for the day. The pretty girl from down the street who filled my diffident heart with fear by wanting to walk to school with me never married. And the kid who choked in the middle of “All Through the Night” on stage at Parent’s Night writes little reminiscences with titles like “Growing Up in a Shoebox.” Yes, he was there. I’m certain of it.
Ron Bezant (at one time known by his playmates as Bee's Aunt, Peasant, and Pee Pants) served in the Royal Canadian Navy from 1953 until unification in 1968, and then in the Canadian Armed Forces air element until he resigned in 1982. Following five years in the private sector as a management consultant and logistics support engineer, he served an additional 2-1/2 years in the military and then completed his working career with Environment Canada in Toronto. At one time he had hoped to turn a part-time hobby writing a satirical column for various community newspapers into a full-time syndicated endeavour until he realized that success is 99 per cent political. Having been "orphaned" in Canada on the paternal side, he strove to discover his roots and managed to assemble a family tree consisting of over 700 characters, many of whom passed away in English insane asylums.
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