A Child's Christmases in Toronto 5: The Big House With the Black Roof

That was our last Christmas in the little white house. In January my parents packed up and moved their goods, chattels and five children into a bigger house about three miles north, a few blocks shy of Toronto's northern border. It was not a beautiful house, but it had a swimming pool. A swimming pool! It also had almost enough bedrooms for everyone and, what was more, these rooms all had doors. After our semi-dormitory existence, this was privacy at last. Meanwhile, it was on the same bus route used by my friend R, which meant I too had an excuse to hang out in the bus station waiting to see boys.

Sixteen 

By my sixteenth Christmas, I was much less self-absorbed than I was at fourteen, but home was still mostly the background to my Social Life. This was in transition, for my until-then best friend R had joined a new crowd and, according to her, I had blown all my chances of a proper boyfriend from my brother's school for having gone once to the movies with one of its pariahs. ("Everybody knows.") 

However, there were other boys' schools, and a fellow I was friendly with asked me out to the movies a few days before Christmas. He had previously told me he had fallen in love with a gypsy girl that summer while visiting relatives  (in Eastern Europe), so really I should been smarter with my heart. He told me all about Anika on our date, and also about the wickedness and proliferation of Albanians in his homeland.  

On Christmas Day, my stocking featured chocolates, four pairs of nylons, clip earrings, typewriter ribbon, a wide belt in red Stuart tartan from Le Chateau, and a tangerine. That must have been the year my sister Tertia and I shared a room, for my parents gave us half-shares in a tape deck/radio. They also gave me a big Italian-English/English-Italian dictionary and (via Santa) a desk calendar. My grandmother Elinor gave me black lingerie (why?), and my grandmother Gladys gave me pyjamas. Nulli gave me a Star Trek calendar, which I loved. "I think everybody likes the presents I got them," I wrote. "I am full of Chelsea bun."  I spent much of the day reading encyclopedia entries about Albanians and my crush object's hometown.

When NATO bombed this city twelve years later, I was shocked.  I was at work when I heard the news on the radio. I was the office expert on the wars in former Yugoslavia, and although it was industrial, this town was almost certainly a civilian target.  

Seventeen

I was very busy when I was seventeen. I had a part-time job before and after school as a barista, I wrote my high school's Christmas play (an adaptation of Little Women), I taught Sunday school and had written its Christmas play. I had a new gang of friends. The café brought me into more contact with the adult world, which included my boss, older employees, another franchise owner, neighbouring shopkeepers, mall security and regular customers.  Meanwhile, I took much more interest in the world outside my Social Life and began to write about other people's opinions and experiences. 

The Marches' Merry Christmas was a success. My parents were at the performance and took me to Pizza Hut afterwards. On the way there, I fussed about things that could still go wrong --like Sister Dorothy not getting her bust of Beethoven back. "Mum tried to calm me down, saying that the play was over, I was only the writer--not responsible for every detail, to stop worrying, to relax, wait until the [Sunday School] play on Sunday..."

 A Saviour was Born was less successful. Apparently "the costumes were magnificent, the audience was attentive, the kids had their lines memorized...it was a mess. We had never had a proper rehearsal so the main angels and shepherds did not know when the angel choir was supposed to come in. Every time they went ahead Nulli [at the organ] and I had to figure out where to move the hymn to. The angel choir missed every cue and clue and had to be obviously prompted. 'Fidelia' forgot a couple of her lines, and there was a long awkward pause while I held my head in my hands and died a thousand deaths." When the play was over, I rushed out to cry behind the church. Then I went back and faked cheer, helping Santa give out presents and telling my students' parents how wonderful their children were. 

Nulli and I took our mum out to see Scrooged the week before Christmas. I bought Mum's ticket, and Nulli bought us all popcorn. He dropped his, so Mum and I shared ours with him. 

Christmas Day revealed a number of treats: "cool earrings, grey nylons, black nylons, typewriter ribbon...pyjamas, blue turtleneck, white blouse, 500 sheets of typewriter paper, a gorgeous, elegant shawl-scarf...a beautiful crucifix to put above my bed, a "Freedom jeanwear" oversize pullover (Tertia's into labels) that is terrific to write in, and a digital alarm clock with green numbers."

But the best was saved for last: Dad gave Mum a VCR. We children were incredibly excited. I never thought we'd get one. We watched Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Peggy Sue got Married. In the afternoon, we were called upon by two parish families, whose daughters were my friends, and later Nulli and I were dragged off to see my father's colleague and his family. 

Having gone on the worst-date-of-life-so-far with the eldest son of this family, I kicked up a tremendous fuss and even chanted HADES, MINIME, NOLO IRE! (roughly, "Hell, no, I won't go!"), but this was to no avail. We were supposed to be gone only an hour and a half, but my ordeal lasted four hours. "Look at it this way," said Mum, "It's grist for your mill."  True.

Nulli and I did our best to chat with the two boys-our-age, both of whom were absolutely brilliant at music and mathematics but sadly lacking in social skills. I felt it my duty as a woman to keep the chat flowing:

I managed to keep up some small talk to shorten the long, slightly embarrassing pauses in our  half of the room....  In one attempt to carry [stilted small talk] into a [conversation], I asked the boys what they got for Christmas. Nulli's favourite new toy was a mouse-pad. [Elder Son's] favourite is his Rubik's Revenge puzzle. [Younger Son] spoke with great enthusiasm about a painting of a Florida beach and a potted azalea. 

I believe I wore the mask very well until there was such an unfillable gap that Mrs B came over to suggest we watch a movie on their VCR. By now we had been there for somewhere around two and a half hours, and I wanted desperately to get back to [writing] my [new] play before I got tired. 

The movie, F/X, was full of senseless violence and the sound was turned down low so that the adults' conversation would not be disturbed. I could hear Mummy loud and clear from where I sat and silently berated my parents for making their children suffer like this. When we got home, Mummy congratulated me on my good, cheerful, interested behaviour. I growled. 

A few days later, I had a little Christmas party. Three out of the seven girls invited came. We talked a lot about other girls at school and once again enjoyed the story of what one enemy had told her cousin about his girlfriend's best friends, including me. (She said I was "queer" and the others were "strange.") The daughter of Italian immigrants claimed (again) that it was much harder for Italians than for anyone else to adjust to the New World.  The girl with Welsh parents told us all about Wales. We discussed the recent police shooting of a black teenager, and "not even" the black girl thought he had been shot because he was black. "Finally, we discussed what we thought the Feminist movement had really done or hadn't done and what we think of the school's religious program. We ate chips, pizza and coke. I think the party was a success."

And that was what Christmas was like when I was seventeen, all those years ago.  

A Child's Christmases in Toronto 4: The Dancing Snowflake

When I was fourteen, the world revolved around me. If you were fourteen at the time, and you thought the world revolved around you, you were wrong. Sorry. I have the textual evidence in my own handwriting before me that I was of primary interest to the globe, thanks to my charmingly eccentric personality. I recognized the supremacy of God and that Our Lady was the best woman ever, but after that--me, me, me.

I must have been difficult to live with, but enough about other people. That Christmas was about me.

The fuse of my youth was lit on September 4 when I first stepped through the ersatz Tudor doors of my high school, and it exploded on October 19 when I went to my first high school dance. If I had considered my brother Nulli, whose school it was, I might have been more circumspect. But according to my fourteen year old self, happily recollecting my October debut in December, "I danced my wildest and flirted like crazy. [My friends] were in shock. [H] met [P], [R] met [L], and I met every guy there, forgot their names and danced with them." Oh dear. It gets worse. "Met [J] and [fatally--ed. JK] Slow dance with [JK] through [Cory Hart's] "Never Surrender". Nice fellow buys me a [carbonated] drink. I forget his name."  

Flibbertigibbet.

These were teenage boys kept from girls for at least 7 hours a day, so I didn't do half-badly, which is to say I generally won an admirer at each dance I went to during my first term. It helped, of course, that although girls from my school were welcome at all the boys' school dances, boys were banned from any boys' school dance not their own. Thus, I could have surreptitiously dated a chap from every Catholic boys' school unless girls from my school found out and blabbed, which they certainly would have done. It was fortunate, perhaps, that although I enjoyed talking to my admirers at dances and on the telephone, I was less enthusiastic at the prospect of actual dates. I was allowed to date, but I was too young to date, and although my mother didn't know this, I did. Although it is good for girls to be wary of male teenage sexuality, I was inordinately terrified.

Suddenly Nulli's school Christmas Concert, which took place annually at Massey Hall, was no longer mostly dull but an exciting opportunity to see new male acquaintances, especially [JK], the one to whom I had sent a "candygram". (The exchange of messages and candy between local boys-only and girls-only Catholic schools was a time-honoured tradition.) I was not particularly enamoured of this Favourite at the time, and indeed I sent two other candygrams to a rival school. However, I was so beglamoured by [JK's] comic performances during his school's rendition of "Jingle Bells", that when my father whisked me away from under my Favourite's nose right after the concert, I wrote the latter a congratulatory letter.

Naturally I sent it by way of the Nulli Express. It would be years before I learned that one way men get at each other is through their sisters or by mocking their sisters' reputations. Fortunately for Nulli, only older boys were allowed to attend their own school dances, and these older boys tended to be fond of him. Thus, I may be forgiven that when my my friend R (now dating L) found out from my Favourite's friend (probably L) about this imprudent missive, I thought solely of myself.

R milked the situation of all possible Drama, so the way she broke that bad news was to claim, "My source says that [JK] was running all over the school with [the letter] and half the school read it. What did it say?"

This turned out not to be strictly true, but it should have taught me never to write boys letters. Sadly, it didn't. Don't be like me, girls. Learn from my mistakes: they are legion. The conclusions I actually drew from the modified story were that JK must really like me a lot, which meant I had two, if not three, admirers that month. To paraphrase Olivia Dukakis in Moonstruck, what I did not know about boys was a lot.

My diary entry for Christmas Day was characteristically self-absorbed. I see, however, that it was "mega-amazing". I ate too much, forswore one of my crush objects, received a phone call from the most eager admirer and spent part of the day having an intimate conversation with a chum. My godfather dropped by my house and gave me a $50 gift certificate from my favourite clothing store. One of my grandmothers had given me $30, so I plotted a Boxing Day shopping spree with this enormous $80 sum.

Meanwhile, I had found in my Christmas stocking that morning a tangerine, an apple, chocolates, "gold" clip earrings, blank cassette tapes, batteries, pens and elephant earmuffs. Santa also gave me a waste paper basket for my room.

My parents gave me a tape recorder and white lace tights,  and my grandmother Gladys gave me pyjamas (which I needed) and fancy lingerie (which I didn't). My sister Tertia, who was only 10, gave me a heart-topped pen and a grape-scented eraser. Nulli gave me a 45-record adaptor and two "singles" or "45s", as we called two-sided, physical MP3s back then: "Small Town" by John Cougar Mellencamp and "Rock Me Amadeus" by our beloved Falco. My best girlfriends gave me a makeup bag with a brown eyeliner, two shades of brown eyeliner and a lip-gloss. Unusually, my father's cousins sent me a china angel.

My diary passes over the rest of the holidays in silence. On January 6th I minutely recorded the excitement around the candygrams my school had received from the boys' schools. I got three--two from bona fide admirers, and one from my gossiping Favourite. My admirers signed their candygrams with "affectionately yours" or "love", whereas my Favourite merely signed his with his name. I took this as a bad omen, but derived solace from the friendly little exclamation mark after his message. Fourteen years later he stood me up at 1 AM in the Gare de Lyon in Paris.

Let that be a lesson to you all.

A Child's Christmases in Toronto 3: Concerts

As played by Dorothy C.

When I was a child I wanted to be a stage actress. As I was but rarely taken to the theater, I knew nothing about contemporary stage actresses. Everything I knew about the theatre came from children's books written before 1950. Thus, it is safe to say that I unknowingly wanted to be a stage actress in the nineteenth century.

My mother, who knew more about nineteenth century actresses than I did, tried to discourage this ambition by invoking the "Evils of the Theatre." I was confused, as none of my primary sources, Little Women, Jo's Boys, and Anne of Ingleside, mentioned these evils or found anything wrong with theatrical ambition.

There were three important stages in my childhood, all of them proscenium. The first was the stage in the gymnasium of my elementary school. The second was the stage in the church basement. The third belonged to Toronto's venerable Massey Hall. All three featured the Christmas concerts that were a traditional part of Toronto life. 

From fourth grade or so, I was in my school choir, and so I appeared at the school Christmas concert, which was given twice: once in the day for the delectation of the whole school, and once at night for the parents. However, I found this paled in glamour beside the glory of the School Play, which was usually performed by children in Grade 8. I terribly, terribly, terribly wanted to appear in the Grade 8 play, and so from the age of 9 or 10 set out to charm the Grade 8 teacher. 

In hindsight it is odd that a child destined to become THE social pariah of her classroom was so popular with teachers, but perhaps it was this popularity with teachers that led to my disgrace. At any rate, both my Grade 1 teacher (who became my Grade 6 teacher) and the Grade 8 teacher adored me; and the Grade 8 teacher (who married a friend's widowed mother) remembers my 10 year old self fondly to this day. Apparently I was a little ray of strawberry blonde sunshine who confidently took Miss M or Mr B by the hand when they were on yard duty and prattled with one or the other gaily about my theatrical ambitions. 

Mr B fell a victim to my charm and cast me in the Grade 8 Christmas play as the Christ Child.  As I was a girl, this confused my classmates and possibly everyone else  unfamiliar with iconography of the Christ Child as a feminine-looking child with long strawberry-blond hair.   

I hope the priests didn't mind. I think of them because the parish church was just around the corner from the school, and strict Father Robinson had famously walked out of the day performance of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, which meant the evening performance was cancelled. Come to think of it, Mother Angelica of EWTN would have been horrified by my being cast as the Christ Child, but it was 1981 or so and, being in Alabama, she was blissfully unaware of our existence. 

My next performance was, I believe, as Amahl's Mother in a non-musical production of Gian Carlo Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors. Sadly, I did not write about this. Instead I have the faintest memory of the Senior Youth Group borrowing my infant sister Quinta to play Baby Jesus in the parish Christmas concert that year. Thus both Quinta and I have both played the part of our Lord and Saviour, although possibly Mother Angelica would not have minded Quinta as much. 

But I do have a full description of my bravura performance as King Saul in the choir's production of "Holy Boy". What follows will probably cause Benedict Ambrose great pain, but we must face the facts of my post-Vatican II liturgical upbringing. The choir master, a dear good man, was to blame.

The choir master, or our singing teacher, was a graduate of my brothers' cathedral choir school, which was founded in the 1930s. Although the school somehow kept the pre-Vatican II musical traditions alive--and thus the Cathedral had the best music in the Archdiocese--they also kept up to date on the latest trends. At least, I assume so. Our choir master certainly did. There was a rather dashing African (or "African") Lord's Prayer he taught us, and naturally we sang "Day by Day" and "Pre-ee-ee-pare YE the WAY of the LORD" too. Thus, it is not at all surprising that we performed Holy Boy, although I admit it is probably strange that I played King Saul.  

Here in the junior drag king's words is an account of the performance:

Being the king of Israel is hard work. Yes! As I hinted darkly last Thursday, I was chose to be the ill-fated King Saul for the choir's musical "Holy Boy". The actors didn't sing when acting--only the choir. Several practices were sweated through underneath the voice of Mrs. K. The little kid playing David was a rather stupid third grader named Michael H, who is the youngest in the choir because he does some grade four work. He also sings out of tune. During our two performances, 1. for the school (dress rehearsal), and 2 for the concert last night, he forgot one crucial scene:

And when David spared him his life with a grin/

He gave up the title and David was King (2x)

I was supposed to be collapsed in my chair when David with Danny's (who played Goliath) fake Bowie knife, creeps up on me (King Saul) and, with a grin (oh boy) throws it away. Then King Saul gets up and sadly places the crown on David's head who then grins like a ninny.

During the public dress rehearsal, David forgot to creep up. You see, I had done my scorn of the Lord (Neil, Grade 5), my defiance of Samuel (Michael McR), had done my madman pacing and temper tantrums, been calmed by my dear daughter (Nicole P) and by David's invisible harp, and the choir's song "The Lord is my Shepherd", paced again, silently watched Goliath get "killed" by David's trusty sling-shot (made in Taiwan) and had silently plotted David's death and this was to be my last scene. This is what happened to me.

"King Saul was flaming. King Saul was waning," sings choir.

I sink into my "throne", eyes covered.

"All his plans seemed to go quite astray/David was winning more battles each day" continues choir.

Okay, I think, he should be right in front of me now.

"And when David spared him his life with a grin..."

I open my eyes.  Where is he? He was staring, [still] in the choir, at [the choir master]. Aaugh! Quickly I save the day. 

"He gave up the title and--"

I walk across the floor and sadly and slowly place the crown on David's head.

"----Davide was kinnng! David was---KINNNG!"

David beamed affably. 

On the night of the concert, I see, I caused pandemonium by arriving at school wearing a beard and moustache painted on with my mother's ancient pot of eyeliner. The howling and screaming, which swept through the halls, brought the Grade 8 teacher out of her classroom to shout for silence.

Then she saw me. She stopped. Then she gathered herself together and ushered [the Grade 8 actors] into the classroom. 

There follows a long description of my interactions with the Lord (as played by Neil M). Apparently I copied my performance from that of Tim Pigott-Smith as Ronald Merrick in the Jewel in the Crown.

Potential BNP Candidate for Edinburgh South

David (as played by the dim-witted Michael H) forgot the coronation scene again. When David died and was replaced by Isaiah (played by Danny K), I hissed "You idiot!" 

When the concert was over, I pushed through the crowds in the direction of the washroom (as we called it) to scrub the beard off my face with the soap I had had the foresight to bring. The next day I was accosted by two Grade 5s in the nearby shopping mall, who told me that I was a bad king. I agreed.

"Why didja want to be a bad king? Why are YOU a king?"

"I'ts a dirty job but someone's got to do it," I intoned and walked on grinning. 

A Child's Christmases in Toronto 2: The Little White House

Let us flee from the alt-right and terrorist-studded present back to the distant past. Saigon has fallen to the Viet Cong, and my still-youthful parents have bought a house in a tree-lined street of modest houses in northern Toronto. My mother, still in her twenties, has had her third baby, a girl. My father, still slim with brown curly hair, goes back to work, aka "the office." I go to kindergarten on a minibus. My mother continues her project of painting walls, running up curtains, sewing quilts, washing and hanging out the laundry, cooking all the meals, grocery shopping, breastfeeding and a hundred other activities I took for granted.

From the outside, this south-facing house looked like an ordinary two-storey Toronto dwelling, built in the 1950s. It had a green tar-shingled roof, a red front door and was painted with white harling. A short flight of sideways steps led to the front door. The front garden was staggered,  a flagstone wall supporting the smaller upper lawn, and above this wall a black lamppost. A number plate hung from a slender arm jutting from the post. 

Alongside this garden and the house, separating them from the red brick next door, ran a gravel driveway, each stone a pointy-sided pebble rather painful to naked feet. The drive ended shortly before the side door and, across from this door, the wooden tool shed. Built into the bumpy white wall to the right of the side door was a little wooden door to an old-fashioned milk- or post-box. (My grandmother's house had one, too.) The post went through the slot in the red front door, however. 

Behind the house was a long back garden with trees, bushes, flowerbeds and a white arbour which supported grape vines on the west side and climbing purple flowers on the east. To the north of this structure was a round raised flagstone flower bed from which tiger lilies grew year after year. The yard wasn't even--at a certain point it rose, which created almost enough of a hill for toboggans to slide down. 

A swing set was soon placed between the pussy willow and a much taller, smoother tree with inaccessible branches. To the south of the smooth tree was a pear tree surrounded by a massive bush of dry white flowers grouped like snowballs: I had no interest in flowers, so I cannot remember what they were called. Beyond the pear tree was a narrow band of grass running past the west windows of the dining-room towards a fence attached to the front of the house. My parents planted climbing roses here. Below the south windows of the dining-room were raised gardens of ferns and a mock-orange tree. Its scent on summer evenings was heavenly. 

The landscaping was rather clever and included a raised flagstone platform behind a large (and climbable)  maple tree growing on the south-east side of the garden. My father constructed a sandbox there. Meanwhile, the whole was visible from the large north-east kitchen window, and when my mother thought her children were being naughty, she banged on the glass. 

There was a flight of stone steps at the centre of the north (back) side of the house leading from the garden to the cellar. My father constructed a winter cover for these steps to keep the cold out of the house and the children from falling down icy stairs. (His basement office window was high in the wall and looked out at the garden.) When the cover came off in the spring, my mother would emerge from the cellar door every fine Monday with a big yellow plastic tub of wet laundry. She hung it up to dry on a laundry line operated by a pulley. In winter the laundry was dried in racks in the immaculate furnace room. 

The house was unusual inside, however. The top storey had been fashioned as a "railroad" apartment for the previous owner's married child. The staircase led to a landing with two doors. One door opened onto a small west-facing room which years later became a nursery. The other opened on a suite of three connected rooms running towards the back of the house in an L-shape. 

The first room, probably a sitting-room, became my green-and-tan bedroom. The second room, whose sink hinted at a former kitchen, became the baby's pink-and-white bedroom. The third room, which was separated from Tertia's room by a short corridor the length of two built-in closets' width, became Nulli's bedroom. For years it had the brown carpet and orange walls for which 1970s home design is notorious. Eventually Nulli (and our younger brother Quadrophic, who was moved there from the nursery when Quinta was on her way) would create some privacy from sisters by opening all the closet doors. Otherwise, we lived in semi-dormitory conditions. 

My parents' bedroom was on the ground floor on the west side of the red front door. It had its own lockable door to the one bathroom. Its other door opened to the front hall and looked towards the primary sitting-room. Meanwhile, it had a big window that looked onto the street, but was screened by bushes and was rather dark whenever the lights were off. It didn't get much sun. I thought it gloomy, which is just as well as it was usually off-limits. 

The primary sitting-room also had a plate-glass window and besides that a long chimney piece, built in bookshelves,  a fireplace and a wide doorway leading to a smaller sitting-room, which we called the TV room although it became dominated by a standard upright piano/torture device. In summers when the TV room's window was open, the lady in the brick house would have her housekeeper open her own window so that she could listen to Nulli play the piano. Mrs Brown had been a radio star. 

The west doorway of the TV room led to the hall. Staircase to the north, windowless bathroom to the west, window-lined dining-room to the northwest, kitchen to the north and stairs down to the side door on the east. Agatha Christie would just have drawn you a map. 

What I hope all this description gets across to curious (as opposed to nostalgic) readers  is that we lived in a small and increasingly crowded but very pretty house with a splendid back garden to cultivate and banish children to. My parents were both enormously hardworking although the world would have credited only my father, for he made all the money and climbed the only career ladder. My mother was "just" a homemaker--unfortunately in the decades of history this was least fashionable--and what a beautiful home. When I dream about home, home is always that pretty white house. It even has its own flavour, for my parents made jam from the pear tree. 

My family celebrated ten Christmases in this house, although some of us fewer than that. Sometimes my foreign relations--including a grandmother and an uncle--would make the journey, and sometimes they sent large, hopeful, brown paper parcels instead. My father always went to fetch my Canadian grandmother on Christmas morning. The Christmas tree was set up in the larger sitting-room, and my mother decked the mantelpiece first with golden tinsel and later with cedar rope. In those days, the tree was always decorated with gingerbread doves entirely covered with white icing. The birds dominated less and less as the years wore on and the Christmas tree decorations became more numerous. I am sure most families like mine have similar boxes of decades-old, instantly recognizable Christmas baubles. 

What I remember most vividly about that first Christmas in the little white house was the baby-stroller under the tree. As this was for my mother--and newborn Baby Tertia--I don't know why it made such an impression, other than that it was large and unwrapped. I cannot say for certain which Christmas we got the two wooden sleds--maybe when I was seven--but they also made an impression. 

Christmas Day (or Midnight) Masses of the 1970s may have made a strong impression then, but I don't remember them very well now. But I was a pious child from early on, and my mother says I evangelized my newborn sister by pretending to read her the Christmas story from my child's Bible--the Good News about the Baby Jesus "and his Mother Marty."

Turning to a material artifact, I close this section with the description of a blue hardcover, formerly blank book. At the bottom of the spine is the motto "GRUMBACHER 7194.1" in gold. On the front cover are the remnants of gold stick-on letters that once spelled "DOROTHY."  On the inside of the front cover is my maiden name, address and telephone number written in pencil. The frontspiece bears a crayoned self-portrait and the penciled information "My name is Dorothy. I'm 7 years old. I received this on X-mas." The first dated entry is marked Friday, December 29 of the same year. 

Amusingly, the tops of the pages have December 25 and December 26 written in and crossed out. Apparently I had intended to write every day. But however infrequently I wrote, I provided us with the following glimpses of Christmas that year:

1. I liked playing in the snow. (I no longer do unless skiing counts.)

2. We enjoyed a very rare dinner at a Chinese restaurant shortly after Christmas. 

3. Nulli and I were taken out tobogganing at a public tobogganing hill. I fell off the toboggan a lot, and I found this unusually painful. 

4. In January I attempted poetry suspicious reminiscent of that of Canadian poet Dennis Lee, so I strongly suspect Nulli and I received Alligator Pie and Garbage Delight that year. 

Sadly--for fans of these memories--I did not write again about Christmas until 1984. Without my childhood books to jog my memory, I'm afraid other Christmasses are just a blur. However, Christmas 1980 stands out in my mind as the Worst Ever (insofar as Christmas could ever have been bad) because our beloved uncle died that Advent. 

With our absorbing crayon drawings, Nulli and I weathered our grandfather George's death with nary a tear. And as you may have surmised from our lovely home and all that clean laundry, we had a relatively cloudless existence through our share of the 1970s. But the police officers' knock on the door ripped a hole in our hearts. Here was Early Death and Loss and Pain. I'm glad now, come to think of it, that in our baby way we shared in our elders' sufferings. But whenever I get on a plane, I pray "Not yet, Lord. Not until the children are older." 

The little white house, by the way, most of its trees, its gardens and its driveway, were all apparently destroyed to make way for a soulless, pretentious monster home.  (Its hideous back patio stretches past the surviving pussy willow,) I say "apparently", for as long as we remember it, it still exists.

A Child's Christmases in Toronto 1: Prehistory

Knitting pattern good looks.

"My theme is memory," wrote Evelyn Waugh in the voice of Charles Ryder,"that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time. These memories, which are my life--for we possess nothing certainly except the past--were always with me. Like the pigeons of St. Mark's, they were everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder or pecking a broken biscuit from between my lips; until, suddenly, the noon gun boomed and in a moment, with a flutter and a sweep of wings, the pavement was bare and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl. Thus it was that morning."

 My first memory is a very early one indeed. It is from my crib, and therefore was formed before the end of the American war in Vietnam. Fittingly, it is of my mother, who was still in her mid-twenties, a beautiful girl with long, wavy chestnut hair, green eyes, a delicate nose and dark-framed spectacles. She is holding a yellow doll, probably homemade, whose body is merely a velvet hooded onesie to which a smiling plastic baby face has been attached. The name of this doll is, appropriately enough, Baby. The girl--whom I know to be my mother and my infant heart contracts with adoration--makes swooping movements with Baby.

"It's a bird," cries my mother. "It's a plane! It's----SUPERBABY!"

And down comes Baby into my crib, and I am delighted.  

Where this was exactly, I don't know. My young parents had a mildly peripatetic, rental-accommodation existence until shortly before my fifth birthday. Churchgoing Catholics, they married 13 months before I was born, and from an early age I have enjoyed looking at their wedding photos. 

They married in Advent, and my mother carried a bouquet of red poinsettia. Her maid-of-honour wore a dark red dress and carried white poinsettia. My mother's white wool "medieval" dress was trimmed with rabbit fur, and she wore a fur band in her wavy hair instead of a veil. Outside the church--built in 1856--the confetti on the newlywed's hair and shoulders looks like snow. In one photo, the 29-year-old groom puts on his homburg hat. He is tall and slim, has short, dark curly hair and looks like an Irish-American.* The groom is a doctoral student with teaching duties, and he has married during the university's Christmas break. The bride, I think, is a foreman at Dunlop Rubber & Co.--an unusual job for a woman at the time. Her career with Dunlop will be cut short by my own advent. While pregnant, she will type my father's PhD thesis. 

Besides the episode with Baby, I remember when my stuffed blue whale was new, and the arrival of a plaid octopus wearing a plaid cap. If these were Christmas presents, that is all I remember of that Christmas. I also have a very vague memory of a Christmas visit to the USA, and feeling uncomfortable and cross. 

As far as I know, there are no home movies of this visit, but I most certainly could be wrong. Very early on, my father took an interest in making home movies; these later filled me with mortification. The most embarrassing one is of my infant brother Nulli Secundus--probably on a Christmas Day--striving to reach a toy. His eyes are full of interest and joy, and he drags himself in an elementary crawl to the object. Just as he is about to reach for it, the plump red-haired toddler who was me notices his intent and takes the toy away. Ha ha ha. Hilarious.

My brain did not start accumulating memories in earnest until I was almost four and Nulli was two. My father, now an assistant or associate professor, took a sabbatical and signed on to do post-doctoral research at Cambridge University.  He brought along his young family and a number of steamer trunks. Going abroad for a year was enormously adventurous for my parents, and to my great disappointment, they never repeated the experiment. Possibly they were worried about the logistics of moving a growing family. I have a very vague memory of my brother being airsick on our first Atlantic crossing, and according to my mother, the very first words he ever uttered were "I want to go home." 

Not to be sentimental, but Cambridge became for me even more than a home. As the years went on, it figured in my imagination as a lost paradise. This is in part because our row house--married student housing--was built on the ruins of an old botanical garden, and woods, a common, and a raised duck pond all feature in my memories. I remember visiting one university quadrangle, and thus have an impression of old stone walls in my mind, but I was too young at four to understand that Cambridge University carried enormous significance for the world. When I did understand, I prided myself highly on having spent a year on its edges. 

It was also paradise because, although I knew there was God, I didn't know there was death. My merry Canadian grandfather (source of the red hair) was only 64, and no-one knew this was the last year of his life. Meanwhile, I don't remember a cross word from my mother--although two admonishments from my father, once because my brother and I were messing with his film canisters and once because we were marching around the breakfast table making a tremendous racket with toy instruments--or any quarrel with Nulli, who was a cheerful, friendly, easy-bossed little cherub. Strangely, we were allowed to roam freely in the woods and the common without any adult oversight. When my hair got caught in a climbing frame, I had to send Nulli for rescue. 

This I remember very well on my own, even without the often repeated story of how Nulli burst in on my mother crying "Dorothy duck" and thus my mother flew in a panic to the duck pond. I was very lonely there on the bit of green, stuck to the climbing frame. I passed the time by moaning and blowing spit bubbles. It was drizzling. I sank into a luxurious depression. Typically, I remember my sufferings but not my rescue. 

Our Cambridge Christmas I do not remember. Instead there are photographs which explain the origins of common objects in our resumed Toronto life. One is of my father in a highly unfashionable red nightshirt and nightcap. The nightcap had a white pompom and became the "elf hat" that distinguishes whoever's job it is to hand out the Christmas presents. Others feature the woolly elephants my mother knitted for her children, complete with our first initial sewn to the elephants' jumpers. Nulli's hair is thick, straight and platinum. My hair is soft, wavy and strawberry blonde. We looked like British knitting pattern child models, and we were dressed like them too. Possibly we sounded like them; we played with local children on their common and picked up their working-class accents. 

There was one serpent in this paradise, and it was a supernatural being I called The Weatherman. I was terribly frightened of him, and I thought he was responsible for the strange coloured dots and squiggles I could see in the dark of my room when I went to bed. If pressed to identify him, I would have said he was an invisible wizard. He was certainly evil and meant me no good. Although as I got older I dismissed these impressions as sheer imagination, I wonder now if this was not some very early recognition of the Enemy of Mankind. Perhaps I unconsciously sensed his presence in news reports. Although I myself was entirely sheltered from the concept of death, there were constant IRA bombings that year--so many that there was palpable anti-Catholic (to say nothing of anti-Irish) feeling in Cambridge. According to family legend, a neighbour saw us emerging from church and snarled "Catholic bastards." 

Fortunately, I do not remember this at all, and unfortunately, I now know exactly how he felt because right after I watched the Twin Towers fall--live--on television, my eye fell upon a perfectly innocent and harmless woman in hijab walking along an Ontario street and I felt murderous rage. Thank God I didn't say anything. 

Unless I am mistaken, our year in the UK was from September to July or August. When we returned to Canada, my mother was heavily pregnant and my parents began to purchase a house. Before we moved in, we stayed with my mother's parents---devoted Gladys and funny George. I believe I remember sitting on one end of a "teeter-totter" swing with my grandfather on the other end. If so, this is my only memory of him, as he died in early September, shortly before my sister Tertia was born. 

My grandmother was devastated, but again we children were protected as much as possible from the sorrows of adult life. Either my brother or I--or both of us--drew a picture or pictures [entirely fictional] of our late grandfather being rushed to the hospital in an ambulance. We were admonished not to show this (or these) to our grandmother, as she would be sad. Thinking about this as an older child, I was shocked by our insensitivity, but now I understand this is simply a way children process tragic events beyond their comprehension. Meanwhile, my parents' and grandmother's sorrow did not throw the slightest hint of shadow on our Christmas three months later. However, that is a story for tomorrow. Another thing I wish to say about Cambridge is that when I first set foot in the Historical House, I smelled the ancient-damp-British-house-smell for the first time in over 30 years. In a strange but real way, I felt I had come home. Meanwhile, I have no idea what cleaning products they use, but when, a few years later, I walked into the local library loo, I was transported to the WC of my Cambridge nursery school and remembered all the bottles of milk lined up before the frosted window.

Once when I was naughty, I was given my milk--a government-funded ration, incidentally--but not my daily cookies. My brother Nulli voluntarily--and happily--shared his. If I possess any memories the day I die, I am sure that will be one of them.  My brother has given me many presents over the years, but nothing has made a deeper impression than that spontaneous, joyful, authority-thwarting act of loyalty. According to family legend, when (in Cambridge) I was informed that I would soon have a new sister or brother, I was terribly troubled, thinking this meant I would have to give up Nulli in exchange.

*This is hard to explain, but if you have male relations who are at least 75% Irish-American, you can guess what I mean.