Leaving Whitby and my friends produced no great trauma, no teary good-byes, some half hearted promises to write every week throughout our remaining lives. There were no dogs to leave behind and no housekeepers. We left the boring brick house with its big porch which had been witness to girl secrets and we left the chestnut lined streets and the arched and spired churches, the library and the cold vaulted post office where I’d collected mail each day after school.

So it was again to a village, a place for the family to put down roots, a place where we’d be known by name to those on the street and it was thought that something new and important would be accomplished by the participants in this atomic energy adventure. The war years had brought this and we were moving ahead into a new age.

The village was in bits and pieces when we arrived, hacked out of the middle of a pine forest, set on piles of sand and needles. The town site fingered the great Ottawa river which was two miles across at this place. It was the end of August when we came and the long needles of the tall trees hummed with winds in their upper branches, like mouth organs pursuing tunes. We were assigned one of eight identical houses which backed onto the river. Sandy tire tracks connected us to other houses under construction and to the one newly-assembled store and post office. Looping streets were laid out with names like Alder, Beach, Spruce, and Maple and

We were told that this had once been an Indian village. The trees possessed spirits that wailed into the black night and the river lapped summer evenings into dusk, and on still nights expanding rings marked the tentative nibbles of fish sampling downed flies.

It was the first time I had lived by a river, ciphering its season’s-song, listening. Later in winter I discovered that it snapped and blasted with shifting ice pans and it echoed with the eerie howls of wolves when deer where circled and run to exhaustion in the deep snow, hamstrung and bleeding. In spring the river tinkled with silver shards. Floating cakes carried off adventuresome young boys who were forced to wade the shallows to shore, cloths crisp with layered ice sheets.

On a hill, deeper in the woods away from the river there was a barbed wire encampment. There, army huts stretched long and grey, and the wire enclosed men with black circles sewn onto their shirt backs to provide easy marks for rifles should they attempt escape. They talked to us in accented English and smiled when we approached. They were going home soon, back to Germany. I thought they would rather stay if given a chance and many later returned as “displaced persons” or immigrants. On Friday evenings the village children went to watch movies there in the Quonset huts, old travelogues, scratchy

My mother was pregnant again. She was in the first half of her thirties, still slender and overwhelmed. Help would be required and there were no local farm girls near who understood preserving or who felt comfortable with us and with that proper table decorum decreed at meal time tinged with chaos. Never was food to be loaded on the fork by knife, never was the fork used in an inverted position like some English person, never was the knife held in the hand except for cutting, after which the fork was transferred from the left to the right hand and of course one never talked with a full mouth. It was only later that I discovered that one’s eating habits defined geographic home as surely as accent.

In Southern Ontario housekeepers were seldom maids in the uniformed eat-in-the-kitchen Montreal sense. They were family. They ate and prayed with us. Their clothes were entwined with ours in the washing machine.

The baby was born soon after we arrived, another boy, this one called Warren. My mother doted on his silken red hair and large hands. Because he was the largest of the babies he would surely grow to six

The company house was small for our household which consisted of parents and five children who were my brother Douglas and myself, along with the three younger brothers, and now the four bedrooms would have to be parceled out to accommodate another, a stranger. A housekeeper had been ordered from Scotland, a Mrs. Furlong. I had no expectations so her arrival was as uneventful as she was nondescript. She seemed middle aged with streaks of gray in her frizzed auburn hair and she wore ribbed stockings and cardigans with her flowered cotton dresses and spoke with a heavy burr. She smiled seldom seemingly absorbing her surroundings with the cautious curiosity of a beaten child. Although Mrs. Furlong got on well enough, methodically accomplishing her required chores with

So the search began again for a helper. This time it extended to Toronto where interviews were conducted and a woman called Eve was engaged. She must have arrived by bus. One afternoon she was there stretching a gloved finger toward the bell when I opened the door. She was broad shouldered willowy with a generous toothy smile. To my parents surprise she came accompanied by too many others. On her hip she carried a bundled infant. Another small boy pulled at her skirts while attempting to hide. He didn’t smile. Balancing on spindly legs he peeped from behind. His name was Gene. So she was assigned a bedroom, the one vacated by Mrs. Furlong.

It was a time when assistance for single women was non existent nor would she have tolerated welfare so she had come to this, to us. She was a graduate of the University of Toronto in home economics, and had been married to an artist on the western plains. Responsibility in any form was his nemesis, a load too heavy to be borne so he had left her with his unacknowledged son when she became pregnant a second time. She had never mentioned the second son, the new baby when she was interviewed by my parents, possibly understanding that there could be no roof for all three. She’d known what she

Forty-eight years later, again when the sun neared noon and Eve was long dead, the older boy Gene called having tracked me through many alleys. “Did I have a brother?” he asked, “do you know if I have a brother?” Perhaps there had been a picture somewhere or a friend of the mother’s in Toronto had told him. Eve hadn’t. He knew so little, only that possibly there had been another. I advised him to try the adoption agencies that were close to Deep River, perhaps Pembroke or Armprior. I never heard more. At least he now knew surely that there was kin. Eve and my mother became the closest of friends, the first real friend Catherine had since before marriage. I would often hear her laughing like a girl again while sharing feelings, and her attitude toward me changed too. There were times when I, too, now was one of the girls, privy to the inner workings of an adult woman’s heart. I heard of the ways of the world from Eve as did my sheltered mother. We were held under the spell of stories of failed loves, and adventures with grizzly bears in the mountains of British Columbia while we were taught the intricacies of the finest of tailoring.

It wasn’t long before Eve became part of the village social scene, part of the sub-culture of returning veterans and young physicists. They partied as only returning veterans could. There were those who celebrated the unexpected gift of life found in each day and those who had to forget horrors and

A garden was attempted the first years. A lost field in a clearing away from the village was designated as Victory garden and parceled out to villagers. We upturned sod, shook white threaded roots and roughed the crumbling earth in an attempt to build loam. Even so, scant weeds grew and escaped grasses were sickly. Few seeds germinated and those that did gangled and bowed yellow toward the dirt or remained puny. This place was marked for death and eventually it became the village burial ground where graves were honoured with brass plaques, flat to the ground instead of substantial grave-stones.

Other endeavors were more successful. My father reveled in his work. He loved the two hospitals that he had designed and built, he enjoyed the dealings of administration, of hiring staff and the sorting of problems. He didn’t so much like tending patients though, which may have cost him in the end. There were times when need came knocking at our door and he’d send them off to the doctor on call which seemed sensible but didn’t always sit well with the villagers, small villages being what they are. And he founded the village Community Church that was made up of souls from all denominations with the exception of Anglicans who wanted no part of this rag-tag lot and Catholics who had their own crumbling but serviceable brick building near the highway which was presently used by a scatter of locals.

Our church met in the recreation centre. In summer we sat on flimsy chairs and blinked and sweated as the sun bounced off the playing field through squared windows and listened to what seemed to me, irrational sermons. I hated it. One Sunday morning at age fifteen, after screwing up the piano playing of Onward Christian Soldiers for the hymn-sing I announced to my father that I no longer wished to attend church nor to play the piano for Sunday School services. We were walking home and I just said it. “It’s stupid.” He looked me hard in the eye with a sort of stoic disappointment and that quietness of his. “All right, if that’s how you feel,” he said, as though perhaps expecting such an announcement and turned away and plodded on. He accepted my decision with grace, no doubt hoping that I would come to my senses in later life in time to reap my final reward.

We had good times too. The yard backing onto the river was soon strewn with boats—a Sponson canoe with floatation along the sides, a cumbersome craft, not at all appropriate for Indian country; a motor boat with motor not quite strong enough for water skiing; and, most fun of all, a round bottomed sail boat. My father attempted to teach me to sail at the same time he was learning. We never placed well in the Y-flier class-races even with a generous handicap. The fliers were a determined and fearsome craft. Hauled by a huge wing of sail, their flat decks sliced and hissed through the waters. They wheeled into the wind in unison like a flock when jockeying for

There was an energy in the village, the energy of youth and of mixed cultures. The staff hotel was replete with young physicists and technicians starting afresh after the war, and the little town-site houses, sparsely furnished were inhabited by new families, some with babies. Soon clubs for innumerable activities were formed, skiing, drama, gymnastics, tennis, libraries were stocked, the ball fields mowed and the recreation department functioned at full bore. We, the twenty or so teen-agers, benefited. We had more coaches than participants. Our parents gave us the freedom to explore our world feeling the village to be protected by isolation from big city evils. But the recreation department wasn’t so sure, understanding that isolation could produced its own problems. Being forward thinking they soon organized a session of Friday night lectures on male parts and female parts and contraceptive measures, primitive though they were. This was delivered before our weekly sock-hop which included cheek to cheek dancing.

Some might say that we were an unruly bunch of kids. Our lives seemed unhampered by authority. We purposely missed the school bus in order to spend the day in the pursuit of baseballs or each other. We jigged class to go to the movies, we hitch-hiked distances along the Trans Canada highway, sipped cokes in the coffee shop, and gossiped. No-one asked us where we were though sometimes letters arrived from school. We pleaded solidarity. Schooling wasn’t