The Way of a Gardener. Des Kennedy
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play at saying Mass. We’d create a little makeshift altar in the house from whatever props we had at hand and dress ourselves as priest—a prized role that almost always fell to Ger, who was the primary instigator in the business—and altar boys, then go through the entire ritual, raising our make-believe Host, ringing the bells and all. Holy Mother Church remained at the core of our lives.
Soon we were released for summer vacation, which stretched for an eternity compared with the short English school holidays we’d known. That was the summer of Davy Crockett—the Disney version of America’s greatest frontiersman was everywhere, on television and in movie theaters. Three different versions of “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” played repeatedly on radio. Kids were wearing coonskin caps and moccasins. Naturally this fed right into my pre-existing frontier fetishes, and I soon had a pair of moccasins myself. Jim Bowie, Kit Carson, Daniel Boone—I couldn’t get enough of them. I devoured Western comic books and TV shows. I acquired a miniature ranch and used to spend hours arranging its fences and buildings and moving around the small figures of cowboys and Indians engaged in endless dispute.
The public schoolyard across from our house had a softball diamond, and frequently on the long, warm summer evenings a crowd would gather for a men’s fast-pitch game. These were fabulous events, the players men of immense strength and skill, the uniformed umpire as authoritative a figure as any priest or policeman, the crowds of wives and girlfriends raucous in their running commentaries. I’d experienced nothing like it before: the determination of a batter digging in, the lightning-fast pitch and smack of the ball into the catcher’s mitt, the time-honed chants of the players—“Hum, baby, hum!” “You got him, you got him!”— repeated like incantations. This was a game I wanted to play.
I WAS NOT aware at the time of how precarious our financial situation was. Something had gone wrong with the house purchase and, I only learned much later, we had almost lost the house and our investment in it. My father worked at two jobs. He’d leave home late in the evening to work the night shift as a maintenance man on the Toronto subway system known as the ttc . Returning home in the morning, he’d have breakfast and then go to a nearby nursery where he’d work in the greenhouses for another four or five hours, or if there was no nursery work, he’d pick up day-laboring jobs from the labor exchange. In the afternoon he’d work at our place. In very short order, to my dismay, the trees on our property that I’d prized so much upon arrival had been chopped down to make way for gardens, and within a year or two the front yard was a full English cottage garden while the yard out back was chockablock with fruits and vegetables. My dad would sleep for a few hours in the late afternoon and evening and then begin the work cycle all over again. At the t tc he’d take any special shifts available—on Christmas Day or New Year’s Eve—because of the extra pay involved. In all the years I was at home my parents never took a vacation anywhere.
My brothers and I learned from an early age how not to be noisy. Dear old Mum had a very limited tolerance for what she called “bedlam,” which would be anything much louder than the sound of snow falling. If I’d tried to raise four active boys within the confines of a small house I’m sure I’d have adopted a similar approach. Plus there was the wrath of a sleep-deprived dad to consider; if we kids were around the house and made any sound at all that awoke him from his slumbers, it was rather like facing a grouchy bear emerging from hibernation. We became adept at creeping and whispering, and came to think of noisy people as depraved.
For the first few years we were identifiably poor amid the modest affluence of our neighbors. In contrast to England, here almost everybody owned their own house; some even had a summer cottage up at Lake Simcoe or on Georgian Bay. Everyone owned a car. A few days before our first Christmas in Canada, there came a rapping on our front door. Two men, volunteers from the parish, had come to deliver a Christmas hamper. We kids were thrilled at all the unaccustomed treats stuffed into the bushel basket, but my parents were mortified. They told the Good Samaritans that we didn’t need or want the hamper, that there must be poor people in the parish who deserved it far more than we. There was a terrible awkwardness as we all stood in our little front room, the adults contending over disposition of the hamper, we kids not saying a word. I retain no memory of whether the hamper was finally refused or reluctantly accepted, delight in its treats tainted by the shame that was attached to them. The hamper proclaimed our poverty, that we were a charity case, and this was bitterly intolerable.
As soon as we were old enough, we boys began contributing to the cash flow. Ger and I started with a large paper route when I was about eleven, delivering the old Telegram and eventually switching to the rival Toronto Star. Spring through fall we’d haul our papers on a wagon and in winter on a sleigh. Like our fellow paperboys we took great pride in knowing how to bundle a paper tightly against itself so you could chuck it from sidewalk to front door without its opening up on impact. Within a year or two we each had our own route, and Ger soon graduated to being assistant on the truck that dropped off each delivery boy’s bundles.
The daily rounds of a paperboy were full of perks and perils— I was bitten by dogs and f lirted with by girls, and I gained fascinating glimpses into the homes and lives of my customers. I opened my own bank account and derived immense pleasure from its accumulating capital. My first paper route ran down what we called Main Street, the heart of old Weston and now called Weston Road. Here I got to deliver to a mortuary and to a shop that sold scandalous-looking ladies’ lingerie. I was equally intrigued by prosthetic devices in one of the shops I served, and treated kindly at the local police station where the cops would occasionally show me their guns.
Best of all, the route brought me into close proximity to the Humber River, which ran through a deep valley more or less parallel to Main Street. This was the kind of wild area toward which my inner Davy Crockett yearned. I spent many a summer afternoon, either alone or with school chums, poking around the willow-cloaked valley bottom and fishing for big suckers in the river’s pools. A century earlier the Humber had powered a sawmill and later a flour mill, both of which played a major role in the town’s development. But the mills were long gone and so was most everything else along the valley, because it had been one of the areas hardest hit by Hurricane Hazel, the deadliest hurricane in Canadian history, which struck in October of 1954. Almost a foot of rainfall within forty-eight hours had sent a wall of water roaring down the Humber that swept away everything in its path, including one whole block of homes in which thirty-two sleeping residents were killed within an hour. The floodplain was subsequently designated off limits for development, and the resultant ribbon of wilderness through the city fit my predilections perfectly.
SHORTLY AFTER EACH new school year began I would get swept up in World Series fever. This was the golden age of baseball, before expansion and multimillion-dollar contracts. I joined my schoolmates in thrilling to the exploits of Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays and Hammerin’ Hank Aaron. We became passionately attached to one team or another. To be sitting in a classroom while the Series games were being played mid-afternoon was pure torture, rendered even more torturous by a sympathetic teacher occasionally providing a scoring update. Within a year or two I’d uncharacteristically become one of the bad boys who’d sneak a miniature transistor radio into the classroom and furtively listen to the game through a cleverly concealed earpiece. And why not? There was nothing in the curriculum, scarcely anything in the universe, of greater consequence than that the Dodgers—the great Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Gil Hodges, Duke Snider, and the other Bums—took the 1955 Series over the Yanks in seven games. Or that the following year the excellence of Mantle, Yogi Berra, and Whitey Ford and Don Larsen’s perfect game powered the Yankees to the title in another thrilling seven-game series.
I began my own career playing first base on the class softball team. Dipping into the profits from my newspaper route, I purchased a first baseman’s mitt upon which I lavished obsessive attention. I repeatedly worked oil into its soft leather. I placed a ball inside the glove’s deep pocket and tied the glove tight around it overnight. I carried my glove wherever I could, repeatedly pounding my right fist into its pocket. Although there was no coach on hand, I worked diligently at my craft, fielding hot grounders and pop-ups, charging the bunt, stretching from the bag to shave a millisecond off a throw from the infield.
When the bitter Toronto winter set in, I was forced to become a sports spectator. Most of