GRANDVIEW STREET
Grandview Street is where I spent most of my childhood until the family moved to Edmonton when I was twelve. It was a ramshackle street, probably typical of Flin Flon with its rapid unplanned growth. I remember the frequent chimney fires next door at the Blake's house and the manual pump for drinking water they had on their kitchen counter.
Further down the street lived a woman alone with her children. She was practically destitute. I visited her when I was eight or nine years old and was much affected by what I saw. I went home and got my Mom to donate things to help her out.
In the opposite direction lived a family that allowed their kitchen waste water to flow directly out of the house into what we kids called a slop ditch. It was quite disgusting to look at, as it had lots of food waste in it. One day, while quite a few kids were playing nearby, my sister Suzanne, who was only three, fell into it. The water was so deep that I was afraid she would drown. I stood there for a moment horrified, before I could control my feelings of revulsion and reach over to pull her out. Of course, she was extremely upset and cried all the way home. I was convinced I had rescued her from drowning. Only much later could I see the humorous side of the incident.
Also on the street lived the Eidt family, whose daughter Norma was a friend. When I went to her house, her father Garnet, who I liked a lot, made bread pudding. To make it, he would put a pan with pieces of bread, milk, sugar and raisins to cook in the oven. I remember not liking it, but I loved the set of books he had called something like "Lands and Peoples". I loved to go to Norma's and look at these books. They help to explain my love of travel. What made them so wonderful was the coloured photos, which for me were a great rarity. The only other colour I recall seeing as a young child was in a film at school about Canada's natural resources that showed salmon jumping in mountain streams.
Memories of my father on Grandview Street may help to give an idea of his life there. He frequently chopped wood for the furnace, stoked it every day and kept a big wood pile in the back yard. His job involved being outdoors a lot which he enjoyed even in winter. I remember that at some point his job with HBM&S became one of a civil rather than a mining engineer.
In the summer, he sailed his boat at Big Island Lake, eight miles from town. I don't remember how he traveled those miles before he got a car in 1949, but I know that he and my mother would sail there. Sailing was unfortunately brought to an end when they had a frightening experience, though no one was hurt. A big storm suddenly blew up when they were in the middle of the lake. The return trip had to be made by tacking. My mother believed she would die, as she couldn't swim. As a child, to deter her from going near the river bank on their farm, her mother had made her very afraid of drowning. Hence, her fear of the water and her decision never to sail again.
We continued to go to Big Island Lake, and my father considered building a cottage, but eventually sold the property instead. My father bought a car after the road into Flin Flon was built when I was nine. The eight-mile drive to the lake on a dusty gravel road seemed never-ending. The dust forced us to close the windows, and as the car took one curve after another, we lurched continuously from side to side. Inevitably, my small sister Suzanne would cry out that she was going to be sick.
Instead of a cottage, my father decided to build a garage. I was enlisted as his helper so I could earn half the money needed to buy my bike. My job was to hand my Dad the tools he needed. We didn't talk much. I just stood there until he would say, "Hammer", or "Chisel", or "Level". By the time I was ten, I was quite an expert on garage construction, only to become even more of an expert when, a year later, he decided to build a new house in the Willowvale neighbourhood.
Another memory of my father during those years was of him putting on his army uniform. He was in an essential industry so didn't get called up during the war, but instead was in the reserve army which held periodic exercises. Another is that one winter he used a wooden box and snow to make me an igloo which turned out to be just like those used by the Inuit. It was big enough to be able to go inside if we crouched down. We didn't stay long, though, because it was so cold.
My father also built me a play house. This provided many hours of fun. It was located part way up the rocky hill at the back of our yard, and so seemed to be my very own pretend home. I was probably bossy towards my sister, Suzanne, when she played there with me. We would make cookies out of mud that we mixed up and allowed to dry in the lids of jam jars. Then we would have fancy teas pretending to eat and drink using our child-sized set of dinner dishes made out of real china. There wasn't a lot of mud in this rocky area, but in the recesses between rocks we managed to find some that hardened very nicely into excellent cookies.
In the photos are:
1) and 2) Annette and the play house
3) Suzanne, aged seven or eight at our grandmother's house in Edmonton
4) My father in the snow with his tripod
5) Annette beside the wood pile, and
6) My father in what may have been his reserve army uniform.
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