Friday, January 29, 2010

Returning to School Fifty Years Ago

Fifty years ago society regarded single support and unwed mothers as pariahs.  The welfare system was almost non-existent, and most people did not even consider applying because of the stigma.  Universal health care was unheard of.  Few young women raising children alone had the necessary skills to get jobs that would cover the cost of daycare and bus fare.  And there were no adult high schools with daycare facilities on-site to make it easier to get the pieces of paper necessary to enter or re-enter the work force. 

These were the bad old days before women's liberation began to demand some measure of equality for women, before such luxuries as maternity leave and equal pay for equal work were in place.  Women in Quebec did not receive the right to vote until 1949, so it is really not surprising that women teachers did not receive equal pay until the 1961-62 school year.  When I went to court in Montreal for the custody hearing in 1959, a judge towered above me in a public hearing and chastised me at length for leaving my marriage.  no one chastised my husband for being unable to keep up his end of things.  It was illegal to buy contraceptives in Quebec until the late sixties, and the trade in back alley abortions flourished, and killed sexually active women.  It was not a good time or place to be  female.

In a society that made it all but impossible for women to rise once they had fallen, I was luckier than most.  My father provided a roof over our heads and put food in our bellies.  My grandmother provided daycare.  Because she was in her late seventies, there were conditions attached, and it was not a completely worry-free situation, but she was there when I needed her.  I was able to finish high school, the first step to becoming self sufficient.

But there were conditions there too.

Three years before, I had flounced out of the John Rennie office, sure that I was on my way to better things than a high school could provide. Now I was the girl who spent her evenings spelling words with the neighbours in order to keep her brain alive. Cap in hand, I pleaded for re- admittance.  I was lucky.  Even though they remembered the mouthy sixteen year old who had thought about nothing but boys and skipped most classes, they gave me another chance. 

I had to sign an agreement that stated that I would not cause any trouble and that I would not date any of the students.  It took no deliberation at all to sign it.  After all I was there for one reason only.  I wanted to get that piece of paper.  I wanted to learn.  The thought of dating pimply-faced sixteen year old boys struck me as funny, and I certainly had no intention of breaking any school rules.

I was behind, of course, because I had missed the first term, and I knew I would be playing catch-up all year, but I also knew I could do it if they just gave me a chance.

People who go back to school now are given truncated courses, special conditions,  and lots of support and leeway, because educators recognize that adults have responsibilities that kids don't have to deal with.  They know that it makes good sense to fast track adults so that they can get into post-secondary programmes that will prepare them for the work force. Fifty years ago you went back to regular high school if you went back at all. 

I took ten subjects, just like everyone else.  In June I would sit for ten examinations: English Literature, English Composition, French written and oral, History, Geometry, Algebra, Chemistry, North American Literature, and Geography.  A lot of catching up, a lot of remembering, and a lot of homework for a woman with two children, one of whom was still in diapers.

For a while I despaired of ever learning Geometry.  I am left brained and this subject made demands I found daunting.  In addition there were great holes in my background.  I was now doing Book 4 without having done Book 3 ... and this on a leaky foundation from three years before when I did Book 2 without Book 1.  In addition, the only class with room for me was an enriched class in which the teacher could whiz through explanations and go on to more challenging problems.  I found myself sitting in the front seat listening hard, and, in the middle of working on a problem, by using common sense, I would see how to solve it, but find I was missing the reference.  I would turn around to ask if there was a proposition to prove that angle A was equal to Angle B, and the bright,  nerdy sixteen year old boy behind me would furnish the proof  I needed to continue. 

The School Board worried about me dating my fellow students ... contaminating them with my sexual experience. In fact,  my interest in these boys had far more to do with what was in their heads than in their trousers;  they were the ones with the valuable experience.  In June, I passed the geometry exam with a mark in the eighties.

French presented a different kind of problem.  I was years behind people educated in Quebec when I came from Nova Scotia at fifteen, and, even with tutoring,  had barely scraped a pass in Grade 10.  In grade 11,  I was placed in the class of the scariest teacher in the school, Ray Bolla.  I couldn't do anything right, it seemed.  When I skipped his classes in order to avoid the misery, he reported me, so I began skipping school completely. 

Mr. Rouse, my French teacher when I returned to school, was not at all frightening --  simply incompetent.  I realized I needed better teaching if I hoped to pass, so I went to Mr. Bolla and asked for tutoring.  I didn't pass French with flying colours, but, thanks to his help, I managed a decent pass in each of the French exams.

My own French teacher almost had me kicked out of school shortly before graduation.  A paper was being circulated for yearbook write-ups.  I asked the person who passed it to me what it was and  Mr. Rowse gave me a detention for talking.  After class, I told him it was impossible for me to serve the detention; that I had to get home to my children.  He made no comment and I assumed that he understood.  The next day my home room teacher kept me behind for a few minutes to tell me that they were thinking of expelling me for not attending the detention.  I explained, and  Mr. Howse told me to go to Mr. Rowse and offer to serve the detention at noon.  I did this, but when I went to the French classroom, the door was locked and he never showed up.  The following morning I told Mr. Howse what had occurred and asked what I should do now.  He said, very succinctly, that I should consider the detention served.  I never heard anything else, and I assume he took care of it.

When I returned to John Rennie, I discovered that I had several guardian angels besides Ray Bolla who gave of his time, and John Howse who stood up for me against injustice.  In the weeks before the June exams were written, my geography teacher, John Jared, was preparing to move to the Arctic with twin babies and the rest of his young family.  I realized after he'd packed everything away that I had missed learning about aerial photography and that one of the compulsory questions would be on that first term work.  I met him at the shopping centre on a Saturday.  I had the babies with me, and he offered me a lift home in the van he had just had detailed before leaving.  I mentioned the aerial photographs.  Then one of my children got car sick, messily, all over his back seat.  I forgot all about aerial photographs in my embarrassed efforts to clean up the mess.  John Jared, however, remembered.   On Monday he presented me with the photographs and study notes he'd dug out over the weekend.

The woman who taught me English three years before, Dr. Alanna Smith, called me in to her office to apologize for not having done more to help me stay in school.  I assured her that nothing she could have done, not even giving me a part in the school play, the failure she was regretting, would have changed my headstrong resolve to quit school and get married.

My English teacher when I returned was one of the best in the department.  Michael Witham was Cambridge educated, knowledgeable and strict ... and he liked me because I loved his subject.  His guardianship was to extend beyond high school, as was that of the vice principal, Lloyd Patch.

I decided to become a teacher because of Mr. Patch's advice, but it was the teachers I encountered when I returned to school who were the real reason I decided to join their ranks.

But college is another story.

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Escape: Part 2

Peter means rock ...

Peter was a tall attractive man with blond hair who drove his ancient car all over Canada, almost always on a whim.  He was extremely intelligent but flighty. He cared deeply about the world we lived in; once walked from Montreal to Ottawa to fight for nuclear disarmament.   He had long slim fingers, played the piano, loved jazz and classical music.  Those same hands fashioned wooden toys for my babies. He was a reader, a writer, a thinker, a philosopher.  It was Peter who forced me to think about things like the existence of God.  The term "Renaissance Man" was unknown to me when I knew him, but Peter was the only real Renaissance Man I ever knew.

He saved me because he loved me.  He saved me because he saw something inside me that was invisible to most people.  He saw what Pat saw ... an intelligent young woman trapped in poverty and ignorance.

My grandmother loved him.  Even though he didn't speak German (he tried), they got along well.  Most of their communication was non-verbal.   He helped her with dishes.  He showed his appreciation of her cooking.  She knew he loved and valued her.

My father thought the world of Peter.  They shared a love of art and music.  Peter was always willing to help Dad at his "farm" in Mansonville, providing the manual strength, a  knowledge of tools, and an extra pair of hands.  Once they hooked a chain onto a building and hauled it from one location to another using Peter's old car.  Peter sat in the trunk hanging onto the chain and a rope.  They both loved doing the unthinkable. My father would have loved to have had a son like Peter.

Peter was my best friend, my brother, a surrogate father to my babies, and my boy friend.  We talked endlessly. We encouraged one another to be the best we could be.  I remember hours and hours of exploring the city ... of driving to see new things ... of spending time at his parents' home ... sometimes alone but just as often with the children.  We kissed.  We cuddled.  We even slept together occasionally. 

But we were not lovers.  We tried once; it was not the high point of our relationship.

Peter was gay in an era when that term with all it implies had much uglier appellations.  Pansy.  Queer. Fruit. Faggot.  It was a time when homosexuality was thought to be a mental aberration, a form of insanity, an affliction that could be fixed by psychiatry.

Peter committed suicide about five years after I met him.  We were in our twenties.  We spent his last evening together ... at a jazz club in Montreal.  It was a week night and I had to work the next day.  I remember my last words to him ... "I'm going to kick you out now, Peter," I said.  "I have to get up in the morning and you can't stay here."  He kissed me good bye.  I had no idea that would be the last time I would feel his arms around me.

It was over a week before I heard that he had driven that old Plymouth up into the Laurentians north of Montreal and parked it in a field where he sealed up the windows and turned the exhaust hose into the car.  He was found by a stranger several days after his death.  His family got in touch with my father after the funeral. 

I still cry when I think about the loss of my dearest friend, my brother, the man who saved my life, the man I wish could have been my husband, my children's father.  My tears, of course, are for my own loss, but they are also tears of regret that Peter could not have lived long enough to be accepted for who he was, that he died before it was possible for men and women to be openly gay. It is more than forty years since Peter committed suicide.  If Peter had lived today, his story, our story, would have been very different.

The road to freedom was a pretty bumpy road.  First there was the confrontation with my husband.  It hurt Peter to hurt anyone, and my husband was stunned.  Peter smashed his fist into a concrete basement wall to hurt himself as he knew my husband was hurting. 

I found it harder to understand my husband's surprise and pain.  It had been a while since we had admitted that we didn't love each other.  We'd comforted ourselves by making love afterward.  We knew that we were trapped, that there was no out for us.  We had two little girls born just eleven months apart.  We had nothing in common, not even the babies.  All we had were our bodies and their need for each other.

I had been complaining for a long time about my unhappiness, about his total lack of interest in me or the children.  I had screamed ugly things about my entrapment that was more complete than his.  He could escape occasionally but I couldn't ever get away because he couldn't be trusted to look after the babies. 

The only time I ever left them in his care was the day I took the two hour bus ride into Montreal to pick up a snowsuit my father had won.  I visited with Dad and stayed to attend a movie.  I was gone for about eight hours.   When I returned, the babies were screaming in their cribs, their little bottoms blistered and raw, empty bottles lying in and near the cribs.  I comforted them, bathed them, applied ointment and dressed them in clean clothes, and then confronted him with the accusation that he didn't give a damn about anyone but himself, not even the babies.  Why had he just left them alone all day while he watched television?  He said he had poured cold milk into bottles from time to time and given them to them in their cribs.  I guess that gave him some respite from their crying; allowed him to watch the football game undisturbed. 

Maybe that was the last straw for me.  Maybe that is why I asked Peter to take me away just before the Christmas when they were one and two years old.

At first, we went to a grungy room ... student digs in a boarding house.  I think it was Tom's place.  Peter went out during the day to try to find us a better arrangement.  While he was gone, I washed diapers in the tiny kitchen sink and dried them on radiators.  The landlady arrived at the door and told me that the room was not intended to house a family.  I was relieved when Peter came back and took us away.

This time we went to his parents' place.  He had simply told them that he was bringing a woman and her two children.  They, god bless them, said, "Oh, Peter, what have you done now?" And then they welcomed us into their home.  It was a safe haven of cleanliness and warmth.

But of course we couldn't stay there either.

I felt I could not go to my father; that I had made my bed.  So I turned to my mother, a woman I hardly knew, a woman I had only met after leaving my father's house.  When I phoned, she said we could come.

Peter and I got into the car and drove to Toronto.  When we arrived, my mother told us we couldn't stay, that her husband didn't want us there, that their lives couldn't accommodate two toddlers.  When she had received my call she had contacted my father.  He told her we could stay with him.  So we drove back to Montreal.  My father and grandmother welcomed us as warmly as Peter's parents had.  Only this time I knew we could stay, that we were finally safe.

As soon as the babies were asleep, my father asked me what I wanted to do.  "Go back to school," I said.

 "That's fine.  Oma will look after the children," was the response. 

And that was the beginning of the next hurdle on the road out of ignorance and poverty.

Escape



We were such a care-less generation, those of us who spent our adolescence in the fifties. However did we grow up to be people who cared about the world? Pat, Claire and I all became women who stood up. Perhaps now we don’t stand quite as tall as we once did, but we all still care. We marched as long as we could, and we continue to care even though we do so from home now.

In the mid-fifties I was never inside their heads, despite the fact that we talked all the time, but my memory seems to tell me that Pat at least did some thinking. Claire remembers thinking, if not in 1955, at least in 1958.

What I remember about my own thinking is not very flattering. My head was filled with cotton candy, sickly sweet thoughts utterly empty of substance. I cared about clothes and boys and sex. I wanted to make as much money as possible so that I could buy more clothes, attract more boys, have more sex. I didn’t care a whit about school in 1955. I was sure that I knew enough to do what I really wanted to do, have babies.

And my life was just as empty as my head.

They went on to university. I descended into a world of diapers. Their minds expanded. My bubble filled up with trite dullness. My only contact with adults was occasionally with parents of babies and toddlers, women who, like me had traded lives for mothering ... not in any conscious intelligent way, but simply because that was what we did. And even that contact disappeared when we moved east of the city.

The paucity of intelligent thought was matched by our physical poverty. We lived in rent to income housing on the outskirts of  Pointe-aux-Trembles in a concrete, faceless collection of anonymous three storey buildings. In some ways they make me think of a refugee camp I saw in Jordan, but worse. In Jordan the refugees had a sense of community. The poor anglos living in the Point-aux-Trembles ghetto led atomized, separate lives.

My husband was a man who spent hours commuting on a series of buses. When he got home he collapsed on the couch in front of the television set as soon as he had eaten supper, a meal that was as dull and flat as the rest of our lives. My grocery budget was $15 a week so we made do with wieners and hamburger. A wiser older woman, a better cook, could have done something interesting with so little, but I was still a teenager.

We never talked. We shared a bed and a dinner table, nothing else. We didn’t even share an interest in the children. They were my children, his burden to support. They were simply the bars of the trap we shared.

He escaped to play softball and to go out drinking with the boys. Even his job was an escape for him.

Until the couple moved in next door, there was no escape for me. They were both nurses who had training if not education. On the nights my husband was out I would slip over to their apartment leaving our two front doors open so that I could hear the children.

And we would have spelling bees. I find it hard to imagine a life so devoid of colour that a spelling bee could be vitally important, my only escape. Then one day even that escape route was cut off.

My husband came home drunk one night and we went to bed almost immediately. We slept in a single bed with a bookcase headboard, the same bed I had slept in since I was eleven. Normally we adjusted our bodies quite easily to the cramped space we shared, but this night he became angry instead of simply rolling over to accommodate my movements.

His elbow crashed into my eye with such force that I was knocked onto the floor. All I remember now is how fast my eye swelled up. I could barely cup my open palm around the lump. When I got to the bathroom, it was already beginning to discolour, and the eyelid was split open.

As soon as he saw me, he was immediately sober and contrite. He was not a brutal man. He was a boy ... a trapped child, just like me.

The next day I spent as much time as possible lying down, getting up only to change diapers and feed the babies.

About 10 a.m. there was a knock on the door. It was my friend from next door. He was off duty till the afternoon. He took one look at me and told me my eye needed attention. He bathed it and then went in to the hospital to get some advice and whatever he needed to treat it.

When he came back he sat down on the edge of the couch and looked after me ... and then his hand strayed to my breast. That was the end of my friendship with the couple next door. I was afraid to be alone with him. I didn’t tell his wife. I just distanced myself from them. The spelling bees ended.

The next time I escaped was when Pat came back into my life. She was living with Tom. Peter was their friend. They talked about things that young university students talk about, at least all the things that young university students who imagine themselves to be budding intellectuals and bohemians discuss. I was enthralled. I saw them seldom; I lived in Pointe aux Trembles after all, but those brief glimpses of life outside the ghetto walls were like oxygen to a starved brain.

One day I packed up my babies, climbed into Peter’s old Plymouth and fled my barren existence.