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'My
Commonplace Book'
By Beryl A. (Bock) McPhee
Back in Watrous life went on but after the taste of the bush it wasn't
the same, we went a couple of times on holidays that were lovely! Two
of our friendliest neighbors in Watrous were Mr. & Mrs. Jim Freeland,
she would sometimes invite me in and let me listen to her "player" piano,
if you put in a roll and worked the pedals a tune would play without you
touching the keys! Mrs. Freeland was a school teacher and she had a young
grey Clydesdale horse called Maude which she hitched up to a buggy to
go to school, the school children teased Maude and turned her into a cheeky
animal that would nip you or stand on your foot, she'd even press you
against the side of the stall to frighten you if she could.
While
we still lived in Watrous Mrs. Freeland retired and sold Maude to Grandpa
who got her for Dad who hadn't any of his own horses yet, before Maude
he had rented or borrowed other teams such as Star & Stripe or Sorrell's
light chestnut horse. Dad took the train to Watrous and drove Maude and
the buggy back to Ladder Valley (about 200 miles), he told us later that
at night he would sleep with Maude to keep warm and if it was in a stall
she would be very careful not to step or lay on him. When he got home
he tethered her in the meadow to feed and came into the house for supper,
soon they missed Bubbles and couldn't find her, she was only about 3 years
old so panic ensued, when they found her she was swinging on Maude's tail
between her hind legs! The horse never batted an eye, it just kept on
eating and moving forward being careful not to step on a little girl,
Maude was always so good with small children but not teenagers!
Granny
said one year that I could have a birthday party and several school friends
were invited, one of which lived on the way home from school. The party
was held on a school night and I had strict instructions to come right
home so I could change clothes before my guests arrived, the girl who
lived on the way said to wait for her till she got changed and of course
I was easily swayed, she took a very long time and Granny was wild with
me when we got there. Of all my presents I only really cared for the one
my slow friend had given me that was a book of Grimm's fairy tales which
I have to this day. Dad and Mom sent me a lovely brown plaid dress and
a "scotty" brooch which I still have also. No more parties!!
During
the "Dirty Thirties" worst summer Grandpa, Granny and I made a trip to
Regina, Sask. to see Aunt Era, 
we
traveled in Grandpa's Essex car and what a trip! There was a terrible
drought right across the Canadian prairie provinces which are extremely
flat, the farmers didn't do contour ploughing then and as a result the
wind whipped the topsoil into huge dust clouds that turned day into night.
We left Watrous with fine weather but about halfway we hit the dust, Grandpa
had to drive with the car lights on all the time and we only knew where
the road was because of the telephone poles on either side of us, to make
it harder the dust had drifted and piled up all along the road about half
way up the poles, there weren't any fences to be seen at all.
At
one point the car got stuck and there was nothing to do but sit there,
finally through the dust we spotted the roof of a farm building so Grandpa
walked to the house and the farmer brought his team of horses to pull
us out. It was a very frightening experience! In later times we had a
locust plague and when the rains did come we had a flooded cellar that
had to be bailed out, with the water came frogs, lizards and snakes that
had gone under the house to keep cool!
As
we lived so close to the railroad lines in Watrous, we had a lot of men
come to the kitchen door asking for something to eat, they traveled in
boxcars from one place to another desperately looking for work, we were
sure that in some way our house was "marked" and word was passed that
no-one was ever refused a bit of food. One or two would come almost every
day, they always offered to do some work in payment so Granny would usually
ask them to split some wood.
One
of the things I liked when we lived in Watrous was going home with the
Dorward girls after school, they were allowed thick slices of bread and
home-made jam and of course I got some too! Granny would make large batches
of Aunt Mary's and Ginger cookies, they were lovely dunked in milk when
I came home from school! There was always a cookie jar on the table (which
I still have) that I could help myself from. In the winter if we had a
fresh snow Granny would ask me to gather some new clean snow in a large
pan then she would make toffee, she'd pour the soft toffee over the snow
in wiggly lines and it would set, it tasted lovely and different somehow,
we'd call it "snow toffee".
Granny
wouldn't allow me to have many candies, one day on the way to school I
went to the shop without Granny knowing and for one cent I bought a paper
about 6 by 3 inches that had colored dots of candy in rows all over it,
I went happily to school because I finally had something the other children
had, the "dots" I am sure were only hard icing and never again was I tempted
to try things like that. In Watrous was an ice-cream parlor where once
in a while we went to have a dish of ice-cream or a banana split, the
chairs and little round tables were what we now call "wire" furniture
and were painted gold, there were booths you could sit in too. The ice-cream
was of course home-made then and was served in cone shaped cups with a
paper lining, the fragrance of it permeated the woodwork in the store,
that was proven to me fifteen years later when I visited the parlor again
and it smelled the same as I remembered.
Some
other things I remember about Watrous - when winter was coldest a heavy
frost would cover the windows on the inside, and I would get Granny's
metal thimble from her sewing basket, wet it and proceed to make bunches
of "grapes" in the frost. and the comics in the newspapers such as Little
Orphan Annie (Daddy Warbucks had a TV!), Mr. & Mrs. Married Life as It
Is, Blondie & Dagwood drawn as stick figures, and Maggie and Jiggs.
One
summer for some reason we took our holiday during the school term so Granny
took me to see the teacher and asked whether my work during the year was
good enough that I could miss writing exams and still pass onto the next
grade, the teacher said yes and we happily went up to Ladder Valley on
holiday. When school started again I wasn't allowed to start grade six
and had to repeat grade five, she shock was terrific to me. I knew I could
have written exams so to be away from my class-mates of many years was
traumatic.
Then
Great Joy! when we finally went to live in the north when Grandpa retired
from the C.N.R., I was eleven years old at the time. At first we had to
live in a one-room shack at Aunt Era's until Dad could build us a house.
Wilber & Era had lived there a few years then went back to Regina soon
after we moved up there, Wilber was never a farmer but he tried, if it
wasn't for Dad clearing the land and building for him he would have got
nowhere, being more of an academic he found life hard in the bush. Aunt
Era was very particular, she was an excellent house-keeper and cook (attributes
Granny thought was wonderful in her eldest daughter), maybe I was not
very nice to her but to me Aunt Era was always critical and stingy.
When
they left Grandpa, Granny and I moved into their house for a while and
one night we had a very heavy rain storm, the tar-paper on the roof over
the bedrooms was rotten so the roof leaked like a sieve, I was the only
one who thought it was funny! I started school again at 
Ladder
Valley, it was a one-room affair with a much-used wood stove to keep us
warm in winter, the first day I had to go by myself through the bush about
two miles and there was no direct route there, on the way a mother partridge
flew up from under my feet and gave me a big fright, she was only trying
to lure me away from her little ones! I was in grade five again but that
year was easy as I had done it all before, I soon made new friends though,
my best friend was a Ukrainian girl about my age named Mary Woroly.
Teachers
used to come and go every year and some found the older boys very hard
to discipline, there were grades from one to eight with children in age
from six to seventeen or so. My favorite subjects at this stage were spelling,
geography and art, I can't remember ever passing a mathematics exam in
my life! At recess we would sit under trees to eat our lunch and the "Whiskey
Jacks" or Canada Jays as they are properly called would take tit-bits
out of our hands, we played games such as stick and wheel, "tag", "pom-pom-pull
away", "horses" and softball, in winter we played "pie" a lot, in the
fresh snow we made a huge circle and divided it into wedges, then someone
was "it" until another person was tagged, all the players had to stay
inside their "wedge" and if you could get to the centre you were safe.
There
were always times the boys and girls would fight, the boys would bring
dead mice or something to school and chase the girls around with them,
the girls would run to the toilets and as they ran in the boys would throw
the dead object in after them! Mary and I were just tomboys and we'd go
in to get the dead thing to give back to the boys to chase the girls again,
Mary, myself, Bert Bond and Nelson Wright were the terrible foursome,
if we didn't like what the others were playing we would start a game of
tag ourselves or play "ante-i-over". Mary and I obviously didn't fit in
with the other silly things the girls got up to, if the boys were short
of one or two players for softball or "scrub" we would make up the numbers,
we enjoyed being difficult towards the other girls!
As
time went on the children showed me short cuts to school and on the way
to and from we used to have lovely times singing cowboy songs such as
Cowboy Jack, children from outlying farms would gather others as they
went along so we'd generally have a little group when
we got to school. I learned the lot - catching tadpoles in the slough
in the spring, looking for four-leaf clovers in a certain spot in Haschlebacker's
farmyard we had to pass through, Mary had found the patch about as big
around as a small plate and it was all four-leaf-clovers.
In
time Wilber and Era arrived back to the farm so Dad built Grandpa and
Granny a four room house with a cellar under it on their block, at the
same time he also built a stable for Maude because Grandpa was looking
after her for a while. I remember him lifting those big logs into position
by himself putting one end on his shoulder and climbing up the end of
the wall to place it in it's spot, he was so strong and worked so hard,
he used spruce logs with mud, water and straw mixed together to form a
doughy consistency which filled the gaps - "chinks" in the logs, we called
the job "mudding" and it was done every fall and in the spring if needed.
The
mixture was thrown into the chinks with a wooden paddle from the outside
of the house, one year I remember Dad mischievously throwing the mud very
hard where a wide gap was, of course the mud came right through and went
everywhere. Mom was supposed to run when he called to hold a rag on the
inside to catch the mud, but he could hear her coming no matter how quiet
she was and with a fiendish giggle he threw the mud just before she got
there! Much hilarity! I liked to go down into the big cellar there, it
was dark of course and I had to take a light if I was going way back into
it, at the bottom of the stairs sat a large earthenware crock filled with
sauerkraut that I always had to have a taste of and next to it was a crock
of eggs preserved for winter in water-glass, we never kept chickens over
winter as they would have frozen to death so their meat was canned every
fall and new chicks were bought in spring.
On
shelves in the cellar were bottles of preserved meat, fruit and vegetables
and in bins were potatoes, carrots, turnips, etc. that kept fresh through
the winter. It was a family project when sauerkraut was made, the nice
new cabbages were gathered and the outer leaves were trimmed off, a big
well-scrubbed crock, a baseball bat and the cabbage cutter were at the
ready and in the evening after supper Dad was generally the one working
the cutter while Granny would put a layer of cabbage into the bottom of
the crock and Grandpa would pound it with the bat, then Granny would add
a layer of coarse salt and mixed whole spices then another layer of cabbage
and so on as Grandpa was pounding until the juice came up to the top of
the crock, to finish off a plate was put over the cabbage and a well-scrubbed
rock was placed on it to weigh it down then a cloth put over it all. It
was then taken down to the cellar to "cure" and later enjoyed cooked or
cold! The tinned sauerkraut bought in the shops today leaves much to be
desired.
Dad
usually killed a steer and a pig in the fall for winter meat when the
weather started becoming very cold, the meat was cut up and put into a
big wooden container and covered with sawdust and ice so it would keep
all winter. A trip would be made to Ladder Lake where big blocks of ice
were cut with a saw and brought home for the meat box. Granny was given
the cleaned pig's head and feet which she cooked and made into a jellied
meat which we called headcheese and which I could never keep my fingers
out of! Most of our food was of course home-made and so good, the only
things we bought were flour, tea, coffee, sugar, salt and spices.
Aunt
Era kept Rhode Island red chickens and had a fighting rooster, and he
and Grandpa had a continuous running feud, Grandpa could walk well enough
but couldn't lift his feet far above the ground or run (he had crippled
knees and legs from playing football when he was young), so the rooster
thought he was a prime target. Grandpa would use a stick or a garden tool
to fend him off but the funniest was when he used a shovel to lift the
rooster and dunk him in the water barrel, Era was so angry and said he
would drown the bird but I think it was impossible, I've seen him go under
a dozen times on that shovel and come up fighting every time! He never
was cured of the habit but he was one very clean rooster!
Our
clothes were very basic, we had one dress a year to go to church in otherwise
we wore work clothes all the time, on my feet in summer I wore running
shoes or went barefoot and had a pair of sandals for good wear. In winter
I had moccasins made by the local Indians that cost $1.00 a pair, I had
to wear about two to four pair of woollen socks and insoles in them depending
on the cold but they were so comfortable and I loved them. Mom hated the
smell of them because of what was used to tan the skins, one pair of these
would usually last me the winter.
One
year Granny sent away to either Eatons or Simpsons by catalogue and got
me a pair of cowhide moccasins, they were the first and last of that type
I ever wore, nothing more stiff or horrible could be imagined! One time
Granny acquired a sheep's fleece from somewhere, the wool was washed and
carded with handcarders and I helped lay the batts out on a sheet of cloth
till it was completely covered, another sheet was then put over that and
Granny and I tied it with wool to make the first wool quilt I had ever
seen, it was an inspiration to me when we came to Australia and I saw
all the wool here so I've subsequently made lots of doona's!
Memoirs: Beryl A.
(Bock) McPhee
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