I'm the one in the top right corner.
To sum up my childhood in one word, I would pick the word ‘fortunate’.
I was adopted four days after my birth into a middle-class family with three older sisters, thirteen, twelve and seven years older than me, so you might say I had four mothers and a father, probably spoiled from all the attention and love. I don’t remember those early years though I always remember feeling content and happy. I don’t recall ever being spanked but I must have been on one occasion because my mother used to tell me an anecdote of my early wit when I said to her: ‘You spanked me harder than I was bad’. Any such correction must have ceased before I was six or I would have remembered it.
We lived in a quaint, little house in Niagara Falls where my father was an engineer for the American Can Company.
My first school, Princess Margaret elementary, was only four blocks away. I went to kindergarten and started first grade there. I recall very little of it but walking home one day with a pack of kids I was dared to step into what looked like a puddle near the sidewalk. It was actually a water filled hole three feet deep and I fell in up to my neck. Arriving home, all wet and dirty, I was proud to tell my sisters and mom that my hat was still clean.
Another incident happened when an older boy from down the street, Nicky, received a B.B. gun from his father at much too young an age. They were Eastern Europeans, newly arrived, with different customs in such matters. This boy, on receiving said gun decided to chase me down the street, shooting at me, cowboy and Indian style. My father was in our front yard and when he saw this grabbed the gun from Nicky and broke it in two over his knee. The boy went home crying, carrying the two pieces, but nothing ensued.
I suppose if we’d stayed there I would have passed an uneventful, probably bullied and miserable childhood, as I was meek by nature, and many of the neighborhood kids, ignorant ruffians, probably ended up with their just deserts in adulthood, with a petty job in a small town, with slight experience of the world or life, an avatar and scripted life determined by T.V. programing.
But my father had talents which the company recognized. He was promoted and sent as an advisor to a partner company in France, newly acquired, called Sudry. It was located in the mid-sized town of Nantes in the middle of France, and he was sent there for three years to help them coordinate their machine shop with the American ones, though he knew not ten words of French when we boarded plane.
So into this strange land we flew, five of us, as my oldest sister Sylvia stayed behind, having just starting nursing school in Kingston. Nantes was a provincial city with strange sights and sounds and open-air markets very different from anything we’d ever seen, and completely French, a language none of us knew, even slightly.
I was sent to an all-boys school right away, run by nuns, ‘Les Enfants Nantais’. The male principle of the school greeted me the first day. He knew perhaps a dozen words of English. He led me by the hand to my class and my nun teacher wearing an odd white hat with wings (like the flying nun) who knew no English, and twenty French boys, all staring at me strangely as I took an empty desk. But in that environment I assimilated their language very quickly, out of necessity, and I was exactly the right age and in the right place to do so with my pliable six-year-old mind. They were just learning the alphabet and how to read. It was the perfect storm. Within weeks I was playing in the schoolyard with my new friends and talking with them, in French, a little more every day, without a hint of English in my pronunciation. A few months later I was thinking most of my thoughts in French.
On the first day at school an odd thing happened. At lunchtime we were led to a large playground and left alone. A rough looking boy named ‘Pierre’ walked up to me and pushed me on my back. I got up and he started repeatedly kicking me in the shins with his heavy shoes while the other boys formed a circle and watched. I danced around a bit to avoid the kicks, but then I made a fist and smacked him square in the jaw, knocking him down. To the other kids this was a novelty unseen. They always fought by kicking. But Pierre got up, smiled and from then on we were best friends and I was accepted into the group. I never had another fight again. In three months no one could tell me from the other boys.
My sister Paddy also learned quickly, being thirteen, and we were soon translators for mother as she went to the open market down the street to shop for food. My sister Janet only stayed there a year with us. She must have learned some but followed her sister’s career, going to college in Ontario at eighteen. My father had to pick up the language at his work slowly and with a strong English accent. But my mother, with her two ready translators beside her, picked up very little. My family met a few English families living there, one Scottish with two boys my age, and a few French families with the parents knowing English, while I did fine with their children knowing French. We had frequent outings and dinners together, beach houses to visit in the summers for weeks (those who knew English were always upper class and fairly rich). We also took trips by car to Austria, Switzerland and Italy in our Peugeot station wagon, a rich and vivid life for a boy to experience.
At first my father drove me to the school. It was about a mile away, (my mother didn’t drive till she was forty-five). But after a few months and I knew my way home I walked both ways in all seasons, wearing the required school uniform, short pants, and it took a good half hour. I mention this because I really enjoyed the walks along the city streets, looking in the store windows, or just daydreaming. And in winter my legs became inured to cold. To this day my legs never get cold in the coldest weather. It also instilled a love of hiking which probably gave me good health.
One thing in the French educational system that we don’t have, is that it fosters competition in a good way, from the very start. Each week one student in each class would be singled out and awarded a ribbon for some piece of work, not only for neatness of expression but penmanship, because they valued that. He would be brought up before the class and the ribbon hung around his neck by the teacher, to be worn for that one day, a prize of honor. Now the teachers were wise enough to make that ribbon go to almost every boy at least once in the year, to encourage everyone, though they were also fair enough to mark the best students the most.
Once a week we got a special cake at lunch, at a long table, one for each class. The cake contained a twenty-centime coin. The teacher would slice up the cake, dole out the pieces and one lucky boy would get it in his slice. Such little tricks kept us happy, for we had little minds.
Television in France at this time (1961-1963) only aired a few hours a day with one state run channel. Children’s programs were limited to a few hours Thursday afternoons which we had off from school, along with Sundays. Saturday was a full school day. This three-year long absence of television in those formative years broke any habit or interest in watching it, for years after my return to the T.V. addicted norm an American youth in the sixties. I was an avid watcher of silly shows in Canada before I crossed the ocean. But now I learned to occupy the few hours before and after dinner with far better activities than passive viewing.
