Chapter 3: Point Edward
My parents were married in 1938 and moved into a place on Gunn Street in Whitney Pier. After I was born they moved to a bungalow in Sydney River, along Kings Road. To get to this small house you had to cross a steep embankment, and a set of railroad tracks. My uncle Don likes to tell the story about his older brother, Albert, driving into the ditch as he navigated the steep embankment to Kings Road.
With the outbreak of World War II, three of my father's brothers, Donald, Howard, and Wilbert, joined the Army and went overseas. Many years later, in a conversation with my uncle Howard, I asked him about the extent his battlefield action in the tank corps. He said, with a self-effacing grin, "We lost a few hatches."
When the uncles went off to war my family moved to 5 East Street, to help my grandmother, Sadie.
When my sister, Judy, turned 5 she attended Ashby School. My grandmother's younger sister, Cassie, was my sister's teacher. My father's younger sister, Marie, the only girl in the family, took my sister on the bus with her. When the bus near the school, Judy got off and Marie stayed on to go to work at a wholesale company on George Street in Sydney. The principal's daughter, Edwina Duguid, was in grade nine and she and her friend, Marjorie MacLean, accompanied my sister on the bus back to Whitney Pier. My sister got off the bus at the intersection of Victoria Road and Henry Street and walked home to East Street. Remember, I'm talking about a five-year-old girl navigating highways and byways, riding buses, and attending school, traveling to and fro five days a week: no helicopter parents in those days!
I was, perhaps, three years old when my family moved to a small cottage on my grandfather's farm, in the village of Point Edward. We lived there from 1944 until the summer of 1948. My grandfather, Richard Rudderham, 'Grandpa', which we pronounced as 'Grampa' and my grandmother Susan, "Nana", lived in the big white house on the farm. They had nine children, five boys and four girls, one of the girls, Mildred Elizabeth, the oldest girl, born in 1916, was my mother. Only one of Richard and Susan's children, my uncle Donald, the youngest, survives to this day. He was born in 1927.
In the attic in the old house there were scrapbooks of the Dionne Quintuplets and the Princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret. There was also a picture of the early Toronto Maple Leafs with Turk Broda as the goalie. There was a treasure chest of wartime letters from my uncles overseas. They were written on flimsy blue paper that was both writing paper and envelope. I can recall my sister and I rooting around in the attic and reading from those letters.
I don't remember moving into the white, shingled, two bedroom bungalow my father built on the farm. It was nestled in a clearing surrounded by cherry trees and I can remember my father opening a window at the back of the house and reaching out to pluck a cherry from a tree branch.
We sometimes found a dead "wild canary" in the attic and would hold a great funeral with a matchbox as a coffin.
Our house had a large front window and a verandah with steps leading to a large open field where my grandfather had a large vegetable garden. In full bloom, the garden contained row upon row of potatoes, beets, carrots, turnips, corn, cabbage.
We had electricity and a radio but no refrigerator. I can remember standing in the living room while listening to Hank Williams sing Tennessee Waltz.
Farmhouses had root cellars and I remember the one at the main farmhouse where root vegetables were stored for winter. Our bungalow didn't have a cellar and sometimes in the summertime, my father buried a large crockpot where root vegetables could be kept. Another common practice was to harvest winter ice and store it in the barn under piles of straw. Thus preserved, ice kept milk cool in the hot days of summer. The farm had a dairy with a cream separator and a butter churn and, as children, we were often enlisted to help separate cream and churn butter.
