14 A Day I don’t Want to Repeat Ever Again

 One of the highlights of my year at the Read Island School was when I played Little Black Sambo in the school Christmas play and wore a black stocking pulled over my head, with only my face showing.  For hair, black wool yarn was pocked through to resemble the curly hair of a little black boy. My hands and face were covered with charcoal.  I can still remember one of my key lines.  “I love pancakes” I used to love being in school plays as a child.

One thing about that school year that I will never forget and it had nothing to do with school except that is where it took place.  When I first realized something was out of place it was about an hour before the closing bell rang.  I asked Miss Evans if I could go to the out-house which was out behind the school, and I got there none to soon.  I made it back to the school and was more then ready for another trip when the closing bell finally rang.  This time I retched my guts out.  My sister, David, Ronnie, and I had barely gotten on our bicycles for the ride home when I hastily got off my bicycle violently sick again. This happed so repeatedly that I became too weak to ride my bicycle any farther.  I got home through the kindness of some acquaintances the Upton’s.  Mr. Upton who took me home in his small open boat and I can still remember sitting on the seat with my head resting on the gunwale of the boat retching in agony the rest of my way home.

My mother thanked Mr. Upton for his kindness.  And shaking with fever and so weak I could hardly walk; she brought me into the house where I immediately hung my head over the toilet to continue my retching.  It was some hours later before I started feeling well enough to climb in to the tub for a warm bath, and oh it felt so good as it pulled the poison out of me.  This was one experience that I hoped I would never have to go through again.  The only explanation for this episode was possibly from a venison sandwich that I had eaten for my lunch.  The question still remains, why did my sister Dawna escape, as she had the same lunch.

13 Read Island School Days

 As a kid my schooling began when I was 6 years old, but normal it was not.  My first year was at a little log cabin school right in the middle of the island.  It had been around some time even by ‘44 when I attended, and by then it was very old and run down, as it had been built by the first crop of settlers to homestead on Read Island.  There was only a half dozen kids counting all of the grades and one of them was a native lad by the name of Gordie McMillan, he would come up to you put his arm around you like a buddy and then unaware to you, place his leg behind you and flip you over on your back.

Because of the difficulty of getting to school that first year, I only attended briefly before my mother pulled me out.  The half-mile by boat and a mile down a narrow trail, through the dark forest, infested with cougars was more then my mother could handle.  She did not want her little Bobby eaten by a cougar. This caused the decision to send my sister and I off to our grandparents, and it was not until our move to Bird Cove that our schooling began on Read Island. 

I will never forget my first full year at the Read Island school with Miss Evans, an old maid schoolteacher who read from the Bible every morning but for story time after our noon lunch break she would read adventure stories and exciting accounts from the Greek mythologies which I found quite fascinating.

That year we all played our own version of football a game we really loved to play except for Ian who was different and didn’t fit in.   I have often thought about Ian over the years.  You see Ian today would be considered mentally handicapped or we might say had a learning disability.  I have felt sorry for Ian but realized that I learned a valuable lesson about accepting the less fortunate because he came into my life.  Today we used terms that show respect for those thus challenged but back then he was referred to as an idiot as he had a pointed head and would easily lose control, and in his excitement poke his fingers up his nose and whinny like a horse.  Because of this he was subject to much teasing which bothered me and I vowed to respect those less fortunate then myself.

The school had an old gramophone that we all loved to play.  As it was a one-room schoolhouse we could only play the gramophone during the noon hour.  We all loved to gather round and play the half dozen or so records that we had but the one we used to play over and over again was “Love Letters in the Sand.”  As the school had no electricity, in order to get the gramophone to work you had to wind it up with a crank. The tone arm had a needle the size of a darning needle and the music came out of a large built in horn, it is amazing to me that it made music at all.  I thought it was a cool machine.

12 Finally a Logger, and Not Just a Logger's Son

The summer I turned nine was a memorable point in my life because this was the year my sister and I had just come home from the year of school spent with my grandparents at Mission. This was the first time my dad gave me the opportunity to work in the woods. My dad had struck out on his own, inviting my uncle Irwin and a friend of theirs Jim Lambert, to become his partners in a company that was to eventually be called “Bird Cove Logging”. This was driven from necessity as Forest Lambert the son-in-law of the Tanaka's, the family that had rescued our family from the brink of poverty, had forced the company into bankruptcy.  Forest had to take over the running of the camp when his in-laws were hauled off to a concentration camp in central BC, because they were of Japanese decent. Forest was a good man but not good at managing a logging company, and now Dad was without work.

Dad and his partners were able to locate an old steam donkey, which even then was obsolete. The old steam pot was still in running condition, and could it really haul, logs that is. The one major drawback this machine had was that it had a voracious appetite for wood. This kept one man busy with a power saw cutting firewood.

To say my dad made me cut wood for a steam donkey at eight years of age would not be telling the truth, but I do remember him giving me the handles of an old Mall power saw, and a monster it was, with a cutting blade about 5 feet long. I remember him starting the cut and them giving me the saw to hold. It just about rattled my teeth out, but it was enough to infect me with the wood virus and eventually I became one of the logger’s elite brigade, known as fallers.

Not only was I given a chance at running a power saw when I was only eight, but also my first job in the woods.  I was an eight year-old whistle-punk. The whistle-punk was the guy who relayed the signal from the chocker-man to the man running the steam donkey.  This was a very important job because if the signals were not given correctly, the “chocker-man” could get killed.  If the “chocker-man” hollered one “Hey” the whistle punk would jerk the wire once and if the “but-rigging” was stopped it would go but if going, it would stop.  The wire indirectly activated a horn that the “donkey-puncher” could hear. The pay was theoretically $1 per hour, but being the boss’s son was not always a good thing because getting paid was dependent on the availability of funds after all of the bills were paid. I do remember, however, of getting paid at least once as a kid and of buying myself a winter parka and presents for the rest of the family as it was Christmas time.

Steam donkey that Joy Lambert operated

11 Angels Must be for Real, But not David

 It was about two years later after we had moved from the head of Evans Bay to Bird Cove Bay on Read Island, and shortly after my sister and I had returned from living with Grandma Betts, that the three of us spent the next few summers swimming every afternoon as the tide came in. The operative word here is swim, meaning none of us new how.  But we used to have a great time playing in the salt water in front of our house and around the next bay by ourselves, out of site from both our mothers. The beach went out for about a quarter mile and it was mostly a black gooey mud, which made a squishy sucking sound when you walked and was good at sucking gumboots right off your feet.  Before you knew it you were walking with only your socks in the black gooey ooze.  The mud also made for great mud fights, between David, Dawna and I. Nobody ever won but it was sure fun to sling great gobs of the gooey black stuff at one another.  The best thing however was that when the tide went out the mud got really hot by the sun.  When the oncoming tide rolled over the hot mud it raised the cold salt water to bathtub temperatures, and it was lovely to play in.  And play we did on old logs and pieces of wood and such, making rafts to push around with poles.

I always was somewhat envious of David as in my mind he was a bit more daring them I was and he was also a better aim with a rock, and that bugged me. I had proof of that and a scar to prove it. Well before I knew it he had taught himself to swim, before I did, and that really bothered me too. Before to long Dawna had taught herself to swim also, and here I was still too afraid to put my face in the water.  At this point I was feeling a bit negative about the whole thing but still afraid to put my head under the water, when as luck would have it I fell off my raft head first into the water and came up swimming.  I wish all my prayers were answered that easily.

David was really not a bad kid but was the kind of kid that would get into trouble mostly because he never thought of the consequences.

One day when Dawna, David and I were playing outside.  David comes over to my sister and told her to put her hand in his pocket, and feel the little mouse.  Dawna not thinking trustingly did so, and quickly pulled her hand out and ran home and told mom what she had found and it wasn’t a mouse.  Mother immediately told my Aunt, and did David ever get in trouble and a lecture on what nice boys should and should not do to or with girls.  David never did do anything close to that again.  Of course this was a big deal in my mother’s eyes as even legitimate sex was only to be tolerated.  I think she had sex three times, one for each of us kids.

Even though we don’t keep in touch to often I still visit David from time to time, I like to think that because of me he turned out OK, or maybe I should say in spite of me.