The Serial: Far From the Rowan Tree Day 76

It was an attractive spot and the lots were not expensive. The children needed minimum clothes and no shoes

Ronald’s father added: “In fact, anything she wants she just has to ask Harold for and she gets it but she grumbles all the time about how awful Canada is.

“You, on the other hand, in this rickety house with all these kids and very little money, are as happy as sand boys.”

One Saturday we took him up to Lake Nakamun with us. It was a sunny day in early summer with the temperature in the 70s.

Ronald had given his father a small thermometer – one that Empire Real Estate were giving out as advertising gimmicks. Father-in-law had it in his top pocket.

He sat in the shade beside the new cabin that had been built for us at the lake side. He took the thermometer out of his top pocket. Warmed by his body heat it registered 92 degrees. He was most impressed. “92 in the shade,” he said. “That’s not bad.” After a month father-in-law left us to fly off to New York to visit a brother he hadn’t seen for 40 years.

‘’Are you sure you’ll manage on your own?” Ronald said. “Of course I will, laddie.” His tone was firm and so he left us. We had big decisions to make.

Attractive

Henry left us at the beginning of July. He had been with us for almost a year. His work had come to an end in the yard but he had managed to get another job, further south at Blairmore, on the pipeline.

We didn’t advertise for another lodger as we were uncertain of our movements after the summer months.

Besides, Ronald was making a bit more money now and I had more than plenty to do, with all the children off school for the summer vacation.

Every weekend we went to Nakamun. The cabin we now had at the lake was a simple but attractive structure made of wood but as yet without furniture of any kind.

We missed our white tent in the woods. We had been more comfortable there. Now we slept on sleeping bags on the wooden floor of the cabin which was raised on stilts at the waterside.

Sometimes an Arctic wind swept underneath and seeped through the floorboards. However it was safer than the tent in that marauding bears were less likely to break in. If the nights could be cold, the days were always bright and warm.

It was a time of great freedom for the children – a time of sunlight and humming birds, shoals of silver fish, sun-diamonds in the water, the rustle of green leaves, woodsmoke and the sound of happy men with axes cutting down trees in their lots preparing ground for their cabins.

Quite a few more were sold that summer. It was an attractive spot and the lots were not expensive. The children needed minimum clothes and no shoes.

Grant lay a lot in his hammock stretched between two birch trees. I had to keep a watchful eye on Mahri-Louise.

Water fascinated her but also made her dizzy. She had to be kept away from the water’s edge unless someone was with her.

Freedom

Weekdays back in Edmonton, when the children were all on holiday, were not quite as bad as I had anticipated. The sunny days found them always outside playing with all the other children.

There was a great sense of freedom for children in Canadian towns. They went barefoot by choice, loving to feel the hot sidewalks under their active feet.

For a couple of weeks Ronnie, now four years old, went to a summer school. He had made friends with the three little girls next door who were looked after by their grandparents.

They were a Pentecostal family and their church was running a summer school for children. The Foxes had asked me if they could take Ronnie along with them.

“The girls sure want him to go with them,” Mrs Fox said to me one day. Ronnie liked the idea. He was dying to go to something called school like the big boys.

We got him a school satchel which made him feel on top of the world and off he would go every morning with Mrs Fox and the girls, his red hair gleaming in the early sunlight.

He wasn’t shy and enjoyed the summer school immensely. This dramatic religion suited his dramatic temperament.

Religion wasn’t out of fashion in Edmonton but many people didn’t worry about which church they went to.

Many had no great allegiance to any church. Carmen, a Catholic, didn’t mind at all when her boys were determined to go to the Presbyterian Church with our boys. Rupert Street Presbyterian Church was close by and had a good Sunday school.

Children of several denominations went because it was close and accessible with a pleasant young minister in charge.

Top salesman

In August Ronald was top salesman of the month for the second time running. Always at the end of the month Empire Real Estate held a steak and beans dinner for its salesmen.

Top salesman and wife got steak – the others got beans. Ronald had always refused to take me to these dos. He could see through Empire Real Estate tricks – get the wives into competition for the steak.

Not that it was the steak they cared about but the honour of their husband being the top salesman. The theory behind it was that the women would harangue the men to work harder.

Ronald would not go along with that way of working. “I may have to be humiliated into eating beans but I am not having my wife treated that way,” was the stance Ronald took.

“I am employed by Empire Real Estate – my wife is not,” he told them and so I never went.

The steak and beans dinner was held at the end of August. When he came home from the event Ronald told me of all the razzmatazz.

“Worse than usual,” he said. “One of the head bummers stood up and said what a marvellous firm Empire Real Estate is, the greatest in Alberta if not the whole of Canada, how well it had done over the last few years with its wonderful salesmen of which, I tonight, was the shining example.

“He told us what an honour it was to work for such a firm.” (More tomorrow.)