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Here is part of a piece called “Grandfathers,” part of what my father wrote about his own grandfather Thomas Laidlaw, the same Thomas who had come to Morris at the age of seventeen and been appointed to do the cooking in the shanty.
He was a frail white-haired old man, with thin longish hair and a pale skin. Too pale, because he was anemic. He took Vita-Ore, a much-advertised patent medicine. It must have helped, because he lived into his eighties… When I first became aware of him he had retired to the village and leased the farm to my father. He would visit the farm, or me, as I thought, and I would visit him. We would go for walks. There was a sense of security. He talked much more easily than Dad but I don’t recall that we conversed at any length. He explained things much as if he were discovering them himself at the same time. Perhaps he was in a way looking at the world from a child’s viewpoint.
He never spoke harshly, he never said, “Get down off that fence,” or “Mind that puddle.” He preferred to let nature take its course so I could learn that way. The freedom of action inspired a certain amount of caution. There was no undue sympathy when one did get hurt.
We took slow staid walks because he couldn’t go very fast. We gathered stones with fossils of weird creatures of another age, for this was gravelly country in which such stones might be found. We each had a collection. I inherited his when he died and kept both assortments for many years. They were a link with him with which I was very reluctant to part.
We walked along the nearby railway tracks to the huge embankment carrying the tracks over another railway and a big creek. There was a giant stone and cement arch over these. One could look down hundreds of feet to the railway below. I was back there lately. The embankment has shrunk strangely; the railway no longer runs along it. The C.P.R. is still down there but not nearly so far down and the creek is much smaller…
We went to the planing mill nearby and watched the saws whirling and whining. These were the days of all sorts of gingerbread woodwork used for ornamenting the eaves of houses, the verandahs, or any place that could be decorated. There were all sort of discarded pieces with interesting designs, which one could take home.
In the evening we went to the station, the old Grand Trunk, or the Butter and Eggs, as it was known in London. One could put an ear to the track and hear the rumble of the train, far away. Then a distant whistle, and the air became tense with anticipation. The whistles became closer and louder and finally the train burst into view. The earth shook, the heavens all but opened, and the huge monster slid screaming with tortured brakes to a stop…
Here we got the evening daily paper. There were two London papers, the Free Press and the ’Tiser (Advertiser). The ’Tiser was Grit and the Free Press was Tory.
There was no compromise about this. Either you were right or you were wrong. Grandfather was a good Grit of the old George Brown school and took the ’Tiser, so I also have become a Grit and have remained one up to now… And so in this best of all systems were governments chosen according to the number of little Grits or little Tories who got old enough to vote…
The conductor grasped the handhold by the steps. He shouted, “Bort!” and waved his hand. The steam shot down in jets, the wheels clanked and groaned and moved forward, faster and faster, past the way scales, past the stockyards, over the arches, and grew smaller and smaller like a receding galaxy until the train disappeared in to the unknown world to the north…
Once there was a visitor, my namesake from Toronto, a cousin of Grandfather. The great man was reputed to be a millionaire, but he was disappointing, not at all impressive, only a slightly smoother and more polished version of Grandfather. The two old men sat under the maples in front of our house and talked. Probably they talked of the past as old men will. I kept discreetly in the background. Grandpa didn’t say outright but delicately hinted that children were to be seen and not heard.
Sometimes they talked in the broad Scots of the district from which they came. It was not the Scots of the burring R’s which we hear from the singers and comedians but was rather soft and plaintive, with a lilt like Welsh or Swedish.
That is where I feel it best to leave them-my father a little boy, not venturing too close, and the old men sitting through a summer afternoon on wooden chairs placed under one of the great benevolent elm trees that used to shelter my grandparents’ farmhouse. There they spoke the dialect of their childhood-discarded as they became men-which none of their descendants could understand.
Part two. Home
Fathers
All over the countryside, in spring, there was a sound that was soon to disappear. Perhaps it would have disappeared already if it were not for the war. The war meant that the people who had the money to buy tractors could not find any to buy, and the few who had tractors already could not always get the fuel to run them. So the farmers were out on the land with their horses for the spring ploughing, and from time to time, near and far, you could hear them calling out their commands, in which there would be degrees of encouragement, or impatience, or warning. You couldn’t hear the exact words, any more than you could make out what the seagulls on their inland flights were saying, or follow the arguments of crows. From the tone of voice, though, you could generally tell which words were swearing.
With one man it was all swearing. It didn’t matter which words he was using. He could have been saying “butter and eggs” or “afternoon tea,” and the spirit that spilled out would have been the same. As if he was boiling over with a scalding rage and loathing.
His name was Bunt Newcombe. He had the first farm on the county road that curved southwest from town. Bunt was probably a nickname given him at school for going around with his head lowered, ready to bump and shove anybody aside. A boyish name, a holdover, not really adequate to his behavior, or to his reputation, as a grown man.
People sometimes asked what could be the matter with him. He wasn’t poor-he had two hundred acres of decent land, and a banked barn with a peaked silo, and a drive shed, and a well-built square red-brick house. (Though the house, like the man himself, had a look of bad temper. There were dark-green blinds pulled most of the way, or all the way, down on the windows, no curtains visible, and a scar along the front wall where the porch had been torn away. The front door which must at one time have opened onto that porch now opened three feet above weeds and rubble.) And he was not a drunk or a gambler, being too careful of his money for that. He was mean in both senses of the word. He mistreated his horses, and it goes without saying that he mistreated his family.
In the winter he took his milk cans to town on a sleigh pulled by a team of horses-snowplows for the county roads being in short supply then, just like tractors. This was at the time in the morning when everybody was walking to school, and he never slowed down as other farmers did to let you jump on the back of the sleigh and catch a ride. He picked up the whip instead.
Mrs. Newcombe was never with him, on the sleigh or in the car. She walked to town, wearing old-fashioned galoshes even when the weather got warm, and a long drab coat and a scarf over her hair. She mumbled hello without ever looking up, or sometimes turned her head away, not speaking at all. I think she was missing some teeth. That was more common then than it is now, and it was more common also for people to make plain a state of mind, in their speech and dress and gestures, so that everything about them said, I know how I should look and behave and if I don’t do it that’s my own business, or, I don’t care, things have gone too far with me, think what you like.