Chapter 1 Be Careful What You Wish For Colonel John Graves Simcoe delivered the first valentine card in North America. A century later, another colonel, James Sutherland "Buster" Brown, Simcoe born and bred, drafted Defence Scheme No. 1, the Canadian government's secret 1921 plan to invade key U.S. cities in the event of war. That about covers the claim to fame of Simcoe, Ontario. I was born there when it was a town of six thousand; now it's more than doubled, a bedroom community for Hamilton and Toronto. Simcoe prospered with a rich agricultural base, and tobacco was the big industry when I was a boy. No Ontario town was ever nominated to be sister city to Florence, and there were good reasons why Simcoe was among the nonstarters. Scottish conservatism is as close to the opposite of Florentine culture as can be imagined. Piano lessons and church choirs sufficed as culture, which otherwise had no role in the life of the town. Kids like me avoided Sunday school and regular church attendance. We were unwitting cultural morons who couldn't miss what we never had. As did all heathens, we wallowed in an idyllic freedom. This got a huge boost from the Second World War, which removed innumerable dads and further loosened the controls on our behavior. Domestic life and disciplining kids became, by default, the duty of wives, and wives of that era seldom ruled households harshly. The McCall family was big-five boys and, eventually, one girl: Mike, Hugh, me, twins Tom and Walter, and Chris. I attribute my lifelong shunning of group activities to this. My antipathy took a brief time-out when I was suckered into Lord Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts as a Cub, at the bottom of a hierarchy of ranks not unlike the arrangements in the Vatican. Boy Scouts patiently climbed up in modest increments: at the summit stood the Sea Scouts, as elite as the King's Mounted Household Guards. I never saw a Sea Scout. I still suspect they were a gaudy invention, like Jesus, to keep all Boy Scouts striving. I salivated when I landed on the Sea Scouts section of the official Scouts catalog. What greedy kid wouldn't want that inventory? There were silken neckerchiefs. An over-the-shoulder leather Sam Browne belt. A steel canteen. A second belt around the waist, its clasp ingeniously mating two halves to form the Boy Scouts escutcheon. A small leather case clipped to the belt for fishing lures, small change, the odd whistle or rubber band. A hornpipe dangling from the same belt. Over the left shoulder, a set of semaphore signaling flags in a cylindrical leather case. There were pockets and flaps on the official Sea Scout shirt. Binoculars on a strap slung around the neck. Knee socks. A pair of waterproof Sea Scout brogans. Sewn onto the shirtfront and sleeves, resembling a horde of caterpillars, were cloth Sea Scout badges of merit: bed making, swimming, diving, drowning-cat rescue, tree felling, completion of an anti-seasickness course. Badges commemorating a fire extinguished, a torpedo assembled, a torpedo disassembled. And in the Sea Scout model's hand, a silver whistle so powerful that when blown in Cairo it could be heard in Johannesburg. Only the sons of mining company CEOs, arms dealers, and senior officers of secret banks could afford the complete Sea Scout uniform. I grieved for my fundlessness: my bilious-green, beanie-like peaked cap, cut to the pattern of every English public school boy's cap since Tom Brown's School Days, was my only item of Cubs regalia. Ill fortune soon proved good fortune shortly after my enthusiasm for Lord Baden-Powell's mild outdoor adventuring, feeble at the start, crashed. Our pack leader was exposed as a pederast and fled town on his Harley-Davidson with sidecar. I hadn't the money for Sea Scouts gewgaws, and had already tired of sitting on my haunches in some ratty clubhouse, imitating a talking wolf by shouting, "A-Kay-LUH!" I slipped away. The Cubs cap hung around the house, a reminder of the dangers of joining up, until someone (me, legend has it) fed it one day to Billy Perkins's dog, Tip. The toys and tools of a happy boyhood circa 1943 demanded improvisation more than cash. While American kids feasted on tons of magnificent plastic junk, Canada couldn't produce toys in wartime conditions beyond a handful of crude pot-metal Hurricanes. In Simcoe, fifty cents could buy the indiscriminate kid a tommy gun cut out of a chunk of wood that resembled a folded umbrella. Some of our improvisations: The green steel pot Mother used to boil potatoes made a perfect Japanese Imperial Army helmet for Pacific jungle skirmishes in the lilac bushes. The flour canister in the kitchen became a snowbound hell for the five plastic British soldiers-unfazed by their gas masks-sent to ambush Nazis in the wastes of Norway. Mother later discovered a Brit soldier buried deep in the flour, perfectly preserved. Rich brown horse chestnuts, tied by strings to hankies, subbed for a band of Wehrmacht parachutists floating down from a second-story sunporch window to land on Crete. A working cap gun bestowed prestige-and what felt like real killing power-on its owner. A mouth-made firing noise might spray a foe with spittle, but no firing noise from a human source could beat the three or four eardrum-puncturing bang-bang-bang-bangs in a cap-gun blast. A functioning gun cost an eight-year-old partisan big money. A discarded cap gun retrieved from the battlefield, sans trigger and missing its fake-pearl celluloid handle, was as close as I ever came. Even rarer than a working gun were the dirty-red rolls of caps required to make it go bang! and emit an acrid aroma. These were forever in short supply. Maybe the army maintained an elite Cap Gun Brigade that claimed top priority-another damn casualty of wartime restrictions. Weekly Saturday matinees ran war movies. Fifty-two weeks' worth per year exhausted the supply, leaving us to sit through Durango Kid westerns, Boston Blackie detective junk, and the odd stale box-office hit, usually a musical. In retrospect, while certain Hollywood war flicks charged the imagination and lifted the soul, many were so cheaply made that footage of a World War I Spad was suddenly spliced into the frenzy of World War II dogfights. The best war movies were British: Target for Tonight, In Which We Serve, Five Graves to Cairo, et al. Authenticity was the difference. They seemed more realistic than the stagey, broad American fare like Edge of Darkness or Desperate Journey. Toboggans rocketed us down Simcoe's steepest grade, off the first tee of the Norfolk Country Club. Snowshoes had been supplied by our boisterous cousins, the Stewart boys. I never got good at snowshoeing, which requires control and is more like walking hard than sliding along on a pair of skis. A bunch of skis reposed in the shadows but were seldom used, because Simcoe lacked the gradients they were meant for. The substantial Jackson house sat on a hill directly facing our peeling stucco home across Talbot Street. Daredevil kids lugged their sleds up to the Jacksons' front lawn, then dived downhill belly-first on the sleds. A Flexible Flyer, with glass-smooth steel runners, was the ride of choice. Victory went to the sledboy who eked out energy enough to keep his momentum as he reached Talbot Street and his path flattened out. He summoned the last erg of sledpower as he and his mount transected the slippery street and crossed the finish line in a controlled crash. On winter afternoons in Simcoe, darkness fell around four o'clock with an almost audible thud. Cars, headlights blazing, arrowed past. No walkie-talkies linked sledboy and headquarters. A shouted "Look out!" curbed-or tried to curb-sled and pilot as the operator mentally calculated time and distance, how many seconds would be left after the sled burst through the snow-shrouded bushes to lie squarely in the path of the onrushing Studebaker or Nash. That no sled ever collided with a moving vehicle was pure luck-and light traffic, is my theory. Hockey was a cultural signifier in Canada, and a further reason to not be American. The winter pastime made perfect sense: a sport for fans who adored the fast and graceful game while also secretly adoring the cretinous physical violence inherent in it. Canadian hockey fans had it both ways. The national pastime was crucial to the Canadian sense of identity. Playing hockey was a ritual like the Japanese tea ceremony, except for the broken noses. Everybody wanted to play, but there was only one indoor rink in town, and it was devoted to skating parties for people who probably wouldn't leave tracks of blood on the ice. Although Simcoe produced NHL players, few of them were graduates of ponds and backyard rinks. There were twenty wannabe players for every gifted one: How could anyone stand out when pickup games regularly placed thirty skaters on the ice-on both teams? For every ace-some lucky bastard who actually had a puck on his stick for a fleeting instant before vanishing under the human wave of defensemen-there were scores of wretches, drafted by neither team, who had no stick or who couldn't find, borrow, or afford a pair of skates. I came perilously close to being a hockey have-not. The solution, for me, was more like a part solution: in the pile of skates jumbled into a small mountain just inside the kitchen door in the McCall household at 101 Union Street (we moved there in 1942), I literally stumbled on a pair that fit. I hurriedly laced them up in case the owner happened by, and hobbled out in that weird wobble-walk even NHL players had to perform when negotiating a surface other than ice. I skated in circles, to demonstrate skills my older brothers had ridiculed me for. They ridiculed again. My newfound skates were for a girl. I should have detected that fact by looking at them: White. With tiny jingling bells. The front lawn of 101 Union Street was big, but more important, it was level. Run a hose over a rectangular patch of dead grass long enough and by next morning there was a sheet of ice, a hockey rink (in Simcoe parlance, a hockey "cushion," one thing it definitely was not). Snow was piled around the cushion as the boundary. What in November had been a gleaming white border carefully leveled to a uniform height was by early May a dark gray ruin of unevenly melting ice boulders. Growing up during World War II made my contemporaries and me richer for the experience. I was four years old at the start and had just attained my first decade when they finally pinned and hog-tied Nazi Germany. There were twenty-point newspaper headlines, fire trucks marauding down side streets blasting their horns and jangling their bells, and a school shutdown. It was a day so hysterically noisy that no American would believe it was coming out of Canada. That gaudy episode, in a culture allergic to overstatement, shook even a ten-year-old kid. My classmates, neighbors, and friends were glad to hear that Hitler was kaput-although that villain out of central casting left a gaping hole in our schoolyard pantheon of evil. What the war meant to most Simcoe kids was the nonstop entertainment of movies, radio dramas, comic books, and Terry and the Pirates comic strips. One strip starred a freelance squadron of hero pilots who flew a matching set of Grumman Skyrockets, elevated by the sorcery of fiction from the real-life scrap heap to murderously fast, maneuverable fighter planes. The war was a tumultuous party, exciting enough to produce a prepuberty high. No wonder every shortpants warrior was secretly dreading a world at peace. What would life in Simcoe be without the drama of a really smashing war? No more scrap drives, blood banks, Armistice Day parades. Worse yet for the platoon of neighborhood kids in volunteer armies, runty dogfaces all. No more campaigns fought in the war zone of the McCall grounds: thick bushes, copses, alleyways, the broad lawn favoring suicide charges by classmates-turned-Japanese soldiers screaming, "Banzai!" until mowed down by two Yanks-for-the-day and their imaginary machine gun firing from a nest obscured by a fanciful stack of sandbags. We fought an equal-opportunity war. British commandos or Afrika Korps tank drivers, Axis regiments bent on killing innocent civilians in Singapore or whatever Allied heroes were featured in last Saturday's World War II matinee, against a handful of Axis rats stealthily nesting in the leafy umbrella tree edging the side porch that doubled as Allied HQ and my home. Nazis and Imperial Armed Forces constituted ninety-nine percent of all enemies fought and clobbered from the start to the finish of WWII. Dad was home on weekends from his job in Toronto from 1937 until he joined the RCAF and shipped overseas in 1941 at age thirty-one, when I was about six. He returned to Simcoe at thirty-three, battered by depression after a ringside view of the war, especially the death over France in mid-1943 of his closest friend, Wing Commander Chris Bartlett, on a night bombing raid. Nerves scraped raw, he underwent a brief recuperation at home, then went back to Toronto and a civil service job. Back to being an absentee father. A distant figure, anxious to see his brood grow-as long as we didn't spoil his weekend golfing dates. He was no hypocrite. He never pretended to be a doting dad. I hadn't expected much and wasn't disappointed. We barely knew each other, then and in the years to come. This mild estrangement, and his absence from my daily life, allowed the freedom I had come to take for granted to continue. He could radiate what felt like hostility, Mr. Murdstone barely tolerating Oliver Twist. His father, Walter Sydney McCall, would leave his family for months to go adventuring-i.e., gambling-turning up in parlors as far away as Texas. Dad's strict moral code was probably fashioned at this point. He was not amused by his father's exploits and held a grudge, spurning him in later years. And as his mother's loyal defender-protector, he was steadfast until she died of cancer in 1938. Dad married my mother, Helen "Peg" Gilbertson, in 1930. The core mystery remains: Why did they have half a dozen kids? Dad had to work 120 miles away to earn enough to make ends meet, starting a split family life that lasted from 1937 to 1947. By sheer numbers, six kids means family life. In spirit, we were barely a family. Particularly when it was clear that he didn't even like kids. Mother paid the bill-six kids to care for, no money for anything except the kids, and the daily burden of heavy housework with no help. Worst of all, the darkness of loneliness. Drinking was a side door for a bit of relief. She was petite and not particularly robust to begin with. She was a living billboard for nice folk making themselves dizzy-drunk, and soon enough, full-fledged alcoholics. Neither Dad nor a town harboring its fair share of serious addicts lifted a finger to intervene. She graduated to alcoholism as a way of life, further tearing apart the pretense that this was a normal family raising normal kids. Excerpted from How Did I Get Here?: A Memoir by Bruce McCall All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
