Suffer the Children....
When I was a child my parents who were immigrants from Europe, lived with me in a rented flat in an inner-city house on Manning Avenue in Toronto. As a child it did not occur to me that we were not owners of the house, although I was aware that another family lived in the downstairs of the house. My parents rented a small kitchen at the back of the second floor, next to which was the bathroom which all the inhabitants of the house used. Next to the bathroom was a very small room which was my bedroom, later shared by a sister younger than me by four years, and next to that room a larger one at the front of the house which was my parents' bedroom. That bedroom had a radio in it and on Friday nights we would all gather around it to listen to Friday-night radio dramas. The little kitchen was where we spent most of our time. There was another room at the front of the house, also rented out, usually to older single men.By today's living standards my family would have been considered to be economically disadvantaged. To my recollection I was never hungry. I did become aware, as time went by that the clothing I wore was donated by friends of my parents whose own children had outgrown them. I also became aware that I had very few toys, other than a few which were similarly donated. That small house on Manning Avenue housed a family of two adults, two young boys and a dog on the bottom floor, a family of two adults, one, then two, and eventually three children on the second floor, along with another, unrelated renter.
I recall dimly being offered a tissue box by the older male renter and this excited me greatly; a box of tissues, even my parents never bought anything so luxurious. It was either that man or another one of the many who succeeded him who displayed his genitalia to me whenever he caught me alone in the hallway outside his usually-closed bedroom door. I thought his behaviour strange and a little disgusting, also exciting, I really wanted that box. He did eventually hand it to me with a grand gesture of giving. It was empty, and I was disappointed. When I was a little older, perhaps six or seven, and the boys downstairs were in their early teens, occasionally one of their boyfriends visiting after school might catch me in the bathroom and reveal themselves to me just as the older man had.
When I became old enough to attend school there was an elementary school just up and across the street from the house where I lived; Manning Avenue Public School. I became increasingly aware that some children attending the school were entitled to special treatment. Showers were installed at the school for the benefit of these children. Meals were served at the school for these special children. These children were given such attention because there were no bathing facilities where they lived with their parents and often food was in short supply for these families. Although the knowledge was there of such special treatment for certain children, I'm not certain that anyone really knew who these children were.
I knew a little girl who lived down the street from where 'our' house was. A dark-haired little girl, my age, a little larger than me, whom I played with from time to time. Eventually, she brought me home and I saw the interior of a dark and tiny cottage. Her father, she explained to me, was blind. He spoke quietly to me, seemed busy with what I took to be a huge magnifier, and writing tools. When I asked to go to the bathroom my friend told me cheerily that there was no bathroom. Later, when I spoke of this to my father, he became grim and explained they were poor people, although I wasn't certain what that meant.
Next to the house where we lived there was another house, and it was full of Italian immigrants. There was a little boy who lived there with his parents, but we seldom played together. He was a little bit older than me, and we had very little in common. His parents invited me into their house at Christmas so I could admire their bright and colourful Christmas tree. I'd never seen one before. An old woman sat always in the kitchen of that house, knitting, interminally knitting. Scarves and toques, all of them the same dark brown-green colour. For the soldiers, fighting in the war, I was told. But not by her, as she spoke no English, not even the sometimes-hesitant mangled English my mother spoke then.
I knew another little girl who lived on a street next over from the one I lived on. She was a classmate, and we spent a little time together, but not all that often. Once, I boldly accompanied her to the other street and she took me upstairs to where she and her family lived. It was a dark and cold place. No one else appeared to be home. She led me to a cupboard, to show me something really special. We could look, she said, but not touch. She withdrew a can, opened the lid and we peered inside. It looked unappealing, and I was not able to identify it, although even I could see that it was fairly inedible looking due to its age and contaminated state. Honey, she told me proudly, it was a tin of honey.
Up the street again, past the school, lived another child my age. She lived in a house her parents owned, with her four older sisters. Behind their house sat a factory which they also owned. The factory produced seltzer water and ginger ale. On occasion I was permitted to enter the factory on a week-end when production had ceased, where I saw primitive conveyer belts and bottles, lots of bottles. One of the few indulgences my parents regularly indulged in was a bi-weekly delivery of seltzer water.
I would sometimes accompany my parents on a regular shopping foray on College Street. We would enter a long narrow shop whose walls were lined with shelving carrying all manner of groceries and boxes. Fresh food was kept in a long windowed display and at the counter were landsmen of my parents, immigrants like themselves. My mother would carefully, judiciously, decide what she could purchase, and the man would use a long pole with pincers at the end to reach up to the various shelves to draw down the articles of my mother's choosing. That family, parents and three young boys, lived upstairs in several rooms above their shop.
Another little girl with whom I'd occasionally play brought me to her home occasionally. She showed me a secret display which was brought out only once a year. She was a child of Japanese extraction, and what she showed me was a set of girls' day dolls, a Japanese emperor and empress and their retinue in tiny perfection. That child, the same age as me, was gradually losing all her teeth. All of us children at the school used to get regular yearly dental examinations; we would line up for them and any child who was deemed to need dental work was sent to Orde Street Public School where a dental facility was set up. We feared and hated that school. This child was being fitted there for a set of false teeth.
This was a time when ice-boxes sat in kitchens, not refrigerators. When ice would be delivered daily, the ice piled in a wagon being pulled by horses. Horse-hauled wagon delivery was still a common sight in Toronto at that time, 65 years ago. There were cars being used also of course, and trucks, but there were still plenty of horse-drawn wagons in use. There was nothing approximating supermarkets; there were grocers, butchers, individual shops set up across the city. A drug store then was a pharmacy, not a place to buy goods other than pharmaceuticals. Salvation Army bands would often be seen playing in the streets, gathering crowds of onlookers.
When I was older and we'd moved finally to a house on Concord Avenue which my parents managed to buy, I had other friends. None of the girls I knew then appeared to be living as precariously as the children I'd known at a much younger age. But there were girls, when I was 12 and 13 who dressed inappropriately (I considered myself one of them, but for a different reason...that my clothing was second-hand, ugly, ill-fitting and worn...) for their age and wore make-up that made them look much older than their years. These precocious young girls left school at an early age, became unwed mothers, and ended up as movie 'hostesses', low-paying jobs they would never rise above.
Canada is different now. We aid our immigrants. We have food banks, something that did not exist all those years ago, not in that same form in any event. We have social services to assist people in adapting to our economy, our way of life. The kind of poverty I knew second-hand as a child should not exist in a country as wealthy as Canada is. So what happened? Immigrants who had somehow, without the help of the government, managed to pull themselves into better economic positions eventually were able to give their children a better life. Now, with government intervention, offering language assistance, job searches, subsidized housing, educational opportunities, we appear to have a far greater proportion of the population in dire need. Among them, we are told, a million Canadian children who go to bed hungry each night. We need to ask ourselves how this can be.
posted by Pieface @ Friday, January 20, 2006
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