Born Naked: The Early Adventures of the Author of Never Cry Wolf, Page 2

  Angus’s bees did well at first, producing quantities of good clover and buckwheat honey, but since the market was flooded, the crop could not be sold and we had to consume much of it ourselves. I was weaned on soda biscuits soaked in milk and lavishly sweetened with honey—a dish I still find delectable.

  Bees loomed large in my early years. When Angus rattled off in Henry of a summer morning to work his hives in the apple orchard of the Ketcheson farm on York Road, he would often take Helen and me along. Helen would sit under a tree and read. To keep me from crawling into trouble, she would place me in an empty super1 set on the grass nearby. This was the scene of my earliest recollection.

  I see, in my mind’s eye, a large and strikingly marked honey bee standing on an anthill near where I sit. This bee is resolutely and briskly directing the ant traffic away from me, much as a policeman might direct members of an unruly crowd away from some important personage.

  I have since been told by expert apiarists that such behaviour by a bee would be “atypical,” which is a polite way of saying my memory lies. Nonsense. I know I was taken under the protection of the bees, and the proof is that I have never been stung by one, not then or ever. Wasps and hornets, yes. Bees, no. I believe I was adopted into their tribe, and ever since I have been as kindly disposed to them as they to me.

  ANGUS HAD A mania for naming things, even when they already had perfectly good names. As a freshman mining engineer at Queen’s he had re-christened himself Squib. In mining terminology, a squib was a small but potent charge used to detonate a major explosion and this may well have been how he viewed himself.

  He was not satisfied with my name either. I had been christened Farley in memory of Helen’s beloved younger brother killed in a fall from a cliff, but before I was three months old Angus had begun calling me Bunje after some character he had encountered in a novel by, I think, H. G. Wells. When my mother tearfully remonstrated with him, he airily replied that Bunje was merely my “working title” to be used until I could make up my own mind what I wanted to be called.

  Because it was so forbidding, Angus initially named our decaying home The Fortress. Later he changed it to Bingen.

  Bingen, as 1 would learn much later in life, is a pleasant little town located on the river Rhine. It is dominated by an old, square fortalice called the Mouse Tower, wherein Hatto II, erstwhile Bishop of Mainz, was punished because he taunted the poor, who were begging at his palace gates, by calling them rats and mice who would eat up all his corn.

  An enormous plague of real rats and mice thereupon descended on Mainz and so terrified Bishop Hatto that he fled from the city and took refuge in the tower at Bingen. However, the rats and mice swarmed into the river, swam across it and, gnawing and tearing their way through walls and windows, cracks, and crevices, reached the inner chamber housing the terrified Hatto and ate him alive.

  The myriads of rats, mice, bats, and other creatures which made free with our rambling ruin were friendly fellow inhabitants. Their presence may even have helped give rise to the sense of fraternity with other animals which has so powerfully influenced my life. Certainly they were no cause for apprehension.

  Bears were a different matter.

  One night during our final winter at Bingen, my bedroom was visited by an enormous bear. I woke to find him standing upright by the window. He was wearing a checked tweed cap with matching visor and staring about him as if in surprise and even confusion. He did not seem inimical but I was nevertheless too startled to move a muscle. It was not until he began to shuffle towards the door that I let out a yell which, in my father’s words, “brought your mother and me up all standing!” They were in my room within seconds but arrived too late to see my visitor, who had hurriedly decamped.

  Although my parents assured me it had all been a dream, that bear was as real as anything could be. I can still see him in awesome detail: about seven feet tall, brown-furred, long-clawed, and, except for the rakish cap he wore, truly bear. He startled the hell out of me but I couldn’t have been too frightened because I was content to remain alone in that room not only for the rest of the night but for our remaining time at Bingen.

  I even harboured hopes he might return. This time I would be expecting him and, who knows, we might become friends. But he never came back, and I think I know why. My parents were partially correct. It was a dream all right, but it was the bear’s dream. And I think we scared the bejesus out of him.

  1A rectangular wooden frame used in the upper portion of a hive.

  2

  DURING THE SUMMER OF 1923 the apiary, which had always been a losing proposition (we kept bees… not vice versa), was smitten by a pestilence called “foul brood.” The bees perished in their tens of thousands, leaving us without even enough honey to spread on the soda biscuits we could no longer afford.

  The winter following the foul brood disaster was a tough one. Angus sought work and Don Fraser, brother of the ubiquitous Billy, tried to employ him as an insurance salesman.

  “It wasn’t any good,” Angus remembered. “I was too shy, you see. When I saw a likely prospect coming, I’d cross to the other side of the street. But once old Tommy Potts tracked me down. He was eighty-seven, blind in one eye and couldn’t see out of the other, and had halitosis that could knock a horse off its feet at fifty yards. He said he was dying and needed life insurance. I sold him fifty thousand or so dollars’ worth on credit but Don wouldn’t honour the sale.”

  To make things worse, the chimney in Bingen’s cavernous kitchen caught fire and collapsed. We escaped unscathed but had to seek refuge in another decayed structure, which Angus christened the Swamp House because it stank pervasively of rotten wood.

  My mother, most long-suffering of women, was able to endure this except when visitors were expected. Then she would burn quantities of brown paper in the kitchen stove with the chimney damper tightly shut, thereby filling the house with acrid smoke. She admitted that this was exchanging one stink for another but hoped her half-asphyxiated visitors would at least be unaware of the underlying stench of mould which, to her mind, was synonymous with the “stench of poverty.”

  At this juncture some of our little family’s well-wishers came to the rescue. The librarian of the Trenton Public Library, a crotchety spinster who had run her little fiefdom with an autocratic hand for thirty years maintaining her position by threatening to resign if anyone questioned her rule, chose to make this threat once too often. The chairman of the board took her at her word and offered the job to Angus, at the munificent salary of five hundred dollars a year.

  So Angus began the career which was to engross him for the rest of his working days. And we three began to eat regularly. Leaving the Swamp House to the mould and mildew, we took up residence in two upstairs rooms rented from Mrs. White, a railroad worker’s widow whose daughter had been one of my father’s girls in high-school days. This choice did not please my mother. Years later she was to tell me, “He was as charming to that little sniff of a daughter as if she was a princess; and the way she looked at him was enough to make one ill.” Even then I think my mother had begun to suspect she had married a rover.

  My father’s interest in women was surpassed only by his passion for boats, a passion he was determined his son must share. When I was a year old, he began taking Helen and me on weekend excursions aboard one or other of the several local boats owned and sailed by friends.

  In July of 1923, we embarked on our first family cruise—in an ancient sailing canoe borrowed from a retired banker. It must have been built by one of Noah’s sons, and hadn’t been near the water since. Its sail was so thin and sere you could see through it. Nevertheless Angus dumped a little tent, some duffle and food aboard, and we set sail.

  Despite the canoe’s fragility, Angus drove it hard for two days towards the eastern reaches of the bay. We sailed by day and camped on the low, mosquito-haunted shores at night. By the third
day, we were half-way along the coast of Big Island when a nasty black squall with thunder and driving rain hit us over the stern, and Angus made for land.

  None too soon either, according to Helen. “You were like a little wet rat,” she told me many years later, “too cold even to cry. I was crying, with fury. Angus knew that I never liked sailing except for short runs on sunny days with very little wind. But you know what your father was like when he was determined to do something dramatic.”

  I did not know at the time, of course, but I learned that when it came to engaging in sheer, pig-headed histrionics, Angus had few rivals. This was a characteristic which caused my mother much distress, although it did not bother me during my childhood years.

  The following day it continued to rain heavily, with great gusts of wind which finally dissolved the old sail into flapping fragments. There being nothing else for it, Angus reluctantly (and with difficulty) managed to paddle us into Picton harbour. Here the voyage ended in a mutiny. My mother simply refused to go any farther in “that leaky old thing, and Bunje just a two-year-old.”

  Angus was then left with no alternative but to take a train to Trenton to pick up Henry, and come and get us and the canoe. The loss of face he suffered or thought he suffered in having to end the voyage so ignominiously was something for which I think he never quite forgave my mother.

  That autumn we had to move, again. Very late one rainy November evening Angus came home from duck hunting. Instead of rousing someone to let him in, he climbed up on the roof of the porch and set about removing a storm window from his and Helen’s bedroom. Not surprisingly, he lost his footing on the wet shingles and fell to the ground still clutching the storm window. The resultant crash wakened the whole household and most of the neighbours. As my mother remembered it, “He was a little under the influence, you know. So he wasn’t hurt. But then Mrs. White’s shameless daughter rushed out keening like a Valkyrie and threw herself on him as he lay on the grass, and next morning Mrs. White gave us our marching orders.”

  Our next home was a two-bedroom apartment above a clothing store on the main street. This was not a select residential neighbourhood but the rents were low and it was adjacent to the harbour, which was convenient since Angus had decided to buy a boat of his own.

  He bought a seventeen-foot Akroyd sailing dinghy—a beautiful, varnished centre-boarder that sailed like a witch, and cost him a quarter of his first year’s salary. He christened her Little Brown Jug2 and she became the apple of his eye.

  Our first cruise in LBJ, as she was familiarly known, took place in the summer of 1924. It should have been a pleasant saunter through the sheltered waters of the Bay of Quinte to Kingston and have taken no more than four or five days. It took ten. Angus’s log chronicled the voyage with the laconic insouciance of a master mariner taking his square rigger around Cape Horn. Helen, however, recalled it with the kind of shuddering horror which might have afflicted a French gentlewoman being conveyed to the guillotine in a tumbril. I recall it as through a glass dimly, and wetly.

  It was an exceptionally cold summer. Thunderstorms occurred almost daily, accompanied by vicious squalls that churned the shallow waters of the bay into yellow foam. On one occasion the wind blew with gale force for thirty-six hours. High winds and high waters produced floating debris ranging from tree trunks to a dead pig. One day a piece of flotsam was driven into the centre-board housing, jamming the board in the “up” position. This was no problem as long as we were running free, but when a howling head wind suddenly burst upon us, Little Brown Jug could get no hold on the water and was blown into a vast cattail swamp behind Foresters Island. Here for an entire night Helen endured a local version of the travails of Katharine Hepburn aboard The African Queen. Meanwhile, Helen’s Humphrey Bogart flailed about in the swamp muck under the hull trying to free the centre-board. Had this in fact been Africa, Angus would have been a goner. The crocodiles would have got him. And if they had, I suspect my mother might not have mourned overmuch.

  LBJ was a racing machine built for day sailing. She had no cabin and offered no more shelter to man, woman, child, food, or bedding than could be found in a cubbyhole under her tiny foredeck. There was barely sufficient space for me in this cramped little cave. And it seemed never to stop raining or, if it did, the wind blew so hard that spray soaked everything anyway.

  I recall sitting on the floorboards with bilge water sloshing over my bare legs and around my naked bum. More water dribbled down through a seam in the foredeck a few inches above my head, and still more came pelting in through the entrance to my cave whenever a rain squall drove against the sail. Being themselves soaking wet most of the time, there was little enough my parents could do for me.

  Helen put a thick woollen sweater on my top but there was no use clothing the rest of me, which was sitting in the soup. There were some crayfish crawling around and I amused myself playing with them.

  “When I peeped in at you,” Helen remembered, “I thought of Water Babies and wondered if you might sprout gills.”

  I appreciated those crayfish, and also some pollywogs, but I doubt that I was particularly happy slithering helplessly about on the slippery floorboards whenever Little Brown Jug came about, or being jounced mercilessly up and down as she butted her way into what must have been quite formidable waves.

  The experiences I endured during this primal cruise were indelibly etched into my subconscious. Alas, my poor father! In attempting (in his spartan way) to inculcate a love of the sea in his son, he but succeeded in instilling in me a deeply rooted distrust of the sailing life, as anyone who has read The Boat Who Wouldn’t Float will know.

  The immediate result of that ordeal was a protracted trial of wills between my parents. Although occasionally and reluctantly inveigled into going day sailing, Helen resolutely refused to go cruising again unless in a much larger boat, one with a comfortable and waterproof cabin, and an engine that could hurry the vessel into safe harbour in times of storm and peril.

  She was not being selfish. Selfishness was no part of her nature; she was worried about the perceived threat to my survival. Although prepared to be almost infinitely malleable on her own account, she could become an intractable obstacle if she felt my well-being was in jeopardy. “Balky as a bloody mule!” was how my disgruntled father put it.

  Being used to getting his own way, Angus held out for an entire year. Then, near summer’s end of 1925, he capitulated. He sold LBJ and bought an antiquated twenty-six-foot, Lake Ontario fish boat. She was propelled by a 10-horsepower, single-cylinder gasoline engine and did not even have a sail. She was, in fact, that ultimate anathema of all true sailor men—a “stink-pot!” Angus Mowat had bought a power boat! Neptune surely shuddered. This was not mere capitulation; it was abject surrender. Or so it seemed.

  “Your father was such a cunning man,” Helen remembered sadly. “The artful dodger!” He did build a cabin on Stout Fella, (so-called because she was) and it was quite comfortable. But he either couldn’t or wouldn’t make the engine run properly. It was always stopping at the most awkward moments, leaving us drifting about for hours until some kind soul gave us a tow. Angus didn’t say much about these contretemps, except to swear at the engine, but sometimes he would mutter loudly enough for us to hear, “If only this was a sailboat, we could get home on our own.”

  One summer day in my fifth year, Stout Fella was belching her noisy way eastward down the bay towards the combined causeway and bridge which connects the almost-island of Prince Edward County to the town of Belleville on the mainland.

  The movable central span was already swinging to allow a west-bound tug towing a string of coal barges to pass through. Angus concluded (or so he told us) that there would be ample time for us to slip through ahead of the tug, so he headed Stout Fella for the gap. Just as we entered it, the engine gave a terrible backfire and quit.

  When the engine failed, I was standing near the bow feeling su
perior to the passengers in a long line of motor vehicles and horse-drawn wagons backed up on both sides of the swinging span. Stout Fella lost way and did a slow pirouette until she lodged sideways across the gap—her bow aground on some buffer logs edging one bridge pier and her stern jammed against the casing of the opposite pier.

  The tug (the M. Sicken out of Trenton) sheered off from the gap, her hoarse whistle giving full vent to her skipper’s outrage. Car drivers began to blow their horns. The bridge master, a retired lake captain with a flowing white beard, shot out of his little cubicle and hung over the railing ten feet above our heads.

  “Gol durn you, Mowat, you done that a-purpose!” he bellowed. “Now you git that old strawberry crate out of there or by the livin’ Jesus I’ll have the Belleville garbage truck come and git ye!”

  His irritation was warranted. This was a hot Saturday morning and the causeway was full of produce-laden farmers’ trucks bound for the Belleville market. The raucous blare and tootle of their horns filled the air. Horses neighed their distress. Red-faced men and women stomped from the vehicles towards the gap, angrily waving their arms at us.

  In the face of all this hostility, I retreated uncertainly to the cockpit. Humiliated beyond endurance, Helen burst into tears and fled into the little cabin, slamming the companionway hatch behind her. The comments from above became ever more derisive.

  “Why’n’t you just pull the plug and let that bathtub sink?” someone shouted.

  “Ain’t no bathtub! Looks more like grandad’s privy what went adrift in the Big Storm last fall,” jeered another.