The Nova Scotia Book of Fathers Read online

  He loved Christmas. When the time came, we would get in the car and drive to the country to cut down the tree. I don’t know whose land it was. Probably what we were doing was illegal. A lasting image that I carry around with me is of him dragging the cut tree out of the forest, beaming with the satisfaction of having got something for nothing. Simple things are important. He wanted me to learn that and to remember.

  A Halifax Boy: A Driving Life

  Julia Swan

  He’s sitting on my brother’s bicycle, with the banana seat and those crazy Mustang handlebars – like a chopper motorcycle. His tongue protrudes like inflating bubblegum, making him look even more boyish. Seconds after my mother snaps the picture, he’s bumping down the hill in our backyard, following the path my brother Harry and I took daily as we whizzed our bikes out of the yard. When he arrives at the bottom of the hill still seated, we all laugh to kill ourselves.

  It was about 1969 so my father would have been thirty-seven, still a young man, really. He probably didn’t get to play outside with his kids as much as he would’ve liked to, given his demanding job as a city firefighter, but he made some memorable moments, including this one that I’m glad Mum caught on film. It shows my father’s readiness for fun and how he managed to turn even the most prosaic of moments into a laugh. On another occasion, probably a couple of years before, he bought Harry and me model airplanes made of delicate balsa wood. We spent all afternoon and evening flying those surprisingly sturdy little crafts down over the same bank, over and over and over again, until it got dark and my mother called us in for the night. When Dad came out to play, it was an event. We might carry on with the activity after he’d gone in, but some of the zest went back in the house with him.

  He played baseball and hockey with my brother, sports he himself played as a kid with his cousin Bobby, and in the winter he made a skating rink so we could indulge our passion without having to wait for the Frog Pond up the road to freeze enough. When I got older and my brother was rarely around, Dad and I played badminton or catch in the backyard. It was a different backyard then, but the feeling was the same. I’m sure he took it easy on me when he pitched that baseball, but I still remember the pleasurable sting in my palm from the force of the ball hitting that leather mitt.

  Perhaps it’s surprising that he brought so much concentrated effort to his parenting, given that he lost his own father, Harry, just before his fifth birthday. His father figures were his uncles and, briefly, a stepfather. He was an only child, and my grandmother had to go back to work when her husband died. His own grandmother, Emma, is the woman he says raised him, and his stories of her are warm and loving. He admired his uncles and had great fun with his aunts, who were like older sisters to him, and there was Bobby, the brother he never had, who was also funny and, like my father, demonstrated a quick wit. Maybe all of those influences are precisely why he fathered the way he did – the way he still does, the way he does most things: with care and thoughtfulness and deliberation. I think he was almost surprised to have a family, and it was a responsibility he took seriously, with great gravity, but also with gratitude.

  He was baptized Donald Joseph Swan – usually called Don, sometimes Donnie, or, to his firefighter friends, Swannie, and rather often Donald (with heavy emphasis on the first syllable and the second d) by his mother, particularly if she’d been to a Joan Crawford movie, so I’m told. Born in 1932, he was too young to experience the Second World War as a fighting man, although he became a cadet later and was encouraged to join the army as a boy soldier. He tried to join the Air Force at one point when he was older, but both my mother and his grandmother put the kibosh on that. Nevertheless, Halifax as a wartime city provided endless fascination for a boy. He recalls the streets being jam-packed with servicemen. He tells the story of being unable to get across Barrington Street one day because of the crowds, when a friendly man in uniform hiked him under his arm, carried him to the opposite sidewalk, deposited him there, and went on his way.

  He and his friends never had any trouble with servicemen during the war. “They were like your father or older brother.” Soldiers and sailors routinely came to call at the house on Agricola Street, looking for one of his aunts. On one occasion, finding the prospective date in question had already left (probably Gwen – she was a great one for the local dances, and invariably answered her mother’s “Where are you going?” with a shouted “Jube!” as she banged out the door on her way to the Jubilee Boat Club), the young sailor said to my father, “What’re you doing tonight?” “Nuthin’.” “Come on then,” invited the sailor. “Let’s paint the town red!” Dad says he enjoyed a movie at the Paramount thanks to this fellow, who was probably missing his own little brother.

  His memories of this time are vivid. He remembers seeing the bodies of sailors killed when HMCS Esquimault was torpedoed by U-190 off Chebucto Head in April 1945. He was walking home from school, coming along Maynard, Gerrish, and West streets, and saw an exposed foot of one of the victims, as they were being laid on the sidewalk in front of Cruikshanks’ funeral home at the foot of West Street. The Shore Patrol MP kindly told him to move along, because “you don’t want to see this.”

  He recalls the sounds of the shipyards as he ran to do altar service at evening Mass at St. Patrick’s Church. He’d go across Brunswick Street and take the path between the glebe and the church. He could see across Barrington and Water streets to Pier 2, where workers’ acetylene torches flared in the night as the men did repairs on the convoy ships. On occasion a tank would be craned in, anchored with chains, and the chain soldered to the deck to keep the tank secure. Sometimes a corvette would go up the harbour and he’d hear the snappy “Brrpp Brrpp” of its horn. Halifax was noisy – much banging and clanking with all the war work going on in this busy port city. After Benediction, he’d rush home to hear L for Lanky, a radio show about the crew of a Lancaster bomber.

  On visits to Ketch Harbour to see relatives, he would lie in bed at night and listen to the muffled booms of depth charges just at the harbour mouth as the destroyers and corvettes searched for U-boats. Today, as he combs through the books that detail Halifax at war, he tells me, “I saw that. I was there.” When we watch movies of that era, he identifies every car make and every airplane. His uncles taught him how to identify the cars and trucks from the time he was small.

  When I think of my father, I think of him as someone who has led a varied life, someone who has had a lot of experience with a lot of things. As a boy, he spent time on a family member’s farm in Hammonds Plains, keenly observing the ordered way things were done. He looked after horses at the Walker’s sulky racing stables on Bayers Road, when Bayers Road was dirt, inheriting a love for the creatures from his great-uncle Frank, Emma’s brother, who had been with the North West Mounted Police and who exercised the horses for the Dennis family. He describes, as though he’s standing in the Fort Massey exercise yard right then, Frank’s easy and natural way, how he neck-reined and “didn’t like bits.”

  He’s often told the story of Beauty Rose Lee, one of the horses who boarded at the Bayers Road stables and who got away from him one day after school, leading him on a frustrating but hilarious chase through the yard before nimbly trotting back to the barn on her own as though it was all a great game. Dad tells this story in minute detail, imitating Beauty’s movements and expressions and his own fevered efforts to get her safely back in her stall. She belonged to Admiral Bidwell’s daughter Jill and Dad laughs when he recalls that Wilf Walker teased Jill about the big bay’s size by calling the horse a moose, asking where she hid the antlers.

  Seven Up Direct (one of the Direct line, chestnut in colour and a spoiled brat, he says) left him with a lifelong dent in his head, bestowed during one of the colt’s displays of temper. But Dad’s memories of his time spent with Beauty, Seven Up Direct, gentle Dr. L.B. with the “kind eyes,” and Doris Mercury (“She’d follow me from the pasture back to the barn like a dog, with her head by my shoulder.”) warm him st
ill.

  When he was a teenager, he went to work at Moir’s bakery. His mother Marion had worked there both before her marriage and upon her widowhood – indeed, that’s where she’d met his father Harry, one of the bakers – and half her family was employed at Moir’s already. He liked the Burlington buns because one of the women who worked on the floor would give him a couple for his break, and she always gave him extra jam in the centre. When I was a girl, Dad would buy these doughnut-type treats; the jam was always the best part for him.

  He tells me he “failed grade ten because I was chasing your mother” – who he first saw coming around the Melville Cove path on crutches. He says, “Everything else was in black and white, and your mother was in colour.” – but Dad is a voracious reader, so any gaps in his formal education he filled quite nicely by reading just about everything he could get his hands on. When he and my mother were courting, he was driving a truck for A.M. Bell’s, a hardware store located on Hollis Street. He loved that job – because he loved to drive and he liked the freedom to load the truck first thing in the morning and then be his own boss for the rest of the day, making his deliveries. He toted kegs of nails, wallboard, and other heavy items to building sites, hard labour and he a slim young man with not much meat on his bones. (But his wiry strength enabled him to row his boat, the Susie, stuffed to the gunnels with my mother’s family – including the dog Spot – around the Arm on Sundays when he and Mum were thwarted in their efforts for a private picnic.)

  He had a hair-raising experience when he lost the brakes on the big truck going down Duke Street one day. He geared down, but there was a new Chrysler in front of him, and the woman driving it was too terrified to get out of his way. Every time the truck rammed the back of her car (“Bam!” says Dad, smacking his fist against his hand to demonstrate the force), she screamed, but she stayed in front of him and the truck’s bumper smashed into her again and again, each time booting her forward. When she finally steered off to the sidewalk, Dad hurtled down Duke toward the waterfront with his heart pounding and the scenery flashing by, praying the warehouse doors were open, hoping he could get stopped before he sailed into the harbour. Fortunately for my mother and the family he was to have, Dad managed to run the truck into the rub rails along the side of the warehouse. When he finally got out, he sank onto the running board because his shaking legs could barely hold him up.

  For me, that story isn’t just exciting. It tells me a good deal of what I’ve come to know about my father throughout my life. As funny as he is, as learned as he is, he’s the man you want there in a crisis because he keeps his head, he knows what to do, and he has courage – lots and lots of courage.

  He learned to drive by watching his uncles Gerald and Bill as he sat in the front seat next to one or the other in a 1932 Chrysler Touring edition when he was little, carefully observing what they did with the gearshift, the steering wheel, how they used the clutch and brake. He asked “thousands of questions” and they were both very patient. When he wasn’t actually going somewhere in that car, he spent ages kneeling on its mohair plush seat and imagining trips, as he slid his hands over the arc of the steering wheel while the Chrysler was parked in front of his grandfather’s barber shop on Harris Street. He once wrote to me, “I was at home behind a steering wheel. It was my joy, my effortless ability, and I found it in me like a gift. … I lived for it. I still do.”

  He served thirty-three years with the Halifax Fire Department, joining in 1955 and rising through the ranks from hoseman to chief. He gave up driving his beloved truck for a job with security because I was on the way. He almost died on several occasions – he was never one to fight a fire from the sidewalk or the sidlelines – and it’s only recently that I’ve learned some of the details of the horrifying experiences he had. In all the years he worked to provide for us, I had little knowledge of the toll those experiences exacted, or the effort it took to keep his nightmares from us.

  It’s likely he both loved and hated that job. Certainly his happiest years in the department were when he actively fought fires, and he studied meticulously the science of firefighting, so he and his crews attacked a blaze intelligently, methodically, efficiently. “Knocking down a dirty fire,” he told me once, gave him real satisfaction. My dad has always been a thinker, a rational man who acquires knowledge, weighs the evidence, and comes to his own conclusions. He’s never been swayed by what everyone else does. Even as a boy, he had a strong inner sense of right and wrong, of justice.

  But I think he really enjoyed the adrenalin rush of heading off to a fire, driving apparatus through Halifax’s narrow, hilly streets, taking corners without touching the brakes because he understood and loved the art of driving so well. He tells of driving a pumper bought in 1939 that had been to every Halifax fire, so it had a lot of both driving and pumping miles on it. He came out of Bayers Road Fire Station on this particular call, barrelled up Bayers Road and turned right onto Connolly Street without touching the brakes – just shifted down into third and let the engine compression slow the pumper down as he cranked it around the corner. Then he walked on the gas – and a piston rod shot out of the right front.

  He drove the old worn-out vehicles and the new ones. He was Training Officer and taught other department members how to drive all the apparatus, from pumpers to the aerial truck, which was the equivalent of a tractor-trailer. (Small wonder he had no trouble with Harry’s bike.) He taught his love of driving to me from the time I was three, when I used to stand behind him in the front seat of our 1940 Plymouth (“our 1940 bus,” my mother has written under the photo of a very young Dad with me sitting on the fender of that beautiful car), with my feet tucked under him and my arm around his shoulder. From the time I was a little girl, I understood the thrill of seeing the world through a windshield behind the wheel of a car you loved.

  The depth and range of his knowledge was never a surprise to me. Like most children, I thought my father knew everything. Only as I’ve aged have I realized what a feat it is to be knowledgeable – really knowledgeable – about so many things. He has always listened well and carefully. Had circumstances allowed, he would have studied philosophy, a subject that fascinated him, at university. He loves an intellectual, stimulating discussion, the exploration of ideas. I’ve never been a match for him in an argument, but he’s never failed to listen to my side of an issue, however vigorously he disagrees. I can see, in the concentration of his listening, how he’s meticulously arranging his rebuttals. Sometimes he’ll get exasperated if he thinks I’m being obstinate, but he’s probably even more stubborn than I am, possibly because he never holds an uninformed opinion. I get the streak of needing to do things my own way from him.

  An inherently good and decent man, willful stupidity and cruelty of any sort are a couple of the things that make him truly angry. He’ll go out of his way to help anyone, whether it’s convenient or not. He’s kind, generous, and loyal. Of the few things at my age that I feel really certain of, my father’s integrity is at the top of the list. He’s forthright; he may try to soften a blow, but you’ll always know where you stand with him. “You’re the most honest person I know,” I wrote in a card to him not so long ago. He looked directly at me. “I hope so,” he responded.

  Dad has been a solid presence in my life, but I wasn’t aware for many years how acutely he felt the loss of his own father. It wasn’t something he spoke of at all until I was well into adulthood, when I was beginning to ask my grandmother for details of her early life and what Harry was like. There are only two photos of Harry, one with Nanny and Dad not long before he died in 1937. My parents named my brother after him.

  I wish Dad had had siblings. Having even one may have gone a long way to assuaging the void left by Harry’s premature death. When my grandmother remarried and the family moved to Hamilton, Ontario, for about a year after the war so Simon, a stevedore from Cape Breton, could work in one of the steel mills, Dad was in heaven living near the airport and hanging out with a group of ne
ighbourhood boys. They all had bikes – his was brand new – and whoever got up first during the summer mornings would round up everyone else. They’d ride to the airport and watch the Piper Cubs take off and land. Sometimes they’d be invited to help out, pulling the lightweight craft into the hangar when thunderstorms threatened. He tells me that living there in Stoney Creek Township and being a part of that group of kids was heaven for him, like being in a movie. He was one of “the bird boys” – the other kid’s name was Billy Crow. I like to think of him in the middle of that crowd of boys, all peddling madly along the sultry Hamilton streets to get to the airport, enjoying themselves to the hilt. I wish I had a picture of him on that bike.

  His Hamilton idyll didn’t last long because Simon was diagnosed with a heart condition and they had to return to Halifax, where he died a short time later. Once again, Dad was a fatherless boy. He liked Simon, though he hadn’t known him at all well before he married his mother. It was another difficult time for him and once again Emma was his anchor. I’m glad he grew up in a house full of people he loved, even if his father Harry wasn’t destined to be a part of that household. I’m glad Emma nourished him not only with her meals but also with her heart. Like most of us, his character formed from many different elements, but she gave him a solid foundation that he needed, so he could begin his own family with my mother, Rufine.

  We have several pictures of him behind the wheels of various cars, trucks, and fire apparatus over the years, but the only other photo in the family album of my dad on a bike is from very early on, when he was about three. It’s a tricycle this time, and it belonged to a neighbour’s child. My grandmother told me she had a hard time getting him off it when it was time to leave. He stares at the camera seriously, unsmilingly. Perhaps she had already indicated he had to climb down and come along home when she snapped the photo. He couldn’t know it then, but he would drive many miles in the years ahead, honing his gift and feeling that quiet joy in the freedom behind the wheel.