The quarrel between my mother and this family, whom I shall call the Downstairs, and their friends, known here as the Naybors three doors down the street came about because the younger son of the Naybors, and a friend of the Downstairs children, had climbed on to a garbage can outside the Downstairs’ kitchen window and shrieked to the maid through the window while pulling on our garden hose used to channel rainwater from the rooftop tank to the ground. It had been set up by Dad as there was no outdoor tap for us. Whether Mum had asked the child to desist in his yanking I cannot tell, but he persisted in doing so, at which point she hurried downstairs and whacked him on the posterior, sending him home wailing. The next day, as my brother Desmond and I arrived home by school bus, we saw an irate Mrs. Naybors descend in fury on the figure of our youngest brother Nigel at the wheel of his pedal car and whack him hard on the back, presumably in retaliation, screaming at my mother on our balcony, “We all think you’re crazy!” From then on, there was cold war between the families. At one point, Desmond and I found an old drill in the garage and pretended it was a machine gun, sending young Downstairs and Naybors alike scurrying for shelter. I have to confess we were unsympathetic when the Downstairs children left Charlie the dog in the car overnight, and we heard them cry from below, “Mom! Charlie’s done a doo-doo in the car!” From all appearances, the Downstairs parents were a reclusive, eccentrically academic couple who let their lackadaisical maid run the household. We never spoke a word to them, nor they to us, not even when Dad accidentally knocked a flowerpot off the rear balcony and it went through their garage roof below, like a hot knife through butter.
Next door to us lived an older man with his wife. He would invite his friends over for long games of dominos on his outdoor patio. From our partly covered rear balcony, where we had our playroom with a bed and a table at which I would do my homework and read The Saturday Evening Post, we could hear the click of the dominos and murmurs of Spanish conversation in the evening on one side, and on the other, in the morning, the curious whistling and snorting of the other neighbour’s two pet peacocks. I remember vividly, as if it were yesterday, the contrast between the warmth of the evening air and the frigid winter air I read about in a poem about the plight of a robin:
The north wind doth blow, and we shall have snow,
And what shall the robin do then, poor thing?
He’ll sit in a barn, and keep himself warm,
And hide his head under his wing, poor thing.
The poetry anthology was English, but I knew nothing of snow. One other textbook, published by Copp Clark, a Toronto publisher, was also assigned us, and it bore a photo of Canadian children in Edmonton patiently waiting for a school bus in a snowstorm, wrapped up like mummies to keep warm. I stared in amazement at their fortitude, little suspecting that I would come to know the cold as well as they did only a few years later…
