The New House

I was running barefoot across the yard toward the construction site of our new house when all of a sudden I felt a stabbing pain in the sole of my foot. I fell on the ground, crying, screaming in pain and swearing. The workers, (neighbour farmers), thinking I had stepped on something sharp all rushed over to help. It turned out to be only a hornet sting, but the pain was real and I was letting out a string of swear words, some of which some of the workers had never heard before. (I was four years old and my two older brothers had taught me swear words as a joke.) I don't rember the exact words, but I guess they were pretty bad for 1939 and for years after some of the workers reminded me of this incident. Work on the new house was progressing nicely, looking not at all like the church from which all the buiding material had been salvaged. The finished house would turn out to be the biggest on the conscession line. It had a full eight foot deep pored concrete basement, (dug out by hand with assistance from horse drawn "scrappers", and the concrete was all mixed by hand and pored into hand made forms). The basement wall had a chute built into it for pouring potatoes into the huge bin for winter storage.(more on potatoes later) The boards making up the forms were later taken off and re-used in the house construction. When finished, the house was a rectangular, two story with five bedrooms, huge kitchen, dining room and of course the parlour. It was fully bricked, with a gavanized steel roof. Across the whole length of the back of the house was a garage and large "wood" shed, which of course was used to store firewood. It still amazes me to this day that Dad and the neighbor farmers possessed the skills to construct such a building from scratch, using only used materials from an old church and they did it in addition to running their own farms. I wonder how many neighbors would,or could, do the same to-day? Electricity wires had just been strung along our concession road the previous year. It was a weak current by to-days standards and would only handle light bulbs (not run motors etc.). Wiring was installed in the new house as it was being built and this was the main new feature. There was no running water or even a refrigerator, but to me it was a castle. It became obvious the house would be finished long before winter, allowing more attention to farming. Next-How the farm worked!

Tarpaper Shack

The scorching sun blazed through the south facing curtainless windows, falling on the homemade kitchen table. It was so damn hot the "shit" flies that had made their way over from the barn were not flying, but just walking up and down the table looking for any stray crumbs. The acrid smell of the new tarpaper on the roof filled the only room in our temporary abode which was furnished with the inevitable wood stove, the table, four chairs and four hand made bunks along the walls for sleeping. Since every household thing we owned had been lost in the housefire there was nothing else to clutter up our new temporary home that Dad had built as soon as possible in the early spring of 1939. This would be our living quarters until he built the new house with help from the neighboring farmers. Mom's loss was perhaps the biggest, because, she had had to send three of her five children away after the fire (none ever returned to live at home again). My two sisters went to live far away in the big city with my aunts and my brother went to the army. There was no time mope about our misfortune, the animals still needed to be tended, the crops planted, the vegetable garden sewn, and most importantly, a new house had to be finished before winter arrived. In Canada, out in the country, in 1939 there was no welfare or any other "social net" to save you. You had to sink or swim on your own.